Astral Codex Ten

Wikimedia Foundation

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Wikimedia Foundation

Article

Wikimedia Foundation is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 10, 2022 and October 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “It is the eventual goal of Wikiciv to be accepted as a Wikimedia Foundation project”; “Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year”; “Hofstadter provoked criticism for forcing the Wikimedia Foundation to censor true but unflattering information”. It most often appears alongside Wikipedia, Bay Area, California.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 10, 2022
  • Last seen: October 19, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#89: A Wiki For Rebuilding Civilization After Disaster My name is Jehan, I've created the site Wikiciv.org as a guide to rebuilding civilization in case of global catastrophe. Its editing is crowdsourced like Wikipedia because a project this large is far too much for one person, or even a team. Technologies and raw materials are linked so both upstream and downstream technologies are easily accessible. There are other projects with similar goals, but they are 1) Not publicly accessible 2) The wrong scale. Books such as "The Knowledge" and "How to Invent Everything" are too cursory to be a practical guide for recreating critical technologies like steel, fertilizer and antibiotics. Meanwhile the "Manual for Civilization" from the Long Now Foundation is 3500 paper books in one corner of San Franciso. Wikiciv fully open and available for database downloads. Distributed backups are encouraged to ensure resiliency during a disaster. WikiCiv could be be helpful even for regional supply-chain disruptions. For example during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were critical oxygen shortages in India. It turns out that a reasonable oxygen generator can be made from zeolite and an air compressor. Wikiciv aims to be a single, interconnected database of "from scratch" manufacturing instructions for situations like these. It is the eventual goal of Wikiciv to be accepted as a Wikimedia Foundation project (like Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage etc). The better Wikiciv becomes, the more likely this is. Get in touch at admin@wikiciv.org
Links For October
October 12, 2022 · Original source
33: Claim spotted on Twitter: Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead? Or is it cancel culture to worry about this?
Inline links: Claim spotted on Twitter, 8%, 43%, some of these grants
Another Bay Area House Party
October 19, 2022 · Original source
“Somebody edited a Controversy section into the Douglas Hofstadter article. It talked about how Hofstadter provoked criticism for forcing the Wikimedia Foundation to censor true but unflattering information from his Wikipedia page. Totally false. Never happened.”