> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.

This is incorrect. Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs.

They are seen as typical Wikipedia editors providing an outside perspective and can be given more weight than an "involved editor" in the area in a structured discussion.

Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work.

Currently, the best shill-farm is ran by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself.[1] Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits. Then you are only "activated" by the Discord mod to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. renaming the article Gaza Genocide. This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network.

It's a continuation of a farm formerly led by Tech 4 Palestine and the Twitter user Zei_Squirrel.[2]

Unfortunately, there's not enough evidence to clearly establish this is happening so no action has been taken. Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point.

[1] https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n

[2] https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...

Considering Wikipedia has remained high quality for so long, you're going to have to expand on this. As is, it exudes the same naivety as "the building hasn't gotten robbed, so why are we spending money on security?"

It is probably one of those things, once they are gone you will see just how effective they were.

You should've checked those pages first, they're actually very neutral lol.

Agreeing with the negative portrayal does not make it an unbiased article.

OP’s chosen example was terrible. I’d agree with the premise, based anecdotoly but what a terrible selection of articles to prove a point. Better to link the discussion articles where the editors actively slant the articles

People become more conservative as they age, so maybe the reality quote is about the young and the young edit Wikipedia more

From his 2006 speech/routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, speaking to then president George Bush:

> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias...

His whole thing was phenomenal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY

Gentle suggestion for you to read the guidelines again

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.

Honestly, I think on any politicised topic, that’s a waste of time - there’s a large contingent of Wikipedia editors with a shared deeply ingrained perspective that will reliably back each other up. There are better uses of one’s time than fighting such a losing battle.

> Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”

I tend to use AI to surface sources and concepts, and then go read the sources for myself to verify the AI’s claims. AI has a strong tendency to e.g. misrepresent what journal articles say, but (if they are open access or otherwise available-and they generally are if an AI is citing them) you can then read them yourself and make up your own mind.

AI has genuinely taught me things I didn’t know before about topics of interest to me-e.g. Islamic history-but I’m careful to verify its claims with reliable sources rather than just trusting them-which of course one should do with Wikipedia too

> Personally, I do not know a better alternative.

For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading. You wouldn't be picked to lead a particular domain unless your academic track record made it clear that you're level-headed.

But I think that AI, just like your X friend anecdote, actually illustrates an interesting point: most of the time, when we consult some sort of an online reference, we're not doing anything important, so the accuracy is not critical. Quite often, we're just trying to validate our beliefs or win online arguments. An LLM that's 90% accurate but sounds 120% authoritative (and almost always willing to support your priors) is perfect for that.

> The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources.

This is true of good articles, but the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia tends to lack citations or, worse, cites sources that don't actually support the stated facts.

If an account in good standing adds a cited sentence the likelihood that anyone will actually go and check the source to confirm it supports the sentence is low. It's more likely that the edit will be reverted for other reasons.

Citogenesis is also a real problem, and wildly under-documented.

And most people who read Wikipedia do not take the time to examine all of the sources (if they're even able to - just cite a book if you want to make something up), read through the edit history, and get up to speed on the article-specific politics playing out on the talk page.

Still, it's better than everything else out there.

> stated facts backed by decent sources.

Like WW2-era articles backed by books wtitten in 2003 from an obscure author. And only this author.

That's being overly charitable. Wikipedia articles will often frequently lack sources even on scientific articles and make up completely false history (like a Welsh king who has never existed). Bias is an issue, yes, but it's not the only issue.

Unironically an excellent analogy

I’ve seen cases where Wikipedia is completely missing any coverage of some topic, but AIs can cover it easily, because they are capable of doing a few web searches and pulling up relevant news articles or journal articles.

Admittedly this is mainly an issue for the long tail of more obscure topics. And of course AI is still reliant on some human to produce those articles it is using as input. But Wikipedia isn’t in the picture.

Must be :D

Abstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a large corpus of text to train things on.

Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.

  > give me the information on this page in my preferred language

> "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at.

...So long as you don't mind it introducing random hallucinations into the information.

It's not a good idea for common languages like German or English or French.

But it is a great idea for indigenous languages that aren't in the training data but many people speak, which was the original purpose.

I am hopeful that it'll create synthetic training data for those groups.

You don't have to report the false positive, the link to the place to do it is just included in explanatory edit summary so that you can conveniently use it if you want to. (The reported ones eventually are reviewed by multiple other editors, and then, true or false, are included in the training data to improve the accuracy). The retrained bot is measured against the human-verified vandalism and non-vandalism data so that the bot is expected to generate 1% false positives of all the reverts it does.

By the way, the bot will only revert an edit once, so you can undo that revert and the edit goes back in (at least until a human editor decides it should be reverted). The bot has available to it not just the change text and its placement in the existing article text, but also meta information such as the editor's account information (and I believe logged-out edits happen to get dinged more often simply because those are the major source of vandalizing edits).

> There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market.

What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it.

A lot of people do ask them not to do it.

It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.

It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.

> I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?

A non-zero amount.

This isn't like a huge part of their budget, but people sue wikipedia constantly. Someone has to deal with that. We're also seeing a more complicated regulatory environment with new privacy laws, new nsfw laws, new social media laws. Someone has to keep track of those developments, figure which apply, and figure out what needs to be done to comply with them.

> What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider,

And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house? Big public communities have more Trust&safety needs not less. We want people to feel safe editing Wikipedia.

And then you also have people who are arrested for their edits to Wikipedia (e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-launches-new-offli... ). Often there is not a whole lot anyone can do about that, but having someone at WMF advocating for them where they can seems like a worthy thing to do.

Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees). The previous year the same event had a bomb threat. Part of trust and safety's job is to ensure proper security procedures for in person events

> I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.

People post PII to wikipedia all the time. You are right that WMF intentionally collects less than most, but people post PII to dox others all the time.

> How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?

I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.

> IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.

They do offer database downloads, which are mirrored extensively.

The thing with most distributed solutions is the make tradeoffs which make the product worse. Often they are rigid, and have poor latency characteristics. You could spend a lot of money trying to make a better distributed system only to get nowhere. I think most wikipedians would prefer WMF focus on lower risk ventures.

> > Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.

> Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.

That's a debatable point, but i do think users eventually drift away if nobody fixes the bugs and frustrations they encounter. To be clear though, i dont think every software feature wmf works on is a good idea. Actually i think quite a few are stupid. But i think some are needed.

----

Anyways, my point is that all these things add up, and they are important at least to some extent. I'm sure you could dig in to these items and find parts of each that could be cut. All i want to say is they should not be eliminated entirely. I think to make fair criticisms of WMF budget people need to do the actual digging and not just say any money not spent on a server is wasted money.

That's a fine goal, but at some point, someone should evaluate if that goal is being achieved, if the purported methods actually work.

It's difficult to look at any remotely contentious Wiki page today and conclude that they have succeeded.

Is there any charity (older than five years) where the majority of the money doesn’t go to administrative staff?

What do you think the core purpose of the Wikipedia Foundation is? Do you think the engineers who write the code and operate the site are “administrative staff”?

I don't think you've ever met anybody who worked for a non-profit in your life.

"status-compensated"?

They lost their engineering aspect and are normal businesses now that treat their employees like replaceable cogs and cost centers like all enterprise shops. Nothing particularly bad about tech as they pay better than most other enterprise shops. It is more that they are no longer the tech/engineering led places they once were.

My friends who have been there for many years are overall very wealthy and continue to earn enormous amounts. So the pay continues to be good.

it's still ridiculously good compared to the alternatives, IME it's that a huge cohort of people came into tech during COVID and that was not a normal market. Now things are tightening up and the sense of entitlement is on display.

I've been doing this for a long time, and I remembering quiting my sales job to make 50% less as a developer, but I loved the work, the growth opportunities were amazing and playing the long game worked out.

> ... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared?

Of course not. Paying people has always been undesirable for the people paying. Software has been an exceptionally cushy job for an exceptionally long time, so people are exceptionally excited to pay less.

Since the act of typing has never been the bulk of a software engineer's time -- the act of understanding has been -- the way that AI speeds up development is by allowing the shortcutting of understanding. The understanding of details is what has historically made software engineers expensive and difficult to replace. Any idiot can type fast, but typing fast doesn't someone a software engineer. The excitement is about automating the understanding of problems, because understanding is expensive.

Why do the benefits of logistics go to people at the top of the food chain rather than being spread out evenly among everyone? That type of democratization of the benefits is the exact type of thing unions are meant to achieve.

There is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.

From Wikipedia:

>After graduation, she worked on Wall Street, first at JPMorgan Chase and then Lehman Brothers. She later joined the United States Foreign Service.

Looks pretty wall street to me.

[flagged]

I don’t think there is any dispute about this, the question is to what degree? No one is advocating enslaving the employees and similarly no one (I think) is advocating for spending 100% of an organization’s resources on the salaries of existing employees. So how do we find the right spot in between? With a traditional for profit company, I can comfortably say that employees should do whatever they can to demand as much as they can because the alternative is yielding the wealth to the shareholder class. I don’t have a similar principle for how not-for-profit employees ought to behave because the moral calculus seems more complex.

I've heard this before, but I've not seen anyone go into detail on it (until now)

I want to help fund Wikipedia. Is there a better way I can do that?

What a horrible take.

The janitor deserves to be paid well, work in safe conditions, and have stable hours. They may not provide “the majority of the value” but without them work would grind to a halt.

Same applies to every other job. If it needs to be done, then it should be treated with respect and dignity.

yawn

I think the question was intended more as "what does PE have to do with Wikimedia", not "why is PE a problem".

and which part of this makes any sense at all when applied to the wikimedia foundation

and who exactly owns shares of the 501(c)3 wikimedia foundation?