Poll: Poll: Does anyone else donate to Wikipedia?

Do you donate to Wikipedia?

  • Total voters
    92
  • Poll closed .
I won't donate to it. Wikipedia is far too much of a foul sewer beneath the surface to consider it.
 
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I once came very close to donating until I realised how rich they are and how much they use the money for political lobbying. From that point onward I was out.
 
the_chicco said:
Lmao. You clearly have no idea how enterprise IT works
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Perhaps you can show how much you know about enterprise it, in relation to the points raised.

The point is does wiki really need funding from regular people? And will it just die if they don't get enough donations from the average internet users like us?

It's a website at the end of the day and 99.9% of all content served is provided for free by its users, including all images on Wikimedia Commons.

The fact is we have people in charge of things, call them elite, who are in control, who can stop Wikipedia from dying using the change in their pocket. If it ever gets to that point. Therefore if Wikipedia ever dies and it's blamed on "no funds", I would consider it BS.
 
asim18 said:
Perhaps you can show how much you know about enterprise it, in relation to the points raised.
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He clearly doesn't need to. I've spent 22 years in enterprise IT and can tell you that the amount of traffic that Wikipedia generates will require a massive amount of networking and compute power. Not to mention storage that can deal with IOPS in the 1,000,000+ range. That stuff doesn't come cheap. It's also got to be resilient. We're talking 5 nines.
Even if they are running it on AWS the hosting costs will be astronomical.
 
tbh I think anyone that remembers using Britannica on CD knows just how great Wikipedia is. :D

I'll donate something when I am home.
 
asim18 said:
Perhaps you can show how much you know about enterprise it, in relation to the points raised.

The point is does wiki really need funding from regular people? And will it just die if they don't get enough donations from the average internet users like us?

It's a website at the end of the day and 99.9% of all content served is provided for free by its users, including all images on Wikimedia Commons.

The fact is we have people in charge of things, call them elite, who are in control, who can stop Wikipedia from dying using the change in their pocket. If it ever gets to that point. Therefore if Wikipedia ever dies and it's blamed on "no funds", I would consider it BS.
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Put your spliff down fam.
 
Yup.

Dear Paul,

About a year ago, you donated £5 to keep Wikipedia online for hundreds of millions of readers. I'm deeply grateful for your continued support. You are part of the 1% of readers who donated to support Wikipedia. We need your help again this year.

I ask you, humbly: please renew your donation today.
 
Oneshotbigshot said:
Surely they couldn't run on AWS that would be insane cost?
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Their accounts are available online through their website. It shows that they spend a little over $2 Million per year on hosting.

They need to appoint asim as head of IT because he can get them the hosting for free. ...because ISP caches!
 
Oh noes look like the absurd/deflection argument people have arrived. When I'm talking about people in control being able to keep Wiki afloat in the event of it's imminent collapse due to no funding from average internet users, I'm not talking about ME, personally, getting wiki hosted for FREE. LOOOL What sort of mental gymnastics does one have to perform to come to that conclusion :D:D. This has gotta be the most absurd deflective argument I've ever come across. :D

When I talk about the cost of running Wikipedia, I'm not talking about what "enterprise IT" consultants will put on the invoice (we all know "enterprise" IT is terrible value for money (I've worked in it for 8 years)). Nor am I talking about what it will cost if you to purchase enough Amazon Web Services to be able handle Wikipedia's computational load.

I am saying that if Wikipedia was at a stage of imminent collapse due to no funding from average internet users, then it can easily be saved by a few people out of thousands who can provide direct technical contributions...

People in-charge of settlement free internet networks. That's your hosting sorted for free. People need to understand that networks are established. When you buy hosting, the backbone infrastructure is ALREADY there. If 100 people decide to download all 23TB of the Wiki, it will cost them nothing because the end user is paying for an internet connection, and the the backbone IP transit is settlement free.

Now we talk about server hardware, HP throws away servers all the time ;). Do people think Wikipedia renews their hardware monthly or something? It's doing the SAME operations it's been doing since 10 years ago, the volume of requests will have gone up relatively, but we're not talking about any major technical advancement, we're not going from 240p Youtube, to 8K Youtube, text remains textual. There is absolutely ZERO technical advancement/increase for running the wiki.

Thirdly, The creators of the content, or the contributors to wiki aren't paid a dime. All content on wiki is free, including most images.

All they need to do is put a few small images at the bottom, something like "Powered by hp, Akamai, Tata Communications" and bam, bob's your uncle, the fact is all costs can be absorbed by the current establishments of the internet.
 
the_chicco said:
I don't need to, I've worked in it for nearly 25 years.
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You've worked in enterprise I.T since you were 11?

To answer the OP, yes, I do donate from time to time. Regardless of anything sinister going on under the surface, it's a cracking source of information. I even randomly search for things to read on there from time to time, rather than specifically searching for something I want.
 
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