Comment by akolbe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akolbe | Hacker News Reader

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Wikipedia was a top-10 site in 2007, when the WMF had 11 employees. Child porn got deleted. I'm all in favour of someone being paid for such work, and the WMF taking on child protection responsibilities (after many years of leaving them to volunteers) but it doesn't explain a headcount of 550 when throughout most of Wikipedia's existence the work got done by a fraction of that.

ORES was built with substantial volunteer input. ClueBot, an even more important vandal-fighting feature, was created by volunteers.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kill...

But in a way that's immaterial. Nothing wrong with having money and expanding. They just shouldn't tell people money is needed to defend Wikipedia's independence when by any measure they are richer and more secure than ever before. If you want more money, lay out your plans. Enthuse people for the additional things you want to do with the extra funds. Don't pretend you need five or ten times more money to do the same thing you've been doing all along.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...

Your response doesn't account for the vast change in scale and technology since then. I also was clear that these two things didn't explain all of the expansion just that they were examples of things some folks might not recognize are part of the Foundation's work.

As for laying out their plans, there are dozens of wiki pages[1] dedicated to it and every task[2] and commit[3] to the code is public.

What they tell people in these pleas for donations is the language that actually gets people to donate. If folks would donate after reading the Medium Term Plan, then they would promote but instead humans tend to act only when an emotional appeal is made. That might not work for you but testing and experimenting on those ads proves that it does for most people.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...

[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org

[3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org

That's precisely the point though: telling people "what gets them to donate". That's manipulative.

And it's the inevitable result of a sophisticated, decade-long program of A/B testing. And this is the outfit, remember, that wants to steward "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge", the most-propagated information source on the planet.

I'd rather have someone in charge of that who's committed to telling "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", rather than someone who tells people what "gets them to do what they want them to do". Wouldn't you?

In an altruistic and idealistic world, sure. But that's not the world I live in.

Personally, I find the ads histrionic and would like them to change. However, an article like this that insinuates something akin to malice or subterfuge instead of recognizing the reality of non-profit fundraising isn't helpful. That was my point.

A little more courage ... :) In my view you should hold those who claim to be different from the corrupt profit-makers that preceded them to the standards they claim to embody.

Nothing will ever improve by accepting that the new boss you've just met is the same as the old boss.

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