
Amazon donates $1M to Wikimedia - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/25/amazon-donates-1m-to-wikimedia/
======
tyingq
_" Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all contributed around $50,000 by
matching employee gifts."_

That seems paltry for Google, given that their knowledge graph benefits a lot
from Wikipedia content.

~~~
cromwellian
Google gave $2 million in 2010 from searches, and Brin gave $500k. I'm
guessing they gave more at various times, but I think you're right, Wikipedia
is a vital resource used by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon's AI agents,
and they should be donating far more since it is arguably a significant value
add for those products.

~~~
gammateam
Throwing money at an organization has diminishing efficacy.

What do you think $2 million or $10 million or $100 million would have done
for the Wikimedia organization, you think they would hide the donation <div>
next year?

~~~
fullshark
Establish an endowment to ensure they are not fighting for survival in the
future.

~~~
xyzzyz
In 2017 WMF had $120M in assets. It's probably closer to $150M today, since
they are making over $20M a year in "profit" (revenues minus expenes). The
cost of actually running Wikimedia projects (servers + network + salaries of
dev ops and salaries of code maintainers) should easily fit below $10M,
because it did in 2012. There has been growth since then in terms of usage,
but this is very scalable growth that's cheap to handle: it's not servers and
network expenses that's been skyrocketing, these are pretty much constant
since 2012. It's the salaries, grants and awards. Look at their financial
reports[1], and especially compare the growth in expenses over time. Suffice
to say, if WMF struggles in the future, it's only due to mismanagement of its
cancerous growth.

[1] - [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-
reports/](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/)

~~~
gsnedders
> It's the salaries, grants and awards.

Salaries for who?

Grants to who and for what?

Awards to who and for what?

Like, can someone provide a summary, for those of us who don't really have the
time to dive into the reports?

~~~
tibbon
They have around 300 FTEs. It might sound high, but they are the 5th most
visited website in the world. Of others in the top 10, I think Reddit is the
only other company with under 1,000 employees (at around 250). In comparison,
Taobao which is also in the top 10 has over 30,000 employees.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites)

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Final/Staff_and_Contractors)

~~~
xyzzyz
It was already top 8 in 2012, and had less than half of the headcount it has
today, spending a third of what it spends today in salaries.

~~~
tibbon
Eh - I find this public over-scrutiny of a company just because it's a
nonprofit to be a little offputing. Sure, you want to know your donations
aren't being wasted, but I keep in mind that most non-profits where my friends
work have people under-staffed and without enough budgets overall compared to
their parallels in commercial businesses.

Do you know for a fact there that what they were doing in 2012 was sustainable
for their employees, and building a solid future path for growth? If
everyone's overworked and not efficient, keeping it overly lean isn't good in
the long term.

~~~
xyzzyz
Sure, I was an admin on Wikipedia in 2008-2012, and we were doing completely
fine. The Foundation was tenth of its current size at the time, and wasn't
doing much except keeping the lights running, which is all the community
needed. Bear in mind that Wikipedia is run by community, and if the Foundation
has anything to say in Wikipedia's internal affairs, it is through employees
who also happen to be community members. If the Foundation is overworked and
not efficient, it literally doesn't matter, as they don't actually do much on
Wikipedia itself.

------
xyzzyz
Useless signaling. Wikipedia definitely doesn’t need any more money. This $1M
will be burned on salaries of Wikimedia Foundation employees, majority of
which do nothing useful. Look at their financial statements and see for
yourself. Wikimedia has enough cash already to find operations for a decade or
two, and they spend most of it on salaries of people running programs you
never hear about, and which have no bearing on the way most people actually
use Wikipedia and Commons.

~~~
hirundo
> Useless signaling.

Their contribution to Wikimedia sends a positive signal to potential customers
that is very possibly less useless than the more typical form of corporate
signalling: advertising.

Do you think that advertising is also useless signalling?

~~~
andrepd
Useless from the point of view of the recipient. I believe GP meant "useless"
as in "PR stunt"; certainly not useless for their public perception,
unfortunately.

------
akshayB
Google went after Freebase, did all the knowledge transfer to their graph and
discontinued the project. Wikipedia now became a vitally important source of
information and it is great to see big players trying to keep open knowledge
base funded.

~~~
singularity2001
Wikidata is the new better Freebase:

[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page)

[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2) 'Earth'
example

------
julianozen
I'm sure this has been discussed before on HN, but how has wikimedia avoided
the fake news problem that plagues facebook, twitter and youtube.

~~~
not_kurt_godel
Wikipedia definitely is not immune to the fake news effect. I can recall both
reading about and directly seeing numerous instances of propaganda-esque
edits. I'm guessing it probably just seems less prevalent because readership
isn't concentrated on any one Wiki article the way that news/fake news is. I'm
also under the impression that most wiki articles are closely watched by their
authors as well as various wiki bots that alert to certain types of changes,
so many/most malicious edits are probably noticed and reverted soon after they
are made.

~~~
valarauca1
Wikipedia has started to become _dare I say_ hostile to outside editors. The
current glacial pace that it is updated at maintains pace with science, and
journalism. But rarely the larger internet.

While this is frustrating, when your trying to correct a citation or trivial
spelling error in a long forgotten page. While on frequently trafficked pages
this pace prevents a lot of malicious behavior.

~~~
yorwba
My Wikipedia account was created two months ago and has exactly two edits, one
of which removed a spam link and another which fixed a transliteration error.
There has been no hostile reaction.

If you're just trying to correct a citation or trivial spelling error on a
long forgotten page, editing doesn't seem to be particularly difficult.

~~~
soperj
You don't even need an account to do those changes.

------
mmanfrin
Considering all of their 'Alexa what is [x]' information comes from wiki, this
seems short-changed.

------
azinman2
It’s kinda gross how little the big tech players have donated considering how
much of their and academia’s AI efforts leverage wikimedia data.

------
rajekas
As other commentators have said, this donation will definitely invite
accusations of virtue signaling. What Amazon needs to do is pay (not donate!)
its employees better but that's also stating the obvious.

What intrigues me more is that each era's barons find certain causes more
appealing than others. Carnegie gave a lot of money to public libraries at a
time when the printed word was expanding its reach. It's not surprising that
Wikipedia is a favorite amongst tech tycoons along with education.

~~~
smsm42
Amazon has 500K+ employees. $1M is what, two bucks per employee? Maybe three
bucks if we exclude higher management, they get enough anyway. So you're
saying "instead of donating to Wikipedia they should give each of their
employees a free Starbucks coffee once a year". That would surely change
things.

~~~
rajekas
You need to read what I wrote more carefully. I said "Amazon needs to pay its
employees better" as in a living wage - not distribute the one mil it gave
Wikipedia amongst its employees.

~~~
smsm42
Why would you mention it as a comment to Amazon donating to Wikipedia unless
you see some link between this $1M and Amazon workers pay?

------
dajohnson89
Nice to see good news like this.

~~~
jimjimjim
That's a good point. This is good news. Why don't people celebrate good news?

~~~
gnulinux
Because it is neutral news. Wikimedia has way more money than they can burn
any time soon, and money has diminishing returns.

~~~
jimjimjim
at this point in time in the dumpster fire, neutral should be celebrated!

~~~
gnulinux
I don't understand this sort of pessimism. If a news is good, we should say
good. If a news is bad, we should say bad. If it's neither, then we should
state it's neither. What makes you think we live in an especially bad time
frame?

~~~
jimjimjim
the assault on truth, misinformation and disinformation.

the rise of authoritarianism.

the polarization of poltics.

climate change denial.

jerks getting outraged when people suggest not being a jerk.

rage-baiting for clicks.

~~~
gnulinux
How is this random potpourri of global problems supposed to prove your point?
Do we have any data we have more problems now than before? According to what
basis? Even if this is true, what change does this make, why does this imply
we should start praising neutral news just because it's not bad.

~~~
jimjimjim
a potpourri it may be but it is a response to your question about why I think
this is an especially bad time frame. I see no reason not to consider them
relevant and I also see them as being indicators that things could be a lot
better. Based on this my original comment was a desire to try to increase
positivity.

------
devwastaken
Waste of money. Wikimedia is still trying to support the ancient and
effectively deprecated Mediawiki which is only realistically useable for
corporate style deployments. Individuals cannot use it well and wikimedia
fails at meeting its mission statement time and time again. Donations to
wikimedia are effectively donations to wikipedia, which cannot house the
worlds information properly. Information craves distribution and perspectives,
decentralization.

I want to see proffessors and trade skill teachers create good wiki style
sites, not for yet more useless projects by wikimedia designed to bolster
their salaries.

It'd be possible to make an absolutely free hosting site for informational
wiki's (a wiki farm) for 1M that'd last a generation. But nobody really cares
about that.

~~~
xyzzyz
What exactly is the problem with MediaWiki? I for one don't believe that any
problems Wikipedia currently has are of technical nature. Lots of people has
contributed greatly to Wikipedia in 2000s, when MediaWiki was even less
accessible than it is right now.

~~~
devwastaken
Setting up MediaWiki properly yourself is not a small undertaking. How
wikipedia does what they do is with puppet deployments and a significant
amount of automatic server management. It's incredibly inefficient given that
pages should be statically served, it's very difficult to even know what to
install and it may not even be future compatible.

For example getting VisualEditor, MediaWiki's custom PHP-lua extension for
your version of PHP, needing PHP-FPM, managing versions of PHP, correct
configs. Setting up page caching, knowing what extensions to get, seeing lots
of out of date ones, having to configure them properly. Ontop of all this
doing it actually right with proper file and user permissions is just
completely inaccessible to anyone but those who make a job of it.

Even the mediawiki 'package' is out of date and works differntly, causing more
problems.

It should be as simple as getting a domain, getting cloudflare, pop up a $5
VPS and a couple commands to have a proper and automatically updated install.
User sets up website, sets backups to GDrive or some other cloud service,
allows logins from google, facebook, whatever, and can then manage everything
from the UI.

~~~
xyzzyz
Right, these are all real problems with the software, but then again, none of
these is really a problem for Wikipedia itself at all. For Wikipedia, all of
the problems you mention have been already solved, everything is set up and
functional.

~~~
devwastaken
And that's the problem. The world's information cannot be in one place, and
mediawiki is made to look like it's 'for information' when in reality it's for
Wikipedia. It has intentions to be extensible but fails to follow through, and
this is incredibly misleading.

------
WhompingWindows
This is the equivalent of me announcing a $3 donation to Wikipedia. PR
signaling and nothing more.

~~~
gammateam
Throwing money at Wikimedia foundation doesn't solve a problem either.

Typically the reason why wealthy individuals and organizations opt to do
"matching" is because there isn't a $number that will satisfy people or even
help the situation.

So then you could tie your contribution directly to public interest.

The world is open to better ideas, so try to contribute those.

------
linuxftw
Large companies donating large sums of money non-anonymously seems to
circumvent the 'we're neutral because we don't have sponsors' credo.

They'll get used to the large cash injections, that is how political power is
bought.

~~~
nolok
Wikipedia already has a problem with cash injections and not being able to
save extra money instead of launching more and more projects.

As for the point you're making, I disagree as long as the income from one
company isn't reaching too big a percentage of their total yearly income. And
then again, Firefox clearly wasn't politically subservient to Google, despite
most of their income coming from there.

So it's not so much an automatic reaction, the internal culture plays a big
role. Which is why Wikipedia pre-existing issue with incoming cash usage is a
red flag.

------
wpdev_63
good - they deserve it!

------
mudil
Chump change for Bezos. Really.

~~~
talltimtom
It’s Amazon the company not Bezos the person.

~~~
stygiansonic
At this point, can you really separate the two? Most of Bezos’s wealth is tied
up in Amazon, and he is virtually in control of the company.

~~~
the_duke
According to Bloomberg [1] he owns "just" 16.4 percent.

Sure, he is CEO and probably has a large influence on the board too.

But just based on stock, he doesn't even seem to have a blocking minority.
(Unless he has a lot of preferred shares of some kind).

~~~
astrodust
He's the shot-caller. Nobody else has that much influence in the company.

