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The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They m
by alt227 3mo ago
The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They make it sound like wikipedia is very much at risk of dying due to lack of funds when in reality they are looking for more funding for programmes like this, which is where a lot of the mistrust and 'deceptive advertising' opinions come from.
- inigyou 3mo agoThey could tell us which programs.
- alt227 3mo agoThey could, but if their donation ads said for example 'please help us to take more photos of live events' instead of 'we need your help to keep wikipedia alive' then they would not get half the donations they do currently, which is the point.
- inigyou 3mo agoI agree, that you can lie to people to make more money. That's called fraud.
- Sabinus 3mo agoI wonder how well they would go if you could target your donation. Humble bundle did this and I appreciated it.
- bawolff 3mo agoIf the ads only mentioned a program that gets less than 1% of the budget, that would also be pretty deceptive
- joshspankit 3mo agoHonestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”. Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
- ReactiveJelly 3mo agoI don't even use Wikipedia anymore, I use the free online P2P encyclopedia. It's called
- Gander5739 3mo agoHosting isn't the expensive part, maintaining mediawiki is. For example, unifying the parser for the markup language: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification/en https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification/en
- account42 3mo agoMaintaining a shitty PHP website isn't that expensive either.
- bawolff 3mo agoDepends on how you define "hosting". CapEx costs for buying the servers is a non trivial expense (note: in accounting statements this isn't considered part of internet hosting). Not as much as software, but still expensive.
- bawolff 3mo agoP2P hosting doesn't really work in reality, especially for websites that change regularly and require quick propagation of those changes. Its not just Wikipedia. Name a high traffic site that actually uses p2p hosting. I'll wait. Bandwidth is also the sort of thing that gets way cheaper at scale than most people expect. When you are big enough there comes a point where the telecom companies want to connect to you because all their users want to access your website. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot (not all) of Wikimedia's bandwidth is actually free.
- joshspankit 2mo agoActually, I think your argument is almost entirely about P2P tech inspired by BitTorrent. We’ve had good be the enemy of great here. No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can. In fact, I’d say the biggest impediment to P2P sites in 2026 is the absolute unit that is advertiser data. We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%). We have VPS and serverless. We also have content addressing and symmetric cert verification, but when a site’s “traffic” is P2P you lose visibility on most of it. And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it? Woof.