akolbe

54 ms·

631.
by akolbe 9y ago
That "prudent reserve" argument is really a red herring the WMF loves to employ, because as long as you find ways to inflate your annual spending you can justify any reserve amount as "necessary". And that's exact
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by akolbe 9y ago
Thanks for looking into it. (Btw, I wrote that Quora answer you linked to.) Yes, the donation banners sound slightly less alarmist these days (partly due to year-long efforts by myself and others), but most people who donate still think the
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by akolbe 9y ago
You just don't get that WMF, who you give your money to, and Wikipedia are not the same. WMF don't write Wikipedia, don't curate Wikipedia, don't check its content. They pay the hosting (2% of their expenses), tweak the
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by akolbe 9y ago
Exactly. Even if they didn't pay writers (which might create its own problems), they could do far more to create and publicise a user-friendly scheme to provide volunteers with access to paywalled sources, digitised books etc. They cou
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by akolbe 9y ago
Why more power to them? The WMF often treats the volunteer community - the people actually writing Wikipedia - like shit. Many of their flagship engineering projects were disasters that required unpaid volunteers to clean up after them. The
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by akolbe 9y ago
A lot of people seem to have that reaction. And that's why WMF is swimming in cash.
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by akolbe 9y ago
Yes, and that revenue comes from begging banners that more often than not create the - entirely false - impression that if people don't donate, Wikipedia will blink out of existence. In the early days, when almost everything was volun
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by akolbe 12y ago
You shouldn't write anyone a free license to collect as much money as they can by monetizing the Wikipedia brand. The money has to actually serve a need and be spent in a way that benefits the reader. And there have been germane questi
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by akolbe 12y ago
The simple story is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff has massively expanded over the past six or seven years; both the revenue and their spending have risen exponentially (from 2 million in 2006/2007 to over $40 million in 2013&#x2F
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by akolbe 12y ago
For six years, Wikipedia named Boston College basketball player Joe Streater as one of the key figures in the 1978–79 point shaving scandal. Streater was innocent: he wasn't even on the team that season. Yet this spurious fact came to
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Wikipedia: re-writing history(wikipediocracy.com)
2 points by akolbe 12y ago|2 comments
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What do your donations to keep Wikipedia “online and ad-free” really pay for?(wikipediocracy.com)
1 points by akolbe 12y ago|0 comments