Comment on Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.”

• softwarist@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I should have specified: I don’t agree with every part of the article, but I shared it for this excerpt:

  The Wikimedia Foundation solicits donations from Wikipedia users every year, even though its expenses ($2 million to run hosting and servers) are vanishingly small compared to its profits. Wikimedia has increased its spending over 1000% since 2008 and sits on $97.6 million in assets as of 2016.

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  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    so you’re judging their costs and balances based on ten year old data? and acting like times haven’t changed enormously in that decade?

    I know the amount of bandwidth AI’s are using to scrape wikipedia is itself an onus:

    arstechnica.com/…/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-ban…

    nymag.com/…/wikipedia-contributors-are-worried-ab…

    thecoremachine.com/…/wikipedia-vs-ai-traffic-hold…

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    • softwarist@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Here is their FY 24–25 Audit Report. To wit, their net assets were $296.6 million, while their total internet hosting expenses were $3.5 million. So the claim that hosting expenses make up a trivial fraction of their total assets would appear to hold true even moreso today than a decade ago.

      Granted, the FAQs for the report state that “The vast majority of […] revenue came from donations […], as well as investment income, Wikimedia Enterprise revenue, and other revenue primarily related to a cost sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Endowment”.

      I remain suspicious of the large increases in “Salaries and wages” year-over-year compared to other expense categories.

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      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        cool, you do you. don’t donate and continue to use it like a parasite lol

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  • ernest314@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    ah okay, I think sharing that entire article is kinda endorsing all the weird stuff in it, but thanks for specifying.

    I know those are large numbers, but like, Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet? “$97.6 million in assets” is peanuts to that (compare it to any other website in a similar range!). The fact that they don’t have that much operating costs is a good thing, right? It means they’re efficient, which is what people love to complain about with non-profits.

    Anyway, it’s not like they ask for much–I think the last fundraiser I saw they were asking for $2.75 a year, if you felt like they provided you that much value over the year. I certainly do, and I donate $10/year to them. If you don’t feel like Wikipedia is worth that cost to you that’s fair–but I think telling other people that they shouldn’t donate because it objectively(?) isn’t worth it is a strange thing to do.

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    • softwarist@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Operating expenses don’t necessarily equate to total expenditure. The article also mentions that fifteen executives took home a six-figure salary in 2015; that doesn’t strike me as particularly efficient.

      Notwithstanding, what I originally said was not prescriptive. People are free to spend their money as they see fit. Even I have donated to the Wikimedia Foundation in the past and still believe that they provide invaluable resources for the common good.

      Where I take issue is the fact that the messaging in their campaigns often gives the impression that the organization is scraping by on user donations, whereas in reality they’re sitting on pile of assets that would ostensibly be in the 99.9ᵗʰ percentile of household net worth in the US.

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