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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1].

That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping the servers running is about the same as that fund. It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Just minor things of no importance to modern didactics like, you know, functional video support and rarely used, obscure, functions like uploading.

They have more important things to do like weird elections and appointing cryptobro "disrupters" to the board.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund

[2] https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers

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From the first link:

>The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.

What an interesting signaling statement. If you did not know what "racial equity" was, imagine trying to parse out what it is from that statement.

Imagine reading this phrase out loud to anybody not already involved in this debate. Would this help them understand what "racial equity" was? If you read this statement to any of my family or friends, who live in the middle of the country, they would probably conclude that this was some sort of racist propaganda thing, and wouldn't want to talk to whoever brought it up anymore.

I mean the fact that the foundation which is supposed to also be providing information to the world is also proudly publishing things like that should be pretty revelatory.

Absolutely 100%. I can't tell you how many companies I've lost respect for because they've hopped on the virtue-signalling PR bandwagon. It couldn't be more obvious they don't even believe what they're saying but it's in vouge these days so they plow forward anyways. The added bonus of some casual anti-white/anti-european hatred is the cherry on top.

Sure does sound like racism to me, just like Reddit's stance that you can't be racist against white people.

I think waaay too many people are unknowingly hanging around other people they like too much and it causes their circle to double down on crazy.

I just always find it funny that 'Eurocentricity' is one of the problems, given the whole movement is AMERICA-CENTRIC as hell. We've even co-opted what being 'Eurocentric' means! Talk about arrogance!

Your friends and family probably wouldn't participate in a debate about how to build an encyclopaedia that is representative of the world, not just the world according to a bunch of mostly middle class white nerds. If they did have an interest in such a debate, I am sure they would be capable of processing that statement.

There's nothing intellectually controversial about Wikipedia's statement, to argue against it on the basis that it's impossible to parse seems anti-intellectual rather than... actually challenging the content of the statement.

You may wish to argue that Wikipedia can simultaneously be an encyclopaedia that represents the world AND be an encyclopaedia mostly written by middle class white people, but that's a point that requires much more discussion than a hand-wavey statement about how this discussion isn't relevant to your friends and family.

If the content of the encyclopedia is meant to be a representation of objective facts, then why on earth could it matter what the race of the people writing it is?

This sounds like straight up Nazi propaganda. The idea that races are so different that we literally inhabit separate realities is insane levels of bigotry.

The hyperbole isn’t helpful. As has been highlighted time and time again, Wikipedia is the work of a relatively small amount of people and there is a great deal of bias because humans suffer from bias — regardless of their intentions.

“History is written by the victors” is a famous phrase a reason — facts are a representation of the information we are most confident in, not truth.

"History's written by the victors" seems like a stretch that's only kinda truth-adjacent in some situations, e.g. where one side gets wiped out and there're no third-party observers, etc.. But, it doesn't hold in most cases, e.g. in World War 1 or 2, nor basically any modern war, where most of the losing side survives and tells its stories too. Heck, in the US, some folks complain about how much the loser of the American Civil War got to push its narratives. [From StackExchange's History site](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/5597/is-history-... ).

Anyway, critique of that quote aside, how's it relevant to Wikipedia?

The quote is relevant because it demonstrates that it is widely understood that history (“facts”) is not an absolute truth, but a collection of ostensibly-true pieces of information disseminated by one party.

To say that Wikipedia is not representative of its editors, is to say that history is not representative of the victors.

To pick an example of a group that is somewhat insular: if the majority of Wikipedia editors were Chinese, would Wikipedia look as it does today? Would Wikipedia be an equally-as-accurate reflection on the west as Wikipedia is today?

> To pick an example of a group that is somewhat insular: if the majority of Wikipedia editors were Chinese, would Wikipedia look as it does today? Would Wikipedia be an equally-as-accurate reflection on the west as Wikipedia is today?

There's a Chinese Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia

However, even the English-Wikipedia's articles on China are likely to be disproportionately influenced by Chinese posters, even if they're a minority of the overall contribution-base.

That said, what's the potential relevance here? Is this purely about articles on politics, or..?

Interestingly, from the Universal Code of Conduct [1]

> Note: The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct

This could almost be taken word for word from an article about Mozilla.

People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set really high standards for the open, independant organisations they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they don't follow their priorities.

Social justice isn't a bad thing. Social justice instead of actually fulfilling your primary goal is. If all the bugs are closed, the product is beautiful and there's still money sloshing about, then fill your boots.

Also, make sure that your donors know their donation is going to go to racial education of Arab journalists (grantee #1), and not to paying developers and server bills. The begging banners on Wikimedia sites fail to mention that there's already 9 figure surplus, and yet the engineering teams will not see any of it no matter what you give, and their money isn't going to actually end up helping a wiki at all.

If I wanted to donate to racial justice in media, I can send the money to the Media Foundation for West Africa (grantee #5), the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (#2) or any of the others myself.

I think it's a bad thing by itself. With the wikipedia example - anyone can edit, editors can by anonymous or psuedonomous, and there is no preference, implicit or explicit, for race and gender. Over the years wikipedia has been built up, by volunteers, into an amazing and valuable resource.

Now, the organization controlling their work and this global good, decides that aggregate race and gender statistics are a problem. Wikipedia is a little too white, and a little too male, and that's a bad thing!

Imagine applying this reason to any other organization and any other race and gender combination. Here's a crazy idea - if you want to reduce race and gender based prejudice, start by not having clear race and gender prejudices yourself.

Instead of treating it as a nice-to-have when everything else is perfect, maybe consider that pursuing social justice will help you fulfill your primary goal?

I think you're both right.

Social justice INSTEAD of one's primary mission is a terrible idea. This happens when social justice initiatives are put in place to help the careers of people running them instead of the organization. That's when you get issues like the displeasure when I tried asking how many poor white people went to our graduate school in a racism discussion. My interest was in knowing whether it was first-order/direct racism resulting in an underrepresentation of POC or second-order/indirect racism (via classism and POC being more likely to be in poverty). Different causes would mean different solutions, but examining the issue wasn't the actual point. The POINT was so we could all stand up and declare ourselves good people + put it on our CVs.

Social justice in addition to a primary mission is very useful, because getting different people in the room means you think of way more things and identify new ways to carry out your mission.

I don't think this is a social justice thing. I personally would be just as annoyed about any other cause. Wikipedia donations shouldn't be championing any cause that isn't open access to information, no matter what side of the political spectrum it's on. Especially if it's to the point that Wikipedia itself is being left to rot in favor of unrelated causes.

The thing being complained about is literally them executing their stated mission:

> This pilot initiative is rooted in our strategic direction, where Knowledge Equity emerged in 2017 as one of two key pillars of focus in order for us to achieve our vision for 2030. Knowledge equity acknowledges that we can’t achieve free knowledge if there are societal or economic barriers that prevent some people’s ability to share and contribute to knowledge. With this focused fund, we will invest in organizations working to address systems of racial bias and inequality around the world, with the goal of creating a more inclusive, representative future for free knowledge.

This is a motte and bailey argument. The motte here is that people living in unjust situations will likely be unable or less able to contribute to the Wikipedia project, which is true. The bailey is that donation funds are being funneled into these initiatives rather than improving Wikipedia itself (see other comments about bug counts and features lacking in Wikipedia, which are not being addressed). The Knowledge Equity fund may or may not improve "racial justice," however they define that - but the strategic goal of improving free access to the world's knowledge is almost certainly better reached by direct improvements to the Wikipedia software and development, and support of open access and free speech causes rather than racially-focused ones (such as, for example, support for Alexandra Elbakyan's endeavors to keep Sci-Hub operational, or speech protection in more repressive governments).

My favourite irony with the WMF's love of funding racial justice [1] is that one thing that does not work well at all in MediaWiki is the mobile editing interface [2]. It's basically just plain text and you're expected to type in the syntax manually on a phone, and also all the links to the talk, history and other pages are hidden when editing. Guess which countries disproportionately use mobile devices and don't have as much access to actual computers.

[1] Not my emphasis: the KEF seems very much racial rather then social. Social justice that cuts across "class" lines rather than race lines seems much inherently fairer to me, since the point is to offset disadvantages, and race is a proxy of disadvantage, while "class" is almost a direct statement of how disadvantaged you are.

[2] The reading interface is quite good, though certainly could be better (hidden ToCs in articles?).

> the mobile editing interface

They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c... Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to site settings and turning on a special "Advanced" interface in order to get something that's not broken. Awful.

It's worth noting that the bias in Wikipedia editorship is very real, and persists even after controlling for obvious causal factors such as Internet access. This is why "knowledge equity" was identified as a key part of Wikimedia projects' future strategy. Of course, trying to single-handedly solve "systems of racial bias and inequality around the world" is a pointless, Sisyphean task: what they ought to do in the first place is identify what factors make it harder for minorities and the socially marginalized to contribute to Wiki projects, specifically, and address these things. But Wikimedia is not a very evidence-driven organization, so they'd rather content themselves with these pointless and self-defeating platitudes.

> At the same time, we recognize this is work that we as a movement cannot do alone. Our projects can only do so much when, for example, academic and mass media representation of marginalized communities remains insufficient, which in turn limits citations and primary sources for us to build from.

The document linked above has some very pragmatic and boring goals like:

* Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on people of color around the world, in order to expand reliable media sources covering these communities

* Addressing unequal internet access

* Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to knowledge

* Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e. oral histories)

What do you think they're doing that's so wooly and vague and useless?

These "goals" are far from narrowly targeted towards fixing the critical issue of biased minority editorship. We don't even know what exactly might deter marginalized people from contributing. Perhaps they're turned away by all the pointless wikilawyering, in which case the most effective solution would look very different from what the WMF is proposing here.

Supporting minority media is a job for minorities, who will be far more keenly aware of what media are worth supporting and what are not. Writing down oral history is great, but is properly a job for academia, not for WMF projects (with the singular and notable exception of Wikijournal, which is a primary source of publishable research). Other listed things are similarly beside the point, e.g. as argued above wrt. Internet access.

This is a grant giving programme in which they support vital projects that need to be done outside Wikimedia to further their mission and work with outside groups with proven experience in those areas to enable that. So, stuff inside wikipedia, is by definition not going to be in this list, and they are explicitly not doing any of these things themselves, because it's not their focus or skillset. Why are you assuming these tasks won't be done by minorities and/or academics as appropriate? Those both seem highly likely to be involved unless I'm missing something.

They didn’t get my donations saying they’re gonna bring about racial justice. They said this is what is needed to keep Wikipedia without ads and that they’re suffering. Misleading is an understatement.

Np, this is gaslighting.

"If you don't agree with our objectives, you are the enemy!"

Disagreeing with specific elements of social justice, particularly statements like:

"The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide."

Etc. is not 'being against social justice'.

The distinction is quite important, in fact, it's kind of 'the point'.

Most people agree with basic elements of social justice.

How many people are opposed to women voting? To women having 'equal opportunity'? Etc.

We're now into a war of opportunity and outcomes, which is a different kind of playing field.

I think Wikepedia generally does a good job overall, and it's probably fairly hard to do, that said, there is bias.

Spoken like a true Culture citizen.

Since you're familiar enough with the activities of the knowledge equity fund to be confident that it's a waste, can you fill in more detail about which grants that it has issued that ended up being wasteful? I understand that you're not "going straight to OMG, the SJWs", so surely you have some knowledge of how these millions of dollars were allocated and at least some vague understanding of their particular failures.

Unless of course you read "racial equity" and assumed that there could not possibly be a valuable distribution of funds based on that idea. Assuming that's not the case, could you give an example of a grant writing fund that ostensibly supports the idea and has created value?

there should be a pie chart specifying where the Wikipedia budget is going

Close enough[1]? That breakdown doesn't seem too unreasonable, the 'community' bucket is large, but not larger than 'direct support to websites' (which I take to mean Keeping The Lights On). The overhead for admin and fundraising looks fairly typical for a nonprofit.

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...

That's a few too many passive aggressive questions to be asking with a sockpuppet account. If you could rewrite it to be less leading and resentful, I think the GP would be more willing to engage.

I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go back in time and register earlier.

Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules?

If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves.

Namaste!

Since you arent a sockpuppet and just new, do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

You dont need to speak on behalf of OP to give you a heads up about a common problem with your approach, its pretty universal. Picture it this way, there is list of common problems which make a sensible discussion less likely. Which might be overlooked if you havent heard about it before. For example your sentences being too convoluted or having a bad structure. Another one of those is needlessly escalating a conversation.

That kind of boils down to what the aim of your post is. If its not aimed at having a fruitful engaging conversation that might proof your wrong, then you are either doing it for yourself or to set an atmosphere. Which is where the assumption of a sockpuppet comes from.

Differently put, what good does your post if its not aimed at getting somebody to engage in a meaningful way? And if that is your aim, you might want to take his advice, you generally get better results.

>do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

Considering that the person whom I was addressing responded to my post in a productive manner and we were able to have a civil and thoughtful exchange... Yes?

Do you think it's productive to police the conversations of others in a way that is entirely off topic to the threads? I understand that neither you nor hitekker enjoyed my wording. In the future, when I am speaking to you about a topic in a thread, I'll try to imagine what one's reaction might be if they interpret it as meaning offense before I post. I can't guarantee that I'll always be able to align with your preferred style of decorum, especially since I'm not sure what the rules are here; my post was bad and hitekker's post (an unprovoked off-topic personal attack on me under the auspices of speaking for another person who didn't appear to share their sentiment in the first place) was good.

I won't be engaging any further on the minutae of posting best practices in the discussion thread for the future of the wikimedia project. Have a nice day!

Different registers of english are an interesting conversational issue.

Your phrasing read to me as being close to passive aggressive, but had I been the author of the top level post you were replying to I would have assumed good faith too.

My most common failure mode in HN comments is coming across as more combative than I intended because I tend towards blunt in my communication style. If you look at my comments, you'll note quite a few have a disclaimer in a parenthetical at the end to try and avoid that happening.

Whether or not adopting a similar approach would be remotely useful to you, I genuinely have no idea.

Just from the grants on that page, none of them are designed to actually result in concrete wiki-relevant activity. This is, apparently, deliberate[1].

The metrics of success are not defined in a measurable way with respect to the wiki projects; whatever they do result in won't be published until the end of the year. Maybe we will see 4.5 million worth of value. Maybe we will not.

I'm not saying that it's a waste in absolute terms: the initiatives are likely a net good to humanity. But I don't think they are going to improve Wikipedia very much when the money is withheld from the platform itself. Yes, that's a false dichotomy, because if you have enough cash, you can have both racial justice funds and engineering excellence. But somewhere a decision was made that one is more important than the other, and I suggest that if you can have only one, going the other way will help Wikipedia more.

And no, I don't have an example of an racial justice grant that resulted in a value, but I don't claim that they are axiomatically without it.

The WMF does do quite a few other grants that I think have been and are valuable in wiki-adjacent areas. A lot of Wikipedian in Residences are very interesting, and these can have vast potential for increasing access to non-Western cultural resources. Something that I'd say is more in the WMF wheelhouse.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund#W...

Thanks for the link! I can see being sceptical about the fund given the somewhat nebulous nature of the descriptions of their grants, and I look forward to seeing how they shake out by the end of the year. The reason why I asked is because it seemed like a strong position to take to say that the money was being "sprayed up the wall" given the little information we have about the outcomes of the fund. ?

That being said, "what is best for Wikipedia" is in itself a nebulous proposition in the first place because different people have different requirements and visions for the project. Personally to me, the investments in investigative journalism (1) seem like they could have a direct value contribution since it could expand original reporting of facts for the site. That is of course debatable, but we'll see.

Thanks for clarifying!

1 https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/p...

Yes, remember that Wikipedia, just like other big "nonprofits" abuse that meaning to make money. This isn't some org comprised of engineers and servers. It's a few engineers, some servers, and mostly warm bodies that are incentivizes to come up to contrived problems to justify their existence. It's very similar to modern U.S. academia.

I'm not a huge fan of Wikimedia's fundraising copy, but their budget is well documented, and their spend is relatively good, in comparison to other non-profits (and especially in comparison to for-profits of similarly-sized web properties).

You've conveniently left out links to the financial reports [1], which have annual plans, audited financial statements, form 990s, Q&As, etc. It also proves that your claim that keeping the servers running costs around the same as the knowledge equity fund is bullshit, unless you don't count paying engineering staff. Even the cost of the equipment, and the hosting itself is quite a bit more than the cost of this program. As a whole, this program is 2% of their budget for the year.

In terms of the engineering, you can't look at a list of growing bug counts to determine project health. A growing list of bugs could simply a byproduct of growth of the overall project. Listing that without any analysis of open vs close ratios is lazy at best, and disingenuous at worst. Also, a number of the projects on that maintainers list are community maintained, or don't have a need for change (I wrote OAuthAuth, for instance, and can tell you it doesn't need active development).

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

I was ashamed when I learnt Wikipedia artificially funds the writing of pages of women, so they try to reach equal numbers to men. I wouldn’t be ashamed if the criteria for admissibility were equal, but barely being a researcher with published papers is enough, while men with entire books on the subject get rejected.

Talk about rewriting history…

> while men with entire books on the subject get rejected.

Ok, I'll bite. Giving incentives to increase the number of pages about women, does not impact in any way the number of existing pages about men.

Lets say you have a company that requires a level of technical skill to work at, and instead of hiring for that technical skill, you hire them based on being blue. Everyone else, including those who are blue, know you are doing this because the individual is clearly not ready for that work. This creates resentment, which creates discrimination.

You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create further inequality. A natural solution in this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia, and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.

Or you maintain the same hiring standards, but do more work to ensure your candidate pool, which historically is 99% not blue, actually contains some blue people, which naturally leads to more blue people on the team. These blue people are just as qualified as anyone else, and their presence keeps people from building idiotic ideas like “the only reason blue people can be hired is if we lower our standards,” since everyone who works with them can see that they are talented and deserve to be there.

The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.

>The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.

Any metric is a goal. Boss says we have a program that focuses upon hiring minorities and wants a % that check off some boxes to ward off title IX suits and make them look good. Hr really wants to see new hires for this reason too. You open up interviews, candidates can't meet the standards. Your boss says they really want to get those numbers up. Do you A. Do your job and hire, or do you B. Not do your job?

By definition minorities are a scarce resource. Industry wants a disproportionate amount in comparison to the available pool that meets requirements. Some are perfectly capable, sometimes the best, but the company isn't looking for 1, they want dozens to hundreds.

Therefore, to meet the requirements you will have to modify the process, and that is overwhelmingly done by making it easier. That's not how it should be, but that's how it's done because it is the easiest method. People respond to incentives.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, especially at large companies, but it is much less common at smaller companies and startups in my experience, where I’ve consistently had colleagues from underrepresented populations who were among the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.

What I am doing is arguing against the idea that it’s the way things have to be or the way they always are, and I’m particularly arguing assuming that any given person was hired for that reason.

Assuming your colleague must be less talented than you because of some hypothetical hiring process that you in all likelihood aren’t even privy to is exactly the kind of ego-assuaging, prejudicial arrogance people in our field are so prone to.

Such assumptions also only make the field more hostile for everyone who’s not of the typical profile, because they have to fight constantly to prove that they belong in a way that Jimmy the drinking bud of the hiring manager for some reason doesn’t.

People get hired for the wrong reasons all the time. I don’t think “diversity quota hire” is meaningfully more or less common than hiring for nepotism, or subconscious biases about looks or height, or just because someone is a smooth talker. Focusing on this one thing both hurts the industry and distracts from what we should really be doing, which is assuming our colleagues are just as smart and talented as we are and working from there. If someone is a bad hire, they’re a bad hire. It happens all the time, and we can deal with it on that individual level rather than letting our assumptions color the entire group.

(Generalized “you” throughout, not saying anything about you personally.)

I believe what the parent post is hinting at is that this is likely to impact the notability treshold - which would require some proof in order to start the discussion.

If you look at where the money is going, it seems a mix of orgs working to create new citable sources about under-covered topics (good, and surely in line with an encyclopaedia’s mission), and orgs who are going to “study” “issues” (highly questionable value).

Is that true? I have been told that money given to Wikipedia went towards wikipedia only, and those other activities were separate. I can't find a definite answer in their public reports and plans though.

> It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2].

Wikipedia is moving to Vue.

That's almost just like doing something to fix things.

They haven't even finished moving to OOUI.

Actually, if they'd just bothered to document OOUI properly in the first place, would they need to move?

As it is, they'll now have three concurrent systems (jQuery, OOUI and Vue). It's like GTK 2,3,4 all over again.

They're not "moving" to Vue. They plan to build some optional JS-based components on Vue, since the alternative of purely handcrafted code is unappealing. And even then, that code can probably be refactored to use the vastly superior Svelte once the dev team's weird hostility to workflows based on ahead-of-time code generation is addressed.

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