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Comment by richij | Hacker News Reader

Please support the original investigative journalism, rather than TNW's tawdry rehash: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

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Flagging for this. It's in the guidelines to target the original source, and TNW doesn't add anything here.

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.

> Wikipedians who have made hundreds of thousands of edits may well feel someone else is enjoying the fruit of their labor.

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.

Yeah, that's not how human psychology works. You didn't have managers earning $400,000K+ at the Wikimedia Foundation then. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg

So pay them less, fine whatever. But let's not pretend anybody was duped about anything here. Not one single person has ever been forced to make a Wikipedia edit. That "labor" was given freely under the term of the license, it's at best incredibly disingenuous and naive to pretend you're owed anything for it.

Who said anyone got duped?

If I make edits to Wikipedia, it's because I want to share them with the world. I couldn't care less for the managers (from a purely technical perspective), as long as they do a good job of keeping Wikipedia running.

This argument would work better if the editors were paid in the first place, and then they see an increase in the executives' salaries and get jelous or feel it's unfair. Clearly not the case, since they already knew it's all volunteer work.

The editors argument would work better if they would say: "we donated (time, work, knowledge) and are not happy with how foundation spends its resources (money)". The whole "pay gap" thing is muddying the water. One comes closer to the truth when abstracting donations and resources.

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.

> It's literally in the license and everyone who edits Wikipedia should know this

So I'm betting that you know exactly the license for every single cookie and website you've ever visited then.

This is more analagous to knowing about the concept of credit when taking out a credit card.

If you don't read the contract you sign you're still bound by it.

Yes, someone else, (including themselves and billions of us) are enjoying the fruit of their labor. So we are eternally thankful for that. The fact that someone makes 400k at Wikipedia doesn't take away from its impact on the world.

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?

The endowment is $100 million the other $200 million is foundation assets – including (these are last years June 2020 figures)

$71 million cash

$95 million short term investments

https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...

That makes me wonder if Wikimedia foundation decides to share their funds with the editors say based on a formula(depending upon the quantity & quality of edits) to send payments to their LiberaPay; How would Wikipedia be perceived at large?

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.

Originality discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887

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