Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

Just one short detail to show how ridiculous and picking on details this article is:

How is covering Festivalsommer 2013 "highly questionable"? Thats a clever way do things!

Getting rights for pictures of artists is a long and messy process, so you best take them yourself and make sure that you are an accredited journalist, so you are actually allowed to publish them. For many german artists, there are no pictures at all. The project has already been tried on one festival last year (Wacken 2012) and they try to cover 30 festivals. Expecting 50 Bands per festival, this potentially yields 1500 pictures (more or less). For that, 18000 is a _steal_, especially expecting that volunteers provide their own equipment.

So, tl;dr: Wikipedia is more than a website, it is also a foundation[1] that tries to improve all aspects of the service in clever ways. This costs money as well.

[1] Actually, more then one, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is something completely different. Another thing the Article misses: Wikimedia Deutschland has its own budget.

The issue is that wikipedia has necessary expenses (keeping the servers running) and optional ones (paying people to take photos of German music festivals). Yet all their guilt-tripping asking for money is focused on the necessary expenses. I'm sure that is more effective, but that doesn't mean I don't feel misled.

That could have been conveyed in a much shorter article that doesn't discredit honest projects of community members. Also, I don't feel guilt-tripped. What do you expect? A multi-paragraph article on top of each page?

If you click through, for example in Germany, you get a pretty detailed explanation of where your money goes:

https://spenden.wikimedia.de/spenden/Ihre_Spende_wirkt

The largest part: support for volunteers. Isn't that what Wikipedia is all about?

> Isn't that what Wikipedia is all about?

That's the heart of the issue, right? Is the Wikimedia Foundation just supposed to run a website that is edited by volunteers, or is it supposed to also do other things that further the same goals as the actual Wikipedia? The foundation itself has the latter viewpoint, while I expect most people donating are just donating to pay for the former.

> I expect most people

Please put numbers on the table, because I expect "most people" to be fully aware of how that non-profit thing works.

Ok, fine. Neither side has numbers. But based on the pervasive banners, I thought wikipedia was still in dire straits and needed my money urgently just to keep the servers and bandwidth running. Now that I know they are doing just fine, I doubt I will contribute again. I'd rather put my charity donations to more worthy causes.

me too. except add "needy" after "worthy".

Thats exactly the point why people are reluctant to donate. The budget for running Wikipedia the website is rapidly approaching single digit percentages while the foundation is hiring at startup rate.

I agree that the foundation could do a better job at actually propagating that the running costs of wikipedia are not the server costs, but also the cost of governance and evolution and that alot of the results of that make wikipedia better in the end.

So the angle of advertisement may be improvable, but I still think that it is worthwile to fund all their other projects through donations.

I'm not following. Why are people reluctant to donate? And why do you say that? The donation drives are quite successful!

A lot of those people are doing things like working on software and doing DevOps, which seems like "running Wikipedia the website to me". People complain that MediaWiki needs a visual editor that's easier for people to use, so Wikimedia hired developers who are working on that. That's pretty directly related to operational expenses, no?

People also want more frequent and better database dumps, scaling to account for more traffic and improve reliability, worldwide mirroring of the database servers to reduce latency across the world, a replacement of the increasingly crufty template language, etc., etc. All reasonable requests, but they require a staff of developers and sysadmins to implement.

>Thats exactly the point why people are reluctant to donate

The evidence appears to be against you on this claim.

Sorry, but €12 per amateur picture is not a steal.

Then there is a whole different issue of prioritizing resources while you get into projects like that. Why rock festivals? Why not illustrating Polka performers, or wurst wrappings, or carriages of subway park in Nuremberg? (Rhetorical, we all know rock festivals are fun)

Who says that the pictures are amateurish and that amateurs are taking the pictures? Also, I don't expect them to take 1500 pictures, but 1500 usable pictures (one per act).

Please read through the linked statement in the article, there is actually a long text attached.

And yes, you have to prioritize. One of the factors is actual volunteers. There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? Because Polka should be covered as well?

The article calls this "highly questionable". No, its a thought out decision that went through multiple levels of review.

These are volunteers who are taking the pictures, I doubt they all are professional photographers. Which is fine, photography isn't that hard, these days you can't really swing a dead cat without hitting a decent photographer.

My point was that amateur photography doesn't cost on €12 a pop today, if only due to sheer abundance of imagery.

> There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? Because Polka should be covered as well?

This is not someone's private project we're talking about, but resources contributed by people. These are not their money, they don't get to decide. I clearly don't give a damn about Polka either, but I'm sure there are tons of places in Wikipedia where investment would make more sense.

> This is not someone's private project we're talking about, but resources contributed by people. These are not their money, they don't get to decide.

Thats where you have it wrong. Once you donated the money, it is theirs and they can use it at their discretion, as long as you haven't stated what the money is specifically for and the use isn't fraudulent. Yes, they can even spend it on beer to improve employee morale and they certainly do from time to time.

Well, the other thing is that Wikimedia Deutschland do not necessarily get all of their funding from the Wikipedia fundraiser. Chapters often raise money themselves and sometimes get money from third parties specifically for particular projects and partnerships.

In Britain, for instance, most of the Wikimedia partnerships I've been involved in have had no cost to the chapter beyond a low-cost train fare and a few sandwiches. A lot of the cost is shared with the organisations we are partnering with. There are hundreds of organisations that want to work with Wikimedia, and it's usually of the "spend a few quid on sandwiches" variety.

The idea that people are getting rich off Wikimedia chapter outreach type work is ludicrous. If I want to get rich, well, my consulting day rate is a hell of a lot more than the cost of a sandwich and a train fare.

It's not 1 photo, it's the best photo out however many they took + publishing rights. And Publishing rights for a single high quality photo can easily cost you thousands of dollars.

>There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? //

Isn't the point - in part at least - that you aren't letting them do stuff they volunteer for but are paying someone else to do it. And that the payments to some editors or content providers automatically adds a political/social bias by favouring rock concerts over other performing arts (say).

No, the grant is for supporting wikipedia volunteers to fulfill their project. There is a detailed discussion here:

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer_Diskussio...

(in german, obviously)

This has been one of my biggest complaints about wikipedia and I'm glad they're addressing it - media rights. The more pictures, video, and audio they own the better. When I was a kid I read the encyclopedia for fun and a big part of what drew me in was the images in them. I feel like that would really help the site.

> Thats a clever way do things!

A clever way of doing it would be to ask people who are already attending the concerts to submit their photos. Or, you know, asking the bands themselves.

Hiring somebody, buying them a camera, sending them to the concert to take photos is what I would classify as the least cleaver way of solving the problem.

They are _not_ hiring someone. They are sponsoring community members doing the legwork.

The problem is that if you are not accredited to concerts, picture rights are very messy. Most of the time, concert entry with proper camera equipment is not allowed or - by buying a ticket - you waive rights to the picture. The easiest way to get usable pictures at concerts is to get accredited as a photographer. Also, bands of note and their labels usually don't provide pictures with open licensing as requested by wikimedia commons. The same goes for accredited photographers already present at the concert.

Please click through to the discussion of the project, all this was discussed before the grant was given. The inability to gather usable media is the core of the funding request.

Please click through to the discussion of the project, all this was discussed before the grant was given.

This is what irritates me about Orlowski. The community debated (extensively) what they want to do, and some "journalist" from the peanut gallery comes in sniping at the good work of others. Orlowski is a disgrace.

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