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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?

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.

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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