Comment by _Algernon_
2 years ago
Why should Wikipedia do new stuff? Or rather, why is it okay for Wikipedia to lie to people to get funding for their new pet projects?
2 years ago
Why should Wikipedia do new stuff? Or rather, why is it okay for Wikipedia to lie to people to get funding for their new pet projects?
> Why should Wikipedia do new stuff?
Because it's not perfect yet?
The point of Wikipedia is not to have some servers ticking over. The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
I agree it's not ok for them to lie, and am bothered enough by their dubious fundraising tactics that I stopped donating. But that's a totally separate concern than whether Wikipedia's mission is complete.
What is the mission for Wikipedia beyond doing what they already do, which is just hosting the largest internet encyclopedia? Purely curious because I thought Wikipedia was pretty much at its end game for what it wants to accomplish that is the job of the organization rather than the job of all of its volunteers.
> The Wikimedia Foundation's mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Its mission is not just "hosting" - actually creating an encyclopedia is much more than paying for the server costs.
Wikimedia produced many very useful projects which often integrate into Wikipedia, but work well standalone as well, and work towards the stated mission - projects like Commons, WikiData, WikiSource. Some projects are more useful than others, but that's just normal.
Wikipedia is the marketing face of Wikimedia. People donate to the first, but the money gets used by the second, and Wikimedia grows to use all of the money it receives. Wikimedia has no solvable mission, its just a mechanism to turn donations for a project people like into donations for arbitrary causes.
> The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
That's not their vision. Not only do they require entries to be notable, they'll remove information from articles that are, in their editorial judgment, too long. Neither action is compatible with the goal of sharing the sum of all knowledge.
It is, because removing this barrier to entry and editorial power would lead to spam and SEO bullshit, which arguably already exists. Knowledge does not equal amount of content.
Stop conflating wikipedia and wikimedia.
Little of the new stuff is for wikipedia and what's there is of questionable value.
Why not? Wikimedia intentionally conflates the two in their own funding drives, which is exactly the issue we are discussing in this thread.
I see mentioned something like making a new editor UI. This is quite important for the longevity of Wikipedia.
Some of those new projects are directly applicable to potentially improving Wikipedia. Some.