On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations.
The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.
And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.
I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.
Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.
I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.
To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.
The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".
Hosting does not include software development. It does not include sysadmins. I'm not sure if it even includes data center personel (Wikipedia owns its own servers. That means you have to hire people to plug them in. Amazon isnt doing it for you).
Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going.
That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia.
Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.
By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.
The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant.
Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.
Corporate editors, boiler room political operations, and random conspiracy cranks are given a bothsideism platform to edit and narrate facts in their favor.
"Bothsidesism" is a tired argument. Somehow if you don't think that one side of a debate is utter evil and the other side is as pure as the driven snow, you're engaging in "bothsidesism" if you acknowledge there are any shades of gray in the world. Which is a childish argument for anyone older than a high school sophomore.
"Bothsidesism" is a lie that is used to avoid criticizing one side when the other side is also bad. Just because one side is awful does not grant the other side a free pass to be immune from criticism or to get their way on everything. The idea of "bothsidesism" forces a false dichotomy and then forces you to pick a side, when there are almost always more than two choices. It's what partisans use to beat down people who say "I pick 'None Of The Above,' because you both suck."
You define it that way but that's only you as far as I know - I haven't seen that definition or had that experience - and it ignores the actual bothsidesism problem, which is certainly not a lie IME.
I love this use of hole punching, also love how the author handled authentication.
I have definitely been in the position of needing to tweak a workflow over and over to get it to work, wasting hours when a terminal into the action would have allowed me to close the loop in minutes. Nice work to the author!
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