Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 08:56, 24 December 2016

Jimbo welcomes your comments and updates. He holds the founder's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The current trustees occupying "community-selected" seats until Wikimania 2017 are Pundit and Raystorm. The Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Support and Safety is Maggie Dennis.

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Comparisons to other organizations

A couple of sections above I asked those folks who are campaigning against donating to the WMF, "Can you name any organization the does as much or more good with the same or smaller amount of money?" Nobody has bothered to answer that question but @Carrite: has responded

"why don't you show us a charity that has done less with $70 million (granted that it does take about $2 million per year to actually run the Misplaced Pages show)? And tell us about another paid bureaucracy growing at the same cancerous rate as WMF while you are at it."

Apparently Carrite feels that his ignorance is justification for campaigning against a non-profit that clearly is a leader in spreading knowledge to the world, a website that has invited him in and published his work (but which he doesn't have to contribute to). He also seems to believe that just paying for the web hosting will keep Misplaced Pages online and growing. Pure nonsense.

I would like to demonstrate that, with a couple hours of work, he could come up with a few facts that could shed some light on the topic he is ignorantly blathering about. I'll also suggest that, for next year, the WMF could come up with some comparisons that can shed some light on its effectiveness as an organization. My comparisons here are very incomplete and any numbers should be checked, but this is just a demonstration of what could be done. I don't mean to criticize any of the organizations below, but I do think that in comparison to Misplaced Pages, Misplaced Pages looks to be in the same ballpark in terms of effectiveness, or perhaps better in some cases.

The comparisons should be to other organizations that are in the field of education, broadly defined. I'll use:

• The Barnes Foundation, a small but world-class art museum (small audience, working almost entirely off-line)
• a bit about colleges and universities (small audience, mostly offline)
• NPR/PBS public broadcasting stations (very large audience with lots of online material)
• edX a non-profit MOOC provider working with universities (mass online audience)
• Khan Academy, probably the most comparable organization we'll be able to find.

Offline comparisons

The Barnes Foundation, in its small collection houses some of the very best of early modern and impressionist art. They reach less than 400,000 people per year at the museum. Total assets, including the building and endowment are about $200 million (for some reason the art is only valued at about $6 million). Total revenues and expenses are about $20-$25 million.

• Conclusion:while they are difficult to compare directly offline educational organization can spend similar amounts of money to online organizations, but have much smaller reach.

Colleges and universities - if you look at US higher ed institutions with enrollments of 5,000-10,000 students you should be able to find some with a similar budget to the WMFs. They obviously educate these few students to a greater depth than Misplaced Pages ever could be expected to, and they offer degrees. Some even offer online material. But I think you'll find that their high cost to students and limited reach (a few thousand graduates per year), put them at a great disadvantage compared to Misplaced Pages in many ways.

• Conclusion:while they are difficult to compare directly, bricks-and-mortar (and ivy) educational organizations can spend similar amounts of money to online organizations, but have much smaller reach.

NPR/PBS (radio/TV) public broadcasting stations. A very few of these have larger budgets than the WMF. A few have budgets in the $20-$50 million range. They mostly offer in-depth information and are usually reliable sources, and have a very loyal audience, but even the largest probably don't reach a million people. The intrusiveness of their donation campaigns is several orders of magnitude higher than anything the WMF does. They have been adding online resources, but these don't come close to Misplaced Pages's reach.

• Conclusion:though they are well established, high quality information providers who reach for a mass audience, individual stations with similar budgets can't come close to Misplaced Pages's reach.

So perhaps I've just demonstrated the obvious so far. Offline educational institutions can have similar budgets to the WMF, but their reach is orders of magnitude smaller. Quality differences, which are hard to judge or quantify, make comparisons difficult.

Online comparisons

edX a MOOC provider, giving universities access to their platform giving online university level courses for free (extra for certificates) plus some course aimed a businesses for pay.

7,250,000 students signed up for courses in their first 4 years , though typically MOOCs have a 90% drop out rate. They offer about 700 courses. Much of the expense is probably paid by the universities using the platform, but, as of June 2014, their annual expenses and contributions were about $22 million. Assets about $35 million. , See also

• Conclusion:Even “Massive Open Online Course” providers with roughly similar costs have a smaller reach and don’t offer the breadth of information as Misplaced Pages. Again quality comparisons are difficult to make.

Khan Academy - Sometimes considered a MOOC, Khan Academy offers short videos in multiple subjects to students at multiple levels. Students don’t need to enter an organized course, but can view the video and other material whenever they’d like. Probably Misplaced Pages's closest comparison to an online knowledge provider. Reaches “With fewer than 100 employees, Khan Academy serves more than 15 million users each month with over 100,000 videos and exercises” and has a donation pitch remarkably similar to ours . Total revenue (2014) about $34 million , total assets about $60 million. With the “number of videos and exercises” of 100,000, it has something like 1/50th the material the En:Misplaced Pages has. And 15 million users per month - something like 1/30th the viewers (on all Wikipedias). While we have 100s of language editions, they translate their videos into about 10 languages (check please). Of course those number aren’t directly comparable, but it seems they are somewhat smaller than Misplaced Pages.

IMHO we can even roughly compare the quality of our articles versus their videos. KA offers more organized sequences of material, to a wider variety of learning levels. They are probably better on math and technology material (aimed at the majority of the world’s non-math grad students and non-techies) than our similar material. But for a wide range af not-purely-academic material, our articles are probably better. And of course we have much more material, more languages, and greater reach.

I think Khan Academy is great, but if they did twice as much material at twice the cost, they’d have about the same budget as the WMF, and IMHO wouldn’t be offering as much as Misplaced Pages does.

• Conclusion: even given my biases, it’s easy to say that Misplaced Pages is pretty close to or better than an outstanding program such as Khan Academy in terms of cost effectiveness, reach and material.

Now this is just a first pass. I do hope that the WMF goes through similar comparisons to see what they (we!) are accomplishing, and where we might do better. If folks want to criticize the WMF donation campaign, they should be able to do at least as much, rather than argue from pure ignorance with claims such as it " take about $2 million per year to actually run the Misplaced Pages show”.

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:55, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

I appreciate all the research you did to create this post, but I don't think it's relevant to compare any of those to the WMF. Misplaced Pages content is completely created by volunteers, so the only requirement from the WMF would be to keep the servers up and running, which you could do with a small team and a much smaller budget. I'm hard pressed to find really any great tools or features that weren't existent in the early days. There have definitely been quality of life improvements, but nothing so great to justify the vast budget. It is also surprising to see the $2.5mil proposed for a new long term strategy. Shouldn't that already be the exact job of the many people already employed by the WMF? User:Carrite's idea to help Wikipedians access high quality sourcing would certainly be a more tangible benefit than developing a new strategy for an already mature, successful organization. Mr Ernie (talk) 21:48, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

So the WMF is an incomparably valuable tool that nobody has anything anywhere near as useful. Is that what you mean to say? I just thought of another organization that does roughly the same thing, TED (conference). If other people can think of other large organizations which have goals to disseminate knowledge online, please include them below. If I have time before Christmas, I may be able to take a quick look at them.

There haven't been any improvements since the early days? Puff! We can run on $2 million annually? come on now. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:29, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

The growth of WMF's cash intake and it's highly correlated mass expansion of its employee base on the one hand, and the degrees of failure of things like Visual Editor, Flow, and the New Page curation tool on the other speaks for itself. The actual tools we use on a daily basis have changed only minimally since I came here in 2008, with virtually every vaunted "improvement" actually being a disimprovement. We do manage to fund festivals in Italian skiing villages with very, very inclusive travel grants for needy middle-class vacationers from around the world, and so forth, which adds next to bupkis in terms of content or curation ability... Carrite (talk) 01:57, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Right. WMF has done nothing in the last 10 years. All their tech projects have been complete failures. And Misplaced Pages itself is a complete failure. Right.

I'm still waiting to hear your response to "Can you name any organization that does as much or more good with the same or smaller amount of money?" Can you come up with any comparison to any organization that disseminates knowledge online (or off) where Misplaced Pages looks significantly less effective? Don't try to bs your way out of the question. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:31, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Because Misplaced Pages is the best at what it does does not mean editors can't be critical about how the money is used. You willfully misrepresented most of my comment above, and I do not understand why. Misplaced Pages is awesome. I love it, and so do countless others. But let's be honest with ourselves about how the vast resources are used. Mr Ernie (talk) 02:44, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

"Because Misplaced Pages is the best at what it does does not mean editors can't be critical about how the money is used," we're making some progress. If I misunderstood that you are part of the group that is campaigning against people making donations to Misplaced Pages, then I apologize. Sure, you can criticize spending. Better yet, participate in all the forums where spending is decided (small grants, FDC feedback, etc.) But please don't make the mistake of saying that all the WMF needs to do is keep the servers on. And please don't cross the line to campaigning against donations to Misplaced Pages. Donations are crucial to keeping Misplaced Pages open in the long run. It's just offensive to campaign against donations. It comes across like "Misplaced Pages doesn't do everything the way I'd like it done, so let's shut it down." If you ever feel that way, please just relax, and keep it to yourself. Or just leave. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:25, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

• I don't understand this conversation. I don't care whether the WMF is well-managed or not. I don't give money so it's no concern of mine. However, as a volunteer I would like to see more resources devoted to making volunteering a more useful undertaking, and the best way to do that, to help all concerned, is to put money into databases: the premium Newspapers.com, Lexis/Nexis and ProQuest. If they're over-staffed I don't really give a damn, except that it diverts money from the most important participant in the process, which is me. Coretheapple (talk) 03:09, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

• The general argument is not that they are 'overstaffed' its that the staff are ineffective and bad value for money. The second would not be a huge problem if they were *effective* and bad value for money. At least some serious improvements might appear. Either way, that would still not be an issue if significant amounts of the money they were raising were actually visibly budgeted and trackable towards tangible benefits to improving wikipedia. No one really cares if they spent 1 million on office chairs if they spend 30 million on editing improvements. In the last ten years there have been hardware upgrades, backroom improvements and so on, but these are just incremental changes that you would naturally expect in a tech organisation over time. The actual 'projects' the WMF has attempted have almost all fallen well below expected standards. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:44, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

• OK, well, whatever the area of waste, if money is being flushed down the toilet, then I'd suggest that volunteers should focus on specific ideas for alternative spending. Databases, as suggested above, is one area. Coretheapple (talk) 15:03, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

• Coretheapple - WMF is running a more or less deceptive "donate to us to keep the servers running" campaign backed by the goodwill generated by the content freely given by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the globe, so you should be concerned with what they are doing with the money raised on our backs and in our name. You should care about a paid bureaucracy that now approaches 10% of the size of the volunteer core of English WP and the political implications of that — and what things will be like five years hence given the current pace of hiring growth. You should care that WMF's paid staff, many of them at least, see themselves not as the legal guardians of a volunteer encyclopedia project, but as the owners and decision-makers of such a project. Whether Jimmy Wales wants to talk about the bloated WMF budget or their track record of engineering failure or whether he wants to dodge the issues and tusk tusk his critics for not being happy, smiling, friendly disciples of some sort of kumbaya cult is neither here nor there — you should be concerned by what goes on in our name. Take some ownership, for god's sakes... Carrite (talk) 16:55, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

The premises of your speech are silly: Misplaced Pages writers (including me) are actually here, in fact, to give-up ownership freely. As for the rest, your attempt at a guilt trip is just odd. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:03, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Please don't play word games. I am clearly and obviously speaking about "ownership" in the commonly-used, colloquial sense — not in terms of legalism. Carrite (talk) 17:16, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

What I'm suggesting is not inconsistent with your position. All I'm suggesting is that volunteers push for specific things so as to make volunteering better for the project. The way you framed it above - why spend on X when we need Y - has much more chance of working and getting wide support. Coretheapple (talk) 18:03, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Well then what's the point of the WMF raising $70+mil when the volunteers create the content and improve the structure of the project? That's what I understand this issue to be about. Where is the accountability for how exactly all of this money is used? Mr Ernie (talk) 18:11, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Good question. I'm not defending the WMF. I just feel that volunteers have their own agenda - databases, and possibly also an "umbrella" of a formal kind to prevent personal liability. Tangible stuff, short of getting paid to edit, God forbid. Coretheapple (talk) 22:14, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Just wanted to reinforce what I said above: the more I think about it, the more I believe that concerns regarding the WMF spending are valid from a volunteer perspective. I would caution my colleagues not to dismiss such criticism and concerns as " griping." It is that, but it is also valid. WMF does raise a lot of money and it is perfectly understandable to complain about why are not taking place with that money. I don't view the WMF as a particularly warm and fuzzy operation and while the kneejerk criticism annoys me, so does reflexive defense. Coretheapple (talk) 14:09, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps some are valid, its also repetitive, useless, pointy, sometimes trolling, to whine about them, here. If you actually want to discuss it, go to the WMF budget areas, review the published documents, and the people who write and review the budget and campaign and discuss it. And this, 'everyone, must take this moral crusade tone' is senseless, perhaps, especially when your message is 'I want people to lose their jobs.' -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:46, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree. The tone of much of the criticism is personal and sometimes reflects a conspiracy-theory agenda. Coretheapple (talk) 16:17, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Only $2.5m?

@Jimbo Wales: you pour scorn on my estimate of 'well under $10m', and you poison the well by adding that I have been banned in the past. But substantially the same claim is made by a Wikipedian in good standing here. He writes ' As I recall, the $2 million (now $2.5 million) figure came from discussions with technical staff about what it would cost to keep the site running for a year and an examination of relevant Wikimedia-related budget breakdowns that were split out between non-technical staff costs, overhead costs, etc. However, following Cunningham's Law, if you have a better figure, please share. :-) We can certainly say it's far less than $35 million to only keep the sites up and running (barebones hosting support and related tech staff costs), the question is how much less.' As for what the rest is spent on, I have already pointed out that the financial reports you linked do not break down the expenses in a way that is meaningful. Peter Damian (talk) 13:14, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Note also Erik Moeller's estimate here, of around $10m, which includes the additional costs of legal defence and other costs such as backup data centres that would ensure 'not only bare survival, but actual sustainability of Wikimedia's mission'. Which is exactly what I said, no? Peter Damian (talk) 13:18, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

I find it interesting that you come here to badger Jimmy when you know perfectly well that he wants nothing to do with you. Your questions are better addressed to the foundation itself. Guy (Help!) 15:30, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

@Jimbo Wales: is this true that you want nothing to do with these questions? Please say so, and I will ask elsewhere. Peter Damian (talk) 16:11, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

JzG - You say "badger," I say "raise uncomfortable questions in a pointed manner during the annual fundraising cycle." If those questions are being avoided or dismissed by obvious ad hominem diversions — oh, Bad Peter, he can't be asking good questions — maybe you should ask yourself why these questions are so uncomfortable and why they aren't being addressed. We've seen the routine before: stay mum, the discussion will flag, and the uncomfortable questions will spool away to the nether-regions... So, here are some questions again, in new form: WHY is WMF aggressively fundraising to generate tens of millions of dollars when the actual cost of operations should be far less? What is that actual cost of operation? Where is all that surplus money going? What are all those people in SF actually doing? Why are so many engineering initiatives failing? When are we going to see some real economic support for the content of the encyclopedia? Carrite (talk) 17:09, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

I think Guy's point is that You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. Peter Damian (talk) 18:47, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

No, my point is much simpler. You are, metaphorically, standing in front of Jimbo and hectoring him to his face, when you are perfectly well aware that he would very much prefer to have nothing whatsoever to do with you. You are sealioning. You should really stop doing that. Guy (Help!) 21:20, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

That's the problem with these discussions. They tend to degenerate so that any valuable points are submerged. Way above Carrite made a valid comment about how some of the spending would be better used for databases. It was immediately overshadowed and I imagine will be archived pretty soon. Coretheapple (talk) 16:20, 23 December 2016 (UTC) Correction: it has already been archived. Coretheapple (talk) 16:22, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Better-targeted spending

A few days ago, the results of the 2016 community wishlist survey were published. The process is: active Wikimedia contributors from all languages and projects propose technical changes that will improve our curation and moderation tool kits, and then vote on them, and then Wikimedia's community tech team works on them.

Here you can see the tech team's response to last year's survey. They've completed five of the top ten proposals, are working on three, and have declined the other two (for what seems to me to be good reasons). They've also taken up a number of proposals that fell outside the top ten and have either completed or are making good progress on them. And they've taken up a few from a list generated by the German community, who run their own annual wishlist survey. (Their survey inspired this global survey.)

I believe those responsible for bringing this process into being deserve to be highly and publicly commended. I'd love to know who they are. Also, those managing and implementing the program (I think Ryan Kaldari is leading?) deserve a huge thank you, too.

Judging by how many proposals were addressed in 2016 (from the 2015 global survey and the German language community's survey), and bearing in mind some of those 2015 projects will be ongoing in 2017, I don't expect the community tech team to be able to comfortably address more than a handful from the 2016 list. This isn't a criticism of the team. It's just that there are limits to what one team can do. Neither is it a criticism of the process, which seems to me to be just fine.

Please take a good, long, hard look at the list of 265 proposals in the 2016 survey results. There are scores of proposals there that I believe are uncontroversially beneficial, albeit some may only affect a smaller group of volunteers (but in an important way), and some may only improve the reader experience, so will never get into the top ten.

It will be imperfect, of course, because a lot of people didn't engage with the survey, but let's take that list (or at least the reasonable, well supported proposals in that list) as a description of what the community wants/needs from you, the WMF. And look at what you're presently doing about it: you're taking a handful per year.

I'd like the WMF to look at that list and address all the proposals that you deem feasible and reasonable. And spend whatever money it takes to get it done as a matter of urgency. That is, take our clearly-expressed needs seriously. Not just a handful of them. Judging by the number of 2015 proposals that got resolved in 2016, I guess you'll need to multiply the community tech team by at least five, maybe ten, but I can't think why you wouldn't, and I can't think of a more appropriate use for our donations. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 18:09, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Question for Jimbo re paid editing and WMF

Hi Jimbo

I am interested to learn if the WMF board has discussed taking legal action against companies that offer services to edit Misplaced Pages and that have no on-Wiki presence disclosing their edits here, per the Terms of Use. We all know the companies and their websites, where they use the Misplaced Pages name, etc. I have looked and never found disclosure by any of those companies in WP. I have looked and found no public evidence of WMF legal engaging with these companies, other than Wiki-PR.

Two questions:

Has this been discussed, and if so, what has/have the outcomes been?

Also, is there budget for WMF legal to take action against such companies?

What can you tell me? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 08:13, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

It's a good question, following what appears to have been a big bust at WP:AN/I. Some outfits are basically just taking the piss, and the result is a big time sink for the legit. portions of the community. Alexbrn (talk) 08:33, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

For context, the editor I discovered this week has 45k edits and has created/rewritten hundreds of articles. I have doubts whether all of the could be written by one person. Over time, undisclosed paid editors become more and more sophisticated and it gets harder to identify them. We need to try something new. SmartSE (talk) 09:30, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

As a minimum, articles created by undisclosed paid editors should be nuked, regardless of any discussion of the subject's notability, and substantial edits should be rolled back. When Kohs started out, a number of editors went to extraordinary lengths to protect the articles he created, just to make a point. We're past that now, I think. Spam is spam and should be nuked. Guy (Help!) 14:25, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

JzG, might you then begin your nuking of spam articles with the removal of The People's Operator? That article was created by a marketing consultant for The People's Operator, and that is a fact reliably sourced to The Guardian. - Truth about MVNOs (talk) 14:12, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

You have the wrong admin. My reflex when confronted by any editor with "truth" in the name is to block per WP:NOTHERE. Guy (Help!) 14:46, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

I see, an ad hominem rebuttal when presented with an uncomfortable fact. I'm getting very accustomed to the culture of Misplaced Pages leadership. Thank you for this valuable training. - Truth about MVNOs (talk) 15:03, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Not really, no. You came here to troll and try to crowbar your off-wiki agenda into a discussion that is completely unrelated. Now would be a really great time to go away. Guy (Help!) 20:39, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

• Proposed at WT:CSD, addition of a G14 for material created in violation of the terms of use. Guy (Help!) 15:56, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

• question to jimbo is outstanding. he hasn't edited since the 18th. Jytdog (talk) 05:36, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Twas the Night before Christmas

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:10, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Merry Xmas!

Happy Yuletide!

Merry Yuletide to you! (And a happy new year!) )--5 albert square (talk) 20:11, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Ed

Hi!

I started a new section because the conversations above became a bit heated.

I am not a troll but also not a fanboy. I am a potato.

As you are well aware the people behind wikiedu.org have been supporting the Misplaced Pages Education Program in the United States and Canada since 2010.

You wrote: "If you have some ideas about how the movement might better make use of resources, then the best place to start is by getting informed".

Someone explained to me that the WMF does not financially support Wiki Ed, which was a surprise to me.

What do you think about the idea to give Wiki Ed an one-time donation? Their funds are quite limited. Even a relatively small amount would be a big deal to them.

Of course money doesn't magically solve all problems, but I think it might give them a boost.

I think we can all agree that the basic idea behind wikiedu.org is pretty solid.

Maybe you'll think my idea is stupid, please tell me gently, I am here to learn stuff and fix typos.

I am not in any way affiliated with Wiki Ed or any other Wiki-related organization.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 22:43, 22 December 2016 (UTC)