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Comment by majos | Hacker News Reader

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. It’s not perfect, and plenty of pages are outright bad, but repeatedly clicking “random page” [1] is a great source of entertainment to me. There’s so much info out there, yet I reliably get something surprising, interesting, or funny within maybe 10 random pages. And because it’s random, I learn things way outside my normal interests.

Try it if you find yourself mindlessly scrolling! It’s pretty easy but you find way more cool things (that typically people don’t broadly know about, if you like that sort of thing).

I donate a few bucks a month and it’s well worth it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:random

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Wikipedia is AWESOME and I admire your selflessness & generosity in donating to a cause :)

However, before giving them any more money I would recommend reading through the (Wikipedia-hosted, ironically) article titled "Wikipedia has Cancer". The revenue vs. employee count/operating costs ratio is way off. Like, orders of magnitude off.

It's a tough pill to swallow considering how useful the site is and their respectable "information should be free for all" mission.

Again, your generosity is admired and there are far worse causes to donate towards. Just want to make sure people see both sides of the coin before spending hard earned cash!

I remember this essay, the author’s main argument was: Wikipedia seemed fine 10 years ago with 5% of its current money, so the increased spending (and calls for donations to cover it) seems unjustified.

I side with the author in requesting more transparency about what exactly donations get spent on, but this strict argument in terms of how spending growth just “looks” unreasonable isn’t convincing. Namely, it’s pretty plausible to me that scaling big to very big is more costly than scaling medium to big, so this comparison of increasing costs to cancer makes me skeptical.

I don’t have any proof that Wikipedia uses donations judiciously, but the scale and quality of the service they offer relative to the annual revenue (about 100m) and expenses (about 80m) seems...pretty good.

At any rate, I mostly view this as “paying a little for a good service” rather than “donating efficiently”.

But thanks for the pointer.

They're actually pretty transparent in their annual report [0].

The issue is that their ads are slightly misleading in that they hint that they might have to pull the plug ("we depend on donations [...] we need your help [...] time is running out in 2019 to help us") even though the time is running out in 2019 part is because they're running the ads during the end of the year, not because they're running out of money. They spent 46 million in salaries out of 120 million in revenue, while the hosting expenses are one of their smallest line items at 2.3 million.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

I feel like if I applied this reasoning I wouldn't give any money to any cause. There is always waste, no organization is perfectly managed. To be fair, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be open to criticism.

That article is pretty unfair. The Wikimedia Foundation has started a lot of other projects since 2005, several of which are very useful and contribute to their general mission to bring knowledge to everyone. Wikibooks, Wikidata, and Wiktionary spring to mind, among others. They've also become the point of reference for almost everything for the entire internet-connected population, which legitimately requires more PR people, more lawyers, and much higher administrative costs, just to maintain their original level of quality in the face of adversarial governments, megacorporations, and every troll with a keyboard. The relative lack of scandals, disasters, and press attacks in the current climate is borderline miraculous.

Compare Wikimedia to, say, Mozilla. Another high-tech open-access-focused non-profit (sort of), and with 5x higher revenues ($500 million!). They've also spent most of it on new projects and skyrocketing administrative overhead. Yet their PR is much worse, they suffer falling market share, and nobody uses most of their side projects. Wikimedia is still efficient and effective given the arenas it competes in.

The thing I consider before donating to Wikipedia is its gender bias - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia

So the donation goes to the foundation while its gender bias comes from its editors - who already don't get paid so stopping donations will not matter.

If anything, the Foundation will need to run programs to fix the status quo (e.g. outreach programs to potential authors who come from underrepresented groups or likely to write about underrepresented topic), so donating money (in addition to volunteering for outreach programs or contributing tech support) are some ways to help with that.

The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work. Diversity and equality don't cost money.

>> The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work.

I don't think this is correct. Policy and culture are mostly bottom-up from the editors, and the foundation has no hard power except for extreme cases like banning outright harassers.

In addition, withholding money from the foundation does not cause any pressure at all to editors because they never get paid from that money anyway.

>> Diversity and equality don't cost money

Sure, but so far most of the efforts to improve diversity seem to come from the foundation rather than the editors, so punishing the foundation seems like the wrong option.

See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_Foundation about the role of the foundation

Since this is hackernews... Other than donating please also consider contributing by coding would also be helpful. Editors rely on tools for many tasks (e.g. to detect & fight vandalism, for article evaluation, analytics, to do tedious tasks such as mass edits), and these tools are often open source. Mediawiki (the software on which Wikipedia runs) are always building features and doing bugfixes. Also, while the English Wikipedia is quite endowed with prolific programmers, many of its sister Wikipedias are less so and often lack basic tools, and there's a lot to do there.

I used to do that sometimes myself (and have also donated)!.

One thing that always seemed strange was how often the random page would be for a soccer/football team or player, or for a random town in Poland.

Combining random with this fantastic chrome plugin: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikitube/aneddidib... has really enhanced my morning.

I use a similar strategy in balancing out exploration and exploitation with videos - pull 5-10 random links and pick one of them.

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