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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27749 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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I've seen people expressing bafflement that the average midwit on Reddit might think they could run Musk's assets better than Musk if they had the same luck/unscrupulousness to have the same resources. I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

  • -24

Here's an honest question: many people in the comments here are saying that Wikipedia could be run for about 5-10% of the donations it receives each year. Given that, it would only take a couple years for Wikipedia to collect enough donations to set up an endowment that would pay their costs in perpetuity without ever needing to do any fundraising again (usually one can expect to withdraw 4-5% of an endowment each year without eating into the principal). Is the Wikimedia foundation already doing something like this? If not, has anyone proposed it and has the Wikimedia foundation explained why it's not doing it?

They already did that; there's a $100 million Wikimedia Endowment. But WMF keeps asking for money and then figuring out things to do with it (in many cases, re-donating it).

Might be a fun graph to see where those donations go.

Probably would, but I think the accounting's divided by location in their official stats; to get the really-fun one you'd want to break it up into individual items and then re-aggregate by cause.

Good point. Actually, after making my comment I tried looking at the Wikimedia Foundation's financial statements and noticed they listed about $5 million per year in returns on investments, which is about in line with a $100 million endowment. Arguably $5 million per year is not quite enough to keep Wikipedia running but it's probably close.

It is enough, you can look up their financial reports. They spend more money on donation processing than on actually hosting the website, true story.

I don't think it's obvious that $5 million per year is enough to support Wikipedia. Certainly it is enough for web hosting, but presumably they need at least a few employees (e.g. sysadmins, a few programmers and web developers) and it also seems like a good idea to retain some legal counsel and some people to manage the other employees, do the accounting, etc. This does not cost a huge amount of money, but could easily be a few million.

But if you have a detailed argument that Wikipedia could be run for $5 million per year I would be interested in hearing it (I mean this sincerely, it seems like an interesting topic).

They're not doing it because if the service was funded they would lose their excuse to beg for more money for causes.

You have a website everybody uses and is part of the bedrock infrastructure of everyone's lives. People either extract money and power from controlling it or they will quickly get replaced by people who do so. Such is the nature of power.

Wikipedia is so valuable as a resource that they know they’ll always be able to get funding. At worst they can get the UN or a few rich people to fund it, or even a university with a large endowment that wants the prestige. So there’s no reason to take any steps toward fiscal sustainability. It’s too big to fail.

That's an interesting point though it raises the question of why Wikipedia never tried in a serious way to become a profit-oriented enterprise. Once it got big enough it probably wouldn't have been hard to monetize. Perhaps some of what's happening here is that people in the Wikimedia Foundation are just picking up $100 million bills left on the ground by Wikipedia's failure to try to make money off of its product. People won't ignore that kind of money-making opportunity forever.

Wikipedia depends on the editor community to keep the encyclopedia current (and the Pareto distribution of editor activity means that the part of the community that matters is quite small) - the community increasingly see the WMF as a parasite using their encyclopedia to raise donations under false pretenses. The Wikimedia software and the text of the encyclopedia are open source - the only thing that the WMF actually controls is the IP and domain names (which would use value fast if they pointed to an "encyclopedia" that was full of rubbish).

The Fram ban incident was the point at which the community and the WMF became actively hostile - and the community won by getting Fram's ban overturned and an in-principle agreement from the WMF that wikis with active communities would remain primarily responsible for policing their own users. But the community now know that the self-perpetuating woke oligarchy that control the WMF think of them as unwashed white male neanderthals who are only one step removed from gamergaters, or something like that. My read was that both the WMF and the community realised that either side could destroy the social value of the encyclopedia, and neither wanted to do so.

When Jimbo (who had much more goodwill in the editor community than the current WMF leadership) launched the for-profit Wikia in 2004, the threat of an editor revolt meant that he had to keep it entirely separate from Wikipedia. If the WMF tried the same thing, there would be an editor strike.

Wait, Jimbo's the reason why Fandom exists???

This is an interesting story, but it seems hard to square the "Wikipedia's editors resent being seen as Deplorables by the WMF" with the "Wikipedia has a community of power editors who are proud Commies" thing alleged elsewhere in this thread.

I agree, but wokestupid insanity is fractal.

The background to the Fram ban was that the WMF were proposing to change their ToS to incorporate the usual vaguely worded Code of Conduct that people expect to be selectively enforced against conservatives but is actually selectively enforced against spergy men who are more focussed on improving the product than playing politics. And as part of the ToS to use the server, this would be enforced by the WMF and not the community. There were the usual complaints by the WMF that the sex ratio in the community (which is male-dominated for the obvious reasons) must be due to Deplorable behaviour chasing women away.

Most of the evidence in the case is not public, but it looks like a woman who was friends with the WMF CEO was adding articles on Spanish Paralympians that were sufficiently badly translated that the community thought they were making the encyclopedia worse. Fram tried to make her stop, and she tattled on him.

What is public is that when the MSM picked up the story, the WMF leadership briefed that Fram was banned for being mean to female contributors and that the row was about the WMF trying to crack down on endemic sexism in the editor community.

There are a lot of proud Commies who really are sexist (the sex scandals in the UK Socialist Workers' Party were hilarious), and even more who are victims of bad-faith allegations of sexism by the establishment left. The "Berniebro" meme is the canonical example.

Yes and no. You don't need to keep the WMF to keep Wikipedia - not even legally, because Wikipedia's content is CC-BY-SA and thus anyone with the money to handle the load can make a WP mirror.

It would be hard to get people to use a new, mirrored version of Wikipedia while the Wikimedia Foundation exists.

Yes, but 2rafa was saying the WMF would get bailed out if it somehow did go bankrupt.

I'm saying that in that specific highly-unlikely situation the existence of the mirrors would avoid the need for that.

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