Hi Andreas, fair points!
Just to clarify, my suggestion is a community process to decide how to
allocate the extra resources. I do agree with you and Galder that not
nearly enough resources are spent on MediaWiki, automatic translation tools
being one of many weak points. Another one that to my mind is unforgivable
is that after 10+ years of needing and requesting, there's still no
centralized system for templates, or even Lua modules.
However, we could argue or even agree all day about this and other worthy
causes (within or beyond Wikimedia, within or beyond open-knowledge), but
in the end I think nothing will change unless a big community process
happens (perhaps something similar to the Movement Strategy one).
Lastly, MZMcBride, for what it's worth, the design team seems to at least
be working actively in the Vector skin, but you may not have noticed if you
haven't enabled the Vector 2022 skin in your preferences.
Cheers,
Felipe
User:Sophivorus
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:36 PM Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Felipe,
Funding open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, or other altruistic
projects that have nothing to do with Wikimedia at all (the Knowledge
Equity Fund is a case in point, of course ...) doesn't seem right to me.
The WMF has been fundraising in India (as well as in Latin America and
South Africa) this month, telling people there:
– that "a lot" of the money Wikimedia raises is flowing into the Global
South[1] (according to the WMF tax return, it's about 2.5% of the money
raised)
– to donate because it will "keep Wikipedia online, ad-free and growing
for years to come" (India emails)
– "We request you to sustain Wikipedia's independence. 98% of our readers
don't donate ..." (India fundraising banners)
Leaving aside what "keeping Wikipedia online" and "sustaining
Wikipedia's
independence" actually mean in this context, given that Wikimedia is richer
than it has ever been and last year alone brought in about $90 million more
than it spent – leaving that aside, you cannot beg a people earning a
fraction of what you make on average for money as if Wikipedia's survival
depended on it and then go and give their money away to some completely
different cause.
Just for reference, according to the India FoodBanking Network[1],
– India is home to the largest undernourished population in the world
– 189.2 million people i.e. 14% of India's population is undernourished
– 20% of children under 5 are underweight
– 34.7% of children under 5 years of age are stunted
– 51.4% women in the reproductive age (15-49 years) are anaemic
Reading such statistics one wonders whether Wikipedia's Indian fundraising
banners wouldn't be more appropriately used if they advertised some
charities that will improve the quality of life of some of the most
vulnerable people in India, instead of asking people there to send money to
the US.
Should the WMF still find itself saddled with an embarrassment of riches:
I recall that the other day we were encouraged here on this list to endorse
a Discourse forum for Wikimedia strategy discussions – because it has good
machine translation capabilities that MediaWiki lacks. If there is such a
big surplus, wouldn't it be better to use it to incorporate similar
translation capabilities in MediaWiki? MediaWiki is woefully obsolete in
this respect, and in Wikimedia's case international communication across
language barriers is arguably more important than it is in the case of
sites like Facebook, which incorporated automatic translation a fair while
ago.
This still wouldn't be about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" or
"sustaining Wikipedia's independence", but at least it would help the
volunteers who actually write Wikipedia.
Best,
Andreas
[1]
https://www.indiafoodbanking.org/hunger
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 1:18 PM Felipe Schenone <schenonef(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with
the solution. If Wikimedia
is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it,
there's
probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to
decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving
indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable,
considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
* Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
* Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
* Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
* Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and
generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM <tim.herb(a)gmx.de> wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia
Foundation hired a lot
of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output.
It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas
at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency
that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs
then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure.
With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This
is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available
and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce
the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia
Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in
the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do
not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are
currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I
think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the
Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_ses…
Hogü-456
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