WMF Endowment

[thekohser]

An update on the WMF Endowment activity is being transmitted on JimboTalk lately. We learn that:

* The endowment currently (September 2017) has $17.3 million, with another $5 million pledged

* Questions about long-term policy of how the endowment will be spent are left unanswered

* We should not expect to see monthly disclosures of the endowment's investment performance

* Jimbo believes that by sitting on both the WMF board of trustees and the WMF Endowment advisory board, this provides the "and balances" portion of "checks and balances"

[Randy from Boise]

What we haven't learned yet is how the WMF manages to achieve a rate of return under 2% per annum on that amount of money in the current economic climate. The actual rate of return is conspicuously missing from JW's discourse. He knows it, he has a background in investments and loves money.

RfB

[thekohser]

This is a beautiful observation that merits saving for posterity.

[Kingsindian]

Jimbo often gets blamed (correctly) of letting uncomfortable or awkward questions lapse so they get archived. In this particular case, Jimbo hoisted the old discussion from the archives himself, and tried to provide an answer.

I don't know if he's turning over a new leaf or what. Good to keep the pressure up on him, lest he fall back into the old ways.

[Poetlister]

We are excited to announce a matching gift from Wikimedia Endowment Advisory Board member Peter Baldwin and his wife Lisbet Rausing, co-founders of the Arcadia Fund of $5 million to the Wikimedia Endowment. Lisbet and Peter’s gift is the largest single gift to the Wikimedia Endowment to date. This grant was matched by $5 million in donations collected from our online and major gifts team’s efforts in FY 2016-17. In total, these gifts will increase the size of the Endowment by $10 million.

That's quite a lot of cups of coffee!

[Bezdomni]

To celebrate the birth of KnowlEdge Equity Fund, this thread might be usefully resurrected rather than just linked to. If not, it will fade back into the wo-bowels.

Lisa Gruwell explains that this heureux événement is all due to the pandemic (what else?) Overflows due to events being canceled and "slowed" hiring just had to be spent before EO(F)Y. So the money came, not from the endowment, but from the WMF budget, and little KnowlEdge Equity was born at the Tides Advocacy clinic.

I find it remarkably politic that while she mentions that "[p]eople around the world were losing their sources of income, as unemployment soared," she does not mention the folks over at Wiki Education who let go of their salaries, presumably because they were disbursed from yet another fund foundation.

I am very puzzled by all these different foundries.

[Poetlister]

I am very puzzled by all these different foundries.

That is very probably exactly what the WMF hopes will happen. While they boast that wiki software is transparent so everyone can see most of what is going on, they are not always equally transparent with their own affairs.

[Bezdomni]

Over at Sucks, Eric noticed "Wikipedia's Deep Ties to Big Tech" (§) by M. Olenick (§) originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and reprinted in Naked Capitalism by "Yves Smith".

In it, we learn not only that M. Olenick has written as "Ruby Day" (§), but also that they sought comment from the WMF on their article, but received none. (Those who have read the 2016 Minassian Communication Report, compiled during the 2016 US election, will recall that the usefulness of engagement with critical-sounding inquiries was grappled with in contradictory and not overly grammatical ways.)

What does this article talk about?

• The Okapi Delaware Shell Corporation; the Google Juice Company
• a leading brand of detergent progressive charity
• Minassian Media
• two members of MoveCom
• KR Maher, Council of Foreign Relations

What doesn't it talk about?

• Blue Ocean Strategy
• (at least I don't think it does)

[Zoloft]

Over at Sucks, Eric noticed "Wikipedia's Deep Ties to Big Tech" (§) by M. Olenick (§) originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and reprinted in Naked Capitalism by "Yves Smith".

In it, we learn not only that M. Olenick has written as "Ruby Day" (§), but also that they sought comment from the WMF on their article, but received none. (Those who have read the 2016 Minassian Communication Report, compiled during the 2016 US election, will recall that the usefulness of engagement with critical-sounding inquiries was grappled with in contradictory and not overly grammatical ways.)

What does this article talk about?

• The Okapi Delaware Shell Corporation; the Google Juice Company
• a leading brand of detergent progressive charity
• Minassian Media
• two members of MoveCom
• KR Maher, Council of Foreign Relations

What doesn't it talk about?

• Blue Ocean Strategy
• (at least I don't think it does)

From the article:

In fact there are essentially two disjoint Wikimedia movements. The first ones to create wiki projects and make money (through donations). And the second, who spend this money on some strange projects. That’s why the communities don’t know about Foundation’s initiatives and reject them. We must put an end to this.

Ok. Good luck with that.

We should reach out to the author.

[Midsize Jake]

We should reach out to the author.

Okay, but I have to say I'm not super-impressed with his use of the Archie McCardell (T-H-L) article as his #1 example of Wikipedian COI. I mean, putting aside the fact that it's always better to use examples in which you're not personally involved, it really was self-serving to have cited his own article from a site that clearly wouldn't pass WP:RS, especially when the original source of the McCardell quote he used is very much WP:RS and is readily available.

What's more, he's accusing the guy who reverted the edit of having a COI using some extremely dicey logic. If Tim1965 (T-C-L) really is a "union activist," why wouldn't he want to include a quote that makes union-buster McCardell look bad? Why would Olenick/Day jump to the conclusion that something sinister was going on, rather than accept the possibility that the edit summary reflects what Tim1965 was actually thinking? (i.e., "removing biased source (self-promotional edit, using an article written by the editor), linked to nonreliable wiki source" — okay, it's not super-friendly-sounding, but how thin-skinned do you have to be?)

Then he follows that with three much-better examples — why not find more like those three, and forget about the McCardell edit altogether? It just looks petty and vindictive.

Still, he seems nice.

[Anroth]

Then he follows that with three much-better examples — why not find more like those three, and forget about the McCardell edit altogether? It just looks petty and vindictive.

Was that a genuine questions? The issue with people citing their own work on wikipedia is longstanding and well trodden. Its one of ego to start with, the assumption that *their* work is clearly superior on any given topic. While in some rare cases this may be true, it ignores the basic facts that very few people can correctly assess their own ability in relation to others. When their own work is removed for any reason, the same ego wont let it lie. Its not petty and vindictive, its just the same mentality that drives them to insert themselves on wikipedia, drives them to insert themselves elsewhere. The attention-whore isnt an obscure concept.

[No Ledge]

Big Tech businesses are uncomfortable supporting the non-profit through donations and that they’d prefer a more explicit fee-for-service arrangement.

Yeah, I'm "uncomfortable" too about supporting the non-profit through my labor and would prefer a more explicit fee-for-service arrangement.

I'm not expecting them to pay me $100K, Just enough to keep my coffee cup filled would be a start.

My concerns aren't selfish. If they want "the community" to be more diverse – more than just financially independent white guys – they should start paying those who can't afford to "donate" their work. I'd be happy to help supervise them to ensure they're competent and aren't slacking off.

Via opaque Tides Foundation donations they're likely to fund politically-connected incompetents who slack off and deliver little of value to the encyclopedia.

[Jim]

Big Tech businesses are uncomfortable supporting the non-profit through donations and that they’d prefer a more explicit fee-for-service arrangement.

Yeah, I'm "uncomfortable" too about supporting the non-profit through my labor and would prefer a more explicit fee-for-service arrangement.

You keep saying stuff like that, and alluding to the idea you'd like to be paid for what you do on wikipedia.

What is it that you think you do which somebody else wouldn't just do for free, perhaps as well, or better, if you stopped doing it for lack of pay?

Why do you keep doing it anyway if you're "uncomfortable" about it?

Because you're scared of someone else doing it worse (or not at all) if you just stop?

These are genuine questions - I'm interested in your perspective.

[No Ledge]

I keep doing it because people deserve to have good, quality information available to them as a public service.

Rather than misinformation from a "Mickey-Mouse" platform. I didn't pay that much attention to Wikipedia during its first decade. Because it was obviously just a bunch of amateur-produced content that nobody would take seriously.

But now people do take it seriously, which means it's potentially more dangerous. The site needs more people supervising it, not fewer.

Should I just shut down my bots and put up a {{retired}} banner, and then watch to see what happens? I toyed with the idea of doing that on April 1. Maybe next year.

When I take time off, for the most part nobody picks up the slack by filling in for me. When I find myself sucked into a "rabbit hole" problem that takes a lot of time to fix, nobody fills in for my routine tasks, backlogs just grow there until I get back to them.

Sometimes I'm able to engineer things so that volunteers do start working for me. The linked misspellings list is a good example of that. When I first found it it was a heap with over 1,000 items on it. People see a backlog like that as "hopeless" and don't even try to put a dent into it. Now the linked misspellings are generally getting cleared on a daily basis. I just need to drop by occasionally to clear off the "hard stuff" that the others don't know how to resolve.

Something else I do is fixed botched moves done by other admins or page movers. They moved an article but not its talk. I move the talk to get it back in sync with the article. Nobody else does this in a comprehensive way. There were hundreds of articles that weren't synced with their talk until I made it my job to do it.

There were over 1200 talk pages redirecting to article-space which had accumulated for years before I took on the task of fixing them.

[Beeblebrox]

Not moving a talk page is just weird. All you have to do is literally nothing and it gets done automatically when moving the page.

[Jim]

Stuff...

Ok - I see where you're coming from - but it's just possible that the world doesn't work the way you'd like it to and you're wasting a lot of time (and that the rest of the world doesn't share your personal assessment of what's important or "matters").

It's also possible I'm wrong, but I stopped editing wikipedia quite some time ago and here's what happened:

The stuff I thought only I cared about got updated regardless. Anything that didn't I was probably being too obsessive about anyway.

You can try to kid yourself that you're somehow irreplaceable, if you like - that without you it would all collapse - but at the end of the day you're an easily replaceable work-unit, and your replacement will be fee-free.

[No Ledge]

Not moving a talk page is just weird. All you have to do is literally nothing and it gets done automatically when moving the page.

Not true. It doesn't move automatically unless it can move over a redirect. And the system doesn't warn or ask admins about that the same way it does for the article page itself.

Admins-in-the-know have complained about this poor functionality, but you can't make the developers fix anything.

You would be surprised that some experienced admins who move a lot of pages never seem to get a clue about this. I'm not naming names here.

[No Ledge]

The stuff I thought only I cared about got updated regardless. Anything that didn't I was probably being too obsessive about anyway.

So why does Wikipediocracy exist? Why do y'all obsess about vandalism that goes undetected for years? You're just being too obsessive. Somebody will detect and fix that vandalism eventually.

[Jim]

The stuff I thought only I cared about got updated regardless. Anything that didn't I was probably being too obsessive about anyway.

So why does Wikipediocracy exist? Why do y'all obsess about vandalism that goes undetected for years? You're just being too obsessive. Somebody will detect and fix that vandalism eventually.

Did you hear that "whoosh" sound just now, or even glance upwards?

[No Ledge]

Sorry, I'm not following the joke.

[Jim]

Sorry, I'm not following the joke.

Please don't ever feel the need to apologise to me.

My "whoosh" comment merely implied that my previous post may have gone "over your head".

That's ok - you and I differ about what difference our efforts make to wikipedia, are likely to make to wikipedia, and whether they should deserve any kind of recompense (and what kind of difference any of that would ever make in any case).

It's all good.

[No Ledge]

OK. This isn't totally over my head. We're in a Catch-22 situation. That's what monopolists do. I just don't see catch-22 situations as being funny.

For example, I could shut off my Internet service to spite my monopolist cable provider. But that wouldn't be very effective because they can get lots of customers to take my place.

I'm curious about what was behind this. Seems there was more behind your leaving than just having an epiphany that your contributions wouldn't be missed and would easily be replaced.

[Bezdomni]

I'm not super-impressed with his use of the Archie McCardell (T-H-L) article as his #1 example of Wikipedian COI.

No? There are some other diffs in his history that show he's not a frequent Waikiki-flyer... but insofar as pointing to them, even indirectly, might someday be to "out" him (things get deleted), it's probably better that I don't. Of course "outing" here isn't quite the same as "outing" while operating the monoply tissue-tresser, but you can never be too careful, right?

Why would Olenick/Day jump to the conclusion that something sinistral was going on?

Why wouldn't he? I think part of it may be that he didn't "waste time" working out the by copiously edit-warring over the molehill, but instead chose to study the mountain...

[Poetlister]

The stuff I thought only I cared about got updated regardless. Anything that didn't I was probably being too obsessive about anyway.

So why does Wikipediocracy exist? Why do y'all obsess about vandalism that goes undetected for years? You're just being too obsessive. Somebody will detect and fix that vandalism eventually.

I just wonder how long you think "eventually" is, when there is clearly vandalism that has gone unfixed for many years. And even if it is fixed eventually, who knows how many people may have been misled in that time? Of course, no reference work is perfect; mistakes can be found in the most reliable of sources. But that is whataboutery.

[No Ledge]

The stuff I thought only I cared about got updated regardless. Anything that didn't I was probably being too obsessive about anyway.

So why does Wikipediocracy exist? Why do y'all obsess about vandalism that goes undetected for years? You're just being too obsessive. Somebody will detect and fix that vandalism eventually.

I just wonder how long you think "eventually" is, when there is clearly vandalism that has gone unfixed for many years. And even if it is fixed eventually, who knows how many people may have been misled in that time? Of course, no reference work is perfect; mistakes can be found in the most reliable of sources. But that is whataboutery.

"Eventually" would probably have been a lot sooner if the WMF had given Jacobi Carter a job offer and a full time job tasked with improving ClueBot to detect more subtle stuff. Instead, he's working elsewhere else and I'm not sure anyone has replaced him.

[No Ledge]

A gang of about 50 Indian editors are on top of a chain of editors and they have complete control over Wikipedia
The top 50 editors are mostly from IT companies with much free time on their hands and they are on Wiki the whole day.
They are on top of a chain of command. A team consists of about 10 editors.
A newbie proposes an edit and a chain of command approves it and further edits it.

They may exercise a high degree of control over certain articles about India or Indians but they don't have "complete control over Wikipedia".

[Poetlister]

A gang of about 50 Indian editors are on top of a chain of editors and they have complete control over Wikipedia
The top 50 editors are mostly from IT companies with much free time on their hands and they are on Wiki the whole day.
They are on top of a chain of command. A team consists of about 10 editors.
A newbie proposes an edit and a chain of command approves it and further edits it.

They may exercise a high degree of control over certain articles about India or Indians but they don't have "complete control over Wikipedia".

organiser.org

This looks like a very right-wing site. The story was picked up by an online newspaper that I have had occasion to quote before.

Opindia

[Jim]

I'm curious about what was behind this.

Not much - Bbb23 behaved like an utter shit to me for no real reason I could see, and that, given his then "powerful" position, made me think quite a bit about how I was wasting my spare time, and realise that I wasn't actually enjoying contributing to wikipedia any more anyway, and couldn't see the point in donating any more time if it might entail arguing with a dickhead like that - so I just stopped going there at all.

Call it a "moment of clarity" if you like... . It's been a good decision for me so far. I've since missed editing wikipedia not at all. Not even for a moment, now I think about it...

I think I muttered something about karma coming to get him in the end, and it turns out it did, as it tends to, which amused me a bit (but I nevertheless felt a little bit sorry for him at the time because once you've committed so much effort to something it's got to come as a jarring shock when said thing rejects you - however much of a dickhead you are, and however justified that rejection was) - but, honestly, I've missed editing there not one jot since then...

Does that satisfy your "curiosity"? I've tried to do so.

If, on the other hand, I've failed to assuage your thirst for context in some way, I'm pretty much an open book, and happy to share - so you could just ask me more...

[No Ledge]

Well, the WMF gets what it pays for in terms of admins in powerful positions.

It's not like the community shouldn't have seen this coming. From his RfA:

There seems to be a somewhat aggressive editing approach to removing content, which could be an indication of the potential for aggressive admin actions that push the limits of policy.

[jf1970]

Well, the WMF gets what it pays for in terms of admins in powerful positions.

It's not like the community shouldn't have seen this coming. From his RfA:

There seems to be a somewhat aggressive editing approach to removing content, which could be an indication of the potential for aggressive admin actions that push the limits of policy.

The community did see it coming. And complained about it. Loudly. For years. The problem wasn't ignored, it was simply allowed to persist because the problem was protected by fellow advanced permissions holders. It's not like any other admin ever did anything about it, although any admin could have at any point. But no admin will block another admin. It's a good old boys club.

[No Ledge]

...no admin will block another admin. It's a good old boys club.

Curious about this, I just ran a report that confirmed this is not true. Of 1106 current administrators, 339 or about 30% have been blocked at least one time. No admins are currently blocked, though.

Current administrators have been blocked a total of 689 times, and unblocked 530 times – so a blocked admin is more likely to be unblocked than an ordinary extended-confirmed blocked editor. 290 of these were self-blocks, just for practice I suppose.

Pathoschild (T-C-L) has the most administrator blocks 21 of them! But most are similar to:
block for 1 minute by Pathoschild – Testing [[MediaWiki:Blockedtext]]: {{usernameblock}}

Among the reasons for unblocking admins:

• Accidently clicked wrong link
• error
• ridiculous
• Stupid me...
• (the below was an IRC joke we had going on)
• Accepted he's stupid
• Blocked in error - finger trouble. Profuse apologies!
• stupid mistake on my part - meant to block someone else
• sorry! wrong person
• Erroneous block... omg
• So sorry. I think you can guess what I was trying to do.

Yes, administrators are human; they're not perfect.

It takes some work to sort out the intended blocks from these, but I think the most common are short-term (24 hours or less) for edit warring. My program counts 114 edit-warring blocks, though some may be false-positives (test blocks).

[jf1970]

...no admin will block another admin. It's a good old boys club.

Curious about this, I just ran a report that confirmed this is not true. Of 1106 current administrators, 339 or about 30% have been blocked at least one time. No admins are currently blocked, though.

Current administrators have been blocked a total of 689 times, and unblocked 530 times – so a blocked admin is more likely to be unblocked than an ordinary extended-confirmed blocked editor. 290 of these were self-blocks, just for practice I suppose.

Pathoschild (T-C-L) has the most administrator blocks 21 of them! But most are similar to:
block for 1 minute by Pathoschild – Testing [[MediaWiki:Blockedtext]]: {{usernameblock}}

Among the reasons for unblocking admins:

• Accidently clicked wrong link
• error
• ridiculous
• Stupid me...
• (the below was an IRC joke we had going on)
• Accepted he's stupid
• Blocked in error - finger trouble. Profuse apologies!
• stupid mistake on my part - meant to block someone else
• sorry! wrong person
• Erroneous block... omg
• So sorry. I think you can guess what I was trying to do.

Yes, administrators are human; they're not perfect.

It takes some work to sort out the intended blocks from these, but I think the most common are short-term (24 hours or less) for edit warring. My program counts 114 edit-warring blocks, though some may be false-positives (test blocks).

How many admins were intentionally blocked in the last year? Five years?

[No Ledge]

How many admins were intentionally blocked in the last year? Five years?

Will take some work to answer this. I can think of at least one former admin who was blocked before they were desysopped.

[AngelOne]

...no admin will block another admin. It's a good old boys club.

Curious about this, I just ran a report that confirmed this is not true. Of 1106 current administrators, 339 or about 30% have been blocked at least one time. No admins are currently blocked, though.

Current administrators have been blocked a total of 689 times, and unblocked 530 times – so a blocked admin is more likely to be unblocked than an ordinary extended-confirmed blocked editor. 290 of these were self-blocks, just for practice I suppose.
...

Interesting. Are these blocks from after the admin received the admin bit, or do they include blocks from before as well?

Other questions: are admins (who have been blocked) being blocked more frequently before or after they become admins? Are admins who received blocks before they became admins blocked more often afterwards than those who did not receive blocks?

[No Ledge]

As I research for some answers, I found that the admin who was unblocked because their block was "ridiculous" had been blocked in this 2007 mass-blocking incident.
.
Interesting that this incident was not sufficient to implement a gun-control policy, it took over a decade and another incident to make that happen.

[No Ledge]

Also counted 16 compromised account blocks. One of the reasons for implementing gun control was so that a compromised Super Mario couldn't unblock themself and reload.

[No Ledge]

Of 1106 current administrators, 339 or about 30% have been blocked at least one time. No admins are currently blocked, though.

Current administrators have been blocked a total of 689 times, and unblocked 530 times – so a blocked admin is more likely to be unblocked than an ordinary extended-confirmed blocked editor. 290 of these were self-blocks...

Interesting. Are these blocks from after the admin received the admin bit, or do they include blocks from before as well?

Other questions: are admins (who have been blocked) being blocked more frequently before or after they become admins? Are admins who received blocks before they became admins blocked more often afterwards than those who did not receive blocks?

Apparently the user interface for blocking was more confusing in the past, resulting in a lot of accidental button pushing. This issue seems to have been mitigated at some time.

Not sure how worth my time it would be to enhance my code to do a more comprehensive analysis, but I've looked through the first part of my bot's report to get a general idea.

Yes, the report includes blocks received before the admin bit. An editor was given a 24-hour block for 3RR in September 2006. They passed their RfA in March 2007. They mentioned this 3RR incident in their answer to RfA question #3 saying they "took this as an opportunity to study the relevant policies", and it remains the only block in their log. Meanwhile the admin who blocked the admin-to-be in 2006 was desysopped in September 2018 due to inactivity after an Arbcom case in their name was opened & suspended in September 2017.

Another editor was blocked In November 2006 for 24 hours for edit warring on the biography of the founding father of the Republic of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (T-H-L). They passed their RfA in July 2007 after stating in their answer to RfA question #3 "I don't think I'll have that sort of issue again, as I learned the ins and outs of the Wikipedia:Three-revert rule by experience there!" This is still the only block in their log. The admin who made the block was desysopped in 2012 under "Level I procedures" after their account was deemed to have been compromised.

Another editor was blocked for 8 hours for 3RR on "Israel and the United Nations" in August 2006, then unblocked after "Said he would avoid the article via email". He had just passed his RfA the month before, in July 2006. The admin who blocked this freshly-minted fellow admin has a colorful history, ending with vanishing after an Arbitration Committee block in November 2015 which followed a December 2014 desysopping by ArbCom after having held administrator privileges under two other accounts after the account that made this block. This 2006 block is still the only block in this admin's log.

The fourth case I found in my somewhat random examination of cases is someone who passed their RfA in August 2010. Blocked themselves just a month later, in September 2010: "stupid mistake on my part - meant to block someone else". The only other block on their log happened in January 2014 – a 24 hour block for edit warring. Of the four cases, this is the only one where the blocking admin is still an administrator. However this is an admin who has scored major Mario points and earned multiple Mario lives; they were prohibited from making any edits relating to a certain topic which was the subject of a 2020 arbitration case in which they were an involved party. EDIT: An Arbitration Committee finding-of-fact in that case was that this admin "has repeatedly edit-warred".

So, the anecdotal conclusion I draw from this limited, random examination of intended blocks of current administrators, is that they may reflect more negatively on the admin making the block than on the admin or admin-in-waiting who was blocked.

[michaelo]

Over at Sucks, Eric noticed "Wikipedia's Deep Ties to Big Tech" (§) by M. Olenick (§) originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and reprinted in Naked Capitalism by "Yves Smith".

In it, we learn not only that M. Olenick has written as "Ruby Day" (§), but also that they sought comment from the WMF on their article, but received none. (Those who have read the 2016 Minassian Communication Report, compiled during the 2016 US election, will recall that the usefulness of engagement with critical-sounding inquiries was grappled with in contradictory and not overly grammatical ways.)

What does this article talk about?

• The Okapi Delaware Shell Corporation; the Google Juice Company
• a leading brand of detergent progressive charity
• Minassian Media
• two members of MoveCom
• KR Maher, Council of Foreign Relations

What doesn't it talk about?

• Blue Ocean Strategy
• (at least I don't think it does)

From the article:

In fact there are essentially two disjoint Wikimedia movements. The first ones to create wiki projects and make money (through donations). And the second, who spend this money on some strange projects. That’s why the communities don’t know about Foundation’s initiatives and reject them. We must put an end to this.

Ok. Good luck with that.

We should reach out to the author.

Hey - I have no idea how to use this forum but posted a reply answering why I mentioned Archie McCardell here that answers some of these questions:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11925#p288512

Ruby is a moniker for the contributors to my innovation blog. I tried using it on Wikipedia thinking we'd do the same. Don't fret that if the practice is banned (if it is) because the first edit didn't go well so we dropped it. Somebody found a login I'd made ages ago (2008) w/ my own name and I'll use that now. But I'm still unlikely to make many Wikipedia edits.

I strongly disagree with the Minassian 2016 conclusion to avoid critical inquiries. That's worked out great for Minassian to ensure their ability to extract six figures of donated money year after year while shielding anybody at Wikimedia from being forced to think whether maybe paying Minassian may not be the best use of donations. Some might even argue it's self-serving. But I can't see how it aligns with their stated core value of transparency.

I'm happy to answer other questions either in these forums or by email, michaelolenick@gmail.com.

[eagle]

To get back to the fundamental point, there is an important community of contributors at English Wikipedia that deserve to function without interference (and some would argue, without day-to-day struggles to keep the servers running.) Unfortunately, the Wikimedia Foundation is now a separate, self-perpetuating entity, that was created by Jimbo Wales, in a manner that leads it into long term conflict with that community. To add insult to injury, there is the Endowment at the Tides Foundation which functions independent of the WMF Board and has a separate Board of Advisors who will determine in the long run whether funds raised to benefit Wikipedia and to keep the servers running will be provided to the WMF or to random other places.

To summarize, "bait and switch."

[thekohser]

Apologies if this was already posted, but there is a scathing (if occasionally factually inaccurate) follow-up from Yves Smith (the pen name of Susan Webber, a Principal of Aurora Advisors) in Naked Capitalism:

Speaking with the longer-term Wikipedians, one element that came up repeatedly is a turning point in Wikipedia’s history when the firm decided to create a Knowledge Engine. That’s a project cooked up by former Wikimedia head Lila Tretikov. It looks like a search engine probably because that’s exactly what it clearly was.

Consistent with the type of transparency I’ve seen, Lila and Wikipedia co-founder and figurehead Jimmy Wales not only kept the project secret but repeatedly obfuscated it to the community. That’s a bad idea in any organization, a worse idea in a non-profit, a terrible idea in a non-profit that sets transparency as a core operating principle, and a godawful inexcusably horrible idea in a non-profit where a not-so-small army of volunteers create 100% of the product that anybody cares about.

Lila secretly applied for and received a grant from the Knight Foundation, first asking for millions then, after being rejected, less. They were eventually granted $250,000 to create a study. As that progressed, the entire project came to light. The two apparently lied that the grant application was secret, due to donor privacy, until a Wikipedian contacted Knight who clarified not only wasn’t it secret but they preferred it to be out in the open. When the lies became clear, much drama ensued as both community members and Wikimedia employees felt betrayed.

[michaelo]

Apologies if this was already posted, but there is a scathing (if occasionally factually inaccurate) follow-up from Yves Smith (the pen name of Susan Webber, a Principal of Aurora Advisors) in Naked Capitalism:

Speaking with the longer-term Wikipedians, one element that came up repeatedly is a turning point in Wikipedia’s history when the firm decided to create a Knowledge Engine. That’s a project cooked up by former Wikimedia head Lila Tretikov. It looks like a search engine probably because that’s exactly what it clearly was.

Consistent with the type of transparency I’ve seen, Lila and Wikipedia co-founder and figurehead Jimmy Wales not only kept the project secret but repeatedly obfuscated it to the community. That’s a bad idea in any organization, a worse idea in a non-profit, a terrible idea in a non-profit that sets transparency as a core operating principle, and a godawful inexcusably horrible idea in a non-profit where a not-so-small army of volunteers create 100% of the product that anybody cares about.

Lila secretly applied for and received a grant from the Knight Foundation, first asking for millions then, after being rejected, less. They were eventually granted $250,000 to create a study. As that progressed, the entire project came to light. The two apparently lied that the grant application was secret, due to donor privacy, until a Wikipedian contacted Knight who clarified not only wasn’t it secret but they preferred it to be out in the open. When the lies became clear, much drama ensued as both community members and Wikimedia employees felt betrayed.

That's also one of mine. Yves/Susan republishes my work often though added a great intro. What do you think is inaccurate about it? - Michael Olenick (just to clarify)

[Midsize Jake]

What do you think is inaccurate about it?

I wouldn't claim to speak on Mr. Kohs' behalf, but I would suggest two things...

First, the "Knowledge Engine" may have been intended as more of a search engine, but that's not why the WP users were upset about it. A fair number of them believed that it was part of a long-term WMF strategy to eventually replace, or at least supplement, human editors (i.e., them) with "AI-lite" software constructs. These constructs would, in theory, take factoids from WikiData and other sources, and produce finished-looking WP articles using preset templates. The articles wouldn't be fully fleshed-out, or even be especially readable, but they would be enough to produce little infoboxes that could be used as hover-over popups by other sites in order to bypass Google, among other things. I'm not sure why the WMF wanted to facilitate that, other than that they were upset that a lot of their traffic was being lost because of Google Knowledge Panels. (The Vice article goes into more detail.) Even so, the last thing the WP user community would ever want to do is jeopardize their high PageRanks, and this might conceivably have done just that.

(I should probably also note that Wikipediocracy didn't take much interest in the Knowledge Engine brouhaha at the time, presumably because we all knew it was yet another WMF vaporware concept that would ultimately amount to nothing... but in retrospect, it looks like maybe we should have treated it as a much bigger deal. Our bad!)

Second, long-term diehard WP critics (such as Mr. Kohs, myself, and I suspect well over half of the regulars here on WPO) could take issue with describing WMF/WP as a "non-profit where a not-so-small army of volunteers create 100% of the product that anybody cares about." Unfortunately, "socially-irresponsible organization pretending to be a 'charity' where a tiny handful of anonymous individuals — some of whom only pretend to be volunteers — administer and maintain about 95% of the content anyone actually reads" is much longer and less concise. Either way, the distinction between article creation and article maintenance, in terms of the amount of human effort involved, is tricky — there are lots of article creators, but very few article maintainers, and many of those maintainers are bots and people using mass-editing tools. It's probably more intuitive to think of article creation as the more labor-intensive activity, but that naturally changes over time. (IOW, an article only has to be created once, but then it's maintained over the course of many years, so there must come a point where the maintenance has required more human effort — except the amount differs with each article, so you can't easily quantify it in overall terms.)

Still, these are mostly quibbles that you wouldn't get from... well, just about anywhere else, so I wouldn't really worry about it.

[michaelo]

What do you think is inaccurate about it?

I wouldn't claim to speak on Mr. Kohs' behalf, but I would suggest two things...

First, the "Knowledge Engine" may have been intended as more of a search engine, but that's not why the WP users were upset about it. A fair number of them believed that it was part of a long-term WMF strategy to eventually replace, or at least supplement, human editors (i.e., them) with "AI-lite" software constructs. These constructs would, in theory, take factoids from WikiData and other sources, and produce finished-looking WP articles using preset templates. The articles wouldn't be fully fleshed-out, or even be especially readable, but they would be enough to produce little infoboxes that could be used as hover-over popups by other sites in order to bypass Google, among other things. I'm not sure why the WMF wanted to facilitate that, other than that they were upset that a lot of their traffic was being lost because of Google Knowledge Panels. (The Vice article goes into more detail.) Even so, the last thing the WP user community would ever want to do is jeopardize their high PageRanks, and this might conceivably have done just that.

(I should probably also note that Wikipediocracy didn't take much interest in the Knowledge Engine brouhaha at the time, presumably because we all knew it was yet another WMF vaporware concept that would ultimately amount to nothing... but in retrospect, it looks like maybe we should have treated it as a much bigger deal. Our bad!)

Second, long-term diehard WP critics (such as Mr. Kohs, myself, and I suspect well over half of the regulars here on WPO) could take issue with describing WMF/WP as a "non-profit where a not-so-small army of volunteers create 100% of the product that anybody cares about." Unfortunately, "socially-irresponsible organization pretending to be a 'charity' where a tiny handful of anonymous individuals — some of whom only pretend to be volunteers — administer and maintain about 95% of the content anyone actually reads" is much longer and less concise. Either way, the distinction between article creation and article maintenance, in terms of the amount of human effort involved, is tricky — there are lots of article creators, but very few article maintainers, and many of those maintainers are bots and people using mass-editing tools. It's probably more intuitive to think of article creation as the more labor-intensive activity, but that naturally changes over time. (IOW, an article only has to be created once, but then it's maintained over the course of many years, so there must come a point where the maintenance has required more human effort — except the amount differs with each article, so you can't easily quantify it in overall terms.)

Still, these are mostly quibbles that you wouldn't get from... well, just about anywhere else, so I wouldn't really worry about it.

This is great stuff, especially bots and a small number of editors being responsible for a large amount of control. Could you (or anybody) point me to more information about that? I'd love to write yet another follow-up piece. I really want to keep on this topic on the assumption somebody from the larger publications will pick it up. As note in my last piece, I've already found Wired regurgitating press releases as news -- exactly like Craig Minassian advocates -- though there must be a journalist with a large platform somewhere that's interested in this. Granted, it's a whole lot easier to write gossip about the royal family or endlessly debate the virtues of political correctness or lack thereof. But the integrity of one of the web's largest repositories of information seems like it's wake one of them from their deep slumber.

Finally, another question ... why not branch Wikipedia, or at least English Wikipedia, and make a new human-powered search engine plus fix the new Wiki to avoid the problems of the mothership? It's not that hard to see changes to the first that'd be easy to fix in a new one, including adding a search engine. Of course, that leads to whether anybody would use it. But I think a Wiki with higher accuracy, better transparency, and a more eclectic base of editors could be well received. These monopolies -- especially Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Wikipedia -- have grown big and rich and lazy and fat and slow. They're arrogant and more than a little bit boring. It's time for Adam Smith's invisible hand to come in and cause a Schumpeter cycle to fire up something different and new and special.

[Poetlister]

why not branch Wikipedia, or at least English Wikipedia, and make a new human-powered search engine

Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley

See Wikia Search (T-H-L). I don't know if it could have been a success with different people involved.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Finally, another question ... why not branch Wikipedia, or at least English Wikipedia, and make a new human-powered search engine plus fix the new Wiki to avoid the problems of the mothership? It's not that hard to see changes to the first that'd be easy to fix in a new one, including adding a search engine. Of course, that leads to whether anybody would use it. But I think a Wiki with higher accuracy, better transparency, and a more eclectic base of editors could be well received. These monopolies -- especially Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Wikipedia -- have grown big and rich and lazy and fat and slow. They're arrogant and more than a little bit boring. It's time for Adam Smith's invisible hand to come in and cause a Schumpeter cycle to fire up something different and new and special.

I have no idea why you think that the Wikipedia model (volunteer editors) would work to create a version of Yahoo or DMOZ that could somehow rival Google. But aside from that, you actually suggest in your article that Wikipedia should do it. Wikipedia isn't even very good at being Wikipedia, let alone curating a web directory.

The idea with the Knowledge Engine, if I recall correctly, was that Wikipedia was going to become a portal of sorts. If you did a search, you'd get Wikipedia results, of course, but you'd also get results from other selected sources. It would integrate all of the Wikimedia projects, so that if you searched for Reno, Nevada you'd get stuff from Wikivoyage about things to see in Reno as well as the Wikipedia page for Reno. (That now comes up as a side-bar called "results from sister projects", but I think that came after the Knowledge Engine debacle.) But it was the results from places outside the WMF world that alarmed people and lead to the "competing with Google" stuff.

I think all of that was fueled by fear of Google's knowledge boxes. If people get the top level fact they want just by searching Google, why even click on the link to Wikipedia? The knowledge boxes have only gotten better since then. The WMF is happily building Wikidata with volunteer labor to make it even easier for Google to make Wikipedia obsolete. As Wikipedia slowly winds down, the WMF is changing itself to have a broader mandate that gives it a reason to exist.

[michaelo]

Wikipedia is not winding down - they're doing just fine, especially donation wise.

I didn't say Wikipedia should make a Google-style search and said exactly the opposite: they should make a limited search, something vastly more focused. This would be easier than keeping up a whole Wiki - search results would be 20 or so links, max, to external sites plus the initial link to Wikipedia. That's far less information to manage.

Traffic to Wikipedia's English site is up over the past five years: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-proje ... al|monthly. The data doesn't support worrying about Google's infoboxes though it does make, like many other things, a fine way to spook people into donating.

[eagle]

Most people assume that a non-profit's main asset is money/endowment. However, one could argue that it is the donor base and the volunteers. We have seen that Jimbo Wales has been unsuccessful in bringing the volunteers to his subsequent ventures. Lila (and significant other Willm) left under a cloud so that there was no possibility of them tapping into the friends they had made at WMF as they moved along. What are the chances that Kathrine and Maria (and spouse Laura Hale) will try to move their contacts to the next chapter in their lives? In terms of donation power, the members of the Endowment Advisory Board are probably the most important. Wales has been a member of that Board, but to what extent has Kathrine, Maria, Laura, et al have had a chance to rub elbows and befriend our largest donors/funders?

If I were an A-list personality, I would donate my money to a more conventional charity in order to network with other A-listers. As we have seen, WMF Executive Directors and Board Chairs lose their luster after moving on from WMF. The division of the Endowment from the rest of the WMF merely reinforces this.

[No Ledge]

Before Wikimedia can even think of creating some sort of new powerful focused-search tool that fills in niche needs that aren't adequately served by Google Search, they first need to competently finish the projects to make MediaWiki Search itself more powerful.

I wouldn't hold my breath. The Discovery Department of Wikimedia Engineering, which I believe is what became of Lila-purple unicorn's controversial Knowledge Engine initiative, is dead.

The former Lead Product Manager for Discovery, whose mission was to "make the wealth of knowledge in the Wikimedia projects easily discoverable", no longer works for the Foundation.

I keep things I think need to be done on my user talk page; the top part of that serves as a sort of long-term to-do list. Among the items there is a request to implement multiple parameters to prefix: operator on fulltext searches. This is something that used to work, before they switched their underlying platform to CirrusSearch. You can follow the links on my user page to the various discussions about this functionality. The Phabricator task remains open, assigned a low priority.

My biggest fear with that approach (while also long overdue and worthwhile) would make it more likely for people to run against query limits. Using | as a separator for values is long-accepted syntax in other places eg: api.php. Cleanup to query parsing should make it pretty easy to break these values on | (nb: skipping it for fields where it doesn't make sense).

This bug, along with a ton of others will really only be fixed by sane query parsing. It's terrible legacy behavior that stems from a need to rapidly prototype, in addition to emulating undocumented behaviors. We didn't start from a formal query language. Eventually someone is going to have to bite the bullet and do it.

We hope to get this looked at in early 2017/2018 fiscal year.

And it just now occurs to me that most of the initiatives of the Wikimedia Foundation eventually have fates similar to many of Jimmy Wales' outside projects, of which there are too many to remember.

[No Ledge]

I see now that the Discovery Department has been replaced by the Wikimedia Search Platform.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Wikipedia is not winding down - they're doing just fine, especially donation wise.

I wrote several paragraphs making the case for this but then decided it wasn't worth the bother. Let's agree to disagree on whether Wikipedia is slowly winding down (by which I mean that it is in decline, losing power like wind-up clockwork toy, not closing itself up as an entity).

I didn't say Wikipedia should make a Google-style search and said exactly the opposite: they should make a limited search, something vastly more focused. This would be easier than keeping up a whole Wiki - search results would be 20 or so links, max, to external sites plus the initial link to Wikipedia. That's far less information to manage.

Remember that time where you quoted Jimbo out of context so thoroughly as to reverse the meaning of what he said? I didn't say what you claim I said.

Traffic to Wikipedia's English site is up over the past five years: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-proje ... al|monthly. The data doesn't support worrying about Google's infoboxes though it does make, like many other things, a fine way to spook people into donating.

That's my memory of what was going on at the time and still my belief.