Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I think the periodic outreach for donations on Wikipedia would be more successful if they earmarked some portion of the funds to identify and remove harmful volunteers.

View on HN

If you actually look into where they spend their money, quite a bit of it doesn't go to Wikipedia itself, which I think makes their donation requests nigh unto dishonest :/. What does is often funneled into projects of questionable value that seem to never make progress, such as switching to a WYSIWYG editor.

.. and didn't fight net neutrality in 3rd world countries.

source?

Seriously? In addition to having been fairly big news, and having been covered and talked about on this website numerous times, it took me all of three seconds with a single generic Google search to get a high-profile news result that focusses on the issue. Knee-jerk challenges to source things should be limited to things that are at least slightly difficult to find sources for and which are also difficult to believe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25...

Not the GP, but while I'd give you credit for the "at least slightly difficult to find sources for" part of that, "difficult to believe" definitely applies (at least for the average person) when it comes to a claim that Wikipedia, of all organizations, acts deliberately to undermine net neutrality.

Not that you're wrong, of course; only that asking for a source for such a claim is by no means unreasonable.

Believe me, I'm the first person to kindly point out that something is "Googlable" or, in the case of programming, direct someone to the docs. With this, I couldn't believe that Wikipedia would engage in such a unethical practice - didn't even search for it considering that Wikipedia is generally a great org.

Thanks for the info.

Assuming you're talking about zero-rating: it's complicated. It's providing a public good, but opens the door for an argument that may see the erosion of net neutrality. I don't think there's something inherent in providing a free service (or enabling free access to a service) that is counter to the goal of net neutrality, and I do think that we can find a way to foster a free and open web and still make this work. It won't be easy, and it won't be perfect, but I think it's worth making the effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com