[StevePerkins]

The Twitter thread devolves into various random citations of "wokeism", and that's all fine and well for those who care to argue such examples on Twitter.

But even aside from the culture war quagmire, the first few tweets in the thread are fascinating. Wikipedia is up to 400+ employees now? It's spending grew from $10 million in 2010, to $112 million in 2020? The actual website costs are only $2-3 million per year, and have declined over the past decade?

WOW. It's amazing how entities grow until they become more about themselves than the mission. I don't care about all of the specific grants that the author wants to Twitter-litigate. I'm just done donating money to Wikipedia because 2 cents on the dollar actually going toward the mission is absurd.

[spiffytech]

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy:

> In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

[ThrowawayTestr]

See also: the clique that has evolved between wiki editors.

[tootie]

I read the opposite. Their operation is so tight and so efficient that one pledge drive a year gives them 4x their operating budget. The product is better than ever. I don't think there's anything unethical in raising funds with a brand name that inspires so much admiration. If they whiff on a few of their grants that's just life in the real world. I doubt the board sign off on or are even aware of how every penny is spent.

[boxed]

> The actual website costs are only $2-3 million per year, and have declined over the past decade?

The HOSTING cost. Not the total cost to run it. That's a big difference.

[jmcguckin]

It’s my understanding that a large percentage of hosting costs are donated by large companies like Google…

[boxed]

Again: irrelevant. Hosting costs are often quite small compared to the ops and dev costs.

[mike_d]

I agree. I wish the thread had stopped two or three tweets in. The random right-wing "culture war" ramblings are not cool and they detract from the important message that Wikipedia has solved the problem it was aiming to solve and is now hopelessly lost as an organization.

[zozbot234]

> Wikipedia has solved the problem it was aiming to solve

"A world where every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge" - that's quite far from being a "solved" problem.

[mike_d]

That is a solid example of a mission statement for an organization that doesn't have a mission anymore.

[KerrAvon]

In what sense? Since this is a culture war adherent spouting this stuff, how can you take any of it at face value?

[_--__--__]

There's nothing biased about the foundation's own financial reports, review them for yourself: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

They place banner ads implying that donations are needed 'to keep Wikipedia thriving for years' which is a weird way to express that they annually collect over 50x their cost of maintenance in donations. And most of what they do collect gets distributed to 1) their employees (employees of the foundation are mostly not directly involved with running Wikipedia, which is edited and maintained by volunteers) and 2) other organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with the operation of the site.

[jancsika]

> Wikipedia is up to 400+ employees now?

Woah. 400+ is nearly as many[1] workers as Amazon[2]. Yet somehow nobody ever talks about unionizing Wikipedia's warehouses.

But it's all there in these Tweets: check out donation recipients like SeRCH gaming the Youtube recommendation engine to misinform elevens[3] of viewers.

1: 400 + 1,608,000

2: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...

3: 43 views in that first video alone. And while I can't read the entire title of the one in the corner, the author's screenshot shows 256 views: nearly twenty times the number of elevens in 43.

Edit: sorry, my math was way off there.

256 is only has about 6 times the number of elevens as 43 does. But my broader argument stands.