Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)(forum.effectivealtruism.org) |
Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)(forum.effectivealtruism.org) |
I know children's cancer and other horrible things pull on more heart strings, but Wikipedia makes such a huge wealth of great information available to such a huge percentage of the world, including many poor people who might otherwise not have access to much education. Saving sick kids is kind, but there are lot of healthy kids who could use a leg up too.
I honestly don't value the other Wikimedia projects very much, and I'm sure there is waste in their policies and beuracracy, but assuming Wikipedia is only getting 10% of my donations, I still think it's great bang for the buck.
If there is a better charity, I'd like to know about it. However, this article reads to me as "Meh, you shouldn't really feel obligated", and I don't think it said much that was useful.
I remember when my family got an encyclopedia set (you'd buy them for a thousand dollar or so, in pre-90s USD, if you were lucky enough to be able to afford them). You'd get yearly updates (physical books, also) for a fee for changes to entries. Didn't have the cross references, the non-text media, the cross referencing, the convenience of external links to online sources....
It's been a huge boon for global knowledge. They are one of the most valuable human endeavors of my lifetime.
edit: support childhood cancer, too. There has been real progress. Family support (lodging, traveling) sometimes get second billing to research or medical care. They're all good. So help us, need in one place doesn't negate the need in another. I like St. Jude, there are a bunch of others that do profound good for the world.
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Collaboration/Flow_sati...
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_open_letter_on_ren...
3. Wikipedia Reward Board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reward_board
However, I am sure what happens if you don't pay the electricity and networking for the servers, or have a team of lawyers protecting the overall effort. Despite it's flaws, the current system is working well by my standards.
And that the foundation's software initiatives have been largely innefective at getting more/better content? [0]
(I've also donated to Wikimedia in the past and contributed to Wikipedia itself)
[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qqds7Z3Ykd9Kdeay/...
That's almost entirely what makes Wikipedia what it is, the idea that it's community maintained by volunteer contributors. If it's compensated, it completely changes the contribution culture and the identity of the site at the core. It still needs a legal team, professional staff, payroll, etc, too. I know they have other projects and that's fine by me, even if they don't succeed.
I did, but I think there's value in just sustaining the platform. I'm worried about perverse incentives and gaming metrics if you reward the contributors. I'm sure you can imagine that going poorly. And, even without rewards, there sure are a lot of good contributions.
Not saying it’s necessarily better or worse, but is worth considering– the Internet archive (ie they run the Wayback machine, among other services). I have donated to both. I feel strongly about archiving/storing all types of information- digital and non-digital.
There is a great amount of information that is lost or unable to be easily located due to 404 errors or servers going off-line (and the source of this issue is only getting worse)
However im glad that this is the article posted, and not the rediculous "cancer" article that compares amount spent on servers when the site was smaller, slow and constantly going down to the modern day site when its fast, stable and a bigger site.
[Disclaimer: used to work for wmf. Do not anymore. My opinions are solely my own]
Edit: i initially just read the intro to the article. The article is long and says a lot more things as well other than just lila/knowledge engine.
If you're in the majority of the population that doesn't regularly donate to a significant level, then please don't let this article simply turn your internal "should I donate to Wikipedia" switch off and leave everything else as is. Instead, start treating the Wikipedia donation banners as reminders to donate to some charity that you feel is worth giving to. (The EA forums would likely be a good place to research that, as well.)
That's an interesting point, and it got me thinking: what does reward past content creators? As someone who has contributed to and created Wikipedia articles in the past, I tried to imagine what would feel like a reward to me, and the things that come to mind are:
a. People adding to those articles and making them more and more polished, turning them into A-class articles that I'd be proud to have contributed to.
b. Knowing that the article has helped someone in some specific way, changing their life a little bit. Some kind of "thank you" page attached to the articles would be nice, where a school kid could tell you how the article brought the subject to life for her, or a middle aged man could say thanks for informing him about his medical condition. (I can see the practical issues with this, but even a heavily-moderated slowly-updated page would serve the purpose, and would provide positive value.)
They happen to be set up as a foundation where I can look at their financials, but in my mind I treat them more like a private company.
If they want to waste my money then so be it. I pay what I think is a fair price for the amount of value I get from the product.
A sketch of the argument: If you think donating is important, it's because on some level, you're hoping to bring about some good in the world. You donate to Wikipedia hoping to encourage Wikipedia to continue existing, and more work to go in to the effort of building Wikipedia.
But I'll bet that you care about other good things in the world as well: saving sick children, preventing climate change, fighting unjust policies. There's a lot of things you could make an impact on donating. How do you decide?
Effective Altruism states that not all donations are equally effective. One charity might take your $1000 and use it to buy a dying child an all-expenses-paid vacation to Disneyland. Another might use it buying bed nets to prevent the spread of malaria, in expectation keeping one more child alive than would have died. And given that your budget is limited and you can't afford both, you must decide which is more valuable to you.
So this article roughly says, "Wikipedia is a great and noble cause. But here's why it doesn't come close to the _very, absolute best_ way to use your money to help others."
The vast majority of their spending does not go to keeping wikipedia's lights on, and that is the only reason their excess reserves are as low as "four years."
Here's the graph of revenue and spending over time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/User%3AG...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER (2016, updated through 2020)
You can agree or disagree with the conclusions, and agree or disagree on the value of WMF's non-wikipedia projects, but the facts are not in dispute (annual revenue, expenses, net assets are all from WMF published figures).
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011
When I saw the cost inflation that came in lock-step with the increase in donations, I figured all my donation would buy was more bloat, not more security about the future of wikipedia.
If anything, donating seemed to leave the future of wikipedia less secure, because as long as costs were exploding, they would be more fragile to an economic downturn or controversy which reduced donations. It's easier to raise an extra 1 million dollars from alternate sources, then it is to raise an extra 100 million dollars from alternate sources.
Thriftiness is key to longevity, and they do not have it, and I will not contribute until they do. Once I'm convinced they have a culture of thrift, I'll contribute generously.
On the other hand, the Spanish version of Wikipedia is rife with ideologically biased articles if you venture into anything that talks about politics or history. The English version is, for the most part, free of this, probably because there are more people reviewing it.
We shouldn't underestimate the propagandist power of Wikipedia in non-English languages, especially when some people give it more credibility than it deserves.
in 2020 however it appears to me that wikpedia gentrified, accruing a thick fat of bureaucrats and has somewhat been stagnating around his stack.
reducing support is maybe a good opportunity for them to lean down a little and get back at rethinking the future of crowd knowledge self-organization, instead of putting layers of gates and red tapes around each bureaucrat turf.
I think it's done more harm than good, I think the editing process is biased, skews to the political left or right (depending on the article), Wikipedia also generally skews secular and humanist (because that's the nature of most contributors). References constantly 404, but that's not even the main problem: references are not parsed properly. A lot of times, I'll look at a cited paper and its cited content will be diametrically opposed to what the Wiki page says.
Controversial topics are nightmare, and contributing to them is even more of a nightmare. The voting process, by definition, is flawed -- and Wikipedia is very much a "tyranny by majority." The only articles that are high quality tend to be very technical ones (where you generally have professionals in the field contribute to non-controversial topics). Most rules -- like NOR, NPOV, and BLP, are implemented haphazardly.
Why do I think Wikipedia has done more harm than good? Because there's a new phenomenon where one reads the Wiki page of a complex topic (say, something like Free Will) and 5 minutes later, the reader thinks they're a bonafide expert on a topic that has puzzled humanity for millennia. There's a reason Wikipedia can't be cited in college (heck, even high school) papers: it's low quality and unvetted. I make it a point to never cite Wikipedia in online discussion. I'd rather cite Wolfram Alpha, or a professor's personal webpage, or a specific paper.
Even before Wikipedia, you had knowledge being disseminated via the web: philosophy professors had their own web-pages, theologians had their own web-pages, and particle physicists had their own web-pages -- all filled with morsels of specific (and often times technical) information. I really wish Encyclopaedia Britannica put more efforts into their own knowledge base, but I get it: high-quality vetted content is hard to do. Wikipedia takes shortcuts, and we'd be foolish to ignore its shortcomings.
I suspect a lot of KE's failure related to inconsistent messaging and project scope. I'm pretty sure even now, nobody knows what KE was planned to be or what its value proposition would be, or "what" it actually is beyond buzzwords
[ Same disclaimer :-) ]
Gender balanced?
Cooperative?
I'm curious because my experience of editing, and that of other people I heard from at an editor meet up, was that the culture is heavily male dominated, and unnecessarily adversarial in a bullying way. That said, the CEO at the time (2007 - 2014), Sue Gardner, seemed enlightened, progressive, smart and highly capable.
Fwiw, when i was there, engineering teams generally had more men than woman. No tech teams and management tended to have more equal representation. However i would say the gender demographics of eng teams were fairly on-par for the industry at large. I never saw any sexism, but as a man, if it was present it probably would not be directed at me, so i may just not have noticed.
The best part about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, anyone can run it, and nobody can lock up its content (for whatever reason). Look no further to Mozilla to see what happens when a non profit fails to meet it's mandate and is stuck with "peacocks" (folks who prioritize status or signaling > substance) instead of practitioners.
When you decide to donate to a non-profit as if you were paying for a product, that assumption doesn't necessarily hold. In this case, you know fairly clearly it doesn't hold: the money doesn't go towards either the future development of the product, the continued existence of the service, or the motivation of people in the future to set up things like Wikipedia (no future Jimmy-Wales-in-2001 is going to be influenced by the 2015 Wikimedia financials). As a charitable donor, you cannot create such a nexus just by wanting it to exist.
(However, what you can create is a nexus between your charitable donation and the fundraising department of whoever you're giving to - all the more if you appear to donate in response to fundraising campaigns and not in response to the actual work the organization is doing.)
This is also why I'm a skeptic of large companies/conglomerates, which have the revenue to continue their existence basically regardless of any individual product. Very few companies operate internally on a market-based economy; they operate on the human judgment of whether management likes you and what you do. That means that a small new project that makes significant profit as a percentage of its expenses might still be a drop in the bucket of the company as a whole, and a politically-important project that's losing money might still continue to be funded if the company can afford its losses. The company might (entirely rationally) decide that "strategically" it should continue to invest in that product, which is to say that it should take advantage of the fact that it's not subject to the usual market pressures to drive out smaller or even differently-shaped competitors that are.
Why are they fighting to fund new initiatives when Jimmy has to beg for donations just to keep the lights on? I want my money to go towards keeping current Wikipedia's lights on, not funding the next big idea some manager has.
On the one hand, I don’t think Wikipedia has made people like me smarter. Maybe the opposite: for all the diversity of opinion I think there’s way more outright BS on Wikipedia than in, say, Brittanica.
On the other hand, I can imagine lots of people don’t have easy access to more “authoritative” sources. And I’ve certainly learned a little bit about a lot of things there.
In the middle, I guess, Wikipedia is a good place to start learning about something, but a terrible place to finish.
As to financing it, I’ve always held the unpopular position that they should run ads. It would be the perfect place to try privacy-respecting advertising.
Really? Technical subjects tend to be some of the worst on wikipedia. Articles on say undergrad math topics tend to be very poor introductions to a topic.
> Because there's a new phenomenon where one reads the Wiki page of a complex topic (say, something like Free Will) and 5 minutes later, the reader thinks they're a bonafide expert on a topic that has puzzled humanity for millennia
I don't think this is a new thing. Encyclopedia articles are by nature introductory. Didn't the same thing happen with britanica back in the day. This seems less an argument against wikipedia and more an argument against letting lay people have access to educational resources at all.
> I really wish Encyclopaedia Britannica put more efforts into their own knowledge base, but I get it: high-quality vetted content is hard to do.
But is Britannica actually high quality? When people do comparisons, britannica doesnt usually come out as being significantly better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Compa...
True, that's why I said very technical. The ones on advanced math are pretty good (for example, technical logic/metalogic articles have impressed me). The ones on undergrad math tend to be edited by.. undergrads ;)
> Wikipedia is wonderful, it provokes wonder.
> ...
> Wikipedia is terrific. It begets terror.
What's more, it is amusing to leaf through the revision history of many pages, and notice patterns of wilful suppression of evidence and deliberate propaganda.
It is delightful to browse contributions of various checkusers, and see clearly which part of the establishment they represent.
If we look back to 2005, Wikipedia was already one of the most popular websites on the internet, but their expenses were only $716k [2]. They were frugal back then!
I agree with the parent that the extra expenses are mostly superfluous. They have a ton of staff [3] and quite a few of their roles seem to be about promoting their brand or maximizing donations.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/28/Wikim... [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
The editing and organizing work is satisfying to some types of people, including some people on the autism spectrum. And that specific type of satisfying work is rewarding to them. Kind of like how a freshly mown lawn is satisfying to others. There are plenty of people who love mowing their lawn that would hate to do it as a job for others.
The query service (the SPARQL endpoint) is probably the most KE like part, and that was later, in 2015. Still before KE but much closer. I think (hard to say because nobody gave a straight answer) that KE was more going to be about federation and searching non wikimedia (Free) resources.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem
[2] https://www.mathplanet.com/education/pre-algebra/right-trian...
On the contrary, how could any CEO lead an organisation that is dysfunctionally structured in the first place?
I'm not commenting on Lila, of whom I know nothing. Rather, I'm looking at the structure of WMF and the Wikipedia product and seeing disconnects and ambiguities.
Wikipedia's value comes from its content, which is provided by contributors who are not paid.
Wikipedia's budget goes to WMF staff, and capex approved by... I don't know whom. But who directs the effort of staff? This is where the org's structure appears to have resulted in years of frustration and dysfunction for all concerned.
How is WMF's strategic direction determined?
What is the role of the founder and public face, Jimmy Wales?
What is the role of the WMF CEO?
What is the role of the Funds Dissemination Committee?
What is the role and influence of large doners?
How are conflicts resolved between these levels of stakeholders?
Those are the key questions that I would want to understand before considering whether I would donate to WMF.
I've just started by reading the below articles. If anyone can add to this list, including with personal observations by insiders, I'd be grateful.
Wikipedia Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money
https://www.theregister.com/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundation_...
Wikimedia timeline of events, 2014–2016
https://www.mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-02-10/Special report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Anyways, some of the info you seek is probably at meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Funds_Disseminati... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy
Jimbo is largely a public figure-head. He has limited influence on WMF priorities beyond what any other board member would have. He has significant moral influence in the english wikipedia volunteer community.
[To be clear, im just answering questions. I dont care whether you donate. Do with your money what you think is best, its none of my business]
I read this wikipedia article about KE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo...
I infer from the article that KE was, in part, a defensive initiative to stop google leaching traffic away from wikipedia.
It sounds like JW was a key strategist, and that wikipedians were left out of the loop, which lead to management turmoil within the ranks.
It sounds like a difficult situation, to fight an external threat using internal broadcast democracy, when you know the information is going to go public right away.
Can you imagine Gates, Bezos, Jobs or Google consulting 50,000 employees every time a competitor looked like gaining traction?
I can imagine the internal transparency and consultation practiced at WMF could be beneficial for many aspects of the operations. But at a strategic level, particularly when threatened, that model could have liabilities for an organisation - particularly one which commands such a significant place in what is a lucrative commercial domain.
To complicate matters, the funding for KE was coming from an external grant source, which may have had its own agenda.
Difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER
They get more and more in donations every year and continue to ramp up their spending, mostly not on Wikipedia (neither operating costs nor "R&D" type costs).
"About a year ago, you donated $15 to keep Wikipedia online for hundreds of millions of readers. I'm surprised by and deeply grateful for your continued support. You are part of the 2% of readers who donated to support Wikipedia. We need your help again this year ... most people will ignore this message. We have no choice but to turn to you: please renew your gift to ensure that Wikipedia remains independent, ad-free, and thriving another year."
I read that as "please donate or we might have to use ads to keep lights on if you don't"
This is true in the same sense that anyone can track down and fix bugs in the Linux kernel.
Now, I have certainly done so, but I've done it as an employee for a big and profitable company who had plenty of time to spend on it. Wikipedia is similar - it is superficially open to everyone, and sure, you can probably add some detail to an article about William of Normandy's first cousin once removed just fine, but if you're trying to document, say, whether or not there was a death camp in Warsaw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...), you're up against people who have more time and resources than you do.
Which in practise also requires skill and effort. Even importing the xml dump file into a mysql database in reasonable time requires special skill when we are talking data in the 100 gb range before decompressing.
Non profit dollars are hard to come by, and the greater issue and frustration is watching orgs like Mozilla and Wikimedia incinerate them on causes that are not their mission (in stark contrast to efficient, nimble orgs like Let's Encrypt and the Free Law Project).
Wikipedia Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money Editors should get dosh, bureaucrats get too much, says outgoing fundraising chief
https://www.theregister.com/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundation_...
Notice how you're the one suggesting `diversity requirements' and then proceed by going on a tirade about it. There are many things to be done about diversity and not all of them requires coercion.
EDIT: @TheNorthman I cannot reply to your comment as I'm throttled by HN. Put bluntly, the gender of contributors does not matter and shouldn't even be considered. Let contributions stand on their own merit.
Why?
Male editing culture tends to work differently to female editing culture.
How?
One tends to be hierarchical. The other tends to be cooperative.
It's possible to develop a system that uses both of these modes to sharpen the editorial process, but that doesn't happen through self organisation when the starting point is a large gender imbalance.
Resolving this conflict is one of the biggest challenges faced by Wikipedia.
The difficulty is, however, that WMF isn't directly involved with Wikipedia content, which comes from the community. WMF is just a software company responsible for the tools the community uses for publishing.
How was this problem presented and discussed inside of WMF?
As an editor, I had an opportunity to discuss it with Sue Gardner at a meet up with other editors. The feedback from other editors was so strong, I'm baffled that WMF couldn't address it.
Although, I understood from Sue that WMF's role was only as a software company that made tools. She said quite clearly that the editor community ran itself.
But if dwindling editor participation is an existential threat, surely that's a core WMF problem? I'm curious what this looked like from inside WMF.
Pay them? Tens of millions of dollars in donations, what's the excuse not to?
WMF had 104 million in revenue in 2018. Even if you could give all of that to contributors, no administrative fees, no money to buy servers, no developers, no bank fees, etc (highly unrealistic), you would only be able to give rmeach person $690. That hardly seems like enough to actually get people to edit wikipedia as a job.
There's also plenty of articles on the internet about how introducing money into volunteer projects can very easily cause the project to collapse and have unexpected side effects.
