Wikipedia Says Traffic Is Falling Due to AI Search Summaries and Social Video

How many people are needed to maintain instagram, facebook, etc? Wikipedia isn't just a collection of static content. The page contents include static and dynamic content (via a lua scriptable set of templates), semantic data (wikidata), multimedia management (wikimedia commons), editing tools (WYSIWYG editing, with full support of the wiki markup and templating), global caching infrastructure, multiple datacenters for HA/DR, etc.

There's also the need to support the staff and volunteer developers, which includes wikimedia cloud services, git hosting, config management and orchestration, CI, community hosted tool/bot services, etc.

WMF has ~600 employees, and that's quite lean, for a service of their complexity.

My point is, using Wikipedia 10% as much is still using Wikipedia.

Does it matter if you see the banner 10 times or 100 times in a month?

In person meetings move things forward.

Paying the travel for a bunch of highly active volunteer contributors to meet up ocassionally and hash out complex community issues pays massive dividends. It keeps the site moving forward. Its also pretty cheap when you consider how much free labour those volunteers provide.

Whenever people criticize wikimedia finances, i think they miss the forest for the trees. I actually think there is a lot to potentially crticize, but in my opinion everyone goes for the wrong things.

No. Why would a payment processor make an exception to its risk-based rules for an organization that increases exposure to that risk? Brand recognition is a liability in this case.

> I can't imagine that wikipedia has high chargeback rates, and clearly the processors don't mind doing business with them.

Its actually somewhat common for people who steal credit cards to use non profits like wikipedia to "test" them. Typically such sites have no minimum donation, have donations from all over the world so fraud detection wont think its weird you're spending money half way across the world.

Check the source on the donation page. It looks like they actually use something called Gr4vy above all that to handle payments.

https://gr4vy.com

Using a platform with its own fee on top of payment processor fees would explain the 6.4%.

You can get a general sense of it from the org chart here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Organiz...

A lot of it is engineers who work on improving the software that runs Wikipedia, and keeping the site running, which you can see happening at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org -- outside of security issues, all the dev work is done in the open. There's constant ongoing work on making Wikipedia and all the related projects work better.

There's also people who do the fundraising, community management, legal defense, etc. Then there's general HR infrastructure around employing hundreds of people.

Basically, that "Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%." point gets brought up, and neglects to mention that you then need to pay for a bunch of people to manage those servers and facilities.

(Disclaimer: I'm an employee of the WMF. I'm just an engineer, so I'm not speaking authoritatively about financial details.)

There seem to be several fake websites already.

They try to work hard and get rid of bias through various methods: peer reviews, precise methodology (randomization, blind tests etc.). And of course, even those sciences are not perfect, subject to biases, and evolve. This applies only to a subset of fields, in a lot of fields you either don't have the time to remove biases this way or it's impossible because it's inherently subjective. Besides, if you needed unbiased perfect opinions before taking any decision, the world would be stuck and slow.

1) The Monty Hall Problem (to be precise it hinges on ambiguity and the distinction between prior and posterior probabilities, but that is something most people aren't aware of and will get wrong the first time they see it, even people with knowledge of say Bayes' Theorem)

2) For several others, see Alon Amit's superb Quora answer to "What are the most interesting or popular probability puzzles in which the intuition is contrary to the solution?" ([2], login-walled). Mentions the very counterintuitive Penney's Game [0].

3) Berkson's Paradox, aka "People in hospital/getting treatment tend to have worse health indicators".

4) Asymmetric dice behavior is counterintuitive, when you first see it.

5) Benford's Law, on quantities occurring in nature (e.g. river lengths), as opposed to uniform distribution.

6) There are lots of counterintuitive things about Platonic solids.

7) Bayes' Theorem itself, superbly useful but possibly one of the things in probability most abused on a daily basis by bad journalism and bad statistics.

8) The Multiple Testing Problem/p-hacking/aka the xkcd "Green jelly beans cause acne" and as a corollary: 8a) Most published (academic) findings aren't replicable, aka "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", Joannidis (2005)

[9] Almost-integers

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

[2]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-interesting-or-popul...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem

[9]: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/AlmostInteger.html

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penney%27s_game

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Probability_theory_pa...

Yep fair point. I was taking them literally, though I didn't necessarily feel the context meant their post was bad faith or concessional, just a simple truth. Your elaboration adds a fair bit to your argument though and I am pretty sure I agree for the most part.

The parent’s point was plainly that bias is unavoidable and making it overt is realistically all we can do. It’s a pragmatic take, albeit overly terse. They could have additionally included something like “and try to minimize its effects” sure, but that to me was implicit. I may be reading that fairly charitably, but perhaps that is just my own bias. I certainly have a bias to judge it more charitably than I do someone who leaps straight to moral outrage and judgement this early in the interaction.

In this case, I simply felt your judgment of the parent wasn’t fair, and showed a moral bias. Maybe they weren’t perfectly clear, and too absolute, but your response wasn’t proportionate either. It condemned more than it understood. I interpreted it as an epistemic observation and you interpreted it as an offense. The very fact that we came away with two completely different readings of the same short sentence rather proves the point.

Thank you for putting words in my mouth regarding my definition of the word bias, but lets use your own: "Bias is a distortion from reality and truth." If that is the case, we can never hope to avoid it, because we will never have perfect information. Using that definition, we are quite literally constantly in a state of bias. Your very own definition is far more broadly supportive of the notion that bias can't be avoided and consequently suggests bias is effectively ubiquitous. This to me is the primary point the parent was making.

I was perhaps too charitable, and you not enough. We are both biased, and going by the advice of the parent, I'm pointing it out. I don't think there is much more I can do.

like the xorg fork

It's founded by the son of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly, so that brand of crazy is basically vintage.

That said, it is indeed so insane that trolls sometimes become contributors just to see how far they can push it. There were several known cases of trolls going far enough undetected to get various admin rights (to block etc).

Some ancient family dynasty Scotch distillery perilous existential vulnerabilities:

[] Indifferent, spoiled rotten progeny seeking maximum return upon inheritance, selling distillery to Seagram's for an immediate gratification windfall fortune.

[] John Cooper VII, the last barrel maker, skill lost at retirement, or Master Cooper VIIth lost savings to Mister Market, or an expensive clandestine affair, extorts 16X per barrel.

[] Seagram's hires brilliant Bill Burr(Breaking Bad car wash business) to pose as EPA agent, threatening federal lawsuit for illegal violation of dumping distillery toxic runoff for past centuries, and/or white oak barrels cause cancer and the distillery has killed victims for hundreds of years.

[] A society grows fallow when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in, while the president's daughter threatens to enforce federal white oak forest's toxic(false, but that's ok!) leaching prosecution if landowners do not immediately purchase a fortune of President altCoin.

In this painfully craven hostile world, Benedictine liqueur would seem to be more durable spirit than any Scotch.

While that is technically true I have always thought hn as a mere place to find interesting content. Of course many of us, me included, dream about finding someone who pays millions for our code. But the attitude towards businessmen is generally hostile here and for a good reason. They can't make things and they aren't even interested in making things, and overall they are more often than not just lame and boring. They are interested in making money, ripping people off, being leeches, extracting every possible penny they just can. Weird geeks are what the hacker culture is all about and politically correct c-suite suckers can go pound sand.

We do appreciate it! There's even posters for the most famous players, posted in prominent public places free of charge.

Now there you Ninja Academy guys go again...

The real question, given how handy Wikipedia is as training data, is why it's your money going to them, and not Zuckerberg's or Altman's or Nadella's.

Mozilla doesn't have any money... do they?