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Comment by fazelesswhite | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I saw the banner last year and wouldn't have donated if I had read this article sooner.

I'm not American so I'm not familiar with donations in general - I always felt it was better for society to build self-sustainable systems via tax and votes or companies to build self-sustainable products via investments and profits, rather than have some shady in between - useful enough for us to want to pay but useless enough for us not to want to pay for real.

It would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I think this needs to die for something more profitable and sustainable to rise in its place, organized by people who make their money input not dependent on charity but a recognized social utility.

That's nice and all, but short of a communist revolution, how do we do that?

StackOverflow seems to handle the fine line well, Reddit as well. They both provide volunteer-heavy knowledge sharing while not appealing to charitable emotions that are disingenuous (if wiki is dying, fine: say it, but if it's not then their only way of growing budget is to pretend it is - it's the sign of an issue for me)

Communist revolutions are just anger and frustration making heads roll all around for a big reset, but the phoenix rising in the ashes of the revolution surprisingly often has the same face as it had before. I live in China, my friends always tell me "we've always had an emperor in Beijing, this is the same thing with another name, why make such a fuss about it", proving that not only did the revolution change nothing for them, but worst: they don't even see there was some sort of point to it. So a communist revolution will change nothing to Wikipedia's governance.

I don't think Wikipedia can be state-sponsored, or even UN-sponsored: it doesn't matter enough. But a corporate entity with a product vision and a clear statement of profit would reduce the tearful aspect of their marketing campaign, appeal to its utility rather than our sobbing hearts and maybe shed a bit (a lot?) of the volunteering to welcome people like me who edit wiki for stuff they need rather than to "offer the world a knowledge sharing platform" in itself ?

They both rely on advertisements (And reddit gold, which is kind of like a donation).

That's generally been very unpalatable to the people who write wikipedia. Even the mere rumour of something like that being considered resulted in a fork of the spanish wikipedia into Enciclopedia Libre back in 2002.

Why would that require communism or a revolution? The American state already gives tax breaks and/or funding to charities, research organisations, public messaging initiatives, school systems, public services etc... there's a huge range of options that involve tweaking the rules of current systems before even getting anywhere near needing to change the entire political system.

I mean the parent suggested not relying on charity. School systems are essentially an arm of the government. I just don't see what the options are for something like wikipedia (Or even say something like a critical open source project like openssl) that doesn't involve relying on charity or advertisments, short of a major change to how our society is structured.

Well for example, and I'm not advocating for these ideas other than pointing out that they'd be much simpler than changing the structure of society: the Government could either buy, or forcefully take control of, Wikipedia, or they could create a competitor with enough funding to take over. They could do it creating a gov department to run it, or they could set it up as an organisation fully owned by the state. They wouldn't even have to go that far, they could just pass a bill that would send however much money from taxpayers to Wikipedia every year, or as a one-off to create a new taxpayer-funded endowment.

There's lots of changes to society that I think would be good, but "ability for government to decide to spend taxpayer money on a charity like Wikipedia, or to create their own version in-house" isn't exactly lacking from the current system.

Man, I do not trust any government to run Wikipedia.

I agree.

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