Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's a hit piece, but that doesn't mean that the author doesn't raise some good questions.

What's the purpose of Wikipedia, anyway? Is it an online, open, encyclopedia? Or is it becoming some kind of quasi-political organization with tendrils everywhere?

There's one thing we are learning about the net: everybody wants to own the entire net. Whether it's Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or Wiki, once you get so large you start thinking of the internet and your service as being the same.

Wikipedia has the money it needs to operate, yet still it grows. If anything, the bigger they get, the more demanding they are getting with asking for contributions. Why? I believe that's an excellent question, and investigating the answer is also fascinating. (As is watching the story continue to develop over the next 5-10 years)

View on HN

I definitely feel misled. The appeal gives you the distinct impression that without your donation they might not be able to keep the lights on. It talks about how many servers they have (and other costs, etc.) and implores you to "take one minute and keep it online another year." It definitely erodes my trust in them to know that they have plenty of money to operate.

As I've seen with every public broadcast channel in my local market, there appears to be a race to the bottom toward constant pledge-driving that may be endemic to the business model. That Wikipedia falls prey to it is not so much a structural flaw as a choice not to innovate on the funding front, and I believe a fact remains that people generally will not contribute to a perpetuation of the commons spontaneously.

I agree. Indeed, it's a very good question whether Wikipedia shouldn't just operate.

However, as I said in the other comment I made, this growth seems to be needed in order to maintain, "just operate", the achieved purpose of Wikipedia - online, open encyclopedia. The growth is needed because online, open encyclopedia is itself a moving target. The main problem, it seems (as pointed in the Annual Plan[1]), is the trend of fewer contributors with each year. If you read the comments at theregister article, all of them talk about the bad experience of editing a wiki and engaging with the contributor community. Now, I have no idea how true this is and how often this happens but the fact that there are fewer contributors each year remains. Wiki edits and the contributor community are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. If these and their quality are waning, then this will have a large impact on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia. Furthermore, to be a true encyclopedia, the quality of the articles needs to be as accurate as possible which certainly is a moving target. Investing into additional tools to better assess articles' quality certainly works towards this target.

Next, there is open and online. Part of the money goes towards broadening the reach of Wikipedia. Like making it available in the Global South via mobile for free, with no data charges (Wikipedia Zero). Or consider lobbying - if the foundation itself does not defend itself from acts like SOPA and thus remain online, who else should step in to WMF's interest? I think it's fair and very empowering to have people with very limited Internet access to at least Wikipedia.

With that said, the question changes. It is not about whether Wikipedia needs more money - it does - but it is about how much it needs, i.e is the foundation efficient enough while maintaining the target of an online open encyclopedia. revelation's comment[2] about hiring as a startup is quite a interesting comparison

[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/4f/2012-1...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4947473

Yes. I think that some commenters thought I meant that whatever they are becoming is necessarily bad, when the point is that it's different. Might deliver a bunch of cool new stuff.

This is a story about mission creep, and growth, and what happens to internet locations that become extremely popular. Would it even be possible to stick to one simple mission? I kind of doubt it. If not, are they being "forced" into growth simply to stay alive (as you mention)? Do they morph into a more traditional charitable NGO? Do they end up as a political party, or a multinational coproration? Or something completely different? Why aren't they moving to more of a PBS model where they operate entirely off of investment returns?

It's going to be a fascinating story. We make a mistake by assuming that they are in complete control over how this thing plays out. In my mind this has much more to do with the internet and technology in general than Wikipedia in particular.

Demanding? Questions to answer?

1. They put up a temporary site notice asking for donations. They don't advertise on the project, and their sole source of funding is though donations. Very demanding.

2. What questions, specifically, does the article raise in your mind? Note - I say "questions", and not vague and ill formulated doubts.

The question it raises in my mind is how much of my donation is going to fund the servers and bandwidth and what they are always asking for money for, and how much is going to other things that I would not agree are worthy of my charity dollars.

Last time I looked at their finances it was about 50% went to fund servers, bandwidth and engineering in general. Now I'm sure that they do need to spend more than that, but I found that proportion different to what I had expected and it discouraged me from donating.

The site notices have steadily become larger and more intrusive over time, which imposes an increasing cognitive burden on the reader.

This year's site notice was less intrusive than the one from last year, IMO.

Really? I, for one, don't feel that way.

It's just plain obnoxious IMHO - also, what for have cookies been invented?

If i click the ad/begging/whatever away, you're not increasing your chances for me to donate when it pops up again whenever i come back to WP - you're achieving the exact opposite..

Hooray, proof that they're not tracking viewers using cookies?

This year's site notice is a lot harder to turn into funny memes than last year's, IMO

Just something about point 1, i donated last year and this, yet ive still received 2 emails this year (after this years donation) asking for another donation, plus you still get the massive banner on the wiki site.

Yeah, it's not like I really care if the banner ad is for wikipedia itself or for an advertiser. It's still an intrusive banner ad. Plus since it's for themselves, they probably go a bit further on the intrusiveness scale.

Questions it raised in my mind: "Lobbying? Who are they paying and for what reasons?"

You can see there entire staff list here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff

Orlowski, again, doesn't name anyone. Lazy/deceptive journalism.

Wikipedia seems to do a good job (even if not precisely specified), but I wonder why no competition has emerged at all (or has there)? Why is there no Wikipedia that allows everything?

There have been attempts. They've mostly failed.

A "Wikipedia that allows everything". Try it. It'd turn to shit really quickly.

People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. Deleting it is a service to the reader in the same way anti-spam filters are to email users.

Articles need to be maintained. To be useful for readers, they have to be reasonably accurate, and in Wikipedia-land, we base accuracy on external sources. And if there aren't any external sources, how the hell can we even try and be accurate?

Fortunately, there is a solution: the rest of the web. Wikipedia has a constrained mission, namely the production of an encyclopedia. Outside Wikipedia, there is a big wide web where you can do whatever you like. Wikis that have explicit points of view, that are focussed on specific topics... all that kind of stuff.

> People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk.

The most common complaint I've heard was rather different: nobody questioned that some pruning is necessary but complained that the standards were incredibly arbitrary and niche interests like anime characters or minor porn stars frequently made the cut while e.g. academics were deleted because they didn't have a mainstream book, New Yorker article, etc. and the deletionist cadre wasn't interested in widely-cited papers, broad recognition within a particular field, etc.

Jason Scott also highlighted a similar problem in http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826 noting that the question again has never been quality but a very small number of people deciding a topic wasn't of interest to anyone else despite demonstrated activity.

Attempting to portray this as a question of spam control or lack of external sources is either uninformed or whitewashing.

I'm not going to say there isn't a problem at all. But I spend more than enough time in the trenches dealing with deletion to know that the vast majority of the time, the stuff that gets deleted probably ought to have been.

The standards aren't that arbitrary: for an article to exist, there needs to be significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.

False positive in wiki editing is much, much worse than false negative. Just as with spam - if your spam filter deletes one email from your CEO, it is much worse than letting in 20 spam emails. Here, also, letting one uninformed, but active Wikipedia bureaucrat to prevail over a more informed scientist is much worse than letting 10 crappy articles to stay on the site and quietly rot while nobody visits them. The latter just wastes tiny bit of resources, the former actually has high potential to spread false information. And given lazy journalists frequently limit their research to looking up stuff in wikipedia, soon the falsity becomes "common knowledge" and then becomes its own source as publications quote Wikipedia which quotes publications.

There is a deletion review, and articles can be undeleted.

DRV is completely worthless; it is purely for procedural issues, not a second AfD where the merits might be debated by a different group. Undeletion is about as common as hen's teeth: stuff deleted stays deleted.

Voted down? There's irony.

My problem is that for wikipedians, "independent reliable sources" means internet articles. If it's a printed book, it doesn't exist.

That hasn't been my experience. I usually cite printed sources in articles when I write them, and most articles I edit that were written by others seem to also be based primarily on books.

Some statistics would be interesting, though. I would imagine online sources are more common in articles on recent events, and in articles on popular culture. In the area I mainly edit in (pre-20th-century history) it's almost entirely books and journal articles.

A good citation to a printed published work grants you demigod-like powers when editing an article - if the work itself is notable. If it's self-published or has no information demonstrating it is a reliable source, not so much.

Yeah, I've found it really reduces any hassles over "notability" if you're citing solid published sources. If I'm writing an article on a Greek archaeological site, and my article cites The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, case is pretty much closed.

with "significant", "multiple", "independent" and "reliable" all being decided arbitrarily depending on which deletionist you are dealing with

Why oh why is this argument always framed like this?

"If Deltionists can't cull at their whim, WP will simply end up as a pile of rubbish!"

Junk is typically not that hard to find and cull, it's the actual content that gets removed, and the absurd politics behind it, that will probably bring about the end of WP.

So, here is a deletion listing from a week or so back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

I'd love to know which of these deletions are bringing about the end of Wikipedia.

By 'end of WP', do you mean 'one of the top 5 websites by traffic' and 'now generally considered the default canonical source of knowledge in the English-speaking world'?

Citation needed.

Quora's approach of first-party sourcing "enforced" with social transparency seems to work quite well for many subjects.

Working with Quora admins is just as bad. There are legitimate questions that are deleted/locked because some admin feels like it has to. Putting in requests to undelete/unlock requires incredible amount of effort and knowledge of the system which is weird because there are so many easy to use functionality for everything else. Same goes for actually getting something to be deleted, locked or marked for abuse. If you know a moderator and have experience with their boards, it's a piece of cake for you - else, you just wait in line for a long time.

I don't understand why the developers resort to an irritating method for getting things reviewed - find the right community, know the right people, go to their court and appeal to their higher order with wonderful pitches about what should be done. There has to be a better way of dealing with things.

There are alternatives that are more or less restrictive than Wikipedia; or that have more or less input from "experts" in the fields.

Wikipedia hit a sweetspot of lots of people entering lots of information which caused it to grow rapidly.

Early deletionism and care about what could be added meant that "Random Article" was a useful link - you'd learn interesting and useful stuff from clicking it. Now, not so much. There's just so much in Wikipedia that 'Random Article" will take you to some malformed stub about a teeny tiny little thing.

Today there's a weird mix of deletionism and inclusionism. It's luck and politics if the subject you're interested in is targetted by deletionists / inclusionists. (Note that I take no sides here. Inclusionism can be just as harmful for a good Wikipedia project as deletionism.

One thing I'd like to see Wikipedia try to do better is "A lead paragraph that anyone can understand". (Perhaps linked with better efforts for Simple English Wikipedia.) Unfortunately lead paragraphs are hotly contested and thus often pretty poor.

Wikia will host a wiki for you, you can put anything you want in it. http://www.wikia.com/Wikia

That's called the Internet.

> the bigger they get, the more demanding they are getting

Is it not a common pattern for any company? They start small and innocent, with high moral values, impatient to take down the big nasty corporation. And soon enough, if successful, they fall pray to the fate of their past nemesis.

I think it is inevitable to turn evil at a certain threshold of growth. This is when moral values shift towards maximization of profit. And as company grows further and gains more social importance, it is a matter of time when it faces politics.

And if one's really lucky, it can grow to a point when it's too big to fail :)

Not just companies. Charities and bureaucracies also suffer from massive scope creep.

I'm wondering about a class-action lawsuit to stop those ads claiming your donation is needed to keep it on the air. That's just a bald-faced lie. Is that permitted under fundraising laws?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com