Every time something like this makes the hn frontpage, I increase my monthly recurring donation by 1$. Wikipedia is literally the best thing to come from the modern Internet and I'm not willing to let it die, no matter how "problematic" the Wikimedia foundation becomes.
Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all?
Do you really mean to say that the content of Wikipedia is so valuable that no matter what else Wikimedia does, it still deserves as much funding as possible? Even though the Wikimedia Foundation did not create that content, and doesn't own it in either a moral or legal sense? Do you not see how that creates some really bad incentives for the health of Wikipedia?
(Personally, I don't have huge disagreements with the actual worthiness of most of the causes that Wikimedia chooses to support, but I think the way it fundraises for them is wildly deceptive.)
> Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all?
Thanks for highlighting this. I am concerned about architectural decisions like the refusal to add a dot onion service, paired with never navigating the original sin of people who created their own name pages and edited them abusing that social position to deny that others are notable.
The fun comes when someone flips that logic around: "I was born in the 80s, who are these pedophiles who met me as a child who keep thinking they can... coerce me? Haven't they read the constitution? I thought they put a crazy catch all in the 9th amendement to avoid some of these retarded takes".
For context, I'm on the autistic spectrum, so I can use the word, and I attended an approved private school before eventually graduating from one of the most allegedly prestigous high schools in the... let's say county?... in the mythical "suburbs of Pittsburgh".
And to be fair, many of the people I'm angry at are not pedophiles -- they're just totally normal people who keep voting for literal fasciss over and over and then expecting me to smile and wave like it's 1996 still.
(It's not gonna happen.)
I think we, as a society, need to think about how to handle edge cases where folks purposefully make bad decisions under uncertainty for purely sadistic reasons, and yeah, that's kind of shitty they don't invest that money such so that it's perpetually self sustaining or donate it over to more infrastructure related projects like Mozilla, Tor, or the various projects associated with HTTPS.
But what is the most likely cause of death for Wikimedia? It's not running out of money to operate servers or maintain the knowledge of keeping them ruining: it's collapsing under it's own wealth, rising costs and inefficiency to a point where one day they actually will be unable to maintain servers and knowledge. Money attracts people eager to get it under their control, and determined wealth-seekers will always outdo their more idealist peers in ascending to that control. And chances are they'll fool everyone including themselves, believing that they are believers when in fact they wouldn't have come close to thinking about joining up without that glimmer of gold leading their attention.
Note that I'm not suggesting that idealists must remain poor, I'm suggesting that there needs to be balance and I don't see Wikimedia anywhere close. I'd rather donate to a frugal Wikimedia for getting them from reserveres equivalent to six generations of operation without new donations to seven generations of reserves than for yet another expensive side project that roughly correlates with some interpretations of Wikipedia ideals.
If those side projects have adequate merit they'll find donations on their own, but if they can only fund themselves hiding behind the wikipedia front, they don't deserve your dollars.
