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Comment by boublepop | Hacker News Reader

> Big tech should be paying for this stuff…

I don’t see anything about anyone paying the content creators. What fairness is it to har one platform currently freeloading of of the work that another platform is freeloading of its users (while begging them for donations mind you) suddenly have to pay the first freeloading platform?

I can’t speak for others naturally, but every vontribution I have made to Wikipedia has been made on the basis of contributing you our common knowledge base, not to try to provide a free service for a profit driven corporation.

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> I don’t see anything about anyone paying the content creators.

The knowledge contributed to Wikimedia is understood to be public knowledge. Any contributions are considered voluntary and available to the general public. This includes profit driven corporations who want to create a service wrapper around Wikimedia content or serve the content in a different presentation (licenses withstanding).

> ...not to try to provide a free service for a profit driven corporation.

I personally feel like this is a fair step. Since contributions are made for public consumption, it makes sense that for-profit corporations whose products depend on Wikimedia APIs would pay for access to those APIs. They're not paying for the data; that's free to the public. They're paying ensure their presentation has a guaranteed level of availability and support[0]. The end result is the same: knowledge contributors aren't paid for additions or edits. The context behind the payments are different.

[0]: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/

IMO, the best mental model is that this gives a more formal way for Google or Apple to donate to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's mission of free knowledge is unchanged, but hopefully tech companies can provide financial support in a structured, reliable fashion. Ideally, it's even positive sum (i.e. the Wikipedia-dependent services can perform better, so that the efforts of Wikipedia volunteers impact more people).

This is still being run by the non-profit, so I suspect that these can go into ongoing Wikimedia operating costs. They're incredibly efficient for the scale they operate at and I'd say this might improve things even further. The less reliance on giant donation banners, the better.

Wikipedia doesn’t rely on giant donation banners - the Wikipedia foundation had $180M dollars available at the end of 2020, and an annual hosting cost of $2M/year. The vast majority of there expenses are $54M/year of salaries, which I doubt are focused on Wikipedia itself.

If you want a charitable cause to donate to find one that needs the money.

Ah yes, all those servers can just putter off by themselves without any attention at all.

For a site called hacker news, its a wonder that people think system admins are a superfluous job, totally unnessary at scale*

* and yes im aware that wmf employees a lot of people, most aren't sysadmins, and some are more critical than others. I just think its rediculous people think that servers just run themselves and hosting is the only core cost.

Psh, how hard could it be. They only do 21 billion page views a month; 39 million edits, register 264k new users, and have a data change of 23 GiB. Free account at Wix.com ought to do it for hosting costs.

jk, it's fascinating how critical people get with how other people spend their money when asking for donations. When was the last time HN took a close look at how Johnathan Ives spends his proceeds?

If you're going to assert that the expenses aren't focused on Wikimedia's services, you should have proof that backs that up. The foundation is quite transparent about their operations, and as a former employee, I can attest that what they provide publicly matches my experience internally.

You could complain about how they're using some of that money to support the projects (the community teams historically have produced relatively little of value), but it's expensive to pay for a highly experienced engineering department, legal department, etc. For a site with the level of reach they have, they do a very good job of doing it with a relatively low cost.

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