[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Nathan]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Peter Damian
<peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Putting this in context.  If I were to donate, say £1,500 of gross income to
> WMF, it would be reasonable to ask what this money was for: how it was
> helping. The WMF goal is to "collect and developing educational content and
> to disseminate it effectively and globally".  Wikipedia is the main engine
> of this project, and is the reason I imagine most people want to donate
> money.  Would I donate such a sum of money if I thought that it was not
> actually helping develop educational content?  Hence my question: has
> Wikipedia actually changed since 2005?  Has any educational content been
> added (I am not including porn star bios as educational content, clearly).
>
> I had three answers:
>
> 1.  The first that this was seriously off-topic.  I don't understand why
> not.
>
> 2.  The second compared Wikipedia to going to the barbers, getting a nice
> trim, and then the hair getting all messy again.  That is clearly not a
> reason for donating money, quite the reverse.  How is the money actually
> going to help, if it all is going to be a mess again in 6 months?  I
> appreciate a lot of it goes to support the servers and IT and things, but
> wouldn't it be more efficient simply to stop people editing, clear up some
> of the mess, and lock Wikipedia down?  That would be much cheaper.  And I
> would be willing to fund a clean-up effort.
>
> 3.  I wasn't quite sure of Phil Nash's objection, I think he was trying to
> say that there is no evidence of Wikipedia failing to develop or grow.  To
> that, I say that if I am going to donate money, I would like clear evidence
> that Wikipedia is progressing in the direction I would hope.
>
> I would like to point out I do support a number of charities.  I help the
> Warburg institute with its library acquisition fund.  This makes hard-to-get
> books available to students.  I don't support WMF, and I won't until there
> is clear evidence the money would be used for a good purpose.  What do
> others think?  Why do people donate to WMF?
>
> Peter
>
>


Peter, a few points. You misunderstood my comment, but I'll let that go.

People who donate to Wikimedia do so for a number of reasons, chief
among them (I suspect) is to support keeping the lights on. That is,
the ongoing maintenance of the project in its current form. Most
donors are probably aware that the content is generated by volunteers
who will not receive donated funds. I'm not sure why you infer that
donors are, or should be, expecting to see some content improvement as
a result of their funding. A related point is that the Wikimedia
projects are not just fancy concepts that might be useful someday down
the road; they are highly useful right now, which is why they have
been used by hundreds of millions of people.

Finally, cherry picking a few articles to determine if the English
encyclopedia has improved in the last 5 years is not exactly an
analytically robust method. I suspect any such method would find that
there has been an enormous increase in both the volume and the quality
of content since 2005.

You are, and have been, committed to several conclusions about
Wikipedia - that the idea of an editable encyclopedia itself is
fatally flawed, that it is unduly oriented to topics of interest to
"the masses", and that the community and its bureaucracy are hopefully
corrupt and ineffective. That, combined with an absolute disregard for
community norms and rules, makes you both a steadfast and imperfect
critic. So I don't imagine anyone expects you to donate or is
surprised that you don't. Few banned editors do.

Nathan