I can't believe a half a million dollars is necessary to reduce harassment. I'm all for reducing harassment online but that much money could make a serious difference applied in a different way. Look at Wikimedia's report on harassment (which this is in response to):
There's room for improvement but not a half a million dollars worth of room for improvement. I suppose people will donate to what's important to them, though.
It sounds like you think this is easy. I think you're underestimating the difficulty in protecting a large, diverse, fairly open online community. In the general case, this is an unsolved problem (see Twitter and Reddit).
I could easily see them spending half a million trying various things and not solving the problem. Or, more hopefully, they'll come up with some good ideas that will work elsewhere too.
To what, things you care more about? You could make the same argument about anything. It would be one thing if you were critiquing the administrators of Wikipedia deciding to allocate resources to this - since they are answerable to a variety of stakeholders - but when you critique someone for choosing to donate to alleviate a specific problem then I fail to see how that's any of your business.
Sure, but I notice a distinct absence of any justification for why your concerns should hold a higher priority, which says to me that you consider harassment to be an issue of inherently low importance.
That's a real asinine assumption to make. I explicitly said in my comment that harassment is a worthy cause, but that a half a million dollars is excessive.
Put a number on it, otherwise you're just blowing smoke. If you can't put a number on it, then you clearly haven't performed the analysis and so your claim of it not being a good use of money is untested.
The same way you actually fix the problems. By figuring out the steps you need to take, and estimating their cost. If you can't do that then how are you going to fix the problems even when you do have the money?
Having worked on anti-abuse/fraud work, I think $500k is light for a site the size of wikipedia. It takes people working full time to create and modify the systems to stop it.
> I can't believe a half a million dollars is necessary to reduce harassment.
I can't believe they think half a million dollars is enough.
Wikipedia is pretty toxic, even now after years of concerted effort to de-toxify it.
I predict someone's going to launch this expensive thing; there are going to be about 750,000 words written about it across different wiki meta pages; some policies are going to be changed (with yet more meta discussion); and then the money is going to run out.
I mean, just look at "Mexican–American War" versus "Mexican-American War" -- that was 20,000 words just on that meta page. (There are easily 500,000 words, some at Arbcom, about - vs – on wikipedia).
It's not just toxic, it's deadly. It certainly brought me to the very edge. There are a number of people who have committed suicide after being harassed on Wikipedia.
That survey is from 2015. 2016 saw a surge in harassment (or, at the very least, a perceived surge in harassment). I'm sure this donation is somewhat of a preventative measure, given our political climate.
Seems like a fine donation to me. Feels like a world where facts are just opinions to some folks, so I think (perhaps and hopefully only cynically) it is going to get worse. If everyone doing good work on Wiki pages is abused into not wanting to do it anymore, that would be a sad and significant loss indeed.
>If everyone doing good work on Wiki pages is abused into not wanting to do it anymore, that would be a sad and significant loss indeed.
Agreed, but Wikimedia's own report (linked above) contradicts this hypothesis. fnovd suggests 2016 is different, but no survey was conducted so it's difficult to say.
I was glad to see a large percentage ignored it, only ~4% surveyed stopped editing in an old survey, but how long would you ignore being harassed? And the number that found it upsetting is higher than those that quit editing. Seems like a preemptive measure.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Harassme...
There's room for improvement but not a half a million dollars worth of room for improvement. I suppose people will donate to what's important to them, though.