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Comment by costco | Hacker News Reader

2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758

2022 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $145,970,915

I love Wikipedia but I don't see how this cost explosion can evenly be remotely justified. What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?

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In that time it’s become increasingly challenging to contribute anything to The People’s Encyclopedia.

I wanted to update a local wiki page with newer data from its original sources, but apparently I have become blacklisted because I use/used Apple’s private relay and safari’s privacy measures by default in all my browsing. Disabling them didn’t fix it. I would love to sign up as a fallback measure to be able to contribute, and verify my account by whatever means necessary, but apparently in the 2020s that’s just not something Wikipedia supports (as I’m also black listed from signing up despite never contributing to Wikipedia.)

Increasingly I see out of date and opinionated articles and I wonder how many of us have meaningful contributions ready but are forced to sit on the sidelines because there’s no “way in” with this product.

Note that WMF has very little relation to article editing. And login problems are likely because you are using some kind of VPN, which is also something the trolls like to use, so it frequently ends up in ban lists. It's a hard problem, because trolls are much more determined to (ab)use any privacy feature that is out there than legitimate newcomers, and unfortunately most Wiki admin teams lean towards solutions that ensure less trolls even if it means also more barriers to entry. These people are almost always volunteers, and handling trolls is not an activity they particularly enjoy, so that's the source of the bias.

I would guess the pool of IP addressed used by Apple has been blocked from contributing since for any good faith editor, there is a vast amount of vandals taking advantage of the feature to deface articles en masse.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay has some context and list potential problems that might arise (and do in your case).

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_Re... is the related discussion page if you want to ask more.

Back in the old days, we maintained a list of trustworthy http proxies for which we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information). So the sole thing we see is the Apple relays IPs and if those are a source of vandalism for sure the community will block them from contributing.

There is a more or less similar issue with TOR exit node for which the issue is described at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editing_with_Tor

Given the relay is only enforced by Safari (as I understand it), you can use the IOS Wikipedia application for editing: https://apps.apple.com/app/wikipedia/id324715238 , though that will not pass through the Apple relays and leak your IP.

> we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information).

Not exactly true - the "Proxy Protocol" [1] was invented for that purpose. Wikipedia as an entity should be large enough to ask Apple if they can implement support for it - the question is if they want to.

[1] https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/latest/load-bala...

If that protocol is a technical solution to the problem and match our requirements toward privacy, I don't see why it would not be adopted, then: - The TCP header is not encrypted and thus publicly exposes the IP address of the client - I don't see why the Apple Relays would emit that information since that would defeat its purpose of obscuring the original client IP - It looks like it is a custom protocol between two HAProxy Enterprise instances - It seems to be a feature of "HAProxy Enterprise" which sounds like it is not available under an open source license.

We do have direct point of contacts with engineers at Apple, Facebook, Google etc and do collaborate with them on a wide range of technical topics. The foundation has a dedicated team to vandalism, blocking etc https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-Harassment_Tools . I forwarded your remark and maybe they can update the wiki page at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay (it is mostly from November 2021 and looks like it might use a refresh).

HAproxy is just an implementer of this protocol, there are others as well (nginx and AWS I know support this), and IIRC also the haproxy community edition.

It has always been like this - at least for the past 10-15 years or so it has been essentially impossible to edit wikipedia.

Basically any change you make it insta-reverted by some bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.

I think some editors decide that they "own" certain pages or group of pages and install themselves as some sort of authority/gate keeper/moderator. If your edit does not please them, it's gone. Instantly. You only get to edit the pages if you are in the editor's cabal of friends.

If you don't have an account, or you do have an account but perhaps have only made a handful of edits, you are instantly distrusted and assumed to be malicious.

Of course, you can never prove that you are not malicious, because there is the default stance of immediate-distrust for anyone, so your edits are constantly undone and you never get to build up enough credibility to appease the editors who control who gets to edit "their" articles.

I gave up years ago after a small edit-war with someone who kept reverting changes about a UK politician who was in national news at the time. No amount of references or citations from e.g. the BBC or the Guardian was good enough as I guess the verifiable truth didn't fit with their view of what this page should selectively say about that person, and so they banned my IP as a "vandal". I gave up (but got a new IP after redialing so it was pointless)

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...

'Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors Researchers found that 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors, and they think this is probably for the best.'

> Basically any change you make it insta-reverted by some bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.

You sound like someone who was pushing a particular point of view about politics, which is precisely the kind of edits that are set up for organ rejection given Wikipedia's strict stance on neutrality, sourcing, and the fact that politics are naturally contentious / prone to edit warring.

There are between 1.5 and 2 million anonymous edits to Wikipedia every month. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contrib... A lot of them are in reality vandalism, spam, and garbage by passersby, but they aren't all reverted.

Have you used Wikipedia?

It was one of the first culture war battlegrounds... And it's been owned for a while now.

Looking at these gross payments (and executive migration to think tanks), are you really pretending things aren't political?

I’m going to be honest I’ve gone to some of the more controversial articles they don’t seem far off from reality a lot of the time. They usually have citations of both pro and anti arguments on both sides of any debate. Is there something I’m missing?

Yes, the Talk and History pages on those articles.

People can play fact Monopoly behind the scenes as much as they want -- there's a reason Talk isn't displayed without clicking on it.

Sure there is a lot of spam but there is also a lot of political pressure to influence politically controversial articles. This rather old video was an eye opener for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY

This kind of campaign is overblown.

They mention the topic of the Gaza flotilla raid in the video. If you read the actual article on this topic, it's pretty balanced, and mentions in the introduction that Israel was condemned by the UN Human Rights Council and their use of force was called excessive and unreasonable. Hardly a Zionist propaganda piece.

Similar issues with stackoverflow. Entrenched systems and editors/moderators create barriers that discourage contributions.

Tried a few times and realized it wasn't worth the effort.

A weird thing about SO is that you can accumulate privileges for doing nothing. I once answered a question about Python which has accumulated thousands of votes/points over the years, and now I have been granted all these editing rights that I don't even know what to do with (nor do I use them).

I got all my SO points from answering a single question on JavaFX, which I only used for about 6 months. It is not even the accepted answer (which was, and still is, incorrect).

There is a lot of demand to control the narrative on political articles. Some political groups [1][2] have mobs of Wikipedia editors trying to influence what you read. I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few moderator roles otherwise a lot of their work would be reverted.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-edit...

Edits might be for sale for things that matter to companies.

Every Public Relations agency claims to 'manage' the content on clients' Wikipedia pages.

During which, Wikipedia and it's prominent editors have become increasingly biased in their reporting of events. Instead of being a neutral "just the facts", we get editorialization about all kinds of things that just further entrench our two camps. Word choice, framing, referenced articles, things left unsaid, etc.

I’m not sure how you’d like people to evaluate this claim without some examples. Yes, some people will try to nitpick, but many readers here will engage in good faith. What’s an example of a heavily editorialized article?

This article is quite heavily biased:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

For an exercise, try mentally replacing terms like "alt-right movement" with "woke movement", "alt-right pipeline" with "woke pipeline" etc.

Gave it a skim. What specifically is biased about it? Even ideas that are wrong need to have articles about those labels.

There could also be an article about a "woke pipeline" if that's a concept label people are taking about.

It demonizes right-wing YouTubers with the slur "alt-right". There could absolutely no such article exist about a "woke" pipeline. Anti left-wing bias is not acceptable in Wikipedia. Anti right-wing bias is not much of a problem.

Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative. Remember how all the media outlets were “anti Trump” because they all described the voting scandal as being “without evidence”? That’s because there was none.

You couldn’t report on that and simultaneously be on the side of reality without also being against the Trump campaign.

Also, is alt right a slur? Cause woke isn’t.

Of course "woke" is mostly used in a derogatory way. Again, no such article analysing a supposed "woke pipeline" would be acceptable in Wikipedia.

> Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative.

The same thing can be said about progressives. Nonetheless, the above example would be seen as highly biased.

Do you have any proof for your claims? So far I'm mainly getting a https://www.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/ vibe from them.

Do you have any proof that vibes are relevant here?

> What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?

Assuming this is not rhetorical - everything is in git so you can look at the git log. Although it is spread through many repos, and not all contributors are paid by wmf.

https://github.com/wikimedia

And I preferred previous theme anyway...

And it can't be set without being logged in ;/

I use redirector with the following settings:

Redirect: https:\/\/(.)\.wikipedia\.org\/wiki\/([^?])(?!=\?useskin=vector)

to: https://$1.wikipedia.org/wiki/$2?useskin=vector

Applies to: Main window (address bar)

Are you saying if we use the URL parameter "useskin" set to "vector" we can get the old layout back? I wonder if this applies on other sites using mediawiki.

[EDIT] Fuck me! It does work both on wikipedia and the Arch wiki. So long.

And if you want the even older skin ?useskin=monobook

The `useskin` parameter should work on any MediaWiki instance as long as the targeted skin is installed on the instance. You can grab the list of skins from:

Special:Version (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version#mw-version-ski... )

An API query: * direct: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&... * demo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=quer...

Which yields the code name of each skins installed (eg: vector-2022, vector, monobook ...).

Thank you for this! Just installed redirector. Actually a few of my tampermonkey scripts are to map twitter to nitter etc, and I have old reddit redirect addon which could be consolidated into this as well.

BTW, to make it work I had to change:

    (.) to ([^.]*) and ([^?]) to ([^?]*)

I think HN formatting ate some characters (I used indenting to try and preserve)

Their costs went up about 100%. The cumulative inflation over those 6 years was about 25%. The US averages 6% salary growth yearly, which over six years is about 42%, and would have been much higher in the tech industry. California averages a cost of living increase of about 8% annually, over six years that's 58%.

So if you adjust for the rising costs of doing anything in tech, their operating budget has increased by much less than would seem - only about 20%.

In those same six years, they've had to deal with a rise in misinformation campaigns, spam, infosec threats and recently ML models.

Call me crazy, but dealing with all of the extra complexity 2022 has over 2016 on a 20% budget increase is pretty great.

It's unfortunate that aiming for 90/00s quality is that much harder nowadays.

> 2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758

$200k less than Beeple's "Everyday" NFT sold for.

This is not an unreasonable comparison at all. It puts things in perspective. I dislike what Wikimedia is becoming, yet Wikipedia is still functioning and useful!

It's fairly unreasonable since NFT values are really not tied to anything, and in tokens that may or may not be valued at what they are supposedly valued due to manipulation of the small markets (similar to penny stock pump and dump).

So those values can be more about money laundering or poor signaling than any indication of real worth.

What would be a good comparison? Meta spending $36+bn on the Metaverse[0]? What are examples of websites that provide clearly better value for money than Wikipedia?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

That would be a better one yes. It was just a bad comparison of fake valuation to real.

But I don't think anyone is disagreeing that Wikipedia is offering good value for money, just that some people might be justifying that to excessively compensate themselves for an operation that requires very little to run and depends almost entirely on unpaid volunteers.

"well, our service is a boon to mankind, therefore it warrants skimming a bit off the top"

And that could be a problem in the long run.

I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but the current budget is more than twice that and continues to grow at a very fast rate. The budget trajectory may even be sustainable from a revenue perspective, I'm just saying it might not be so from a public interest perspective. Wikipedia to the typical user is basically entirely unchanged since 2016 and it's not clear to me why they need so much more money now than they did in 2016.

Beeple’s NFT was bought by the founder of a coin he had a major investment in, and he had been granted 2% of all B.20 tokens for free. Very sketchy. https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...

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