[achn]

Rant: Wikipedia would get my donations easily if they simply included a couple of line items on what they are actually doing to improve Wikipedia! How is Wikipedia’s focus not on building semantic context into their pages? Or adding topical prerequisites? Or any number of meaningful features? Or is their goal to just exist in the present form?

[colechristensen]

I would prefer they not "improve", especially so in order to sell donations.

Wikipedia has largely stayed the same since its inception and that is part of its power. So many things have "improved" themselves into irrelevance, or wasted enormous amounts of resources changing things that don't need change.

There is a deep pit of improving things to satisfy the loudest people who "want" and not realizing until far too late that you're optimizing to a loud majority while your overall appeal shrinks to nothing. (Think of it like a grocery store dropping the least popular half of its products every few months... eventually they'd be left with light beer and ketchup confused about why nobody comes by any more)

[fragmede]

Wikipedia, please continue improving. You first came out in 2001, 6 years before the first iPhone and computing has changed since then. I don't want a grocery store that only has items from 2001 and has never freshened up their products since then. (I wouldn't mind 2001 prices though.) Please keep trying new things with my donation dollars. No one can predict the future perfectly, and especially with how technology continually changes the landscape of the Internet.

[bawolff]

Some things have changed https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage

[bawolff]

Its open source, you could look at git log (of course not all changes are wmf sponsored, but a significant portion are): https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/status:merged

There is also a short weekly news letter of more breaking changes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News

And of course, they also publish annual reports, although those tend to be a bit more pr-ish.

p.s. i'm not sure what you mean by semantic context? Do you mean structured data/semantic web type stuff, or do you mean some sort of thing that tries to add context to articles you are reading, or something else?

[achn]

Appreciate the links. They should include more factuals and vision in their fundraising copy.

All of those are great options for context, but I specifically would like to see logic/math/physics/code with functional context for symbology, usage, and derivation.

[yorwba]

You can find out what at least their programmers are doing by hopping on the public Phabricator instance. E.g. tasks closed as resolved less than a day ago: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/8esyKcP6SJ... I can see quite a few tasks for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikidata, which are both about adding semantic context, each in their own way.

[achn]

Thanks kindly - I wish they distilled some of these goals into their fundraising copy.

[oliwarner]

Is keeping the lights on not enough? It's about the content.

Maybe implementing an Encarta Mind Maze game would do it. Maybe the Encarta 95 splash screen with the Nelson Mandela speech? Hmm, maybe I just want to be 10 again.

[achn]

They specifically state in the email “Imagine if everyone gave? We could transform the way knowledge is shared online.” But they give zero indication of that vision.

[oliwarner]

Okay, yeah, that's fair enough. Absolutely should include some detail on that.

[ryan_lane]

Have you spent any time at all looking into this? Their yearly report lists what they've been spending the money on, including large projects.

The project with the highest level of growth of all the Wikimedia projects is Wikidata, which is focused on bringing semantic content into the other projects (a pretty decent number of articles generate their content panel from wikidata). Check out the list of visualizers that use wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Visualize_data/.... I'm quite a fan of reasonator, myself: https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?q=Q42

[treesknees]

I would donate more often if I wasn't harassed about it later on. I understand they want to email people who are likely to donate again, but between all extra messages and still getting huge banner popups on the website, it put me off to donating again.

[achn]

See I genuinely wouldn’t mind a reminder email, if that email gave me any information (or links to it) but instead it gives me no context for their costs or how donations will be used. How far does google’s millions of dollars go? Etc.

[howenterprisey]

Well, the community would be happy to take requests, but all those things require work and there's not enough resources (both community and foundation) to go around these days.

Like topical prerequisites: I'm sure if you wanted to come up with a bunch yourself and put them up, people would like it, but I - for one - would get bored after doing the fifth page or so.

[20after4]

Disclaimer: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation but I don't represent them.

I'm pretty sure there is a team working on building semantic context into the wikis.

[kemayo]

There's Abstract Wikipedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia

[achn]

That is great to hear! Please promote that they need to give their donors (I.e people who are categorically knowledge seekers) tangible details and data in their fundraising copy!

[renewiltord]

It’s likely that proving this to you to get your donation (and that of similar people) will cost more than it will bring in.

[achn]

Do you mean in the ad-effectiveness sense that many donors wouldn’t care or would be lost?

[renewiltord]

Yeah I suspect RoI will be negative

[achn]

Perhaps, but if there was ever an ad target that could be categorically labeled as “knowledge seekers” it should be Wikipedia donors.