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Comment by samsquire | Hacker News Reader

I think this kind of thinking is negative and an example of the free rider problem.

Wikipedia provides a good service for the money it charges you. It doesn't charge you anything.

The thing about free things is that they aren't really free, someone is paying for it and the people doing the work to keep Wikipedia online are the best skilled and placed and experienced to decide these kind of spending decisions, not people with no personal investment orwho do not donate and don't even edit or do any work but somehow have opinions how other people should do their job for free.

If you use Wikipedia and getting value from it then you can't really complain, it's not positive.

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Charitable giving is important to me personally, and I have a relatively limited budget to donate.

I get a lot of utility from Wikipedia, but is my marginal dollar helping the mission or paying for dinner at a conference? Perhaps I’d be better off donating to an open source foundation for that part of the charity portfolio, which may actually have more impact on Wikipedia!

I think this org doesn’t communicate what it does well.

Is paying for dinner at a conference of wikipedia editors really that bad a thing?

In person conferences move open source projects forward. They build relationships and synergy between people who usually only see each other online. A cheap dinner is probably a lot of bang for buck when it comes to outcomes.

The problem is a social one, if everyone expects everybody else to do something about a problem, it never gets done.

"I thought you were doing it"

If you want to give, then give and I recommend giving to charity, the world needs lasting regular investment.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, someone is ultimately paying. If everybody assumes everybody else will pay for it and nobody is willing to add funds, then that service shall pass away.

Look at any social good and the investment it receives and the state of repair of those same services.

For a charitable/non-profit organization, providing them with funding way above their needs is counterproductive. As seen with Wikipedia, in the presence of excess money, costs proceed to grow uncoupled to the progression of their core mission.

As charity funding is effectively a closed system, excessive contribution to Wikipedia is to the detriment of other charities, with minimal net benefit.

I think their needs are genuine, if we want more of Wikipedia and more of Wikipedia services, it requires investment.

If you think one charity is more deserving your money than Wikipedia, then you are free to decide that with your resources.

You decide how to spend your money and Wikipedia decides how to spend theirs.

Resource allocation is not a solved problem and it is inherently political.

If you're working in the field, you have a perspective of what resources you need to do the job properly and it's always higher than what people outside the field believe.

Were the situations reversed (you were Wikipedia), would you believe what you do today?

If you could do it cheaper, why aren't you?

Are you really suggesting it's not possible for an organization to misallocate funds, or that it is not possible to determine if an organization is misallocating funds without running the same organization or a substitutable replacement organization?

Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) can be the best in its class without the Wikimedia foundation being beyond criticism. 99% of what makes Wikipedia great was already there a decade ago, with exponentially less cost.

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