5 ms·

Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.

by dreslan 9mo ago

jader201 9mo ago
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
- moffkalast 9mo ago
  Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.
- rkozik1989 9mo ago
  There's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with donors is important.
- lgl 9mo ago
  Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed] Fixed.
  - daedrdev 9mo ago
    Its a widely known controversy https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-06-27/Forum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
    - lgl 9mo ago
      Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really? They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads. At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through. They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?
      - daedrdev 9mo ago
        The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
        bawolff 9mo ago
        There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".
        daedrdev 9mo ago
        No, you simply assume that. In 2025 they spend 184 million, and 2% was on hosting. Even several times that for salaries means that an absurd fraction is on non wikipedia items.
        bawolff 9mo ago
        Hosting does not include software development. It does not include sysadmins. I'm not sure if it even includes data center personel (Wikipedia owns its own servers. That means you have to hire people to plug them in. Amazon isnt doing it for you). Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going. That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia. Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.
- adventured 9mo ago
  By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
    - Levitz 9mo ago
      You go ahead an tell users that. Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding. The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
    - breppp 9mo ago
      statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
- hliyan 9mo ago
  On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
  - tdb7893 9mo ago
    It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
  - sirbutters 9mo ago
    For your own sake, get out of Xitter.
  - jader201 9mo ago
    To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations. The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use. And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask. I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so. Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough. I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.
- yreg 9mo ago
  I agree, but this has to be one of the least consequential problems an encyclopedia might have.
CrulesAll 9mo ago
[flagged]
- zxcvasd 9mo ago
  [dead]
- cafebabbe 9mo ago
  Any particular example you could provide to support this wild claim ?
  - Jordan-117 9mo ago
    Citing sources to support claims? Sounds pretty "Wokipedia" to me. /s
  - nailer 9mo ago
    I don't think it's particularly wild - Jimmy Wales talked about the pages to do with Gaza before he locked them due to his concerns: https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-blocks-editing-of-gaza-genocide-page-over-egregious-anti-israel-claims/ https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-... or https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-gaza-genocide-locked-2000680991 https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-gaza-genocide-locked-200068099.... There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant. Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.
    - Gander5739 9mo ago
      A nitpick: Jimmy Wales did not lock the page. He is not an administrator on the site, and doed not have the rights necessary to lock any pages.
fleroviumna 9mo ago
[dead]

Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.

by dreslan 9mo ago

Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.

jader201 9mo ago

Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.

moffkalast 9mo ago
Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.
rkozik1989 9mo ago
There's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with donors is important.
lgl 9mo ago
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed] Fixed.
- daedrdev 9mo ago
  Its a widely known controversy https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-06-27/Forum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
  - lgl 9mo ago
    Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really? They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads. At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through. They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?
    - daedrdev 9mo ago
      The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
      - bawolff 9mo ago
        There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".
        daedrdev 9mo ago
        No, you simply assume that. In 2025 they spend 184 million, and 2% was on hosting. Even several times that for salaries means that an absurd fraction is on non wikipedia items.
        bawolff 9mo ago
        Hosting does not include software development. It does not include sysadmins. I'm not sure if it even includes data center personel (Wikipedia owns its own servers. That means you have to hire people to plug them in. Amazon isnt doing it for you). Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going. That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia. Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.
adventured 9mo ago
By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
  - Levitz 9mo ago
    You go ahead an tell users that. Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding. The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
  - breppp 9mo ago
    statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
hliyan 9mo ago
On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
- tdb7893 9mo ago
  It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
- sirbutters 9mo ago
  For your own sake, get out of Xitter.
- jader201 9mo ago
  To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations. The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use. And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask. I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so. Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough. I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.
yreg 9mo ago
I agree, but this has to be one of the least consequential problems an encyclopedia might have.

CrulesAll 9mo ago

[flagged]

zxcvasd 9mo ago
[dead]
cafebabbe 9mo ago
Any particular example you could provide to support this wild claim ?
- Jordan-117 9mo ago
  Citing sources to support claims? Sounds pretty "Wokipedia" to me. /s
- nailer 9mo ago
  I don't think it's particularly wild - Jimmy Wales talked about the pages to do with Gaza before he locked them due to his concerns: https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-blocks-editing-of-gaza-genocide-page-over-egregious-anti-israel-claims/ https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-... or https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-gaza-genocide-locked-2000680991 https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-gaza-genocide-locked-200068099.... There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant. Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.
  - Gander5739 9mo ago
    A nitpick: Jimmy Wales did not lock the page. He is not an administrator on the site, and doed not have the rights necessary to lock any pages.

fleroviumna 9mo ago

[dead]