you mean making huge profits from donations?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
If you're so intent on smearing WikiPedia it would probably help you if you studied it for a bit before spouting off a bunch of nonsense in this thread. I get it: you don't like WikiPedia because they ask you for a donation. Note that you're under no obligation whatsoever to donate and that the content is yours for the taking.
As compared to say owning the Encyclopedia Britannica, which took on average a tree (or two) to print and was outdated the day you received it. On top of that it took up a huge shelf and cost as much as a car.
> Common contemporary usage classes PascalCase as a special type of CamelCase, namely upper camel case
Google is awesome.
But without Google Wikipedia would still be around, without content sites Google wouldn't exist.
And as for email: I'd much rather have the federated system we used to have rather than the few big players that are dominating the market (I'll never give up running my own email server), cheap alternatives to Microsoft already existed (OpenOffice), and an advertising company producing a browser is just plain wrong.
Google is terrible, but we'll just have to live with it.
Then, there was Google. Initially, it was just another tool in my meta-search toolbox. It grew to index massive number of content sites, its engine filtered bullshit a bit better, its presentation was efficient/clean, and its front-page results were better than the competition. Got to the point that lay people adopted it massively with most of them talking about how it improved their productivity, learning, and entertainment. They supplanted that on video side with YouTube. I continued to use Google to find info I needed before and during build of Wikipedia. It found the Wikipedia articles along with others that may or may not be better. Many people told me they also do what I do: just Google the topic if you're interested in a Wikipedia article since it will be on or near the top anyway.
The productivity and discovery benefits of Google were huge. They just went up with its massive market share and investments. So many people benefit from it for finding content now that they literally tell people to "Google" something instead of search for it. Wikipedia could disappear and I could find all that information through Google. Actually, Google plus Wayback Machine if I'm being totally honest. Content pages can disappear but the archive can keep them. So, Google plus Wayback Machine were most amazing things to me with one giving me everything I need to know plus other preserving everything I need or might want to know.
You think that's terrible but I say it's awesome. The problems you mention come from the market's and voters' preference rather than Google's excellence at search. Market chose to go to surveillance model. They punish most who try to free us from it. The voters chose to put corrupt people in office who would pass or strengthen IP laws benefiting the bribing few over the many. They chose temporary safety over liberty later. Different choices could've led to a very different Google (or replacement). I blame the demand side since they seem to always pull that shit.
Google the company is horrible.
> Market chose to go to surveillance model.
No, companies offer the surveillance model and leave consumers very little in terms of choice unless those consumers are extremely conscious of what is happening behind the scenes. I highly doubt even 10% of the HN audience (which is more knowledgeable than your average consumer in this respect) could accurately tell you what is going on behind all those walled gardens and corporate faces.
From what I've seen it isn't much good.
And that's before we get into Google by assigning a value to a link and not thinking things through destroyed the value of those links.
You must have forgot all the paid, non-surveillance options that existed in most categories that people ignored for surveillance-driven services. Ecosystem effects also drive it: so many people on Facebook Messenger even though things like Signal are free and better UI like Threema is a buck or two. The users had a lot of choices but kept saying free and spyware until most paid options were bankrupt or acquired.
Even today, there's a lot of firms selling security or privacy on top of a widely-accepted piece of software (esp email or browsers) to maximize uptake. They barely scrape by in revenue vs most firms. Some are small ones selling that stuff at a loss since developers themselves wanted it to exist even if market didn't pay.
So, situation is much bleaker on demand side than you say. If it wasn't, those of us developing secure or private tech would be rolling in more money than ad-driven, free tech in average case. We're not but they're regularly IPOing and gettimg tens of millions during acquisition.
My internet use would be vastly worse without Google, it's true. But these days, perhaps 90% of my Googling is optional - I already have a strong guess at which site will give me what I want, the search bar is just a faster route to get there. If I want Stack Overflow, or Wikipedia, or Genius, or Nationmaster, I already know that's where I want to go. When Google's top result answers my question via a site I've never been to, that's a huge win for Google. When they answer it via a Wikipedia link, well...
I'd still give Google slot 1, but it's not as obvious as it was pre-Wikipedia.
(To fact-check this comment, I Googled "Google" and "Wikipedia", to get to the Wikipedia page for each. Kind of telling.)
So, even then it's more like Wikipedia AND Google instead OR.
For political, technical, or obscure topics that becomes a much tougher question. The political issue is obvious, but I'm surprised at how often I go into the weeds on something mathematical or simply unpopular and find that Wikipedia is off the mark. I wouldn't trust it for those topics without further Googling.
That $MM donation stream is a pittance considering their scale - orders of magnitude larger than most VC-funded startups.
Basically, the foundation is managing the playground where the editors can build an encyclopedia (along with other projects, e.g., Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, etc.), and then mostly leaves the community alone (with some exceptions, not all of which were well-perceived). Given the scale of Wikimedia projects, I don't think 300 employees is excessive (it's very little when looking at other sites in the Alexa rankings except Reddit), and it's great that the expenses can be supported by donations so WMF doesn't have to depend on other people than readers.
I don't see why I would mind that WMF staff gets a salary and editors don't -- editing Wikipedia is not my full-time job, but running it is theirs. (In fact, to the extent that editing Wikipedia is part of my job as a public researcher, I already get a salary from my institution...) It's easier to manage Wikipedia content with volunteers (where most processes don't depend on one single person and where there are little firm deadlines) but to have paid staff to manage operations (if the website goes down you want someone to have a look immediately). OK, it would be conceivable that the foundation could offer grants to pay some full-time editors, or redistribute money as small gifts, or as a lottery, or something, but it raises a lot of complicated questions (I don't know whether the topic has been discussed before) and I'm not sure it would be worth the effort.
Another important point is that the WMF is not a company but a nonprofit, so it is reasonably transparent, and many people in the staff are chosen through elections. It's not like individuals are getting large dividends from donations to the WMF.
I my opinion, the most important point to keep in mind is that WMF asks for volunteer work, but the outcome of that work is shared on fair terms with the public. If I want, I can just grab their entire database https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ and software https://www.mediawiki.org/ and start hosting a mirror with the data, and I have both the technical possibility and the legal right to do it. So WMF is not like companies who ask for volunteer work and then keep it behind closed doors (e.g., the volunteer Google Maps editors, or the historical CDDB example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History).
So it's a valuable resource both for humans and AI. We'll benefit from Wikipedia indirectly by using AI trained on its database.
What's so unimaginable about having separate editorial and legal deparments within the WMF?
> Believe me, it would be silly for WMF to be involved in all editorial disputes about what should or shouldn't be on Wikipedia, how things should be formatted, etc., in all languages.
Having months-long discussions over how to spell the title of a Star Trek film is what I would call silly. Having long-winded, vague and haphazardly enforced policies regarding accuracy, scope and style is what I would call not just silly, but outright tragic.
At the end of the day these decisions have to be made somehow, and I'd rather have them made by some entity which can do so with some consistency and vision, and is willing to enforce those decisions, instead of having them made by the ever-changing whims of an amorphous mob throwing around thought-terminating clichés like 'consensus can change' and 'ignore all rules'. (Though I'm not confident that the WMF, as it is, is actually capable of being one.)
Wiki give user knowledge, probably one of the highest quality sources...