Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations?
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I often find books and articles there that I can't find anywhere else. Somewhat surprisingly their content often doesn't show up in Google searches.
Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.
Call it "knowledge debt", similar to the concept of "code debt". Every piece of knowledge also has to be maintained (e.g. in the case of a natural person, if they are still alive), and that maintenance costs effort.
Vs. just labeling the page as old, low-traffic, and little-maintained. Disk space is cheap, and the "backwater" page's information might become more important with time. (If only as a snippet of "what did people back then think about..." data.)
Having unmaintained articles means a huge amount of content not checked by anybody ever so what you get is a mix of self-promo, jokes, intentionally misleading articles, "1054654789764 is a number" articles, political agenda etc.
Editorial-resource-wise, there is a huge difference between:
- "a decent general editor can glance over this article long enough to label it as [1] plausibly legit, [2] obvious drunken rambling, [3] some kid's knock-knock joke collection, [4] ax-grinding extremism, [5] etc."
and
- "a subject-matter-expert editor can determine whether this Korean-language article about Roman legal practices in (the Roman province of) Hispania Baetica under Emperor Caracalla (198-217) is passably correct and current".
I am not a studious follower of things Wiki, but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
But it's very easy to write an article which superficially looks great - nice structure, polished language, links to other wikipedia articles etc, but at the same time can be completely false and talking about something which doesn't actually exist, or does exist and paints it in a completely incorrect light.
Again, not all such articles get caught today, but in general it's a manageable problem with the "Notability" and "Reliable sources" tools. Either there are supporting sources and you can easily verify the information, or there aren't, and you delete the article.
Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do?
> but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
Yeah, they mostly have only very cursory information about what are wikipedia's goals and how it works internally.
At least Wikimedia could hire generalist experts for the major areas of science for each major language that have the time to review contested or suspicious articles, based on the cited sources or actual research. Many governments have such a public service for the members of parliament (e.g. the "Wissenschaftlicher Dienst des Bundestags" in Germany, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaftliche_Dienste_des_...), which every MP can ask to provide guidance on any question they need for their work.
See e.g. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno... where they explicitly say, "the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects." (My emphasis.)
(By the way, for an alternative view of that specific case, see –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... as well as
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-... )
Liability is one consideration here. It is not uncommon for people to be libelled on Wikipedia, but the Wikimedia Foundation, as a platform, is protected from liability under Section 230. So they really have no interest in doing something that will result in their being held responsible for Wikipedia content – such as hiring experts to vet and correct said content. It will never happen: they are and want to remain a platform.
"After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed" https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/wikipedia-bicholim-conflict...
There are a few more examples here:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Farrow
Dr. William Henry Farrow (20 June 1805? – 17 November 1876) was a physician born and trained in England. Farrow practiced in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario. He is most notable for providing one of the first detailed descriptions of synesthesia.[1] Farrow reported the details of the illness, (in this case temporary) in an article published in the Lower Canada Journal of Medicine.[2]
Footnotes
1. New, Chester (1929). Lord Durham. Oxford University Press. pp. 374–376.
2. "An Analysis of Confusion Occurring between the Senses". The Lower Canada Journal of Medicine. The Medical Society of Lower Canada. 12: 56–62. September 1838.
It's always worth remembering that Wikipedia has different sorts of quality problems from conventional encyclopedias.
Wikipedia's goal is to be an accessible comprehensive encyclopedia.
Do you disagree about the purpose of an encyclopedia? There's clearly space with web media to include more comprehensive articles, but IMO this should be _as well_.
It's kinda the "if I had more time I'd have written more briefly" concept writ large (at web scale, if you will).
Seems like it.
As another commenter wrote: “Encyclopedia is not supposed to be an introductory learning material, it's supposed to be a reference work.”
> but to me they're not encyclopedic as they're not really introductory.
Encyclopedia is not supposed to be an introductory learning material, it's supposed to be a reference work.
There's also a Wikimedia's project called Wikibooks which is aimed at producing learning material.
What old collections of books obsoleted in the early 80s are you referring to?
> to someone of moderate learning/intelligence.
It's mostly about the learning, not the intelligence, i.e. current state of research shows only loose correlation to intelligence (g factor) and favors models that use a domain-specific skill to explain maths competency. Intelligence will certainly help, but its effect is quite overvalued.
No it isn’t. It is an extreme claim that advanced mathematics can easily be explained to someone regardless of their intelligence.
The evidence for this claim would be the presence educational programs that can easily educate almost anyone in advanced mathematics.
These do not exist.
But a shallower explanation is the essence of what encyclopedias are all about, IMO.
I think that’s due to encyclopedias having been sets of books with limited space.
If you expect it to be a review of subjects, like an abstract -- as encyclopedias generally were before the advent of Wikipedia -- then it seems like something can be said on most notable topics.
It's a difficult task, it not only requires a thorough understanding of a subject but a special skill as an educator. It's a hard task.
Yes, it's going to be impossible for some articles, but if they're notable aspects of mathematics then it's worth a try.
I note that shelves are filled with books explaining complex topics at lower levels (easier in a book than a few paragraphs!?). Also, YouTube is replete with explanations that get closer to being encyclopedic than simply splurging graduate level textbook pages into a wiki (which is also a useful thing, but useful to different people).
To achieve accessible, Wikipedia accepts lower quality (arguably, often argued within itself), establishes methods to evaluate quality (with parenthetical comments, links to "sources," etc.).
I'm afraid these days I can't make out those goals over the shouting and shrieking of their actions.
If it was wrong when it was originally posted, then that should ideally have been worked out and corrected early on. If not, then it was a case of new information still being wrong, which is always a risk with a mass collaboration project like Wikipedia, regardless of how old each particular article is.
If the information is merely outdated, that's immediately discernible by looking at the age of the most recent edit.
In either case, the way a wiki works is to gradually accumulate improvements in accuracy, detail, and and thoroughness over time. Deleting content prevents this from happening.
> Deleting content prevents this from happening.
If somebody creates an article about their sock collection, they might be somewhat increasing detail and thoroughness, but possibly decreasing overall accuracy. Wikipedia might send a representative to verify this fact, but I'm not sure if the Wikipedia's budget would be sufficient for that. If not, then I think deleting would actually contribute to and not impair the overall goal.
Back when I was an active German Wikipedia editor, decisions were done by community vote.
Personally, I agree with you that the German inclusion policies are way too strict and there have been scandals about it (e.g. about an anti-feminine bias), but the Foundation "overruling" a community vote? That's a line that should not be crossed, for good reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Free Flights to Italy was a minor political party in the 2018 Italian elections. The party was created by Giuseppe Macario.
Rolling Stone Italy published an article on Macario showing that many of his claims about himself were actually fabricated. This was picked up by other media outlets.
La Voce di New York published several not-so-positive articles on the guy at the time. The Points Guy published an article as well.
The account (Modulato) which proposed the deletion is Giuseppe Macario himself. He did the same thing on Italian Wikipedia. It is a strategic attempt to suppress negative stories about his past. You can see this behavior repeated in the history of rogeting article on English Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rogeting&action=h...
Several years ago, Macario ran an academic cheating service called CheatTurnitin. One of the techniques used to circumvent anti-plagiarism services, like Turnitin, is rogeting.
Macario published an article on LinkedIn. He integrated the article as a source for the rogeting article (IP 5.170.* edits). A short while later, he added his service's website to the article as well.
This service attracted a lot of negative reviews on sites like Ripoff Reports. Toward the end of 2017, he attempted to clean up his additions (Adrin10) to the rogeting article. These were reverted by other editors.
Last year, he tried to propose the rogeting article for quick deletion. This was reverted by another editor. And that's when the Modulato account came in and removed the material without being contested.
While this content shouldn't have been there to start with, it just shows an example of not all deletionists being equal. Some are far worse than others.
Considering the main productive work of developing wikipedia is done by volunteers, does funding need to grow vastly in order to keep growing that? And if the goal is to create accessible and open knowledge for all and a superior competitor came along that was able to thoroughly outcompete and obsolete wikipedia unless vast amounts of money kept coming in, it doesn't seem like the goal would necessarily be lost. Might even be achieved better and cheaper.
The question should be rather asked like that:
"Has any charity/NGO ever pretended that they would not be able to run another year without donations RIGHT NOW from everyone visiting their site, while they are fully loaded and not being transparent about it?"
They don't grow, they don't expand or move into new fields. They do their one thing, they do it perfectly. All extra money is saved for a rainy day. Most can run for years without a yen of money coming in just on their savings.
It’s more rare in publicly traded companies - though it can happen. Often it changes after a founder dies.
But generally, there are many businesses and projects around the world which stay at their size and run successful for a long time. I mean isn't Hacker News itself an example for this? Small forum, running year after year and barely changing, nor aiming for growth.
https://hfordsa.medium.com/rise-of-the-underdog-92565503e4af
People may remember how Freebase disappeared – absorbed in Wikimedia's CC-0-licensed Wikidata project (contributor rights be damned), just like much of Wikipedia's infobox content got absorbed in Wikidata (database rights be damned). And there is now actually a chance that even more of Wikipedia's content will end up CC-0 licensed (i.e. completely free and public domain, usable without attribution):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia/Lice...
That would be horrible, as end users would no longer even be given an indication where content presented to them comes from. (Gresham's law also works in the information ecosystem.)
There should always be a Wikipedia, but going CC-0 in a bid for complete world domination is an almost Orwellian dystopia that can only benefit the same Silicon Valley lot who preferred CC-0 Wikidata to CC BY-SA Freebase.
As long as AI-based articles are algorithmically generated nonsense, those seeking accurate knowledge won't turn to them.
They backed up one editor at the highest levels, after people wised up that he edited Wikipedia an average of 30 times per day, every day, over 14 years; almost entirely making edits against left wing and anti-war causes: [1]
They've also literally destroyed someone's life, lied about it, and then patted themselves on the back for fixing the problem nearly a year too late: [2]
With regard to Irish national politics, I can attest that they leave out serious scandal information regarding the top two parties politicians, while leaving out important good stuff and including all sorts of bs about independent and left wing politicians; from what I've seen they do the same everywhere.
[0] - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...
[1] - https://www.mintpressnews.com/phillip-cross-the-mystery-wiki...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
But yes, it's the endemic failure to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" that is so worrying. The Wikimedia Foundation wants to become the "essential infrastructure of the [global] ecosystem of free knowledge".
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...
Even if one were to agree that such a global infrastructure monopoly is a desirable thing to have, one would have to need one's head examined to want an organisation in charge of this infrastructure that regularly resorts to lying by omission to suit its own self-interest.
I've been a WP editor since a couple of years after it was founded. I don't bother trying to edit anything on the Middle East - those articles are patrolled by zionists, with support from the very top. Articles about those states that are the remnants of Yugoslavia seem to be edited by various kinds of authoritarian bigots.
To get the best out of WP, you have to be clear that many editors have an axe to grind; if something smells fishy, have a look at the talk page, and see if people have been challenging it. And have a look at the edit history.
What's remarkable is that WP is as good as it is. But I'm not happy with the idea of one website becoming the touchstone of human knowledge.
Exactly. It's a remarkable constellation of interests. People are invited to exercise anonymous influence on the most widely propagated information source on the planet, on condition that they work for free. Big Tech profits from the free content thus produced.
I love Wikipedia, but it's a very human project. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, all mixed together.
For a more recent example that was posted on HN a few days ago: the proposed deletion of a page on mass-killings under Communism. Most of the arguments on the discussion page were from power-editors complaining that the page was "making Communism look bad" and that it was used for "anti-revolutionary talking-points". While the deletion is still being voted on, gives you an insight into the culture.
> An administrator or other editor is in the process of closing this discussion. Please do not contribute further to it; the result should be posted shortly.
but nothing changed sine 29th November
The problem in my mind is that on subjects where I'm not as well educated I may well not notice the bias because I don't know what may or may not be disputed for a given subject matter.
Obviously everything on Wikipedia should be sourced but it's entirely possible to be selective of which sources you use.
with https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julius_Evola&oldi...
Don't tell me him being antisemitic is such a paramount piece of information that it needs to appear in literally the first sentence.
I'm not trying to underplay what he is saying, but dismissing him in the first sentence on a supposedly neutral article really rubs me the wrong way.
I think you've misunderstood the point of an encyclopedia, personally.
Wiki's intro currently states:
> Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974), better known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher, poet, and painter whose esoteric worldview featured antisemitic conspiracy theories and the occult. He has been described as a "fascist intellectual", a "radical traditionalist", "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular", and as "the leading philosopher of Europe's neofascist movement".
It does not appear to portray antisemitic beliefs as "the single most important or relevant fact about him". It presents them as an important fact, just as Washington's intro includes slaveholding before moving on to the table of contents.
Ultimately, the relevance is subjective.
I would rather have dinner with a antisemite than a paedophile.
Any more defensible examples?
My problem with Wikipedia is that some articles are fiercely gatekept by individuals who have clear bias and the community does little about it. A great example of this would be the Alcoholics Anonymous page.
Any time someone tries to add information about the ineffectiveness of AA's all-or-nothing treatment of substance abuse, the abuse/harassment that goes on in groups, the documentary that revealed said abuse and harassment - one of a small handful of accounts, who rarely participate on any other page, immediately revert the edit with a gish-gallop of claimed wikipedia violations.
Now, aside from the fact that reverting edits is supposed to be something of last resort - the reasons they cite for removing stuff strain credulity all the time. For example, they dismiss the documentary because it apparently wasn't screened in enough festivals and theatres. Which...might be a thing (it really isn't), if one were trying to cite it as a source...but you can't even mention the existence of the documentary, a demonstrable fact, without that being shot down as well due to the documentary not meeting their standards for a documentary.
I believe they also cited a wikipedia rule that says that "both sides" type coverage of a subject needs to be proportionate to how mainstream/fringe each "side" is. So by their reasoning: because there aren't many people talking about the problems with AA, the AA article shouldn't have any mention of the problems with AA.
They justify all this by claiming the AA is under "attack" and they are "defending" AA from the evil people (did I mention that AA is closely tied to Christianity?)
Wikipedia is controlled by a very small number of people who use an exhaustive policy manual to justify whatever actions they want to take, defend viewpoints they like and attack those they don't. It's sort of like how US federal and state laws are extensive that just walking to your mailbox, you probably break some sort of law and could be detained by police for it.
That's the core problem. Wikipedia isn't governed by the truth or fact, but by who knows the policy manual best.
Especially when the example is a philosopher and the thing being described is one of their philosophies.
Not at all. The "BRD" policy puts reverting at the centre of the recommended approach to editing.
> Consider reverting only when necessary. BRD does not encourage reverting
It's bizarre that you think it "puts reverting at the center of the recommended approach to editing" when the policy specifically says it doesn't even encourage reverting.
IME, the majority of edits on WP seem to be reverts. I don't see much evidence of reverting being discouraged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...
It's an "explanatory supplement" to the Consensus policy. The problem with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines is that arguably there are so many of them that you can almost always find one that says what you want it to say. :)
And if not, WP:IAR will do the trick. That, too, is policy:
In fact the article was deleted…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/del...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist...
In other words, there’s a bias in the editors to not make it, but there’s no malicious bias that deleting an actual article would imply.
Someone first moved it to userspace, causing it to become a redirect: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:List_of_left...
Which then triggered it’s deletion.
Take https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Gentzen instead; he was an unquestionable Nazi and it’s pretty well documented in the entry, although not central to the article.
Try better
As an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
Some things cannot be expressed or explained without political language or terminology because they are inherently political. For what it's worth I think Wikipedia did a great job with that article.
If that's proof of bias is another matter.
Are we reading the same article? It says 'Evola viewed Jews as corrosive' and that he believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were broadly accurate even if they were fake.
I doubt that scanning a Wikipedia article is sufficient qualification to announce that someone has been confirmed an antisemite or not, but I'm sure victims of antisemitism are grateful for your judgement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Farrakhan
Yeah I'm OK with Wikipedia being biased against misinformation.
Early in the pandemic, a conspiracy theory emerged that the virus had been bio-engineered by China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One early source of this theory was former Israeli secret service officer Dany Shoham, who gave an interview to The Washington Times regarding the lab.[28][29] Later, US politicians began propagating the idea, including Senator Tom Cotton, President Donald Trump, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.[29] One scientist from Hong Kong, Li-Meng Yan, fled China and supported the idea. Many authorities debunked the conspiracy theory, including American biologist Richard Ebright, NIAID director Anthony Fauci, prominent scientists, and the US intelligence community.[29][failed verification] The conspiracy theory spread widely on social media, but subsequent scientific investigation showed that the virus originated in bats.[25]
So you agree with Wikipedia being biased against the misinformation of the lab leak? You're even fine with them asserting it's a conspiracy theory and shutting down conversation about the possibility?
and the senate minority concluded that it was a lab leak; https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/2/house-gop-re...
I was kind of unclear here intentionally. The source being wild has been disproven. This leaves lab leak as the only viable theory. So while it hasnt been proven, it sure as hell is the current theory.
The point I was making is that the political position set by wikipedia proves the bias. If they reported in a neutral fashion they would have NEVER called it a conspiracy theory. They might have said that we lack the evidence of it being a lab leak and wild source is quite likely over lab leak.
The bias is proven though and then the person I replied to was alright with them ignoring 'misinformation' but this is tantamount to agreeing with the bias.
>There was a senate investigation that biden killed (https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/biden-team-shut-down-inquiry-t...) Why he cancelled it, who's to say, but it COULD be something to do with this; https://nypost.com/2021/11/29/joe-biden-expected-10-percent-...
If you step back, early in the covid lab leak story is that the lead scientists from said wuhan lab published in nature mag the source appears to be bat. Afterall, it is indeed quite related. I believe what this says is that it wasn't an intention leak, they just didn't think they did it.
The follow up theory is that it was intention but not by them. Intentional by someone who was actively in a cold war with china... who might that be... oh right...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/peter-daszak-should-...
""" This article weirdly claims, or implies, a thing that no serious Biblical scholar of any sort would claim, viz., that Jesus was not given the title “Christ” by the original Apostles in the New Testament. The Wikipedia article itself later contradicts that claim, so perhaps the editors of the above paragraph simply meant the two conjoined words “Jesus Christ,” and that Jesus was rarely referred to with those two conjoined words in the New Testament. But this is false, too: the two words are found together in that form throughout the New Testament. """
This is wrong. Or rather, wikipedia is completely right in this case. In fact, the line quoted in the article is fully taken from Encyclopedia Britannica. The line is very clear of what it mean, and while it is true that Jesus (son of Joseph) was probably titled "messiah" (or Christ if you want) after meeting with John the Baptist (from the gospels), "Jesus Christ" as a name probably came later. Some bad translations of the gospel or Paul's letter might say otherwise, but don't found your knowledge on translation. And the historiography tends to agree with Wikipedia/me/anybody who had catechism.
Another article ruined. I can't read further after that, if the author is wrong about that, he might also be wrong on things i'm not an expert on, so i won't be able to take anything i read on this seriously. People should just stop talking about history in political articles, they ruin it every time. Or maybe they should everytime, and allow history geeks to classified them easily in the "untrustworthy" category.
I'm not the guy, i just linked the blog which had examples. My reading of the blog isn't that he's taking a position but rather pointing out how the wiki page is clearly written by someone who does not believe Jesus ever existed. That Christians wouldn't write the article that way.
>The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of unevidenced claims centered on the false allegation that while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt activities relating to the employment of his son Hunter Biden by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.[1] They were spread primarily in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation during the 2020 presidential campaign.[2] United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration."
The article begins by immediately labeling the accusations “unevidenced” and “false” and then suggests that it is a foreign intelligence plot, an allegation which is itself a conspiracy theory. The article then continues to debunk the accusations point by point all in the introduction of the article, placing the refutation prominently at the top so that the only impression the reader is left with is that there is nothing to it. Only in the final sentence does it reluctantly concede that:
>The article's veracity was strongly questioned by most mainstream media outlets, analysts and intelligence officials, due to the questionable provenance of the laptop and its contents, and the suspicion it may have been part of a disinformation campaign.[8][9][10] It was later confirmed that at least some of the laptop materials were genuine and Hunter Biden himself said that the laptop could be his.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_...
In the first paragraph -
> The Mueller investigation culminated with the Mueller Report, which concluded that though the Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference and expected to benefit from it, there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy charges against Trump or his associates.
This makes it sound like there was something underhanded there, and their source for it was some opinion piece news article rather than the report itself. The fact is that the report conceded that they found no evidence which linked Trump or his campaign of colluding, conspiring with Russia.
The alleged hacking or leaking of Clinton and DNC information under the Obama administration by Russians or other hackers was nothing to do with Trump. He "welcomed" it like any politician welcomes bad news for their opponent, but it's a total mischaracterization of the report, which is really a incredibly problematic indictment of the wild conspiracy theories, lies, and misinformation pushed by many politicians and corporations and people around this.
And major related articles from this one, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates.... When you look at other kinds of misinformation or even unproven allegations made by less favorable sides of politics, the articles often lead with "unsubstantiated claims", "without evidence", etc. This Trump Russia conspiracy theory clearly should be treated the same way, but it is not, wikipedia is still attempting to keep it alive and is trying to salvage the reputations of those who perpetuated it and those who fell for it.
The initial article contained unverified reports that the suspect was himself gay, and that that was his motive for the attack. ...and mods on Wikipedia were deleting any edits that referenced the fact that the suspect's father was a former Taliban official that was admitted under the Obama administration, and was politically active in Florida, attending a number of Hillary Clinton talks despite video evidence.
References to the suspect verbally professing his allegiance to ISIS was constantly struck from the article with constant rewrites that the motive was that he himself was gay.
It was wild to see the disinformation being pushed by mods.
The articles on stuff other than politics and political figures tend to be pretty neutral.
I'm thinking of just getting a subscription for a real encyclopedia though because Wikipedia is often rather low quality in my opinion.
Read: fact-leaning bias
That is if you redefine what the words 'fact' or 'fact-checking' mean in the style of Orwellian newspeak.
BBC: "Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language Wikipedia" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128
Slate: "Non-English Editions of Wikipedia Have a Misinformation Problem" (about historical revisionism in Japanese Wikipedia, the far right Croatian Wikipedia, etc.) https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...
WMF report on Croatian Wikipedia ("captured by ideologically driven users", "intentionally distorted the content presented in articles, abused power, and systematically obstructed otherwise accepted global Wikipedia community practices"): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Croatian_WP_Disinformat...
Even within the English Wikipedia, you can find pages with surprising slants. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
By and large, though, I think most people would agree that politically Wikipedia skews somewhat left of centre.
I find this type of sentence very frustrating. Left of which centre? Where is the centre? What is left and what is right? None of these questions have clear answers as soon as you look at a global userbase.
I think en-wiki reflects the attitude of the editorbase, i.e. mostly young, mostly male, mostly white, mostly anglo-saxon, mostly educated, mostly geeky
What I meant with left of centre was that, taking the US as an example, Obama and the Clintons (lots of Wikimedia consultants have Clinton links, actually) are more likely to get favourable write-ups on Wikipedia than Republicans.
The median of English-speaking people, presumably.
It fits right there with the rest of silicon valley companies, we can now officially call it the FWAANG
This. If you have a point of view, then by definition you are not neutral. I know socialists who favour The Telegraph (right-wing) over The Guardian (left wing, supposedly) because The Telegraph is more open about its biases.
I am ailways suspicious of news sources that profess to be neutral. It isn't possible. Wear your affiliation on your sleeve, and then speak freely.
1) Automatically identifying, reporting, and perhaps removing spam, hate speech, advertising, conflict of interest, etc. content. That's done in part by a system called ORES which was designed, built, and is managed by folks working for Wikimedia. Could volunteers have built such a system? Of course. Did they? No.
2) Identifying, blocking, and reporting child pornography. Like any site on the Internet that allows users to upload images, thousands of images of child pornography are uploaded to Wikipedia (and its sibling projects) on a regular basis. There are tools designed to catch most of these. However, humans still have to moderate a lot of this content. Would you volunteer to do that work all day long? I wouldn't. And that's why someone needs to be paid to do it.
So, while there is likely bloat in the organization (as in any group of humans endeavoring toward a shared goal), there is a lot of work done that volunteers wouldn't or couldn't or simply shouldn't do.
ORES was built with substantial volunteer input. ClueBot, an even more important vandal-fighting feature, was created by volunteers.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kill...
But in a way that's immaterial. Nothing wrong with having money and expanding. They just shouldn't tell people money is needed to defend Wikipedia's independence when by any measure they are richer and more secure than ever before. If you want more money, lay out your plans. Enthuse people for the additional things you want to do with the extra funds. Don't pretend you need five or ten times more money to do the same thing you've been doing all along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
As for laying out their plans, there are dozens of wiki pages[1] dedicated to it and every task[2] and commit[3] to the code is public.
What they tell people in these pleas for donations is the language that actually gets people to donate. If folks would donate after reading the Medium Term Plan, then they would promote but instead humans tend to act only when an emotional appeal is made. That might not work for you but testing and experimenting on those ads proves that it does for most people.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...
And it's the inevitable result of a sophisticated, decade-long program of A/B testing. And this is the outfit, remember, that wants to steward "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge", the most-propagated information source on the planet.
I'd rather have someone in charge of that who's committed to telling "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", rather than someone who tells people what "gets them to do what they want them to do". Wouldn't you?
Personally, I find the ads histrionic and would like them to change. However, an article like this that insinuates something akin to malice or subterfuge instead of recognizing the reality of non-profit fundraising isn't helpful. That was my point.
Nothing will ever improve by accepting that the new boss you've just met is the same as the old boss.
The page is basically an abstract to https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais....
The issue is the WMF VP of engineering estimate from 2013 says it costs about $10 million to run Wikipedia for a year. They have (according to this article) $300 million in the bank, and look to have taken $142 million more this year ... but are making desperate sounding pleas for cash.
The article says maybe they have enough and could ease up on the tearful-sounding begging. They're being the corporate equivalent of a beggar king that begs all day and drives back to their mansion in a brand new car in the evening.
From the Kolbe's article:
>WMF’s job advertisement [...] says the WMF employs a team of over 500. Top-tier managers earn $300,000 – $400,000 a year. Over 40 people work exclusively on fundraising.
As for the language in the ads, it's there because it works. The WMF has tried, many times, language which is less emotional and more objective. It doesn't work. People don't respond.
What you're asking for is to have people donate because of their objective sense of value but that's not how most humans work. The WMF does what works.
Currently, there is nothing preventing WMF from drawing down the endowment arbitrarily, effectively making it a checking account, not an endowment.
This is less a complaint about fundraising (we get it, nonprofits need money) but accountability. Its one thing to ask for donations. Its another to use loaded language (ironically in violation of the Wikipedia Manual of Style) that implies the site will go dead in a year unless you contribute money to the dark pool of cash with almost no oversight.
"We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details. We should limit spending increases to no more than inflation plus some percentage (adjusted for any increases in page views), build up our endowment, and structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
'According to the recent Independent Auditors' Report of the WMF [1], at some point prior to the end of June 2020, an entity called the "Wikimedia Knowledge Equity Fund" was established, and $8.723 million was transferred to it by the WMF, in the form of an unconditional grant. The Fund is "managed and controlled by Tides Advocacy" (a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit previously led by the WMF's current General Counsel/Board Secretary, who served as CEO, Board Secretary, and Treasurer there). Given that a Google search for "Wikimedia Knowledge Equity Fund" yields zero results prior to the release of the report, it is clear that the WMF kept this significant move completely secret for over five months, perhaps over a year. The Report FAQ additionally emphasizes that the WMF "has no right of return to the grant funds provided, with the exception of unexpended funds."
'The WMF unilaterally and secretly transferred nearly $9 million of movement funds to an outside organization not recognized by the Affiliations Committee. No mention of the grant was made in any Board resolutions or minutes from the relevant time period. The amount was not mentioned in the public annual plan, which set out rather less than this amount for the entire grantmaking budget for the year. No application was made through any of the various Wikimedia grants processes. No further information has been provided on the administration of this new Fund, or on the text of the grant agreement.
'I am appalled.
'-- Yair Rand'
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
Part of this money eventually turned up here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund
Where were donors told that $4.5 million of the money they gave would be used to fund causes that not only have nothing to do with Wikipedia, but also have nothing to do with any other Wikimedia project? Where was the oversight on who would be awarded these grants?
(That said, I agree that individual WMF employees aren't overpaid per se. But perhaps it doesn't need quite as expansive of a bureaucracy as it does. Not to pick on Wikipedia; I see this phenomenon in other organizations, too: my university has been expanding the bureaucracy and hiking tuition while more and more professors are adjuncts earning below-minimum wage on food stamps. The individual bureaucrats may not be getting rich, but they sure don't have food insecurity like the adjuncts, and perhaps hiring more of them was a poor decision.)
> If you think anyone is getting rich working at the WMF, I can disavow you of that notion. It's just not true.
Managers earning $300K+ are not getting rich. Good. I guess it's all relative.
> As for the language in the ads, it's there because it works. The WMF has tried, many times, language which is less emotional and more objective. It doesn't work. People don't respond.
"We simply couldn't have increased our revenue from $5M in 2008 to $155M in 2021 without being emotional and, um, 'unobjective'. We just couldn't have done it."
> What you're asking for is to have people donate because of their objective sense of value but that's not how most humans work. The WMF does what works.
"If you want people to give you 31 times as much money as before, you have to tell a good story. What else can you do? By the way, did we mention that we think we should be the central part of the world's information ecosystem?"
This is not conducive to honest conversation. I've been nothing but polite in our discussion. Your sarcasm here and in further responses isn't constructive.
> Managers earning $300K+ are not getting rich. Good. I guess it's all relative.
It is relative. If you live in San Francisco where the WMF is headquartered, this salary won't make you rich. I wish I could make that much money but given the role and the location, it doesn't seem exorbitant.
It might be instructive to look at how many people are giving money and not just the actual amount of money. I'm honestly saying that. I don't know the numbers because I haven't looked in years. Maybe there's more money because more people use it, more people find value in it, and more people donate. It would be an interesting way to slice the data. What's the average donation size? How has the geographic distribution of donations changed?
It seems like across all these threads, what many people, possibly including you, are responding negatively to is the language in the ads and not strictly the fact that the WMF collects money from people who willingly give it. I've already said that I don't care for the language either. I believe that they could be successful without it. Perhaps, not equally as successful but successful nonetheless. I shared that feedback when I worked there. I want them to appeal to the better angels of our nature.
Still, it's marketing and if my money supports the mission (the whole mission and not just Wikipedia), which by all accounting it does, then I'll continue to donate. The marketing, while undesirable, doesn't change their dedication to the mission.
This becomes more and more absurd as the Foundation takes more money every year and expands its budget, and not just by a little – revenue doubles every four years or so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
You need to decide for yourself, Alex, whether you are willing to excuse the manipulation or not. You said earlier,
> As for the language in the ads, it's there because it works. The WMF has tried, many times, language which is less emotional and more objective. It doesn't work. People don't respond.
You say now,
> I've already said that I don't care for the language either. I believe that they could be successful without it. Perhaps, not equally as successful but successful nonetheless. I shared that feedback when I worked there. I want them to appeal to the better angels of our nature.
This sounds more reasonable. Language which we both seem to agree is manipulative (a truly alarming habit for a key player in the global information ecosystem to have!) has enabled the WMF to double revenue every four or five years. I see no reason to assume that it couldn't have achieved modest growth with honest fundraising banners. Isn't this just greed?
Moreover, what falls by the wayside in this fundraising approach is what the WMF is actually planning to use its increased funds for. As far as donors and the public are concerned, it all seems to be about keeping Wikipedia up and running. But in fact, the WMF aims to invest in the Global South, in minor languages, in Wikifunctions for machine-translatable articles, in Wikidata, and so on. All of these initiatives might as well not exist for people seeing the fundraising banners with their message about "defending Wikipedia's independence".
This means that there is a lack of public scrutiny and indeed public debate and input into these plans. It is far better when people have a realistic idea of what it is they are supporting.
And indeed, there is a lost opportunity here, because people might actually be enthused by these plans. That would be a far better motivation for donating than artificially created fear.
The comparison should be the people WMF are begging money from, I doubt hardly any of those being asked to donate in order to "save" Wikipedia are earning anything like that amount. Fire the 40 advertising managers and you've got something like half what's _needed_.
They have over $300 million, they don't need people to respond and they certainly don't need to misrepresent the situation as they are.
But will i still be likely to throw a small amount of money Wikipedia's way, given how much utility i've gotten out of it for free otherwise? Probably.
Why? Because there isn't anything better out there, similarly to how we're stuck tolerating Mozilla not being excellent recently, about which i wrote in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395206 (with which i'd like to draw parallels)
That said, having a local and searchable copy of all of the English Wikipedia can be pretty nice as well.
For example, the data is already accessible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...
And then there are local browsers, for example XOWA: http://xowa.org/ or Kiwix: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page
Now, the UI could probably use a few improvements, but it's overall not too hard to get up and running, here's an example guide: https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-f...
The space requirements also shouldn't be too much for a modern HDD to handle either, so it's entirely feasible. That way you can benefit from Wikipedia's data, without having to rely on consuming their other content, much like you can use Firefox without opting in to their other initiatives.
That said, i still occasionally throw a little bit of money their way.
> Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations?
Given lack of transparency my cynical guess is: to fund fundraising department.
"Salaries and wages" without stating which project were funded is useless.
Who got paid? Programmers? Board? Fundraising team?
The question is whether they invest the money according to their mission, or waste it in corruption. And in that regard one should remember that Wikipedia is not just Wikipedia anymore, it's wikimedia for a long time now, which aims for much more than just maintaining a collection of text. Though, whether this is good or bad, and whether they use the money according to their money, I don't know. It seems more information should be spreaded about this.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...
I don't think many donors have ever looked at that. Nor do I think many donors who do can make too much sense of phrases like "The growth in Thriving Movement expenses reflects a large increase in grants to the movement along with additional investments in our Thriving Movement focus areas."
Several people got paid for coming up with that sentence, and many others like it ... just saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
Wikipedia plays a central role in today's information flows. Wouldn't you want the foundation that stewards such a project to be committed to honesty and transparency?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
IMO, cash is the wrong thing to stockpile anyway. They are big enough to benefit from a financial advisor, and with the right portfolio mix, they could both safeguard existing cash and assure a steady income stream so they don't need the donations in the first place.
People by and large have very little idea of what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing with the money. The WMF is planning to take at least $150M this year ...
According to https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-t... "The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget."
The spending is not presented very transparently to the ordinary donor. You have to dig, and even then the info is often phrased in ways that make it difficult to understand what value the money actually brings.
The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today.
Exactly. What, are they all working sales and marketing? What marketing and sales does wikipedia need to do?
The engineering headcount at companies utterly baffles me sometimes.
Mozilla laid off ~350 developers in the last year or two. That's probably well under half their total dev staff. What are all these developers doing? Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird, so they had hundreds of people working full time Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, there's some platform-specific stuff so you've got iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows specific people...but the number still seems wildly high.
How about Twitter? What are all the engineers doing at twitter? We're talking about a company whose product hasn't significantly changed in a decade.
Instagram was ~40 people when they got bought up. What do you suppose the engineering headcount is now?
I recently read that Wayfair has over 2,000 programmers. Two. Thousand. Programmers.
What the fluff are they doing? Maintaining an online furniture store, or developing sentient furniture?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising
Some of the staff will now work on the Wikimedia Enterprise for-profit arm, selling API services to Big Tech companies. That's arguably honest work – they're intending to earn money like anyone is.
They've hired "Disinformation" staff to look at instances of systematic disinformation on various Wikipedia projects. They're working on Abstract Wikipedia/Wikifunctions, a new project based on Wikidata:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing...
This is intended to produce basic Wikipedia articles written in a programming language that are designed for easy translation into many presently underserved languages. And yes, they have lots of programmers, and by and large the community always complains that they don't work on their wishlists but on other stuff they don't want.
Compared to the early days, there has also been a huge increase in bureaucracy layers and management-consultant-speak ... some of the output, like the proposed "Universal Code of Conduct", is just hair-raisingly bad. See e.g. this discussion thread https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
The management culture of the place has always been iffy. People don't tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.
Mozilla doesn't contribute development work to Thunderbird.
The value comes from unpaid content creators and Wikimedia org is just a parasite benefiting from everyone's else unpaid efforts.
So they’re asking their employees to donate as well, when they don’t need to.
As always, the Foundation is richer than the year before. But it wants to grow, and grow, and grow ... something a Wikipedia volunteer once described as an “infinite loop of ‘we should do more things, because we can raise money’ – ‘we need more money, because we want to do more things’.
There have always been discussions in Wikipedia’s volunteer community about this – about how much money to raise, and about the ethics of making readers believe there is an acute financial emergency:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-Janu... https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-Janu...
Recently, a Wikimedia manager in the “Advancement” (= Fundraising) department mentioned that there would be “nothing intrinsically outrageous” about “an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion dollars”:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
The Wikimedia Foundation is arguably well on its way, with revenue and assets regularly increasing by 1,000 percent or so – and more sometimes – over the course of a decade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
Here are some of the latest figures: In the 2020/21 financial year, the Wikimedia Foundation exceeded its own original revenue goal for the year by about $47 million dollars, taking over $154 million rather than the $108 million planned at the start of the year:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimed...
The precise figure reported is "$154,763,121 USD from over 7.7 million donors".
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#K...
Moreover, the Wikimedia Endowment (which is completely separate from the Foundation, and not included in the Foundation's audited accounts or Form 990 reporting) reached the $100 million mark in June of this year, five years earlier than planned:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#W...
In the current July 2021 – June 2022 financial year, the Wikimedia Foundation aims to take $42 million more than the $108 million goal it set itself at the beginning of the previous financial year:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...
That is a planned increase of nearly 40%. For an historic overview of Wikimedia revenue, expenses and net assets see this graphic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
As always, people should know that the Foundation’s paid staff does not write or curate any of the content found on Wikipedia – this is all done by unpaid volunteers. Wikimedia’s medium-term strategy (never spelled out on the fundraising banners) is here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...
There’s actually no mention of Wikipedia in that.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
Form 990: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
One interesting thing I noticed when I last shared it was that their server costs had somehow disproportionately grown as compared to the number of pages served compared to a decade ago.
There's probably much more video, photo and audio content nowadays than a decade ago. Not to mention a decade of historical revisions on each page.
Increasingly, what's being stored is metadata about the content within those pages. Not to mention projects like Wikidata [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page] which is storing "structured knowledge" about literally everything.
Instead of posting and allowing the discussion to flow naturally, they are angrily rebutting every point people in favor of donating make with the same argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
Note that this does not include the $100+ million Wikimedia Endowment.
Our neoliberal politicians have massive confirmed scandals reduced to 1 line vaguenesses, while their tiniest plaudits merit paragraphs.
And vice versa for anyone independent, left wing, anti-war, anti-corruption etc.
And to you I say Wikipedia is open source, you can edit in stuff yourself. Sure there is some inertia and moderation and some users will engage in edit wars but as long as you add information (e.g. the scandals you mention) there is usually a low resistance to do so. Editing or removing stuff requires more justification but it is feasible too, as long as you have an encyclopedic reason to do so.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128
What is true is that the Wikimedia Foundation finally, after 10 years, grasped the nettle and had someone take a look at the Croatian Wikipedia earlier this year:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform...
Some Croatian Wikipedia admins had their privileges removed, but that in itself doesn't change any of the content. Whether and when the Croatian Wikipedia will become mainstream remains to be seen.
Not giving Wikimedia money does absolutely nothing to stop a bad admin or group of admins from making bad choices. Wikimedia has very little control, if any, over things at that level. They can advocate for change but that change must come from the users themselves.
JFC. It's literally in the license and everyone who edits Wikipedia should know this. I did when I was active on Wikipedia and I was 14 at the time.
Edit: Looking at the video with the monkeys two posts up: there could still be a point to it, if we look at the total earnings and total work of a person, instead of just looking at wikipedia: an editor who earns 100k with their day job and donates work to wikipedia can still feel it is unfair when wikipedia management earns four times as much.
So I'm betting that you know exactly the license for every single cookie and website you've ever visited then.
Also as I read this article, I get the sense that the person writing it has no clue what an endowment is, and that's driving a lot of the misguided indignation in this article.
If you have a $300 million endowment, it doesn't mean you have $300 million to spend. It's the interest/investment gains from that money that fuel the organization. So the interest/investments from $100 mil vs $300 mil doesn't equal that amount. It's much less. The whole point is that the $300 mil will remain "forever."
I don't know what the solution is, to be honest. I worry more about articles I read about how very few people actually have an outsized amount of contributions, and who is checking their biases?
$71 million cash
$95 million short term investments
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...
I presume there will be a large influx of contributors due to monetary gain, Then again moderation wouldn't be much difficult as there's money in it for that too. Wouldn't be much different for vested interests as they put everything under their arsenal even now.
PS I don't think it's tawdry for TNW to post this. They are an aggregator, and they actively direct readers to the original. But HN should skip the intermediary.