The wiki took two weeks to correct carefully hidden wrong information? I'm supposed to be worried about this?
Read more carefully -- closer to two months, not weeks; it wasn't "carefully hidden"; and most of the correcting process took place only after the experiment was voluntarily disclosed by me.
It would appear that you're another of the judgmental types who have formed an opinion -- and a strong one at that -- without access to most of the facts.
For example, I didn't "try to start" a business, I actually started one. And it continues to serve clients today, nearly nine years later. What percentage of 2006 start-ups do you think are still open for business today? The practice of writing content in exchange for clients' payment was not "rejected by Wikipedia". Indeed, the practical justification for MyWikiBiz was underscored by the pre-existence of Wikipedia's own authorized "Reward Board", where (you guessed it), clients could and did (and still do) pay editors for content. Indeed, if the business practice was "rejected" by Wikipedia, why did Jimmy Wales (the co-founder of Wikipedia) publicly endorse MyWikiBiz?
Further, my business practice from the start was to DISCLOSE ON WIKIPEDIA every one of my paying clients, so that my edits could be appropriately scrutinized. Jimmy Wales authored a new plan that would put a layer of separation between that disclosure and the provenance of the articles on Wikipedia.
The only thing you seem to have conveyed even remotely correctly is that I have been "shitty with them". But, I'd argue not "every (sic) since". I started getting shitty with Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation and the abusive administrators on Wikipedia when Wales reneged on his mutual agreement with me, and furthermore when I began to discover how much hypocrisy takes place in the Wikipedia community environment. For example, Wales dictated that "interwiki transclusion" links that included thousands of links to his for-profit enterprise Wikia site, should be "do follow", while all other external links should be "no follow". SEO specialists instantly know the enormous financial kick-back that this decision represented for Wikia and Wales. He later denied that he gave that order, but the head code developer for Mediawiki explicitly confirmed publicly that Jimmy Wales told him to switch on "no follow" for all but interwiki links. When you see such a liar and grifter making (literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars off his exploitation of Wikipedia, while I was shamed off the site as a paid editor who wanted to disclose all of his conflicts of interest, yes it rankled me, and it still does.
I have to agree. The experiment cited modified 30 articles with minor and cleverly-chosen falsehoods, and more than half were fixed within two months.
From that, Kohs then claims, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
Um, WTF? That statement proves he's not very good at making accurate statements. If he added a time period to that, and maybe some disclaimer about the popularity of articles being modified, then it wouldn't be much of a point, but it'd be closer to true.
You conveniently leave out that Kohs himself (that's me) reverted 6 of the false edits himself, when it became clear after more than 45 days that nobody else was likely to do it anytime soon.
You're also being rather unfair to say that Kohs' statement -- a sound-bite that the Washington Post journalist selected from a lengthy telephone interview -- which you then rip away from the context of the article, "proves" that I'm not good at making accurate statements. Why don't you peruse the actual spreadsheet of the 30 articles, which speaks for itself on my ability to convey accurate information?
But it uses all of them, which makes it easier to spot errors, discrepancies, and agendas, which can then be the focus of additional investigation.
Poor soul thinks that Wikipedia editors actually "investigate" content with the intent of spotting errors, discrepancies, and agendas. News flash: most Wikipedia editors "challenge" content with the intent of inserting their own agendas. Period.
pointing to corrections that haven't been done yet doesn't mean anything. if something is obscure and unimportant it can persist for years, with no impact. and then it's corrected. if it's important, it will probably be corrected in days or minutes
The vandalism saying that pain from inflammation is caused by rhyolite, a volcanic rock that the body produces, lasted for over 6 weeks, toward the top of an article that got over 100,000 page views in that time period. Nine different subsequent editors modified the article, but none of them thought to question volcanic stone in the human physiology. I'm convinced that had I not terminated the experiment and reported on it at Wikipediocracy, that misinformation would have persisted still longer. Your critique of the methodology was anticipated, and that's why non-obscure, important articles like "Inflammation" were included in the sample.
Why blame Wikipedia? Well, two reasons -- (1) because Wikipedia could have easily made the situation better for thousands of readers, but the governors there elected to deliberately ignore this problem for years, including Jimmy Wales who was directed to a detailed exposé in December 2013, and his response was to admonish the whistle-blower for hanging out with people Jimbo doesn't like; and (2) because Wikipedia is rapidly undermining traditional news reporting, scholarship, and public understanding of what constitutes a reliable source.
The statement from the Wikimedia Foundation is amazing. My, how they wash their hands so cleanly of any responsibility. "We will continue to work to support our editors and administrators in serving as a vigilant defense against such incidents and in hopes that they can prevent future incidents like this from occurring." This would be like your house being robbed, you calling the police, and the police saying that while they cannot assist you with the robbery currently in progress (because, after all, there may not be enough evidence that an actual robbery is taking place), they *are* going to host a "Safety Awareness Barbecue Picnic" in your neighborhood next week, and won't that be really special? Why clueless people donate actual money to this Wikimedia Foundation is beyond comprehension.
This is a fair point, but I'm not sure that you want or expect a critical watchdog group to sit back and just let the subject of its concern go telling lies to hundreds of millions of Wikipedia users, without speaking up. Here's a trick... go to Wikipedia and look up "Wikipediocracy". There, you'll see that even Wikipedia must concede that Wikipediocracy has helped the mainstream media uncover and/or publicize some very disconcerting situations at Wikipedia. So, we are doing our job, and (you believe) Wikipedia is doing its job. I don't see the problem here.
Sorry guys, $50M at an extremely modest return of 3% taxed at 30% is STILL $1,000,000 per year or $87,500 per MONTH, and that's WITHOUT digging into the principal. If you can't hire and run a fleet of servers, sysadmins and corporate types to make Wikimedia go on $87k/mo, you're negligent. Wikipedia doesn't need any more money, it needs to get real.
Tee hee. Don't you know that the hired financial advisor for the Wikimedia Foundation produced only a 1% annual return on the investment capital, between 2013 and 2014? How much did the stock market go up in that time? How much did investment-grade bonds return? They even invested in munis, even though non-profit organizations typically don't benefit from the tax-exempt nature of those returns, because they are ALREADY a tax-exempt organization!
How is it that the WMF is so negligent and inept at EVERYTHING it touches?
I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.
Kolbe, you are killing me! LOL... so the API software wizardry that is cited above as a great reason to donate more money to the gaping maw of the WMF, was actually written by volunteers who are completely apart from the developer boondoggle at the WMF?
I'll be happy to return to editing Wikipedia. Could you get my account unblocked? Either "Thekohser" or "MyWikiBiz" will be fine.
As for the "who should be believed", that was a reference to two choices, neither of which was me. (My real name is Gregory Kohs, by the way. Any cursory search for "thekohser" would lead you to that in a jiffy.) Anyway, I was saying that I would trust the Mediawiki history found on the Mediawiki website more than I would trust your personal memory or interpretation of the development of the software since August 2003.
Regardless, I want to thank you for publicly displaying this "I wrote a Featured Article so I can shit on you" attitude that is so prevalent with Wikipediots. You're exactly the reason why participation on the project is in decline for the past seven years.
(I would tell you how many Wikipedia articles I've written in the past several years, but my non-disclosure agreement with clients prohibits my doing that.)
I just feel like I'm supposed to be outraged, but I don't really see what the problem is, other than a vague sense of "They're spending lots of money, and we don't think that it should cost that much." Having run a business, I know that a lot of things end up costing more than you'd suppose that they would.
No need to feel outraged. Just be inquisitive about how the Wikimedia Foundation frames these issues, versus how outside analysts have offered perspective on them. Here is an interesting test -- go to Jimmy Wales' Talk page on Wikipedia, and ask him whether he thinks it's appropriate to have a $47 million budget to service a $2.5 million bandwidth load, then to advertise to potential donors that their money is needed "to keep Wikipedia running ad-free for another year". If your question is not hidden from view or deleted within 24 hours, then I'll make a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. If Wikipedia is supposedly an "open" and "inclusive" project, such censorship shouldn't be necessary, right?
I'm not sure where I or the original poster defined this as a "scandal". What it is, is a gross misdirection of cash that donors are generally not aware of. Wikipediocracy (in today's blog post) suggests a little-known but arguably better way for donors to help improve the content of Wikipedia with their cash.
Don't tell me I'm wrong until you've written your FA and got the admin bit.
ALERT: Basement-dwelling Wikipedia admin at work (above).
Here's some data about data for you, Maury -- from IDC, a leading technology analyst firm. http://www.networkworld.com/ar... Between 2010 and 2014, the cost-per-bit delivered over the Internet has fallen about 58%. If we assume that curve continues the same way back to 2005, then we can assume that bandwidth costs have come down about 80% to 85% since 2005. So, if you say that total bandwidth on Wikipedia and related projects from 2005 has increased about 15 to 20 times, then the Wikimedia Foundation budget for this function should have increased about threefold or fourfold, given the relative cost discount. Guess what? I believe that it (approximately) has done just that -- with the WMF earmarking for bandwidth from about $500K in 2005 to over $2 million in 2014.
Therefore, we can conclude that the WMF increasing its overall budget from $800K to $47,000,000 represents a staggering excess bloat that has absolutely NOTHING to do with increased bandwidth or server load.
It's difficult to argue with someone who believes that adding a diamond-encrusted, solid gold frame (in the shape of a trapezoid) to the Mona Lisa would be "generating and curating" artwork.
The current software is absolutely nothing whatsoever like it was in 2003.
I say that as someone that joined well before 2003, and have been editing continually since then.
It's a shame that your memory is failing so much. From the Mediawiki website itself:
"New features were added [to Phase III software] in July [2003], like the automatically-generated table of contents, and the ability to edit page sections, both still in use today. The first release under the name "MediaWiki" happened in August 2003, concluding the long genesis of an application whose overall structure would remain fairly stable from there on.
There are no immediate plans for a Phase IV of the software. Instead, MediaWiki development now happens in smaller steps..."
So, they say that the overall structure has remained fairly stable since August 2003, and another major phase of the software is still not in their plans, eleven years later. But *you* say that the current software is "absolutely nothing whatsoever" like the August 2003 version. I wonder who should be believed?
Ok, got it. I still don't feel like there's been a demonstation that they're doing something improper.
If you understand that Sue Gardner expanded the code developer staff from about 20 to about 120, then had them working on software enhancements that the Wikipedia community didn't ask for, and when delivered didn't work (and in many cases actually "broke" existing formatting)... and you feel that this is all well and proper use of a tax-exempt donation dollar, then I'm not sure you will be satisfied by any demonstration short of the donors' money being used to pay for a $1300 steak dinner for four (http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Allegations-swirl-around-Wikipedia-s-Wales-3225462.php ), or a $50,000 stipend being used to help a donor's husband insert plagiarized content into Wikipedia (http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/04/01/business-as-usual/ ). But there's no way such grossly improper activities have ever transpired at the Wikimedia Foundation, right?
I don't see how a large donation is any less prone to influence than an advertiser.
Indeed -- from one of the links in the original post:
"The second major WMF paid content project involved the Stanton Foundation and the Belfer Center. The trustee of the Stanton fund delivered over $50,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, asking them to bankroll a Wikipedia editor who would be assigned to her husband’s office at the Belfer Center at Harvard University. Even though the WMF generated a job description asking for “an experienced Wikipedia editor”, the Belfer Center rejected all of the experienced Wikipedia editors pointed its way, selecting an applicant with no Wikipedia experience at all. Others later found evidence that he had plagiarized content from Belfer Center authors into Wikipedia. Embarrassed by the ensuing scandal, the WMF apologized to the community and vowed that no such paid editing arrangement would ever again be entered into."
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem. You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
Then you are a shining example of someone who has accepted the Wikimedia Foundation's spin.
Let me help you with some facts. In late 2005, all of the Wikipedias (in every language then supported) generated about 5 million edits per month. The WMF monthly budget then was $58,000. So, cost per edit was 1.16 cents. The current edit load is about 10 million per month. The WMF current monthly budget is $3,750,000. Current cost per edit is 37.5 cents.
Considering how hosting and bandwidth costs have decreased dramatically since 2005, how do you explain a 30-fold increase in spending per edit? Please don't say that it's accounted for by increased page views without edits, because I can give you those stats, too. The reason for the increase is that Sue Gardner built a staffing empire around herself, then told all of these programmers to do exciting new things with the software that nobody on the Wikipedia editing community had actually desired. Then, after years of literally a hundred programmers working on things like "Visual Editor" and "Media Viewer", when they rolled them out, they didn't work well at all, and the community literally wrote patch scripts to keep the software enhancements off Wikipedia, to which the Foundation responded with a hastily-written "superprotect" script that forces the terrible, disliked software enhancements back on the users.
This is exactly how you waste about $20 million per year.
Question is: IS Wales correct? He very well *may* be on that note.
You're right, I suppose. Kolbe has achieved nowhere near the number of extramarital affairs followed by divorce that Jimbo has. So, Jimbo got him on that one alone.
...a Google maps API interface, to tell you exactly where they needed photos of which historic monuments, in relation to a given ZIP code. Based on that, I learned there was 200 year old farm house about a half a mile from my office, and I spent a productive lunch break driving over there and photographing it....
You're saying that you needed a million-dollar API to discover that the farm house near your office didn't have a photo on Wikipedia?
By any chance, do you purchase the toilet seats for the US Air Force?
A large chunk of the budget is developing software for "generating and curating Wikipedia content". It's disingenuous to claim that developing tools for generating and curating content "have nothing to do" with generating and curating content.
Except the software was already 90% developed back in 2003, when the Wikimedia Foundation came into existence. The additional software tinkering (if you had read the linked articles) has been for needless, non-working trinkets like Visual Editor (which the vast majority of editors hate) and Media Viewer (which 900 editors signed a petition pleading to the WMF to not force down their throats). Have you ever seen 900 vested Wikipedians ever agree on anything else?
Wake up, inform yourself, and discover that the Wikimedia Foundation is just a big scam to cover up the fact that less than 6% of the budget is needed to keep the Wikipedia sites running.
...while the content on wikipedia has continued to improve...
You really think so? Last night I read on Wikipedia that Jasroop Sandhu is the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks and point guard for the Toronto Raptors. That info has been in place for 7 days, passing through over 950 page views. Nobody questioned that fact enough to change it. Trust me, the content is not improving.
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The wiki took two weeks to correct carefully hidden wrong information? I'm supposed to be worried about this?
Read more carefully -- closer to two months, not weeks; it wasn't "carefully hidden"; and most of the correcting process took place only after the experiment was voluntarily disclosed by me.
It would appear that you're another of the judgmental types who have formed an opinion -- and a strong one at that -- without access to most of the facts.
For example, I didn't "try to start" a business, I actually started one. And it continues to serve clients today, nearly nine years later. What percentage of 2006 start-ups do you think are still open for business today? The practice of writing content in exchange for clients' payment was not "rejected by Wikipedia". Indeed, the practical justification for MyWikiBiz was underscored by the pre-existence of Wikipedia's own authorized "Reward Board", where (you guessed it), clients could and did (and still do) pay editors for content. Indeed, if the business practice was "rejected" by Wikipedia, why did Jimmy Wales (the co-founder of Wikipedia) publicly endorse MyWikiBiz?
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pi...
Further, my business practice from the start was to DISCLOSE ON WIKIPEDIA every one of my paying clients, so that my edits could be appropriately scrutinized. Jimmy Wales authored a new plan that would put a layer of separation between that disclosure and the provenance of the articles on Wikipedia.
The only thing you seem to have conveyed even remotely correctly is that I have been "shitty with them". But, I'd argue not "every (sic) since". I started getting shitty with Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation and the abusive administrators on Wikipedia when Wales reneged on his mutual agreement with me, and furthermore when I began to discover how much hypocrisy takes place in the Wikipedia community environment. For example, Wales dictated that "interwiki transclusion" links that included thousands of links to his for-profit enterprise Wikia site, should be "do follow", while all other external links should be "no follow". SEO specialists instantly know the enormous financial kick-back that this decision represented for Wikia and Wales. He later denied that he gave that order, but the head code developer for Mediawiki explicitly confirmed publicly that Jimmy Wales told him to switch on "no follow" for all but interwiki links. When you see such a liar and grifter making (literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars off his exploitation of Wikipedia, while I was shamed off the site as a paid editor who wanted to disclose all of his conflicts of interest, yes it rankled me, and it still does.
I have to agree. The experiment cited modified 30 articles with minor and cleverly-chosen falsehoods, and more than half were fixed within two months.
From that, Kohs then claims, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
Um, WTF? That statement proves he's not very good at making accurate statements. If he added a time period to that, and maybe some disclaimer about the popularity of articles being modified, then it wouldn't be much of a point, but it'd be closer to true.
You conveniently leave out that Kohs himself (that's me) reverted 6 of the false edits himself, when it became clear after more than 45 days that nobody else was likely to do it anytime soon.
You're also being rather unfair to say that Kohs' statement -- a sound-bite that the Washington Post journalist selected from a lengthy telephone interview -- which you then rip away from the context of the article, "proves" that I'm not good at making accurate statements. Why don't you peruse the actual spreadsheet of the 30 articles, which speaks for itself on my ability to convey accurate information?
The amount of truth out ways it by the magnitude of a galaxy !
Sounds like Wikipedia is an appropriate reference source for someone of your capacity.
But it uses all of them, which makes it easier to spot errors, discrepancies, and agendas, which can then be the focus of additional investigation.
Poor soul thinks that Wikipedia editors actually "investigate" content with the intent of spotting errors, discrepancies, and agendas. News flash: most Wikipedia editors "challenge" content with the intent of inserting their own agendas. Period.
pointing to corrections that haven't been done yet doesn't mean anything. if something is obscure and unimportant it can persist for years, with no impact. and then it's corrected. if it's important, it will probably be corrected in days or minutes
The vandalism saying that pain from inflammation is caused by rhyolite, a volcanic rock that the body produces, lasted for over 6 weeks, toward the top of an article that got over 100,000 page views in that time period. Nine different subsequent editors modified the article, but none of them thought to question volcanic stone in the human physiology. I'm convinced that had I not terminated the experiment and reported on it at Wikipediocracy, that misinformation would have persisted still longer. Your critique of the methodology was anticipated, and that's why non-obscure, important articles like "Inflammation" were included in the sample.
Why blame Wikipedia? Well, two reasons -- (1) because Wikipedia could have easily made the situation better for thousands of readers, but the governors there elected to deliberately ignore this problem for years, including Jimmy Wales who was directed to a detailed exposé in December 2013, and his response was to admonish the whistle-blower for hanging out with people Jimbo doesn't like; and (2) because Wikipedia is rapidly undermining traditional news reporting, scholarship, and public understanding of what constitutes a reliable source.
The statement from the Wikimedia Foundation is amazing. My, how they wash their hands so cleanly of any responsibility. "We will continue to work to support our editors and administrators in serving as a vigilant defense against such incidents and in hopes that they can prevent future incidents like this from occurring." This would be like your house being robbed, you calling the police, and the police saying that while they cannot assist you with the robbery currently in progress (because, after all, there may not be enough evidence that an actual robbery is taking place), they *are* going to host a "Safety Awareness Barbecue Picnic" in your neighborhood next week, and won't that be really special? Why clueless people donate actual money to this Wikimedia Foundation is beyond comprehension.
This is a fair point, but I'm not sure that you want or expect a critical watchdog group to sit back and just let the subject of its concern go telling lies to hundreds of millions of Wikipedia users, without speaking up. Here's a trick... go to Wikipedia and look up "Wikipediocracy". There, you'll see that even Wikipedia must concede that Wikipediocracy has helped the mainstream media uncover and/or publicize some very disconcerting situations at Wikipedia. So, we are doing our job, and (you believe) Wikipedia is doing its job. I don't see the problem here.
Sorry guys, $50M at an extremely modest return of 3% taxed at 30% is STILL $1,000,000 per year or $87,500 per MONTH, and that's WITHOUT digging into the principal.
If you can't hire and run a fleet of servers, sysadmins and corporate types to make Wikimedia go on $87k/mo, you're negligent.
Wikipedia doesn't need any more money, it needs to get real.
Tee hee. Don't you know that the hired financial advisor for the Wikimedia Foundation produced only a 1% annual return on the investment capital, between 2013 and 2014? How much did the stock market go up in that time? How much did investment-grade bonds return? They even invested in munis, even though non-profit organizations typically don't benefit from the tax-exempt nature of those returns, because they are ALREADY a tax-exempt organization!
How is it that the WMF is so negligent and inept at EVERYTHING it touches?
I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.
Kolbe, you are killing me! LOL... so the API software wizardry that is cited above as a great reason to donate more money to the gaping maw of the WMF, was actually written by volunteers who are completely apart from the developer boondoggle at the WMF?
Someone just got pwnd.
Captain's log: releasing recorder buoy to mark the place where Maury detached from reality.
I'll be happy to return to editing Wikipedia. Could you get my account unblocked? Either "Thekohser" or "MyWikiBiz" will be fine.
As for the "who should be believed", that was a reference to two choices, neither of which was me. (My real name is Gregory Kohs, by the way. Any cursory search for "thekohser" would lead you to that in a jiffy.) Anyway, I was saying that I would trust the Mediawiki history found on the Mediawiki website more than I would trust your personal memory or interpretation of the development of the software since August 2003.
Regardless, I want to thank you for publicly displaying this "I wrote a Featured Article so I can shit on you" attitude that is so prevalent with Wikipediots. You're exactly the reason why participation on the project is in decline for the past seven years.
(I would tell you how many Wikipedia articles I've written in the past several years, but my non-disclosure agreement with clients prohibits my doing that.)
I just feel like I'm supposed to be outraged, but I don't really see what the problem is, other than a vague sense of "They're spending lots of money, and we don't think that it should cost that much." Having run a business, I know that a lot of things end up costing more than you'd suppose that they would.
No need to feel outraged. Just be inquisitive about how the Wikimedia Foundation frames these issues, versus how outside analysts have offered perspective on them. Here is an interesting test -- go to Jimmy Wales' Talk page on Wikipedia, and ask him whether he thinks it's appropriate to have a $47 million budget to service a $2.5 million bandwidth load, then to advertise to potential donors that their money is needed "to keep Wikipedia running ad-free for another year". If your question is not hidden from view or deleted within 24 hours, then I'll make a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. If Wikipedia is supposedly an "open" and "inclusive" project, such censorship shouldn't be necessary, right?
...hardly seems like a scandal.
I'm not sure where I or the original poster defined this as a "scandal". What it is, is a gross misdirection of cash that donors are generally not aware of. Wikipediocracy (in today's blog post) suggests a little-known but arguably better way for donors to help improve the content of Wikipedia with their cash.
Don't tell me I'm wrong until you've written your FA and got the admin bit.
ALERT: Basement-dwelling Wikipedia admin at work (above).
Here's some data about data for you, Maury -- from IDC, a leading technology analyst firm. http://www.networkworld.com/ar... Between 2010 and 2014, the cost-per-bit delivered over the Internet has fallen about 58%. If we assume that curve continues the same way back to 2005, then we can assume that bandwidth costs have come down about 80% to 85% since 2005. So, if you say that total bandwidth on Wikipedia and related projects from 2005 has increased about 15 to 20 times, then the Wikimedia Foundation budget for this function should have increased about threefold or fourfold, given the relative cost discount. Guess what? I believe that it (approximately) has done just that -- with the WMF earmarking for bandwidth from about $500K in 2005 to over $2 million in 2014.
Therefore, we can conclude that the WMF increasing its overall budget from $800K to $47,000,000 represents a staggering excess bloat that has absolutely NOTHING to do with increased bandwidth or server load.
It's difficult to argue with someone who believes that adding a diamond-encrusted, solid gold frame (in the shape of a trapezoid) to the Mona Lisa would be "generating and curating" artwork.
The current software is absolutely nothing whatsoever like it was in 2003.
I say that as someone that joined well before 2003, and have been editing continually since then.
It's a shame that your memory is failing so much. From the Mediawiki website itself:
"New features were added [to Phase III software] in July [2003], like the automatically-generated table of contents, and the ability to edit page sections, both still in use today. The first release under the name "MediaWiki" happened in August 2003, concluding the long genesis of an application whose overall structure would remain fairly stable from there on.
There are no immediate plans for a Phase IV of the software. Instead, MediaWiki development now happens in smaller steps..."
So, they say that the overall structure has remained fairly stable since August 2003, and another major phase of the software is still not in their plans, eleven years later. But *you* say that the current software is "absolutely nothing whatsoever" like the August 2003 version. I wonder who should be believed?
Ok, got it. I still don't feel like there's been a demonstation that they're doing something improper.
If you understand that Sue Gardner expanded the code developer staff from about 20 to about 120, then had them working on software enhancements that the Wikipedia community didn't ask for, and when delivered didn't work (and in many cases actually "broke" existing formatting)... and you feel that this is all well and proper use of a tax-exempt donation dollar, then I'm not sure you will be satisfied by any demonstration short of the donors' money being used to pay for a $1300 steak dinner for four (http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Allegations-swirl-around-Wikipedia-s-Wales-3225462.php ), or a $50,000 stipend being used to help a donor's husband insert plagiarized content into Wikipedia (http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/04/01/business-as-usual/ ). But there's no way such grossly improper activities have ever transpired at the Wikimedia Foundation, right?
I don't see how a large donation is any less prone to influence than an advertiser.
Indeed -- from one of the links in the original post:
"The second major WMF paid content project involved the Stanton Foundation and the Belfer Center. The trustee of the Stanton fund delivered over $50,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, asking them to bankroll a Wikipedia editor who would be assigned to her husband’s office at the Belfer Center at Harvard University. Even though the WMF generated a job description asking for “an experienced Wikipedia editor”, the Belfer Center rejected all of the experienced Wikipedia editors pointed its way, selecting an applicant with no Wikipedia experience at all. Others later found evidence that he had plagiarized content from Belfer Center authors into Wikipedia. Embarrassed by the ensuing scandal, the WMF apologized to the community and vowed that no such paid editing arrangement would ever again be entered into."
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem. You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
Then you are a shining example of someone who has accepted the Wikimedia Foundation's spin.
Let me help you with some facts. In late 2005, all of the Wikipedias (in every language then supported) generated about 5 million edits per month. The WMF monthly budget then was $58,000. So, cost per edit was 1.16 cents. The current edit load is about 10 million per month. The WMF current monthly budget is $3,750,000. Current cost per edit is 37.5 cents.
Considering how hosting and bandwidth costs have decreased dramatically since 2005, how do you explain a 30-fold increase in spending per edit? Please don't say that it's accounted for by increased page views without edits, because I can give you those stats, too. The reason for the increase is that Sue Gardner built a staffing empire around herself, then told all of these programmers to do exciting new things with the software that nobody on the Wikipedia editing community had actually desired. Then, after years of literally a hundred programmers working on things like "Visual Editor" and "Media Viewer", when they rolled them out, they didn't work well at all, and the community literally wrote patch scripts to keep the software enhancements off Wikipedia, to which the Foundation responded with a hastily-written "superprotect" script that forces the terrible, disliked software enhancements back on the users.
This is exactly how you waste about $20 million per year.
Question is: IS Wales correct? He very well *may* be on that note.
You're right, I suppose. Kolbe has achieved nowhere near the number of extramarital affairs followed by divorce that Jimbo has. So, Jimbo got him on that one alone.
...a Google maps API interface, to tell you exactly where they needed photos of which historic monuments, in relation to a given ZIP code. Based on that, I learned there was 200 year old farm house about a half a mile from my office, and I spent a productive lunch break driving over there and photographing it. ...
You're saying that you needed a million-dollar API to discover that the farm house near your office didn't have a photo on Wikipedia?
By any chance, do you purchase the toilet seats for the US Air Force?
A large chunk of the budget is developing software for "generating and curating Wikipedia content". It's disingenuous to claim that developing tools for generating and curating content "have nothing to do" with generating and curating content.
Except the software was already 90% developed back in 2003, when the Wikimedia Foundation came into existence. The additional software tinkering (if you had read the linked articles) has been for needless, non-working trinkets like Visual Editor (which the vast majority of editors hate) and Media Viewer (which 900 editors signed a petition pleading to the WMF to not force down their throats). Have you ever seen 900 vested Wikipedians ever agree on anything else?
Wake up, inform yourself, and discover that the Wikimedia Foundation is just a big scam to cover up the fact that less than 6% of the budget is needed to keep the Wikipedia sites running.
...while the content on wikipedia has continued to improve...
You really think so? Last night I read on Wikipedia that Jasroop Sandhu is the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks and point guard for the Toronto Raptors. That info has been in place for 7 days, passing through over 950 page views. Nobody questioned that fact enough to change it. Trust me, the content is not improving.