Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.
This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup.
And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better.
But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
I made “Wikidata Atlas” several weeks ago. [1] [2]
I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
And they have a huge endowment fund now too that more than covers the cost of Wikipedia...
should have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors, worse (or stale) content, less visits
I’ll be curious to see how true this turns out to be.
I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs.
But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X, vs. asking AI questions about X.
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My most visited website.
Thanks for keeping it up and happy birthday!
Maybe I can prompt an LLM to translate this flying div monstrosity into a flat page I can read.
Since we as a culture will be forgotten, a reminder that the catalan wikipedia was the 2nd one to have an article after the english version :)