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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

> What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement?

They are the value. Good luck finding volunteers to replace them.

I'm sure there are plenty of reddit moderators ready to take it up if needed.

Well, it's not exactly the same. It's not a forum (not that a forum is easy, but it's completely different). If you just substitute most Wikipedia editors, with no handover process, I assure you it's going to be a mess.

It’s a mess already. Just look up their definition of NPOV and compare it to what passes for neutrality in articles.

There are no points to be earned on Wikipedia, so redditors surely aren't interested until it gets completely gamified.

It's a different type of game on wikipedia.

Well, they've mostly left reddit as well, afaik. It's a few stragglers, people being paid to push agenda, and auto-moderation now. I was reading / moderating reddit for over 4 hours a day, every day, for close to a decade. Heavy handed pro israeli censorship and propaganda has seen me pick up and leave, as i know many others have done. I was already wavering, over reddit's support of astroturfing and shill bots which were obvious, detectable, and reddit refused to do anything about it. Even actively supported it. So with the whole denying /actively supporting genocide thing, it was time to hang it up and leave.

If wikipedia is shutting off avenues for community input, maybe that is running it's course as well.

Its been nice internet, I loved you, and I will never forgive google for what they put into motion.

Billions of people on the planet, and not a single one of them would offer to do it?

I'm sure some russians will immediately volunteer.

I'm sure many already have

they're not volunteers, it's their day job, via the Internet Research Agency, et al

ditto for the Indian / Nigerian / S African folks they outsource to -- they're gettin paid, ain't no volunteers

Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.

Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.

Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:

"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."

https://www.wikipedia.org/#:~:text=We%20ask%20you%2C%20since...

But money contributions have no commitment, being a regular editor does. The editors striking here aren't doing trivial edits, and if they are then they are doing it in a large volume.

Wikipedia depends on people doing repetitive and semi-thankless work, such as vandalism patrolling. If no one patrols edits, then the entire wiki devolves into vandalism, edit battles and slop.

If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!

The foundation's 2026-2027 draft annual plan explains a bit of their current strategy for recruiting more editors, including by deepening engagement among readers in meaningful ways: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

money is an easy thing to contribute, and they make it frictionless.

volunteering to edit / update / battle / ameliorate wiki pages requires far more time and friction and often drama

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