> I (John Kozubik / rsync.net) will donate USD 10,000 to wikipedia if they change their official stance to inclusionism
The donations go to Wikimedia, the organization that runs the servers. It is purposedly distinct from the various communities of the various language editions of the various Wikimedia projects. I do not think it would be a good thing for the Wikimedia Foundation to start imposing views on the community like you would have them do.
You may be glad wikipedia has a lot of money, but are you glad wikimedia does? Are you happy with the proportion of your wikimedia donation that goes to wikipedia?
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
> I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Necessary how? For what?
I donate to Wikipedia—as a Wikipedian. I've contributed a bunch of time editing content and doing lots of gnomish things to create value so that Wikipedia is a "great service". Millions of others have, too. But neither I nor any of the other people have anything to do with your donations.
Don't misunderstand: this is not a call-to-action for revenue sharing in the vein of the articles constantly appearing about the sustainability of FOSS; I'm not saying "give us a cut". What I am saying is that the Wikimedia fundraising tactics are thoroughly unnecessary to the actual production costs of Wikipedia that Wikimedia is responsible for.
Am I outraged? No. Do I recognize what WMF is doing as borderline slimy? Yes.
Wikipedia has far more money then they know what to do with, their entire foundation is very affluent and there is no risk of them facing any hardship. Your donations have exactly zero influence on Wikipedia staying up or even staying independent. Your money goes into a web of charities (undisclosed which exactly), at best some poor people might profit of a few percentage points of your money, why not just donate to some real charity instead.
>But donating to an organization that doesn't directly benefit Wikipedia in any way, that's where I'm much more doubtful. I'd much prefer they just advertised them in some way instead, like during their donation drives.
The biggest donation is going to a charity managing an archive. A place that has important documents that can be cited by, oh I don't know, an encyclopedia maybe?
> People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does.
On the contrary, Wikipedia itself has a lot of reliance on the other projects. For example, Wikidata solves the problem of interlinking Wikipedia languages and other projects when they're hosting content about the same real-world entity. In fact, this was Wikidata's MVP - the reason it got funded in the first place. It then took off from there.
Wikimedia Commons is a similar story - in addition to the obvious languages issue, there are a lot of concerns about media (such as licensing. enhancement etc.) that really are best addressed in a dedicated venue, with its own committed contributors. This has been very beneficial to Wikipedia itself.
> I cannot fathom the reason for the focus on the Wikimedia Foundation.
for me what those wikipedia pleas are a bit fraudulent.
they’re asking for money using the founder’s name and face, almost always in a very dramatic fashion, but the money won’t actually be spent on wikipedia.
> Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.
I'm pretty sure the foundation could fund such work with the full support of the community, if they went about it in a different way.
For example, if they transparently said they were going to try paying professional researchers/editors/translators to beef up articles on subjects that were under-represented; they took a systematic look at subjects and determined Haiti was under-represented; and they spent $x00k towards some concrete goal, like getting Haiti more articles/words/featured articles than Star Wars.
Or if paying editors is unpopular or ineffective, they could fund efforts to recruit more volunteer contributors to the Hatian-language wikipedia, spending $x00k and measuring success by the increase in article count, how long the newly recruited volunteers stay around for, and suchlike.
You know - transparent priorities, with goals expressed in terms of wikipedia contributions.
>the vast majority of your donation does go to maintaining wikipedia.
Who knows? Is there any good investigative breakdown of exactly what Wikimedia Foundation spends most of its income on? Does it have a huge admin parasitical attachment sucking the money away? I'm not accusing, just wondering myself. Perhaps someone knows about this.
> Nobody would donate to Wikipedia if they knew it could survive on a few million dollars each year and it had hundreds of millions of dollars handy, and no new work was being done to add services and improve existing services.
I mean, I would. I'd rather they fulfill their core mission on ROI alone than waste it on stuff that evidently adds no value.
I'd donate for that. I won't donate to see it wasted.
They are volunteers. They do as much works as they want or don't want to do. Once you are the size of the Wikipedia there are tasks that need to be done, and you can't really relay on volunteers to do it in their free time.
> I would avoid donating to any such organisation myself.
Its your money.
I am just saying that its normal and expected in free and opensource communities to do that sort of things. Organize conferences, meetups, public awareness, handle the legal stuff and hire the core stuff that makes sure thing are running 24/7.
> if Wikipedia, ever in our lifetimes, goes under, it won't be because they weren't given enough money
I agree, I think it will be because they'll accept more money from commercial actors on the terms of whoever these actors are – Google currently does not seem to force any conditions on WP, as far as I can tell.
> If you want to do a good deed donate to the Internet Archive.
I agree with this as well but I consider both Wikimedia and the Internet Archive as extremely important.
Charitable causes always are at risk of "wasting" money. But the reason for that is that in a purely capitalistic sense the cause itself is not profitable.
> > that WMF's primary contribution is Wikipedia, and almost everything else is secondary
> Not so for some time. Also, Wikipedia as a project is way bigger than just software.
well my donation certainly is aimed that way and the insistent nagscreen certainly made me think "yeah I don't want this resource to go away"
and that is Wikipedia. I occasionally use some of the other wikimedia projects, but they should be secondary, it's definitely specifically that one great body of knowledge that got me to donate.
wiktionary is the project I use second most. if they were to beg for donations or else it may go away, I'd be like "eh"
it's Wikipedia only that got me "no wait this is super important, take my money" every year.
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.
> Would you be ok with your donations being used to pay for a feed service and support dedicated to, say, the particular needs of Google search results, or Apple's Siri?
Absolutely not, and this isn't whats happening today. Third parties do not use the existing Wikipedia APIs to begin with, cache page results, and create their own machine readable versions. These "enterprise customers" entirely bear the costs and risk of maintaining a machine readable API. There are also businesses that compete and innovate in this space already.
I'm also not okay with my donations financing an upstart like this targeting enterprise.
This needs to exist outside of Wikimedia. It's completely out of scope. Profit incentives warp missions. Why can't Apple/Google et al start their own consortium that does this themselves. Why does Wikimedia need to do this?
Think of the scale of operations required to support an entity like Google or Apple. This is going to require a /ton/ of investment and talent and it may even fail. Why is Wikimedia incurring start up risks like this to appease the needs of big tech?
> I'm sure this is not what people thought they were funding when they donated to Wikipedia
I do not think your argument follows. Wikipedia as a whole is untrustworthy because at one point they donated 1 million bucks divided between 5 NGOs through their fundation?
It would be like arguing that Exxon has strayed far far far away from their mission because they donated 20 million to the Amazon conservation. Exxon is still extracting oil and maximising profit for its shareholders, and wikipedia is still a free open encyclopedia. I don't think miniscule donations (related to revenue) mark a departure from the mission worthy of betraying their core intention.
> provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself
I don't think I agree with you at all here, given that I grew up wanting the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Wikipedia refuses to offer it... seemingly in no small part because the founder of it makes money off of Wikia.
But, I believe regardless: if someone goes to an encyclopedia and is told "this encyclopedia needs your help: it is going to run out of money unless you donate to it", and you take that money to do something that isn't to improve that encyclopedia, that is absolutely unethical, no matter how useful it might be on its own.
> Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia
This alone might be somewhat fair (though I find it hard to believe, honestly); but, I still challenge whether someone who comes to the website and is shown the current banner would believe their money isn't being flitted away on things that don't benefit the resource they were using, even if it might be "more ethical" to provide better translations.
The donations go to Wikimedia, the organization that runs the servers. It is purposedly distinct from the various communities of the various language editions of the various Wikimedia projects. I do not think it would be a good thing for the Wikimedia Foundation to start imposing views on the community like you would have them do.
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