As a 501(c)(3), it would be illegal for the Wikimedia Foundation to be purchased by any of the tech-giants -- or any other for-profit company, for that matter. In addition, all the content is under freely available licenses.
The most realistic but still bleak scenario I can think of is Wikipedia becoming infested with ads. Anything more extreme, we'd see a fork become popular.
While it can be difficult to sell a nonprofit like Wikipedia to someone like Google or Facebook, it isn't impossible.
There are two ways that the commercial entity could get a court to agree with the sale and both of them start with the WMF screwing up so badly that they run out of money and need to either sell of shut down. We are nowhere near that, but it could happen in the future. I have talked this over with people who appear to know the law on this, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer. If a real lawyer replies, please ignore me and listen to them.
There are a couple of things the commercial entity could do to make it more likely to get approval from a court.
They could simply say that they are abandoning all of the federal and state tax exemptions that a nonprofit enjoys. The easy way to do this would be for the wikipedia.org domain to announce the end of wikipedia and tell everyone that they have accounts with the same usernames and passwords on the new wikipedia.google.com site which runs the exact same software and has the exact same content as the now-frozen wikipedia.com version. Add the usual "we don't plan on changing anything; we just want to save the now-failed wikipedia" language.
Or they could create a new, independent nonprofit with the same rules as the WMF has now but with funding by a generous donation from Google and fork the content as above. As above, the key to making this work is the existing Wikipedia running out of money and shutting down.
So, while it isn't going to happen any time soon, it isn't actually illegal.
"Donate time, not money. Contribute as a volunteer."
My experience in trying to donate any amount of time and effort to wikipedia has been nothing but pain and suffering at the hands of extremely possessive "little hitlers" that do everything possible to defend their "turf".
You are suggesting that volunteering at the corporate/entity level is different than volunteering at the wiki level ?
As a wiki content contributor, it seems like the only easy entry-level approach is to find a category that's interesting to you and largely abandoned. For example, any non-famous books by your favorite author are likely to have stubs or no articles at all.
Of course, if the article doesn't exist at all, you risk a war with the deletionists who've decided certain turf shouldn't exist. And occasionally there's a one-two of one user shredding an article as "excessively detailed", then another nominating it for deletion because it lacks content...
But overall, I've found it a more approachable way to contribute than trying to change or extend any article with an opinionated 'owner'. (At this point, I suspect Wikipedia's factual errors are less likely to come from "anyone can edit" than from possessive and mistaken writers actively restoring errors.)
> that do everything possible to defend their "turf".
In my experience, some of these "little hitlers" appear to be (controlled by) larger corporate entities in some way, shape or form. When the "turf" becomes profitable for some, it becomes very difficult for others to cut the grass so to speak.
For Wikipedia I donate money and not time. I agree, people can be possessive about their turf there, but I think that would only be a real problem if Wikipedia weren't amazingly good.
Wikipedia has a great output. In my view they don't need my time and effort. They're doing great now. When I see a message asking to donate money, I do, because I assume they do need that if they're asking for money.
"The Wikipedia Typo Team is dedicated to improving the quality of Wikipedia by correcting typos and misspellings. If you see any typos (even minor ones), please correct them. This kind of editing is a never-ending job, so we could use your help! Please consider joining our team. All you need to do is start correcting typos."
Re: "When I see a message asking to donate money, I do, because I assume they do need that if they're asking for money." please read
Where did you try to contribute? Over the years I've come to see wikipedia as a long term project. It's generally terrible or controversial on current events or recent history. When people lose general interest and the more academic editors move in it's much better.
> It's generally terrible or controversial on current events or recent history.
Or any person with any kind of ideological charge, especially a boogeyman to some group or other.
The problem with Wikipedia is the fanatics with infinite time, which it accumulates because they're the ones who never give up. The other issue is it's inability to actually deal with problematic users, as the moderation doesn't teach the fanatics to be good, it just teaches them to not be so bad they'll be banned.
I habitually use a VPN, and Wikipedia does not let me contribute (specifically, edit pages), even if I am logged in. So, I don't contribute time anymore, and given the facts mentioned in the essay, I won't contribute money, either.
"I habitually use a VPN, and Wikipedia does not let me contribute ..."
Lucky you.
If you had been allowed to edit, your edits would most likely have been reverted so fast as to be confused with an automatic process. New pages would be up for deletion immediately. A swarm of people with far, far more time on their hands than you could ever have would block you every step of the way.
There is this notion that well meaning, knowledgeable individuals can make small, worthwhile contributions to wikipedia and slowly refine the resource as we all chip in our little bit.
This notion is false.
It's a real shame because I would love to contribute time and effort in the way that people think they can contribute to wikipedia.
> If you had been allowed to edit, your edits would most likely have been reverted so fast as to be confused with an automatic process.
If you know that your edit is at risk of being reverted, you can argue for it on the talk page beforehand. Then if no one replies, you can just make the edit and mark it as "per talk"/"see talk page". If the other person reverts, you can now argue that they're in the wrong because they didn't provide a constructive objection beforehand.
It's a silly game, but it helps provide clarity when editing contentious topics.
Has it become that bad? Back when my password was short and I didn't use a VPN and made the occasional addition or change on Wikipedia, it was all accepted or otherwise incorporated, as far as I can tell.
Re: "Has it become that bad?" No. Not even close. The people who complain about such things are typically newbies who make the mistake of trying to "fix" articles on highly contentious topics with hundreds of edits per day. Just pick a page that hasn't been edited in a while, which is most of them. The history tab tells you how often it gets edited.
I'm a very occasional contributor over the past decade, and not had these nightmares. Of course, I've had my hand swatted a couple of times over obscure rules, but for the most part my edits have gone through without too much fuss, including companies I've launched and products I've built.
"Editors in good standing whose editing is disrupted by unrelated blocks or firewalls may request IP address block exemption, which allows editing on an otherwise-blocked IP address... If you will be editing using an anonymous proxy, including a VPN service, you must send your request to..."
Yes, there are some 370 or so users [1] with an IP block exemption, but my request was denied. Just using a VPN habitually is not a good reason, it appears [2]:
> An editor with a credible editing record who would be affected by this measure may be exempted from the block at administrative discretion, allowing them to edit uninterrupted through the IP address range block.
The conditions for granting this are that:
the editor's normal (non-proxy) IP address will be disrupted by an IP address block placed on a range they usually edit on, through no fault of theirs.
My highlights. At any rate, I'm not going to invest more time and work into being allowed to contribute to Wikipedia.
There are a huge number of trolls and vandals who would love to be able to avoid being blocked by using a VPN. Wikipedia has to balance the need to stop them with the need to let legitimate VPN users edit.
In May of 2018 I posted a request for Comment and got a clarification on who should be granted IPBE.
:It's likely safe to say that administrator judgement on a case-by-case basis can decide whether the provided justification constitutes a legitimate need and whether that need is sufficient to grant IPBE.. it's pretty clear that the community at large likely also doesn't want it to be routinely granted, for lack of a better phrase, just because someone wants it and could hat-collect it. Someone should likely, for example, actually be affected by a block to request it and/or someone should probably be able to explain their need for the additional layer of privacy rather than just, 'Hey I want IPBE because I said the word privacy.' "
That was the decision of the Wikipedia community. If you think that decision was "silly" you are free to post an RfC and see if the consensus has changed.
I've heard bad things about writing articles on Wikis. Lots of ego-wars. Not really sure it's worth my time? If it's a good place to be, I'm happy to help.
EDIT: But I do trust it. So maybe it doesn't matter?
I trusted Wikipedia until I've read articles for which I knew aobut the topic beforehand, too. Now.. not anymore. Pretty sure the crazies with lots of times on their hand have won the editing wars.
Which assumes that the musicians aren't lying, but yes, an occasional lying musician is probably still more accurate overall than Wikipedia's sourcing.
Compared to what? I have the same issue with books in my focus areas that are widely revered, and even some peer-reviewed articles in good journals. I often disagree with things said on Wikipedia, but that's because I often disagree with the novice-accessible versions of things I know a lot about.
Re "I've heard bad things about writing articles on Wikis. Lots of ego-wars." you hear those things from new Wikipedia users who decide that the first thing they should do is either [A] "Fix" the Donald Trump article, [B] try to use Wikipedia to advertise their garage band, or [C] try to correct the biases I list at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:YWAB
If you pick an article, check the history, and find that it ISN'T getting 300 edits every day, you will have a much easier time improving that article.
My Wikipedia page has a link so you can email me. I will be glad to help if you want to become a Wikipedia editor.
Ego-wars are all over the place, even if you avoid political and BLP articles. Burnt-out long-time editors are the most combative. Due to their connections, they won't get blocked.
Thanks! looks like it was a screwup by the ycombinator.com software. The original link ends with a period, and the software stripped it out -- probably because adding a period after a link that is at the end of a sentence is a common error.
I replaced it with another page on Wikipedia that redirects to the "User:Guy Macon/Yes. We are biased." page.
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
Wealth means you can buy nearly anything and that includes people who found a non-profit so one can use them to get to entities like WMF.
The scariest scenario in my opinion is their growing influence on the power of definition.
Like news organizations led by wealthy entities the WMF could just be slightly tuned to spread their alternative truth.
I think this power of defining truth is one of the major battlefields of the 21st century. Look at the annexation of Crimea for example. Was it an annexation or not? For us (people of the West) it seems quite clear but ask people from Russia and a lot of them will tell you another story.
The problem becomes how deeply one needs to research before credible facts can be distinguished from agit-prop / disinformation.
I can't think of many people I know who have the time to become investigative journalists, in effect. And I know that a lot of things I think I know are probably propaganda or spin or just one sided stories.
very big problem. I think you are wise to recognise this, 'And I know that a lot of things I think I know are probably propaganda or spin or just one sided stories.'
How can we flush this from our minds? How do we trust those that purport to speak the truth?
For example, here's an easy one, pi=3.14159 (if rounded to 5 decimal places). Great! I think we all agree this is true. The trouble is without context, this is trivia.
Here is a harder one as we move up the complexity scale. Is Human-driven climate change both 1) real and 2) something we can reasonably combat?
Well, the scientists who study it seem to think it's real and there are ways humankind can reasonably push back against it. But there are many, many who believe differently. Which stance is "true"?
Even harder. Is there a God? I mean, from a philosophical view. Sure by scientific definitions we have to assume there is no measurable supernatural. But does that preclude it's existence? For a significant number of people, G-d of some sort exists. And which is the "truth"????
I'm not soliciting hard answers, just trying to show that as you move to more complex, and in many respects more important, topics of today the notion that there is one singular truth in existence gets fuzzier.
Maths, as I understand it, is merely an a priori deduction from an initial set of assumed-true axioms. In some ways, you can do whatever the heck you like, as long as it's consistent with your axioms and whatever laws govern your deductive process.
The only truth about the world is the world itself. Beyond that, truth is a story which omits and simplifies most while emphasizing some things specificially. Depending on what you omit and what you emphasize you can tell very different stories with "truth".
> Look at the annexation of Crimea for example. Was it an annexation or not? For us (people of the West) it seems quite clear but ask people from Russia and a lot of them will tell you another story.
Perhaps a far aside:
Annexation is a quite defined term, specifically: "the addition of an area or region to a country". Word definitions can change over time, but right now this is what it means. It's not necessarily a charged word either.
This was an annexation, regardless if you believe it was just or not.
And on the latter discussion, I'm much more interested in what people in Crimea think than Russians or us in the West.
And what would sustain the fork? Every time there's talk about the potential to fork a popular web product like Facebook or other social media all that happens is the hobbyists and activists move to it while the mainstream userbase carries on.
Besides, nobody can find the fork anyway. Google banishes such clones to SEO purgatory immediately, from which you are basically guaranteed to never return (especially as a pure clone).
That has been true for a decade now, since the days of Stack Exchange complaining about the clones riding their CC licensed content to easy Google ranking. You can put up a perfect clone of Wikipedia, you'll get nearly zero traffic despite having millions of pages of high quality content.
Yep. Even the RuneScape wiki owner forked their own wiki after Wikia became malicious in terms of ads. It even supported by RuneScape devs themselves. And even then, the original Wikia wiki is still competing on Google SEO after a full year. And this was a real niche. Imagine a big website.
It's true that if you create a perfect fork that search engines will punish you and not even display the results, but that's not to say you can't change that. If the edit-base of a wiki moves with the fork (and this is essential), you can continue to create new content that search engines will index. If you also go back and make tweaks to existing pages, you won't get penalised. It's not a quick process, nor is it simple, but it's possible for a fork can survive, grow and even move above the original.
See https://marc.info , its by far the best mailing list archive, popular in open source communities but it absolutely never appears on Google because it has the same content as massively SEOed crap mailing list archives like Nabble. Google has definitely manually unbanned it a few times but it seems to expire after a while.
Yes, but AFAIK all these archives have nothing to do with their primary source, so while we might all prefer no ads there is no objective way to say marc.info is the authorative source over ad ridden sources.
With Wikipedia or stack overflow, I think whoever gets the majority of participants going forward and keeps activity high could start claiming authority in an objective enough sense, and engaged participants are more mindful of organization ethics than random searchers.
This is the important point. A serious fork of Wikipedia with a large chunk of the community behind it would be dealt with manually by Google; their explicit decision making would be the relevant factor, rather than the algorithm.
But this was in the hypothetical of Wikipedia being sold or taken over. If people don't agree with the practices of the new owners and rally behind a fork trusted by the community, I expect most moderators and contributors to follow.
PR firms are really good at spinning and diffusing and confusing criticism. Not completely, but enough to split a community trying to rally behind anything that is against their interests.
The sale or takeover would start with promises that nothing would change, and then would change slowly enough that each editor would have a different breaking point and thus be too fragmented to move over at a specific point.
Of course there are network effects for moderators. One major reason people volunteer to moderate Wikipedia is because it's in such ubiquitous use.
A fork of Wikipedia with no community is just a content mirror and, because of network effects, you'll have an incredibly hard time attracting anyone to help out with it when they can just go to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia itself. The WMF could continue as an empty shell and sell its core assets. In fact, it would be forced to by law, I believe, if it was badly in debt.
To clarify, Wikipedia comprises not just the stuff which is free of copyright, but primarily the userbase, community, support staff, management structures, and (configured) servers it's hosted on. There's plenty to sell there.
Everything else is easily copied or duplicated, and indeed had been. The only thing you can't copy is the domain name. That's the thing that's worth millions of visitors.
Technically, they could sell the domain & the new owner could maintain the site as-is, but I really don't think that'd happen.
The WMF is mission-driven. A large swath of their funds are spent as grants to other organisations, and they could par that back without affecting their ability to operate.
[disc: Wikipedian since 2004, many friends who are WMF employees]
Just create a dummy-non-profit-company which operates under command of the profit-company. Buy WMF and sellout relevant parts to the profit-company or transform WMF into a profit-orientated organization for the sake of surviving.
The could sell ads, but also edit-permission to articles or cleaning of content, usage of licensed content, user-data, or a gazillion other things which are for the average user harmless in the beginning. Heck, I could see stupid influencers paying $100 for getting their own wikipedia-entry.
Ads and tracking. What you read on wikipedia reveals a lot more about your centres of interest, political opinion and concerns than any commercial website.
The most realistic but still bleak scenario I can think of is Wikipedia becoming infested with ads. Anything more extreme, we'd see a fork become popular.