I agree. While WMF only receives the minutest fraction of the value it creates (or I should say, Wikipedia editors because they’re the ones who do the actual work), that’s not the limiting factor. Like education in America—throwing even more money at the people & systems you believe have failed is not the answer.
Even back in 2009 or so when I was warning the WMF about the editor retention crisis, an existential crisis, the WMF did not actually lack money, and it ramped up its fundraising greatly afterwards. What it lacked was any sense of priorities: it spent its time on prestige projects like sending DVDs to Africa instead of actually keeping the wiki community itself healthy and investing in things like a WYSIWYG editor. It’s possible that if you gave WMF enough billions of dollars, it would, by sheer chance, fund the things it needs to fund; but given that it showed it couldn’t spend effectively the money it did get, I am not optimistic about the counterfactual here.
I agree. While WMF only receives the minutest fraction of the value it creates (or I should say, Wikipedia editors because they’re the ones who do the actual work), that’s not the limiting factor. Like education in America—throwing even more money at the people & systems you believe have failed is not the answer.
Even back in 2009 or so when I was warning the WMF about the editor retention crisis, an existential crisis, the WMF did not actually lack money, and it ramped up its fundraising greatly afterwards. What it lacked was any sense of priorities: it spent its time on prestige projects like sending DVDs to Africa instead of actually keeping the wiki community itself healthy and investing in things like a WYSIWYG editor. It’s possible that if you gave WMF enough billions of dollars, it would, by sheer chance, fund the things it needs to fund; but given that it showed it couldn’t spend effectively the money it did get, I am not optimistic about the counterfactual here.