bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Wikipedia wouldn't do that for two reasons. One, it would force a lot of people to spend a few seconds thinking about what Wikipedia is and is not. And two, it might prompt Google or Amazon or whoever to do what they have always been legally allowed to do, and copy the entire Wikipedia database and host it themselves.
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
The Wikipedia movement is in survival mode, and has for a while now being summarily dumping those things that require lots of volunteer effort to maintain, for very little return in terms of page views. Naturally, none of that has anything to do with the finances, because the job of maintaining Wikipedia content falls to the unpaid.
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
The $100m Endowment was their hedge against donations drying up, being a big enough cash hoard to allow them to stay online indefinitely if donations dropped to zero. It is now fully funded. I wonder how many people even realise this is the case, and will carry on donating under the false impression Wikipedia needs their help to survive.
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
You aren't paying for a product. It's crazy people don't even realise that Wikipedia isn't free because they're just nice people who prefer prefer run on donations not capitalism. It's free because they don't own a single word of their encyclopedia. That was how it was set up. They knew they couldn't charge for it, because they weren't paying anyone to write it, and aren't offering any guarantee that you can trust it. It can be copied and hosted freely by anyone. Wikipedia can do what it likes with your money, except, of course, pay someone to write and maintain a trustworthy encyclopedia. Not by choice, by law.
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
I wonder if that also includes all the work done simply to figure out the best way to solicit for donations?
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
I wouldn't be so sure. Many flagship software projects launched the Foundation have been greeted with outright hostility by the volunteer community, precisley because they don't seem to be of much use, and in some case often hamper, the basic task of writing and maintaining English Wikipedia.
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
"It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise." {citation needed}, as they say. Some parts of the Wikipedia "global" movement are so small, they didn't even realise for example, most of "Scots" Wikipedia was pure gibberish. The so called movement is a galaxy of tiny rocks revolving around one massive black hole, English Wikipedia, and even that project is so small as to feel quite parochial. As a result, there are backlogs everywhere, especially in important but difficult work, like copyright problems.
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
"MediaWiki is free software. No guarantee or warranty of any kind is provided." Sounds about right!
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
It's the best kept secret of Wikipedia that the volunteers generally despise the Foundation, and their long history of being unresponsive to their concerns and slow to act on their priorities while forcing the volunteers to adapt to what the Foundation finds things to spend all this money on, is a big reason for it.
bashmack
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4 years ago
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on: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Keeping Wikipedia accurate is the volunteer's job. You can tell by how easy it is to find errors.
