Wikipedia fundraising strikes again – an open letter to Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia fundraising strikes again – an open letter to Wikipedia

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29 pointskrschacht23 comments

I must say that this is a well-written article, regardless of the opinion, resumed (TL;DR) here:

- Requesting money to Wikipedia viewers is done so often it gets as annoying as an advertisement-packed Wikipedia would potentially be.

- If you have innovated previously (knocking down the traditional enciclopedias), you can do innovate regarding the way yourselves fund the Wikipedia foundation, instead of just implying that "the only way for us to avoid advertising is for us to loudly ask our users over and over again for donations." (author quote)

As pointed out, Wikipedia is part of the Wikimedia Foundation. I find interesting that they apparently only rely on users for the source of income.

On the other hand, if they go for the regular "Foundation" or "NGO" way of requesting money to institutions (which probably would include governments and big companies), this might have a negative impact on Wikipedia's neutrality, and I personally would prefer Wikipedia to stay as neutral as possible.

So it's not so easy to "innovate in funding"...

> Requesting money to Wikipedia viewers is done so often it gets as annoying as an advertisement-packed Wikipedia would potentially be.

I wonder, do many people here agree about this? I don't keep track, but feel like I only see the fundraising messages 2-3 times a year. This is way more preferable to me than seeing (probably multiple) ads on every page all the time.

One of many possibility for innovating in funding: sell access to their data to companies for commercial use. Offer a robust API and clean downloads of data sets in a wide variety of forms—they can let people use this freely for research and non-profit, but I bet lots of companies would pay for it. Not only access to the user-generated content (e.g. to construct a concept graph) but also access to their traffic data (e.g. what articles are viewed most often, what articles are spiking right now, etc).

Wikipedia is being dishonest here. The infrastructure is doing fine, thankyouverymuch, the hosting costs could be paid in perpetuity by taking the cash reserves to the stock market.

But there is all the administrative overhead, outreach, Wiki for Women, Wikimania conference, salaries for the staff in SF who would use their Wikipedia experience to land a cushy job elsewhere - that's what the fundraising is intended to support.

Doesn't this entirely miss the point? If they froze Wikipedia as it is and it stopped keeping up with the times, it'd be significantly less useful. And considering that Wikipedia is substantially losing editors and admins, any attempt they can make to bring more in seems appropriate. There is likely a critical mass of volunteers needed - fewer than that and you lose it all.

The approach theyve taken to this issue may not be cost effective, but it's absolutely necessary.

> There is likely a critical mass of volunteers needed - fewer than that and you lose it all.

Volunteers... don't cost money.

If they were paying people to contribute/edit that would be one thing, but all the money they're spending doesn't contribute to the content on the site at all.

And as far as I can tell, mediawiki -- the software platform -- is basically complete. It accomplishes the goal of displaying editable encyclopedia pages at scale.

Volunteers don't cost money, but acquiring and retaining them does. A lot of these events are chances to get WP volunteers to meet and connect in real life, hopefully making WP more tangible and enjoyable to volunteer for.

Saying that spending money on volunteer outreach doesn't contribute to site content is just absurd. It's exactly the opposite.

The admin corps does need some kind of reform - the place is hostile to newcomers, it doesn't use real-world expertise well (in academia we have secretaries to keep the cranks away), competing interests and astroturfing are an ongoing problem, nevermind the internal politics. The Wikipedia Movement stuff that the donations pay for do not address any of these issues meaningfully. The dropping admin and editor count would support this thesis.

We agree there for sure. I don't know how they could combat those issues more effectively, but I wouldn't expect it to be free.

Wikipedia feels very insular, somehow. It's difficult to explain why, but I think it's the strictly enforced anonymity and the insistence that real-world identity does not matter on the site. It all reminds too much of institutional politics in a second-rate undergraduate college.

It's not clear how more money can reform the encrusted structures. More volunteers can't be the answer.

Wikimedia Foundation is actually rated pretty highly on Charity Navigator with 4 stars:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

  Overall Score & Rating         : 93/100
  Financial                      : 90.96/100
  Accountability & Transparency  : 96.00/100

Charity navigator makes no attempt to see if the charity is doing anything useful. It "rates" charities based mostly on their overhead, which has reasonably been called "The worst way to pick a charity"

https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a...

Under this rating system, a charity that collects money and burns it would be rated highly so long as you didn't pay the guy tending the fire very much.

Exactly. Wikimedia has been quickly increasing spending on things far outside their stated justification for fundraising.

Others in this thread may be interested in extensive discussion on HN of this issue earlier this month (149 points, 121 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429067

and back in May (1054 points, 406 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235

I feel like the author went to the effort of writing what I was too lazy to.

I don't want to donate to WMF simply because I don't want to confuse their metrics into believing this current campaign is working. I've donated before, I'll donate again, but this round has been so disgustingly crass, that I want nothing to do with it.

I've always felt that Wikipedia is an interesting tool, but I don't have a positive feeling about the Foundation, or the organization. There are many problems with Wikipedia, and maybe I haven't looked enough for it, but I would really love if Wikipedia would tie more of their fundraising to fixing these issues. I would like to see Jimmy be more open about their spending, problems, criticism, addressing all of that, and then saying here's why we're raising the money, and here's what we're going to use it for, not just to line Jimmy's pockets.

They're doing fine https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2016-2017_Fundraising_R.... Fundraising by donations is a numbers game. It can be annoying, but a lot of people do give.

The OP isn't arguing that they can't raise enough money this way, he's arguing that they way they are doing it alienates wikipedia users.

Can't Wikipedia decentralise its hosting? Plenty of people would be happy to donate a portion of their bandwidth and storage (I'm thinking of something BitTorrent like). It would fit Wikipedia's purpose and lower costs significantly.

Hosting is a minor expense (about 3% of overall expenses) [0]. They spend nearly twice as much on "donations processing" expenses as they do on internet hosting.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...

Wikimedia Foundation has tons of money, most of which is spent on salaries/administrative overhead, raising more money, processing donations, and "awards".

It's not a scam, but it's a bloated tick on the ass of what could be hosted and run for under $10mil instead of having over $91mil in the kitty, spending $11 million on grants and awards, and almost three times as much processing donations as hosting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235

What an absurd and misconceived open letter. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, as the author acknowledges, and it's up to them how they raise funds but thankfully another fantastic thing is that they are ad free. And this dude thought it was worthwhile to spend an hour writing this letter because an email from wikipedia slightly bothered his inbox one day? Does he not have better things to do? Ridiculous first world problems and ridiculous looking of gift horses in the mouth.

I spent 10 minutes writing it. I simply replied to the email when I received it in my inbox this morning. But the reason I offered this perspective is precisely because I want to see wikipedia continue to succeed, and to thrive! This is the same reason I donate to them. But I've heard many people complain about their nagging about donations and I think they'd benefit from hearing from an outsider on how they're increasingly coming across. They can do better. I think highly enough of them to believe that honest critical feedback would be valuable to them.

Wikipedia has it's fundraisers. Medium has its claps and sign in with TwitBook. I'd miss Wikipedia. Meidum perhaps not.

So long as Wikipedia does not start A/B testing a fake paywall like PBS has been doing recently on my IP address with Ken Burns's Vietnam War, it has not violated my notions of working toward the public good.

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