Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

I know children's cancer and other horrible things pull on more heart strings, but Wikipedia makes such a huge wealth of great information available to such a huge percentage of the world, including many poor people who might otherwise not have access to much education. Saving sick kids is kind, but there are lot of healthy kids who could use a leg up too.

I honestly don't value the other Wikimedia projects very much, and I'm sure there is waste in their policies and beuracracy, but assuming Wikipedia is only getting 10% of my donations, I still think it's great bang for the buck.

If there is a better charity, I'd like to know about it. However, this article reads to me as "Meh, you shouldn't really feel obligated", and I don't think it said much that was useful.

However im glad that this is the article posted, and not the rediculous "cancer" article that compares amount spent on servers when the site was smaller, slow and constantly going down to the modern day site when its fast, stable and a bigger site.

[Disclaimer: used to work for wmf. Do not anymore. My opinions are solely my own]

Edit: i initially just read the intro to the article. The article is long and says a lot more things as well other than just lila/knowledge engine.

If you're in the majority of the population that doesn't regularly donate to a significant level, then please don't let this article simply turn your internal "should I donate to Wikipedia" switch off and leave everything else as is. Instead, start treating the Wikipedia donation banners as reminders to donate to some charity that you feel is worth giving to. (The EA forums would likely be a good place to research that, as well.)

That's an interesting point, and it got me thinking: what does reward past content creators? As someone who has contributed to and created Wikipedia articles in the past, I tried to imagine what would feel like a reward to me, and the things that come to mind are:

a. People adding to those articles and making them more and more polished, turning them into A-class articles that I'd be proud to have contributed to.

b. Knowing that the article has helped someone in some specific way, changing their life a little bit. Some kind of "thank you" page attached to the articles would be nice, where a school kid could tell you how the article brought the subject to life for her, or a middle aged man could say thanks for informing him about his medical condition. (I can see the practical issues with this, but even a heavily-moderated slowly-updated page would serve the purpose, and would provide positive value.)

They happen to be set up as a foundation where I can look at their financials, but in my mind I treat them more like a private company.

If they want to waste my money then so be it. I pay what I think is a fair price for the amount of value I get from the product.

A sketch of the argument: If you think donating is important, it's because on some level, you're hoping to bring about some good in the world. You donate to Wikipedia hoping to encourage Wikipedia to continue existing, and more work to go in to the effort of building Wikipedia.

But I'll bet that you care about other good things in the world as well: saving sick children, preventing climate change, fighting unjust policies. There's a lot of things you could make an impact on donating. How do you decide?

Effective Altruism states that not all donations are equally effective. One charity might take your $1000 and use it to buy a dying child an all-expenses-paid vacation to Disneyland. Another might use it buying bed nets to prevent the spread of malaria, in expectation keeping one more child alive than would have died. And given that your budget is limited and you can't afford both, you must decide which is more valuable to you.

So this article roughly says, "Wikipedia is a great and noble cause. But here's why it doesn't come close to the _very, absolute best_ way to use your money to help others."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER (2016, updated through 2020)

You can agree or disagree with the conclusions, and agree or disagree on the value of WMF's non-wikipedia projects, but the facts are not in dispute (annual revenue, expenses, net assets are all from WMF published figures).

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011

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

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

On the other hand, the Spanish version of Wikipedia is rife with ideologically biased articles if you venture into anything that talks about politics or history. The English version is, for the most part, free of this, probably because there are more people reviewing it.

We shouldn't underestimate the propagandist power of Wikipedia in non-English languages, especially when some people give it more credibility than it deserves.

in 2020 however it appears to me that wikpedia gentrified, accruing a thick fat of bureaucrats and has somewhat been stagnating around his stack.

reducing support is maybe a good opportunity for them to lean down a little and get back at rethinking the future of crowd knowledge self-organization, instead of putting layers of gates and red tapes around each bureaucrat turf.

I think it's done more harm than good, I think the editing process is biased, skews to the political left or right (depending on the article), Wikipedia also generally skews secular and humanist (because that's the nature of most contributors). References constantly 404, but that's not even the main problem: references are not parsed properly. A lot of times, I'll look at a cited paper and its cited content will be diametrically opposed to what the Wiki page says.

Controversial topics are nightmare, and contributing to them is even more of a nightmare. The voting process, by definition, is flawed -- and Wikipedia is very much a "tyranny by majority." The only articles that are high quality tend to be very technical ones (where you generally have professionals in the field contribute to non-controversial topics). Most rules -- like NOR, NPOV, and BLP, are implemented haphazardly.

Why do I think Wikipedia has done more harm than good? Because there's a new phenomenon where one reads the Wiki page of a complex topic (say, something like Free Will) and 5 minutes later, the reader thinks they're a bonafide expert on a topic that has puzzled humanity for millennia. There's a reason Wikipedia can't be cited in college (heck, even high school) papers: it's low quality and unvetted. I make it a point to never cite Wikipedia in online discussion. I'd rather cite Wolfram Alpha, or a professor's personal webpage, or a specific paper.

Even before Wikipedia, you had knowledge being disseminated via the web: philosophy professors had their own web-pages, theologians had their own web-pages, and particle physicists had their own web-pages -- all filled with morsels of specific (and often times technical) information. I really wish Encyclopaedia Britannica put more efforts into their own knowledge base, but I get it: high-quality vetted content is hard to do. Wikipedia takes shortcuts, and we'd be foolish to ignore its shortcomings.