At this point, Wikimedia the organization is parasitic on Wikipedia the open-source information project. The latter generates all the goodwill and the former fucks around doing vanity projects with the ensuing resources.
What's that pithy "law" about eventually any organization existing simply to perpetuate itself and serve the insiders who work there, rather than further its mission? Ironically what came to mind is Cunningham's Law which is the wrong one... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Doesn't this apply to any organization? If you care about the goals of an organization you are going to be promoted because of your value to that task nor would you seem it. Those that don't are going to care more about the organizations structure and focus on improving their standing.
> Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.
> This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.
I think the premise is wrong. Having a structure has many advantages and these advantages work favourably for companies in many cases. Clear hierarchy can immediately end a discussion and bring people to act.
Striving for objective news stories is highly valuable as well as social science regarding as many perspectives on different values as possible. That generates value. Otherwise you just iterate on stagnation. The comparison the author makes is a bit random here and I believe the motivation to define it as such is that she is not content with people making different decisions. Well, nobody truly is but there are different ways to deal with that.
What I agree with is that you should look at power dynamics. Competence is as often seen as a threat by you colleagues as it is seen as a positive. Why is that? Because people feel threatened by it and start to downplay its worth. All those that are threatened do indeed quickly form a structure because of their common goals. That said, there are managers that deserve the authority as they have a talent to keep people focused on relevant issues. They are often well liked and people gladly delegate decision making. But only in the scope of their mission which should be defined just as rigidly as groups are proposed to be here. Although I argue that the latter rigidity is not as relevant.
There are no non-hierarchal organizations, only ones that are written down and ones that aren’t. Even Reinventing Organizations talks about “fluid, natural hierarchies” - i.e. cliques.
I worked once for an organization where relative power was part of the culture. Supervisors literally sat at high desks facing the minions. In another, there was a power structure and folks directly accountable for certain things; but it was very collegial. Everyone treated each other as peers and the senior folks were more like mentors or folks with other responsibilities than bosses.
I messed up a bunch of words and it drastically alterted what I was trying to say. Here's the correction
Doesn't this apply to any organization?
If you care about the goals (engineer, metal worker, etc) of an organization you AREN'T going to be promoted because of your value and need for that task. For example the lead designer for BMW M cars has great value in non-managerial role.
Those that don't care about the goals can then focus on caring about the structure, the politics, fitting in, etc. They are going to be promoted because they are modifying their behavior for that purpose.
This doesn't apply in all situations but basically business people care about business and when they are successful end up in charge.
I think the point is a criticism of organizational bearucracy becoming an end in itself. Any organization can probably end up here, not all are at that point and some may have control to prevent bureaucrats from gaining total control. I don't have good sources but I imagine something along use lines is the common criticism of politicians that they become pure political operatives, disconnected from their constituents actual needs. I imagine an alternative to this would be sortition where randomizing the office holder theoretically minimizes their ability to perpetuate the institution for the sake of its existence.
The latest WMF "vanity project" is Wikidata, started in 2012. It is currently getting more edits than the most popular version of Wikipedia, and has been playing a pivotal role in the "open-source information" ecosystem. If that kind of thing is "parasitic" then maybe we should welcome such parasitism.
The Wikidata software is extensions to Mediawiki (which is maintained by WMF), and though the extensions are primarily developed by a Wikimedia chapter (Wikimedia Deutschland), it's disingenuous to say that Wikidata is fully maintained by them. Its operations, at the very least, are maintained by WMF, and quite a bit of development and a large amount of code review was done by WMF.
Similarly, the test/dev for Wikidata is part of Wikimedia Cloud services (which I created). That environment is also WMF run.
Can you cite any evidence (even in German)? The only thing I'm sure that was done by WMDE is about Wikivoyage (which is definitely more complicated than it seems, mainly because the English version was a fork of WikiTravel).
WMF has its issues, but "unmaintained" is over the top.
There was actually a time i would have agreed with this, and there are still under-maintained parts, but since the recreation of the platform team, i don't think its a reasonable position anymore.
This doesn't seem like a vanity project. The wikimedia projects I've come across usually seem useful, though not as impactful as wikipedia. What are some of the projects you consider mere vanity projects?
I have no problem with wiki trying to expand into other areas, that’s how a company grows. I don’t see any degradation in their primary product and the value they provide is immense. I’m more than happy to see what else they can do in other spaces.
Actually, they're spending less than 3MM per year for hosting. "Other operating expenses" are ~10MM, and everything else on the list has essentially nothing to do with Wikipedia.
However, at the current rate it won't take long until they actually do spend 100MM+ on their own salaries.
A friend of mine who worked there claimed the bulk of the funding is spent on paying attorneys to defend Wikipedia editors against hostile governments and companies that sue and imprison them for writing unflattering material.
Take it with a grain of salt, I guess, given the level of cynicism Hacker News seems to have about Wikimedia Foundation, and you could easily dismiss insiders defending their own organization as shills. I don't really see a way to tell from those financial statements. I'm guessing that would count as program expense and break down between salaries and professional services depending on the relative proportions to which they keep attorneys on staff versus contracting legal defense out to other firms.
>everything else on the list has essentially nothing to do with Wikipedia
I would say that engineer/product/analytics salaries are part of the cost of running and updating a webpage. Then you have HR which is needed to support those employees and Legal which is especially needed given the high risk nature of Wikipedia.
Good luck keeping Wikipedia up in a useful manner without those people.
edit: Then you need Finance to help handle the costs responsibly. Then you need Fundraising to help raise the money needed to pay for all that. Then you generally want some Marketing/Branding/Communications to help with the whole talking to external humans part.
Wikipedia could run with the company the size of craigslist but with all of the additional cash they choose to add layers of bloat without providing similiar value.
You're applying corporate thinking to this. Wikimedia Foundation doesn't need marketing or branding people, it really doesn't. Communications people I can understand because there will be journalists and others that need to be communicated to. But they don't need a marketing strategy nor do they need marketing collateral.
I'm curious if sites like the pirate bay are "high risk". If so, did it take $100M / year to keep them up with legal and HR teams etc?
These claims are often made, but I'm not sure they check out. Plenty of much much more controversial stuff stays online / is available. But supposedly wikipedia will be destroyed without these experts.
Pirate Bay is banned in many countries, was raided by the police multiple times, had its founders literally put into jail, had its domains seized, is blocked by Facebook, can't get donations outside of crypto, etc.
It's a pretty good example of why you need legal teams for any sort of sustainable effort.
I mean Piratebay is up right now. At least, if not literally, in spirit. I can get torrent magnet links off a site that looks exactly like the same Piratebay and probably not get a virus.
The Pirate Bay spent years hopping from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction because of all the suits and enforcement against them. Wikipedia doesn't, and also probably doesn't have any interest in pursuing any sort of expensive jurisdiction-hopping strategy that would also throw all of its employees and work into jeopardy.
Sometimes that can be the right call, if the other organization is doing something that benefits wikimedia.
That said the list at, https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund does seem a bit far afield, and personally i find the descriptions of what the money is to be used for too flowery and not concrete enough to be comfortable.
Sure. I was def exaggerating for effect — there does need to be an org running this project and as that org Wikimedia also does good things. But as with Mozilla, the decision-makers are too distracted by flavor-of-the-week bullshit.
I don't think it is parasitic per se but I do believe one of the problems is that it draws in people that have problems with others freely sharing knowledge if it is to their dislike. Same problem with some moderators and I think the best Wikipedia ever had left the project already.
Absolutely. Mozilla should have increased investment in the development, particularly rewriting the engine in Rust to improve the maintainability, rather than increasing CEO salary.
It seems like these kinds of reactions to WMF posts are always by the same handful of people, because it's like you copy/paste the same lies into every discussion.
If you're going to make shit up, at least link to the completely open documents they use for planning, funding, and accounting, so we're basing it on the same information.
Another point of reference is the principles for scholarly structure. It has clauses to prevent exactly mission drift and other ills. Not adopted by WMF or WMDE, but in the same approximate space.
Don't they have a really big endowment?
I feel like they're expanding to use it rather than expanding to bring in more money. Similar thing seemed to happen with Mozilla.
The endowment isn't that big, given the idea is you are only supposed to use the return not the principle. I think its size is in the neighbourhood of 100 million.
I really don't like this. The foundation already has many multiples more money than it needs to cover its core goal: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
This can, at best, be useless, at worst, corrupt its mission to serve corporations.
There used to be an expression "don't fix what ain't broke." I feel like this old maxim is now completely ignored.
> access to Wikimedia content by reusers is currently achieved through three broad means: Scraping of web pages; data dumps; and APIs. These services are provided freely to all reusers of Wikimedia content. They are and will remain free, libre and gratis, to everyone.
> What many of the largest commercial technology organizations require in order to effectively utilize Wikimedia content goes beyond what we currently provide.
If ISOC had shunted its profits into an endowment like it should have, it might not have ended up as a corrupt organization. This should be a legal requirement for non-profits with positive cash flow.
In this case, it strongly incentivizes them to provide poor service to non-paying, non-enterprise API users. Wikimedia Enterprise apparently generates daily snapshots for paying customers[1]. The general public only gets them twice a month[2]. Wikimedia's goal should be to serve the public.
Why does an organisation that has more than enough money to achieve its current and long term goals, appeal to their site visitors that they really need more money? The ads are in my opinion dishonest and emotionally manipulative, and have actively put me off supporting Wikimedia as a foundation.
What I'd like to see happen (though it's extremely unlikely) would be to rely less on emotionally charged banners thanks to the new revenue provided by the enterprise product.
But the current fundraising strategy works extremely well so I really can't see it changing it at all.
Full disclosure: Until very recently I was employed by Wikimedia as a Release Engineer. I was there for 7 years, however, I left for a new opportunity in February of this year.
I am not a fan of the direction the organization seems to be headed. During the past few years there has been rapid growth and increased corporate culture. Seems to be kind of similar to what happened with the Mozilla foundation and that really hasn't worked out well for them so I am not entirely optimistic about the future of Wikipedia and the free knowledge movement in general.
Goals can be expanded to infinity, uncertainty and inflation is always a thing, thus the need to diversify revenue streams to ensure survival and sustainability.
> The more money they have, the more likely they are to exist in perpetuity.
I think the opposite is true. Consider examples like broke lottery winners, the resource curse [1], and the long history of startups getting lots of money and then cratering, from Webvan to WeWork.
With Wikipedia in particular, I'm concerned that the more money there is, the more attractive it is to people who want to be near large streams of money for various reasons, including living large and diverting money to their own friends, pet projects, and grand visions. I'm also concerned that even if they are able to avoid those people entirely, large budgets pose other risks, including inflexibility in downturns, which I think increase the odds of a setback turning into a full collapse.
Corruption, like cancer, is statistically inevitable for organizations. The only question is whether they have the right mechanisms to detect and exercise the tumors when they're small. But the scrappier Wikipedia stays, the less we have to worry about that.
The more money Wikimedia has, the less likely it gets that they keep recurring expenses in a sustainable range.
And you can be corrupt without money, true. But corrupt people tend to avoid organisations that don't have a lot of money, they all try to work where the money is. And the do-gooders that are the other group of people likely to push into an org like Wikimedia tend to be particularly defenseless against the first kind.
Not exactly, because ads would result in people not donating and go against their mission. Forming into Wikimedia Enterprise allows them to get enterprise revenue without compromising the experience of reading the content
Some people just don't have enough. For them it is necessary.
The only thing that is sad is that is difficult to explain to a child that wiki{m,p}edia is just another "news" outlet and everything there shall be taken with a grain of salt.
Why would a non-profit organization with like 10x more money than they need to achieve their mission beg me for even more money? With multiple screens worth of banners and paragraphs that actually push the article I'm trying to read out of the way in order to nag me for donations? Even ads aren't this bad.
Mate, if there's one thing Wikipedia isn't is bloated. It serves one of the biggest websites on the internet with a fraction of the infrastructure of similar sites.
Depends on their services? Wikipedia serves static sites. Their hosting costs are 3 million a year according to their accountants. They have no real recommendation engine, or really dynamic content at all. 100% of their content is free for them. They can easily store their entire site in ram on a small cluster. Given that I'd say 10-30 million would be reasonable.
I don't really agree with your definition of static. Wikipedia has no request time processing on their pages. If you request the english version of the hacker news article it'll just grab the HTML from ram and send it over. Of course there's an api for posting edits, but that's as simple as updating a few rows in a database, and only happens once, when the edit it posted.
In the ideal case yes - and a significant portion of requests fall into that case (varnish cache), but its also the cheapest case by far.
Wikipedia gets edited a lot, and a single edit can often affect many pages (in extreme cases, millions of pages). Keeping up with content churn is where a lot of the computational resources are directed.
Now sure, this is still a lot easier than if every page view had to be rendered on demand dynamically. However a truly static site where things don't change at all is trivial compared to wikipedia to host.
For the critics, this is basically a way for Wikimedia to charge for high throughput access from commercial users, as well as normalizing the API. These corporations already crawl the entirety of this space, both the HTML and the wikitext. Why wouldn't they if the license allows it?
As long as dumps remain available for free (which as I understand they have to) the community loses nothing, and corporate actors get to contribute a bit more. I don't see things like Kiwix going away any time soon.
Yes, contribute a bit more is good. But contribute to what? Server costs are (compared to WMF budget) small, the actual contributors never have and never will see a cent.
Stop spreading misinformation. The budget data is open. You're discussing server costs, but need to also consider hosting and data center costs, as well as employee salaries. Running Wikimedia is a pretty decent percentage of their budget.
Part of the reason for other parts of the budget is attempting to increase editor numbers in a world where direct readership is declining (because of products like Google's knowledge graph), and improving inclusiveness, so that content will better represent the world. They are also building an endowment to be able to weather bad fundraising years.
Servers don't run themselves. I'm not saying everything wmf spends money on is useful, but servers are useless without sysadmins.
Keep in mind part of the reason server costs are low is because wikimedia owns its own servers. Lots of people rent servers (e.g. AWS) where the cost of hosting will be higher because the cost of some of the sysadmin duties are covered by the AWS fee, where at wikimedia that is a salary that has to be paid.
> As you can see, from 112M total expenses, internet hosting is 2.4M (or 2%), and 'other operating expenses' is 10M (or 9%). This is 11% of expenses. This compares to 56M for salaries and 23M for awards and grants. Where is the misinformation?
I believe the parent already answered your question:
> You're discussing server costs, but need to also consider hosting and data center costs, as well as employee salaries. Running Wikimedia is a pretty decent percentage of their budget.
The numbers you presented confirm this statement: 56M (salaries) + 2.4M (hosting) + 10M (other operating expenses) = 68.4M (61%)
Google already scrapes and utilizes all of Wikipedia's contents to use in its "knowledge graph", and donates a substantial amount to the WMF in return. This simply formalizes the financial agreement and moves the data exchange to an api that is presumably more convenient and less resource intensive for both parties, while offering the same access for any other enterprise customer (and the internet archive gets it for free).
This seems like a good idea for both the WMF and the open internet.
(Contrary to what seem to be a lot of early knee-jerk negative responses in this thread - I suspect I'm seeing a bit of "early-thread contrarian dynamic")
Yeah, I think this is spot on. The version of WMF Enterprise being described here is formalizing / codifying an informal relationship that already existed (Google using Wikipedia content all over the place, and making various one-off donations to WMF), and as you say, formalizing has benefits for both parties! Certainly ways this could have some long-term negative impacts, but WMF is obviously thinking pretty hard about mitigations, it seems.
This is accurate. It isn't a big money grab for wikimedia nor does it really substantially change things for anyone. There is a constant drive for growth at Wikimedia and many of the concerns expressed in this thread are valid but Wikipedia Enterprise doesn't represent a threat to the freedom of Wikipedia.
It really just represents a formalized way for commercial entities to donate to the foundation while accounting for it in their budget as a service rather than a charitable donation. It makes total sense if your business depends on Wikipedia in some way then you should contribute to it's continued existence. This is a totally sensible way to do that.
It also ensures that Google follows the license requirements of Wikimedia data as as it becomes a contractual issue rather than a license issue with each contributor.
It seems for example that Google has recently resolved some long standing issues with attribution in various products(YouTube Music comes to mind).
> to an api that is presumably more convenient and less resource intensive for both parties
Not quite. It sounds like they will increase bandwidth for the API.
> What many of the largest commercial technology organizations require in order to effectively utilize Wikimedia content goes beyond what we currently provide.
So now, if a Google related Wikipedia article has something added to it that Google doesn’t like, they can suggest to Wikimedia they might not renew their contract unless things are “made right”
Google is just one example of this. Any company now has a pathway to do so.
I think this is terrible incentives, and destroys the goal of having an Encyclopedia free from interference where only truth can come through
Where? All i could find is they donated > $50,000 but i dont see how much more. I guess it depends how much more, but that doesn't particularly seem like a lot relative to WMF's annual budget.
The annual report does not have this info as far as i can tell.
That article is about the endowment not WMF itself. It might all be connected, but the endowment is removed enough that i think the argument that the donation gives google any control is silly.
It also says that there was a 1.1 million donation to WMF proper, based on a vote of google staff. Really not seeing the potential control there, given that it wasnt really directed by google executive. Regardless, i dont think a donation that is only ~1% of the annual budget is enough to give google any control
Alternatively, Google can modify their copy of whatever they take from Wikipedia and display to their users. The license permits this. They don't need Wikipedia to change anything.
This is not good at all. Wikipedia has lot of money from donations. Google or its founders already were donors.
Rather than fixing the issue with moderation and editing biases creeping into Wikipedia, they seem to be focussing on being more profligate with their money.
I think the big benefit for Google and Co here is SLA and support, Wikimedia gives contributors and partners access for free...
A win for Wikimedia beyond diversified funding is also that Google and other corporations gets an contractual obligation to follow Wikimedia licensing.
Huh. Some of that I think some people hoped would be available (for free) via things like WikiData. I guess nobody should wait for that.
My somewhat concern is that the wikipedia project has kind of put a flag in the ground to say that providing free access to wikipedia is no longer part of their mission if it's automated/bulk access.
For what it's worth, WikiData is something different -- it's a knowledge graph, and so is mostly a way to get a list of facts about a specific item. Which is useful, and gets used as an input into a lot of things on Wikipedia, but is unrelated to this sort of firehose-API.
>My somewhat concern is that the wikipedia project has kind of put a flag in the ground to say that providing free access to wikipedia is no longer part of their mission if it's automated/bulk access.
I think this is more about paying for an SLA and support agreement which is less tenable as an open free-for-all
My personal theory is that its a mildly better bulk api, with that less being a needed thing, but more a way for big org to justify "donating" by paying for something.
Read it again, it gives them quicker notification that an article has been vandalized/changed in an important way by normal editors, it doesn't give them any special control over any page's content.
Quicker notification is somewhat special control, though I prefer my term of "better ability." There's a meaningful difference between detecting vandalism in a minute vs an hour.
See a lot of criticism for how Wikipedia is run, but never any well reasoned solutions that offer an actionable path forward; as in click to donate to do ABC so that XYZ will happen.
As is, to me, what this is missing is an explicit explanation of why this requires being paid for and metered API with public pricing that does not require “enterprise” effort to use. I could easily see numerous people and organizations wanting real-time notifications to pages of interest to them, but few wanting this for the whole of Wikipedia.
What's that pithy "law" about eventually any organization existing simply to perpetuate itself and serve the insiders who work there, rather than further its mission? Ironically what came to mind is Cunningham's Law which is the wrong one... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law