The servers don't buy themselves. You could argue that WMF doesn't spend money effectively if you want, servers are a small part of the budget after all and like any org there are parts of the budget that are of questionable value, however its a bit much to claim its not going to supporting the wiki.
[Disclaimer: i used to work for WMF a while ago. I dont anymore. My opinions are my own]
I feel like the same thing happened to stack overflow.
But that is unavoidable for articles written by men, rather than some truly neutral artificial intelligence.
My gripe is that I find that Wikipedia does not acknowledge the issues enough, and seems to mostly assert that it is fairly neutral.
This is likely exacerbated by the fact that there are very few "reputable" right-wing English language sources that can be cited on Wikipedia. Similarly, sources from the Middle-East or Russia, which are less likely to be cited, would probably take a less charitable view as well.
English language Wikipedia of course has a disproportional number of editors from the U.S.A. and most of them have a particular side in this culture war.
But it touches upon another issue of All voices must be repræsented, proportional to their weight.. — does this mean all voices currently on the planet? all voices that have ever been on the planet? or only English voices on the English-language Wikipedia?
In particular, I find it somewhat odd that, for instance, English-language Wikipedia will speak of the “critical consensus” surrounding a Japanese work of fiction, using only English-language reviews thereof, while there are probably more Japanese-language reviews and fans of the work, and the critical perception is often very different in different cultures, but English-language Wikipedia very often speaks of “critical consensus” for what should be called “Anglo-Saxon critical consensus”, and dare I say that it is often not even that, but chiefly a U.S.A. consensus.
It's much worse than that. The vast majority of sources that would potentially provide alternative [and valid, but right leaning] perspectives on basically any subject are effectively blacklisted as unreliable by somewhat of a cabal of heavily left leaning regular editors. Go to any talk page on any politically controversial subject and you'll see how the seasoned editors are almost all extremely left leaning and easily overwhelm anyone asking for a more neutral representation of facts. And let's not pretend that this has anything to do with "quality" or "factual reporting" when you'll find sources like Vox and Salon on some of these pages.
It's self reinforcing, in that such heavy editorial bias discourages neutral and right leaning people from making edits that they then have to defend publicly against virtual extremists.
It's pure cultural warfare. And in typical subversive fashion, they all play dumb and dance around the fact that the only approved sources are extremely biased towards their side.
In most of the world, “liberal” does not mean “left”; it means capitalism.
It is a common sentiment of the European that both what the U.S.A. calls “left” and “right” is rather “right” in his eyes, with both he Democratic, and Republican Parties espousing more right wing fiscal policies than many of the most right wing European parties would dream to tender.
The U.S.A.-man might look at it from a perspective of what he calls “right” vs. “left” in terms of neutrality, but from where I stand it is mostly an issue of “U.S.A. culture” vs. “global perspective”, as even articles that pertain to events in specific countries on English-Language Wikipeia seem to very often be analysed from what is clearly a U.S.A. cultural perspective.
I really don't think europeans think the left in american are really "right". Europe is not further left than the american left.
Grrr, what does european even mean. It's like 40 different governments and countries. All with different cultures.
“liberal” very much means capitalism in most European political discourse or really most places outside of the -U.S.A.
Consider that even on Wikipedia, where non-U.S.A. politics is discussed, the term is typically so used:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Party_for_Freedom_a...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Australia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Democratic_Party_(Germany...
> I really don't think europeans think the left in american are really "right". Europe is not further left than the american left.
It is quite a common sentiment one hears from European that from their perspective all U.S.A. politics is right wing.
Consider that there are very few European countries where even the most right wing parties would ever suggest such a system as at-will employment, which is pervasive throughout the U.S.A., and which neither party has shown any desire to end. — it is really seen as quite dystopian from a European perspective.
To say that Europe is not further left is a very strange claim. You will find no European country, or many developed countries at all, with the following, which are common to universal in the U.S.A.:
- The right of employers to terminate without first seeking approval from an employment court or similar organ
- A lack of universal healthcare
- A lack of universal access to higher education
- The legal allowance of advertising drugs
- Non-defaultable student loans
- Very low minimum wages
- Waivability of refund rights
Such things are generally considered extremely capitalist in most developed nations, but are quite normal in the U.S.A..
> Grrr, what does european even mean. It's like 40 different governments and countries. All with different cultures.
And you will find that in each and every one of them healthcare is a universal right, at will employment does not exist, and drugs cannot be advertised, and probably many more of what I listed.
It is not that Europe is so culturally homogeneous, it is that the U.S.A. is very exceptional in how capitalist it is. You will also not find most of these things in, say, Canada, or Australia, or any other developed nations. — the U.S.A. is rather unique in how much it indulges the big man at the expense of the little man, and neither party seems particularly interested in implementing changes that would bring it to a similar balance that the rest of the developed world enjoys.
How about the term 'neoliberal'?
« Liberal » means economic liberalism in pretty much all of continental Europe.
Frankness be, it makes one wonder how one country can so often develop different political terminology from the standard in about the entire world. A similar situation is that in the U.S.A., blue has become the color of left wing politics, and red for right wing politics, a fairly recent symbolism dating back less than two decades, whereas for centuries in the entire world it has been opposite.
How could U.S.A. news stations possibly have decided upon this? it seems to me that the news editors that approved this must have been largely ignorant of this symbolism when they decided to go against the rest of the world here, and so was the population, which must mean that they weren't aware that dating to the French revolution, the left has flown red, and the right has flown blue.
The cold war is a fairly recent event; surely they noticed that the communists took red as their color of choice?
Well, « blue » as a political signifier very much started on the left, being associated to American and French Republicans (in the true sense of the word, not the GOP). The right wing being « white », ie. monarchist. Coincidentally that meaning also found posterity in the Russian Revolution as the colour of the Tsarist regime also happened to be white (possibly in imitation of the French, but religious reasons also play into it).
As far as I'm aware, the US under a « swap » of sorts as the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic and Republican parties broke up and reorganized.
How do you figure this?
The association of left with red, and blue with right, dates from the French revolution, as the three estates of French society each had a color: the commoners had red, and the nobility had blue.
The monarchists at the times of the French revolution always flew blue, and the republicans that wished to abolish it flew red.
> As far as I'm aware, the US under a « swap » of sorts as the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic and Republican parties broke up and reorganized.
That is not the origin of the colors in U.S.A. politics; the origin is that during the Bush v. Gore election, most major U.S.A. news stations, either by coincidence of agreement, congruated on coloring the Republican Party with red, and the Democrat Party with blue, and it remained so ever thereafter.
That they chose to do so, to me, indicates a certain ignorance of global politics,̧ as nearly every capitalist party internationally incorporates a great deal of blue in it's designs, and every socialist party a great deal of red.
That's just... false. The monarchists universally flew white banners. The Republicans were literally known as the Blues.
Only "Excess deaths"...
I do observe tendency in modern world to white-wash communism, and cancel facts about crimes committed by communist regimes.
I know it sounds crazy and I don't have any evidence, but one possible explanation of the trend - Russia's or China's state-sponsored propaganda.
Do you?
This is true regardless of what ideology helped the regime take root. Recognizing this fact is not whitewashing anything.
To give you a less personal (to you) example, the Islamic State of Irak and Levant filmed and uploaded executions of hundreds of people, and killed many, many more people off-screen. They have "Islam" in their name.
Should the page about "Islam (religion)" put ISIL front and center, despite them existing for less than a 1‰ of time Islam existed, and having similarly little adherents in comparison to global population of muslims?
About 25% of the world population are Muslims, roughly 25% of modern countries are predominantly Muslims, yet as you wrote in the comment, ISIL is a small percentage in both space and time.
For communist countries, these atrocities seem more like a rule than an exception. Soviet Union, countries of Eastern Block in 20-th century, China – they all did horrible things.
Wikipedia’s articles about fascism and nazism do mention war crimes and genocides, rightfully so. Yet Wikipedia’s article about communism does not. They do have two links in the “Related topics” section, but other links in that section aren’t particularly related, they also link to capitalism and trade union there.
EDIT: I see it's probably the same link you saw in Related topics, so it's mentioned twice on the page. Should it be mentioned in the text of the article? I don't know. There's similarly no mention of crussades on the Christianity page.
The “communism” article links to the mass murders from the very last page, in an article about 10 pages long. Looking at the edit history of that article, I see the edits to change that are systematically reverted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Communism&type=re...
And I say that as an Eastern European.
Yep, also China and North Korea. And in recent history, the evils of Cambodia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia.
I don’t believe these are coincidences or implementation issues, the list is too long for that. Can’t explain with soviet occupation either, some countries on the list are very far away and never had Soviet military presence.
Please, don't. Putting PRL anywhere near Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, or even Hungary is very, very wrong.
We had no mass murders here. There were some deaths during workers' protests. There was censorship, and political dissidents were put in prison, some others were denied employment. There was a lot of surveilance. And we had a martial law declared for a while in '81.
On the other hand, millions of people were educated (even if Marxism-Leninism was a part of curriculum and some parts of history were erased (like mass-murder of Polish officers by NKVD near Katyn)), millions of people got a chance to work (as long as they didn't publicly criticize socialism or the party too much), to own an apartment; the children got to go to vacations by the sea or in the mountains. Millions of people were lifted from poverty. The pubic infrastructure (roads, trains, hospitals, schools, etc.) improved so much that comparison with the state before war would be a joke.
Czechoslovakia and Hungary had Soviet tanks roll over their protests. That was bad. Nothing like that happened in Poland (arguably the '81 was done to avoid such an intervention).
So, don't use Poland as an example of how horrible communism is. Because in Poland - it wasn't. Not to mention, even the official propaganda wasn't saying we lived under communism - it was called socialism, and was deemed a first stage before world-wide communist revolotution. Which somehow never materialized, and nobody cried because of that.
EDITED to add:
> I don’t believe these are coincidences or implementation issues
These are not coincidences. This is what happens under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. As I said already: it doesn't matter what ideology was used to rise to power, once the power is unchecked, it will be abused. There were decidedly anti-communist regimes in South America and parts of Europe and Middle East which murdered people left and right, too.
You seem to want to see communism as bad, because people you call communist did something bad to you and your family. I'm sorry, but that's wrong way to look at it. Some people with psychopatic tendencies got to use an ideology (which they probably never understood, nor cared to understand) to seize power and abuse it.
Also, I really didn't want to use this card, but maybe there was a reason (other than them being psychopats) for what they did? Maybe they hunted people who collaborated with Nazi forces during the war (you know there were quite a few, right?) Maybe they were afraid they'd be hanged on street lamps (like in Hungary) if they didn't put out the dissent quickly enough?
History is not black and white. "Communism is bad and makes people do bad things" is very wrong way to look at it.
At least 40 people were killed during martial law, and over 10000 interned. Dozens of people were murdered by security forces in the previous years too. Reducing that to "some deaths" just feels tone-deaf.
>The public infrastructure (roads, trains, hospitals, schools, etc.) improved so much that comparison with the state before war would be a joke.
It would be surprising if absolutely nothing improved for over 40 years. But in the end, economy and infrastructure was a joke when compared to Western block. When looking at it it's hard to classify infrastructure development during PRL as success, really.
>(arguably the '81 was done to avoid such an intervention)
This is widely disputed, and most people who promoted this view were themselves involved in introducing martial law, so...
>History is not black and white. "Communism is bad and makes people do bad things" is very wrong way to look at it.
It certainly isn't black and white, but whitewashing totalitarian regime because they didn't kill enough people to classify as mass killing isn't solution either.
Look, the state killing off its people is always bad, yes. What's tone-deaf, though, is equaling dozens of deaths, or even hundreds of deaths, with this (China):
> Estimates of the death toll in Cultural Revolution, including civilians and Red Guards, vary greatly, ranging from hundreds of thousands to 20 million.
This (Ukraine/Soviet Union):
> By the end of 1933, millions of people had starved to death or otherwise died unnaturally in the Soviet republics. Total population loss (including stillbirth) across the union is estimated at 6–7 million.
This (Cambodia):
> According to a 2001 academic source, the most widely accepted estimates of excess deaths under the Khmer Rouge range from 1.5 million to 2 million, although figures as low as 1 million and as high as 3 million have been cited; conventionally accepted estimates of executions range from 500,000 to 1 million, "a third to one half of excess mortality during the period".
and so on, and on, and on.
> This is widely disputed,
Which is why I wrote "arguably".
> whitewashing totalitarian regime because they didn't kill enough people to classify as mass killing isn't solution either
I'm not whitewashing anything. I'm saying that, as far as authoritarian regimes this side of the Iron Courtain go, PRL was relatively peaceful, killed off relatively small amount of people, and - on the other hand - improved living conditions of a relatively large percentage of the population.
As I said many times at this point: when the power goes unchecked, it will be abused. It was also true in the PRL. But there is a spectrum of how bad it gets, and on that spectrum Poland was possibly one of the easiests places to live in the whole Eastern Bloc. Ignoring this is not "being true to historical facts", it's just blatantly pushing an agenda.
Mao arguably murdered more humans than anyone else in history. Read a book or two.
Isn't the point of free speech that the merits of ideas get challenged? The merits of the argument:
1. P is a crazy idea
2. There is no evidence for P
C. Therefore P
are few and far between.
> Mao arguably murdered more humans than anyone else in history. Read a book or two.
We're talking about Soviet and Chinese Communism (and their offshoots). Both of these forms of Communism have had great results as well as terrible. Looking at China now and comparing it to China before Communism I see development that is nothing short of astonishing. Or even just over the last four decades. I don't know how many have been saved by increased standards of living, access to healthcare, and general governmental competence, but I do know that the number is very high. Compare this to a country which has not been under Communism: India. How many have died due to lack of development, lack of access to healthcare, governmental incompetence, etc.?
I do not think that this is a crazy idea at all [1]
As for India, it has many of its own bureaucratic problems without having to be a communist state, true, but to claim that this in any way legitimizes communist social management is absurd. If my family gets sick and some of them die of neglect in my house, it doesn't make my neighbor who outright starved and murdered most of his family any less reprehensible. In any case, India too saw large increases in human development as it left behind pseudo-socialist policies and embraced a more market-friendly form of governance during the same time-frame as China..
India's issues being the result of bureaucratic problems is not what I suggest.
> If my family gets sick and some of them die of neglect in my house, it doesn't make my neighbor who outright starved and murdered most of his family any less reprehensible
I agree. But that is not analogous to the situation with Chinese Communism. A more analogous situation is this one: A man has ten children, each of whom has fallen sick. The man decides to heal them. He has little knowledge, and due to his poor care the first three children he treats die. But he learns from his mistakes, and he successfully heals the rest of his children.
At first, we thought poorly of the man. "Doesn't he know that this method of healing will only hurt his children?" we asked. But as the man learned more and more about healing, we realised that his heart had always been in the right place, and that he was now great caregiver.
And, meanwhile, the neighbor's ten children had also fallen sick. This man decided it was best to let nature take its course, and he did not try to heal his children. Four passed away, three were sickly for the rest of their lives, and three fully recovered.
Looking at these two fathers, at first we looked down on the one who tried to heal his children, but only hurt them. Much better to let nature take its course, we thought. But, by the end, we realised that the first man was in fact the better carer for his children.
> In any case, India too saw large increases in human development as it left behind pseudo-socialist policies and embraced a more market-friendly form of governance during the same time-frame as China..
As a developing country, development is expected. The presence of development is almost irrelevant. So let's compare the rate of development of the two countries: even as India has developed, it has at the same time fallen further and further behind China. And let's compare the nature of the development: In China, unprecedented efforts have been made to ensure that the poorest of the nation are lifted up. In India, this is far from the case.
The countless countries with less state-control of the economy than China, but worse economic performance, stand as evidence strong that this is false.
Not sure what a bureaucratic administration is meant to have to do with communism.
I'm not saying there's no bias on the Wiki, but it manifests in interpretations and wording choices, the facts are generally there. At least in the articles about history, which I read regularly.
As an example, read the page on George Washington and you'll see he recommended a total war against indigenous people of America, "the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible". It's downplayed, explained away in all kinds of ways, but the fact is there.
For example, researchers can measure excess deaths in 2020 compared to the previous year and find a gap between that and confirmed covid deaths in every country. For example, if the caretaker of a child or disabled or elderly person was suddenly hospitalized without time to find a substitute, and they didn't survive due to lack of care.
Purchase of computer equipment: (3,709,426)
At 3% return they need 100 million in the market to cover it, their short term investments are 95 million. Wikimedia does not need to raise money ever again if the only thing they are about are servers: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
Wikimedia is the perfect example of a bureaucracy expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.
So, yes, I'd rather they were extemely conservative about software and management. Running PHP and having a non visual editor is less of a big deal than having to tweak donor Wikipedia pages to remove awkward facts to keep the $$$ flowing and salaries paid.
There is an essay called "wikipedia has cancer" about its balooning costs that grow like a tumor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
It includes updates as of March 2020.
At the end of the day, wikipedia's hosting is much higher quality now than it was in the beginning. Wikipedia used to go down so much there was literally an external website dedicated as a scratch pad for users to write articles on until the real website came back up. Back in the day, when WMF had no money, they cut every corner they could to make it work. The result was something that was always on fire but got the job done. Now we have much better quality. But quality costs money. Whether or not the trade-off is worth it is debatable, but lets not pretend that wikimedia hosting costs are buying the same thing as they were in 2005.
Last of all, i would encourage a comparison to any other site of similar size/popularity. Wikimedia hosting is orders of magnitude cheaper than industry norms.
[Disclaimer: used to work there but not on the infra team. I dont work there anymore. My opinions are my own]
It is a fantastic resource and while is a need for increased transparency, more fiscal responsibility etc. Is there an alternative resource out there that provides as much value to the world? I'd be happy to switch and start supporting something else if so.
It would be rather sad to see donations drop off and the project shut down... I know this would likely never happen with the amount of value it offers at this stage but still...
This would be less risky than donations as it would ensure it doesn't rely on any groups in particular for cash who might have dirty laundry to hide.
Like big tech.
They would need 100,000 advertisers to earn $10 million, which seems impractical.
For comparison, they earned $120 million in contributions in 2020.
That said, Facebook has 8-10 million advertisers, many probably running low budget campaigns. But low budget campaigns typically only work when they're hyper-targeted / personalized (something I assume we don't want Wikipedia to do)
There are very strict content rules with most advertisement networks and threading over those will severely limit the income from ads as those that run advertisement often do not wish to be associated with various content.
Consider what happened to TVTropes, which at one point decided to remove articles that dealt with a variety of sexual subjects as it was very bad for their advertisement revenue that the articles even existed on their website.
If Wikipedia become dependent on advertisers, it would have to tailor it's content to accommodate them.
Of course, it's content also influences the number of donations they receive as it is.
edit: And customer service, people who spend $100 tend to be angrier all too often than people who spend $1,000,000.
Just define a price per day/week/month and that's it.
That's how advertisements in newspapers work since ages, without any overhead.
Jokes aside the whole point of Wikipedia is to be ad free. That's literally the whole thing about it. The rest is made by contributors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
I kept donating every year for the past several years, but I wonder if I should continue to do so.
As other commenters mentioned, the dark patterns make me reluctant to donate in the future, and this move potentially too.
FY 16&17: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/da/Wikim...
FY 18&19: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
I have been contributing to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons for well over 2 years now: Volunteers do contribute a lot but they also tend to create ruckus in equal proportion. One such example: The tools the engineers build for a focus group of Editors who have one or two jobs to do across all Wikipedia properties are absolutely important and don't come for free.
What is that supposed to mean? Increasing "bureaucracy and endowment" is not a goal in itself. Are you implying systemic misappropriation and bad faith acting inside wikipedia org? If so I encourage heavy citation.
It is for some bureaucrats, who are paid according to their ‘importance’. (In the commercial world, this is sometimes limited by a need to produce actual results.)
(And in terms of work that people actually appreciate: I also very much appreciate that it's practically never down and responds quickly. Just not as actively, I suppose, since you only notice when it's not there.)
If they focused on just running the website they'd probably have a decade of runway. If they had saved money instead of growing expenses until now then they'd probably have had 20+ years of runway by now.
A website like pypi gets much more server load and they have never asked for a penny.
pypi servers receive 1 million requests per minute. That's likely more than wikipedia.
According to Wikipedia's public statistics[0], they receive ~3 Billion media requests per day, which is about 2 million requests per minute.
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/content/total-med...
en.wikipedia.org has around 260 million page views per day. Each page view consists of multiple HTTP requests (picking a few random pages shows twenty or more per page) - so I'm pretty sure that wikipedia has higher traffic figures.
It's kinda moot though. I wouldn't begrudge pypi asking for money either.