But who would pay the 137,201 active editors? Oh, wait, they are all unpaid volunteers.
OK, who would pay the 1,149 administrators? Oh wait, they are all unpaid volunteers too.
OK, who would pay the developers? Oh, wait, the software was originally created by unpaid volunteers and it works well enough that having three developers evaluating bug fixes submitted by volunteers would be enough. There are plenty of Linux distributions and open-source projects that get by on one or two developers.
What about the 924,632,645 edits, 49,122,961 pages of all kinds and 5,978,255 articles? Oh wait, those are free to copy over along with the software that runs the encyclopedia.
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"
It sounds like some here are of the opinion that Wikipedia's revenue will never take a nosedive for any reason and that the bubble will never burst. Now where have I heard that kind of talk before?
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"
Ah. I had no idea that they ran out of orphans. If they did, then it would be a perfect analogy. Boys town takes care of all the orphans that it is their mission to take care of, keeps collecting donations and spending on other stuff. The Wikimedia Foundation does everything needed to put an encyclopedia -- the thing that it is their mission to take care of -- keeps collecting donations and spending on other stuff. Thanks for the great analogy, and I apologize for misunderstanding and assuming that there would always be plenty more orphans to take care of.
I am going to think about this, do some research, and see if I can turn it into an essay on Wikipedia about collecting money after the job is done. Thanks!
Didn't the march of dimes also keep taking in donations after polio was eradicated?
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"
It has indeed been raising an endowment for several years, but every time I ask them to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad the answer is "maybe next year".
If the endowment is just one more account that can be drained at will we have no protection from a sudden drop in revenue while the WMF maintains the current spending levels in the hope that revenue will recover.
I also looked into whether the endowment is legally protected against a large payout as a result of a lawsuit. I am not a lawyer, but it looks like the WMF needs to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal to get that sort of protection.
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
Calling out concrete examples of waste also has a downside. It usually results in the discussion going off into the weeds about whether individual expenditures are justified. There are many people who focus on individual examples of waste. I chose to focus on the big picture -- overall spending growth.
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
I believe that I did "actually describe a scenario where it was well functioning but ran out of money."
From my essay:
"Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it will happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment."
I don't think I have ever hinted that Wikipedia is spending too much on servers. I consider that part of Wikipedia to pretty much be the best managed part, and everything they do increases reliability, helps with disaster recovery, or makes the site faster. I even said "It costs a certain amount to have reliable servers, run a good legal team, maintain the core software, etc. But none of the things that the WMF needs to do require ever-expanding spending."
In my opinion, spending 1,250 times as much to do basically the same job is all the evidence you need. I wouldn't squawk at 5 or 10 times as much, but 1,250 times as much? At that point the burden of proof is on the person who claims that such a huge increase in spending was necessary.
Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn't run out of orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on orphans.
A better charity to compare with Wikipedia would be the the Washington Monument Restoration Project.
Once the Washington Monument is completely restored you can't spend any more money restoring the Washington Monument. If donations keep coming in, you shouldn't spend them on giving executives of the charity free ski vacations (yes, the WMF actually did that) You should instead build up an endowment that is eventually big enough that the interest covers all Washington Monument maintenance forever. Then and only then should you tell donors "look, we don't need any more money for restoring the Washington Monument. If you give us a donation we will use it for other things, starting with restoring the Lincoln Memorial".
There are a huge number of trolls and vandals who would love to be able to avoid being blocked by using a VPN. Wikipedia has to balance the need to stop them with the need to let legitimate VPN users edit.
In May of 2018 I posted a request for Comment and got a clarification on who should be granted IPBE.
:It's likely safe to say that administrator judgement on a case-by-case basis can decide whether the provided justification constitutes a legitimate need and whether that need is sufficient to grant IPBE.. it's pretty clear that the community at large likely also doesn't want it to be routinely granted, for lack of a better phrase, just because someone wants it and could hat-collect it. Someone should likely, for example, actually be affected by a block to request it and/or someone should probably be able to explain their need for the additional layer of privacy rather than just, 'Hey I want IPBE because I said the word privacy.' "
That was the decision of the Wikipedia community. If you think that decision was "silly" you are free to post an RfC and see if the consensus has changed.
Re: "Has it become that bad?" No. Not even close. The people who complain about such things are typically newbies who make the mistake of trying to "fix" articles on highly contentious topics with hundreds of edits per day. Just pick a page that hasn't been edited in a while, which is most of them. The history tab tells you how often it gets edited.
"Editors in good standing whose editing is disrupted by unrelated blocks or firewalls may request IP address block exemption, which allows editing on an otherwise-blocked IP address... If you will be editing using an anonymous proxy, including a VPN service, you must send your request to..."
"The Wikipedia Typo Team is dedicated to improving the quality of Wikipedia by correcting typos and misspellings. If you see any typos (even minor ones), please correct them. This kind of editing is a never-ending job, so we could use your help! Please consider joining our team. All you need to do is start correcting typos."
Re: "When I see a message asking to donate money, I do, because I assume they do need that if they're asking for money." please read
First off, the above comment is an example of hijacking; using a discussion about one thing to try to get attention for something else. You see this a lot with Abortion, Gun control, and US presidential politics. I am not saying that those aren't important topics, but do they really need to be inserted into a discussion about how much money Wikipedia is spending?
I would strongly encourage the person trying to hijack this discussion to start a new discussion
I would strongly encourage all HN readers to not give the poster the attention he wants and to downvote any comments that are not about WMF finances
I also would strongly encourage all HN readers to not respond to this sort of thing and to stay on topic.
For those who are interested, here is what Wikipedia has done about this situation:
Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from post-1978 British politics, broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter. This sanction supersedes the community sanction applied in May 2018.
Passed 11 to 0 at 18:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
Amended by motion at 20:08, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia's relevant policy states:
"The purpose of a topic ban is to forbid editors from making edits related to a certain topic area where their contributions have been disruptive, but to allow them to edit the rest of Wikipedia. Unless clearly and unambiguously specified otherwise, a topic ban covers all pages (not only articles) broadly related to the topic, as well as the parts of other pages that are related to the topic, as encapsulated in the phrase 'broadly construed.'"
Thanks! looks like it was a screwup by the ycombinator.com software. The original link ends with a period, and the software stripped it out -- probably because adding a period after a link that is at the end of a sentence is a common error.
I replaced it with another page on Wikipedia that redirects to the "User:Guy Macon/Yes. We are biased." page.
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
I'm just saying.