elect_engineer

I'm just saying.

I am pretty sure that they would welcome comments from Hacker News users on that page.

Also see Wikipedia: Camel's nose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose

:Would you really prefer it if Wikipedia allowed David Miscavige ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Miscavige ) to edit the Wikipedia page on Scientology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology )?

:Wikipedia's policies on writing about yourself are spot on. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Best_practices_for_e...

I don't think I have ever hinted that Wikipedia is spending too much on servers. I consider that part of Wikipedia to pretty much be the best managed part, and everything they do increases reliability, helps with disaster recovery, or makes the site faster. I even said "It costs a certain amount to have reliable servers, run a good legal team, maintain the core software, etc. But none of the things that the WMF needs to do require ever-expanding spending."

In my opinion, spending 1,250 times as much to do basically the same job is all the evidence you need. I wouldn't squawk at 5 or 10 times as much, but 1,250 times as much? At that point the burden of proof is on the person who claims that such a huge increase in spending was necessary.

Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn't run out of orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on orphans.

A better charity to compare with Wikipedia would be the the Washington Monument Restoration Project.

See https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc72.htm

Once the Washington Monument is completely restored you can't spend any more money restoring the Washington Monument. If donations keep coming in, you shouldn't spend them on giving executives of the charity free ski vacations (yes, the WMF actually did that) You should instead build up an endowment that is eventually big enough that the interest covers all Washington Monument maintenance forever. Then and only then should you tell donors "look, we don't need any more money for restoring the Washington Monument. If you give us a donation we will use it for other things, starting with restoring the Lincoln Memorial".

There are a huge number of trolls and vandals who would love to be able to avoid being blocked by using a VPN. Wikipedia has to balance the need to stop them with the need to let legitimate VPN users edit.

In May of 2018 I posted a request for Comment and got a clarification on who should be granted IPBE.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:IP_block_exempt...

The result of that discussion was:

:It's likely safe to say that administrator judgement on a case-by-case basis can decide whether the provided justification constitutes a legitimate need and whether that need is sufficient to grant IPBE.. it's pretty clear that the community at large likely also doesn't want it to be routinely granted, for lack of a better phrase, just because someone wants it and could hat-collect it. Someone should likely, for example, actually be affected by a block to request it and/or someone should probably be able to explain their need for the additional layer of privacy rather than just, 'Hey I want IPBE because I said the word privacy.' "

That was the decision of the Wikipedia community. If you think that decision was "silly" you are free to post an RfC and see if the consensus has changed.