Hacker News Reader

Comment by mewse-hn | Hacker News Reader

I expect Wikipedia to collapse under its own weight and hard fork within the next 10 years. I think it would be a shattering like Twitter if the content wasn't under a permissive license. Instead I think it's going to be like WoWWiki being acquired and forking to Wowpedia, and then Wowpedia being acquired and forking to Warcraft Wiki.

The community around it is extremely unwelcoming and has calcified - only the most cynical and bitter editors remain. I know of a couple of the principles of the site, "be bold" and "assume good faith", I don't think those are followed or respected anymore.

And the finances of the foundation, good lord.

View on HN

> And the finances of the foundation, good lord.

Please expound? Or a link is fine, too.

Any cursory googling of their finances would show you that they balooned and instead of using said finances to run the website they ask for more millions of dollars to sponsor a bunch of unrelated charities and hire a bunch of executives to manage such use of the funds.

I wish someone would hard-fork it already and stick to a promise of strictly sticking to the core job of operating wikipedia the website, with a small dedicated team.

Plus they don't need any more money, they have enough money to run it for a long long time already and if they keep doing a good job people will keep donating. I don't understand this model of "we need to ensure we survive forever as fast as possible by accumulating a billion dollar endowment". Nonprofits should have ~5-10 years runway max and keep getting donations if they keep doing a good job. I don't trust any organization forever. What incentive do they have to be useful and welcoming if they have a forever endowment?

You could make a fantastic fork if you simply stop pretending that credentials can not be validated. It then follows that 5 angry narcissist anons do not equal in value a professor.

Then you can further simplify if you employ expert moderators who have the final say in everything. The infinite size discussions back stage serve no purpose.

I bet people had tons of ideas for other improvements. (think: A distributed system with fancy api's for the robot overlords.)

I've read stuff from insiders that the foundation spending grows exponentially year-after-year and they use those scare banners that "wikipedia is under threat" to collect more money and grow even more, the money is completely unrelated to hosting the site. This is a recent article from a year ago:

https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

Maybe start here: https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_c...

While 10 years old, things haven't gotten better but worse. Seems like lots of projects besides the "core product" Wikipedia are being founded. Obviously people don't like that because they want the money to be used for preserving/building/extending Wikipedia.

Volumes have been written on the ballooning budgets of Wikimedia foundation, of which only a trivially small amount goes towards hosting costs. In mobile rn, but Google should get you plenty of results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com