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Interpreting Exodus 4:24-26

2025-09-22T00:00:00-04:00

If you asked people what's the hardest part of the Bible to interpret, you'd get a wide range of answers, but "Zipporah At The Inn" would probably be one of the most common:

"On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the LORD met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched his feet with it, and said 'Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!' So he let him alone. It was then she said, 'A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.'" -Exodus 4:24-26, NRSVA [^1].

The context is that God sent Moses down to Egypt, only to try and kill somebody when Moses went to an inn with his wife Zipporah and their son Gershom. There's no clear reason for why God's angry, or even who God's trying to kill here. A lot of translations will try to gloss over this by saying that Moses was the target for God's wrath and that Zipporah threw the foreskin at Moses, but that's just information the translator added to make the verse easier to understand. I won't say that adding information is necessarily a bad thing to do (translation is inherently interpretive), but translation choices need to be justified, and there isn't really good justification for this change. In this article, I want to take a good look at this verse and try to come up with my own interpretation.

The Pronoun Game

The main problem with reading this verse is that it's hard to tell who's doing what to who. Like I said before, it's usually assumed that God wanted to kill Moses, but this interpretation has some problems. At this point in the story, it's pretty clear that Moses is meant to play a major role in freeing the slaves from Egypt. You could argue that portraying Moses as expendable could help elevate Aaron's status within the Exodus narrative, which is a common theme in the Priestly source (more on that later), but this is very abstract. It also doesn't explain why Zipporah felt the need to circumcise her son and who she threw the foreskin at. Again, the conventional wisdom is that the foreskin was thrown at Moses, mainly because she refers to the recipient of the foreskin as a "bloody husband". The problem here is that they were already married, so there's no reason to reaffirm their marital status through a circumcision ritual. It certainly couldn't have been the case that God felt that their marriage was invalid unless their son was circumcised, since there's absolutely no evidence that ancient Israelites ever associated circumcision with marriage, regardless of the terminology used in this verse. I also doubt that the foreskin was thrown at Gershom, since referring to your own son as a husband would be extremely taboo. We shouldn't ignore the possibility that God was the recipient of the foreskin either, although this is difficult to reconcile with Zipporah referring to the recipient as her husband. Finally, there's a deep emphasis that's placed on circumcision and its ability to quell God's wrath. Interpreting this story and figuring out who does what requires us to understand how ancient Israelites viewed circumcision. Traditionally, it's been held that the story is about God trying to kill Moses for failing to circumcise his son, based on the belief that Israelites were commanded to circumcise their children. However, I disagree with this interpretation.

Source Criticism And The Abrahamic covenant

Exodus is part of a collection of Biblical books called the Torah, with the other 4 books of the Torah being Genesis, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Tradition says that Moses wrote the 5 books himself, but modern Biblical scholarship says that the Torah was actually compiled from a variety of similar but diverging sources, leading to basic plot points repeating themselves with meaningful differences between them. There's some controversy about how many sources there are and what verses come from which sources, but there's a rough consensus on there being 4 sources:

-The Elohist (Noted for its reluctance to say YHWH and for portraying God has transcendent)

-The Yahwist (Noted for its anthropomorphic portrayal of God)

-The Priestly Source (Noted for promoting the interests of the Aaronic priestly caste and focuses on properly performing rituals)

-The Deutronomist (Noted for its concern for social justice and centralizing worship in Jerusalem)

When viewing the Torah through the lens of source criticism, we see a major problem with the traditional interpretation of Exodus 4:24-26. The commandment for the Israelites to be circumcised comes from Genesis 17, where it's said that every male must be circumcised at 8 days old as part of the Abrahamic covenant. However, a different account for the Abrahamic covenant is given in Genesis 15. In this account, the covenant is sealed by an animal sacrifice, with no mention of circumcision. Clearly, these accounts come from different sources. Specifically, the Wikiversity article on the Bible identifies Genesis 15 as mostly Elohist and Genesis 17 as Priestly. By comparison, Exodus 4:24-26 is identified as Yahwist. Since they aren't from the same source, there's no reason to think that the author saw a failure to circumcise as a sin. In that case, what's going on?

Circumcision As Human Sacrifice

If Exodus 4:24-26 is one of the most difficult verses because of its ambiguous grammar, Exodus 22:29-30 is one of the most difficult because of how its implications. "You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: for seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me." - Exodus 22:29-30, NRSVA.

Viewed in isolation, this verse clearly indicates that the ancient Israelites used to sacrifice their children to God. Of course, you clearly shouldn't view verses in isolation. This verse aside, there's several other verses that clearly denounce human sacrifices. In fact, one of the most famous stories from the Bible is "The Binding Of Isaac", where the climax of the story is God telling Abraham not to sacrifice his son.[^2] Isn't that enough to say that Exodus 22:29-30 has nothing to do with human sacrifices? Well, no.

Exodus 13:12-13 provides some idea of what's going on here:

"You shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb. All firstborn of your livestock that are males shall be the LORD's. But every firstborn donkey you shall redeem with a sheep; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck. Every firstborn male among your children you shall redeem." -Exodus 13:12-13, NRSVA.

Okay, that seems to settle it. Taking these two verses together, clearly the commandment to dedicate your firstborn to God means to redeem the child. Does that solve everything? No. It's still notable that firstborns are even mentioned in a verse about what animals needs to be sacrificed. Rather than outright say that children aren't supposed to be sacrificed, the verse says they need to be redeemed to avoid sacrifice. This creates a de facto ban on child sacrifice, but the verse implies that firstborn children are still de jure valid sacrificial creatures. Turning the page to Ezekiel 20:25-26, we see the following:

"Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the LORD." -Ezekiel 20:25-26, NRSVA.

Okay, so according to this verse, God actually did make the Israelites sacrifice their children, but just as a temporary punishment. This is mostly what Exodus 13:12-13 says, but implies that firstborn children aren't actually de jure sacrifical creatures. More importantly, it implies that firstborn children really were sacrificed at one point. We run into even more problems when we turn to Jeremiah: "And they go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire--which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind." -Jeremiah 7:31, NRSVA

Now we have a verse saying that God actually never wanted the Israelites to sacrifice their children in the first place. How do we reconcile this with the other verses? The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the ancient Israelites really did sacrifice their firstborns, but rapidly developed a stigma around the practice and attempted to find ways to avoid killing their children. True to the often fragmented nature of the ancient Israelite religion, this resulted in a variety of different traditions about why the Israelites were wrong to perform child sacrifice. Since the ancient Israelites believed that life-essence is stored in the blood, we might expect them to have developed a tradition that involves shedding a child's blood without killing them. With that in mind, here's my interpretation of "Zipporah At The Inn":

"Moses failed to sacrifice his firstborn son, angering God. In retribution, God descends to Earth to personally kill Gershom. Desperate to save her son, Zipporah circumcises her son with a sharp piece of flint, implicitly showing that she didn't have a knife on hand because she never planned on doing this. After circumcising him, she throws the foreskin at God's feet as an offering. To convince God that this sacrifice is valid, she emphasizes the blood that was shed. God accepts this offering as valid and leaves. Triumphantly, Zipporah proclaims that the blood was shed by circumcision, as opposed to child sacrifice."

This would have started out as being exclusively for firstborn males, but it's easy to see how this would expand to all male children out of ambiguity over what to do if the firstborn is a girl or if the firstborn dies before reaching 8 days old, which is when Exodus 22:29-30 says the firstborn son is supposed to be sacrificed. Speaking of which, let's go and take a proper look at Genesis 17:

"This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring." -Genesis 17:10:12, NRSVA

While this verse says that circumcision is meant as a visual reminder of the covenant, it's notable that it says to circumcise on the exact same day that firstborns are supposed to be sacrificed. It also creates a nice parallel to Genesis 15: The Elohist account seals the covenant with an animal sacrifice, while the Priestly account seals the covenant with a form of human sacrifice that's neither literal nor symbolic. Also, the Sanchuniathon says that El (a Caananite deity that God is based on) circumcised himself after sacrificing his son. If this is true, then the ancient Israelites already had a cultural link between circumcision and child sacrifice, making it a natural choice to serve as an alternative to child sacrifice.

Difficulties

While I think that this is the best way to interpret Exodus 4:24-26, there's counterarguments that you could make to it. For starters, not everybody thinks that the ancient Israelites sacrificed every firstborn. Specifically, Joel Baden, Yale professor of the Hebrew Bible, thinks not only did the ancient Israelites not sacrifice every firstborn, this practice didn't happen anywhere in the ancient Near East. Instead, he thinks that the firstborn sons became priests before the tradition that the Levite tribe were the only ones allowed to serve, as recorded in Numbers 3:12. However, I'm not convinced.

Even if there isn't much evidence of the ancient Israelites sacrificing literally every firstborn, there's plenty of evidence that child sacrifice was practised with some frequency in the ancient Near East and Israel itself. I also think that Dr. Baden is too quick to discard Exodus 22:29-30 as evidence for this practice. After all, if we have a civilization that Dr. Baden admits practised child sacrifice, and a text from that civilization says to sacrifice every firstborn child, that's pretty good evidence that they actually did sacrifice every single firstborn.

Another thing is that even if this story actually is about human sacrifice, this isn't a straightforward reading of the text. It doesn't tell us anything about what Zipporah referred to the recipient of the foreskin as a bridegroom, and while its plausible that the story is about human sacrifice, the story doesn't outright say it. It's totally possible that the story is a splinter from a larger (now lost) story that had a completely different message. While we can't discount this possibility, it's pointless to speculate about the message of the hypothetical lost story. Even with the parts that are difficult to explain, the best explanation for the story as a whole is that it's a text about human sacrifice.

TL;DR

Exodus 4:24-26 seems to be an origin myth for the practice of circumcision, which emerged as an alternative to child sacrifice.

Footnotes

[^1] The NRSVA translation says that the foreskin was flung at Moses, but this isn't in the actual Hebrew.

[^2] There's actually a theory that this story was originally about a completed human sacrifice, and that the story was later changed by an editor to match changing norms about sacrificial laws. I'm probably going to write an article about this, but I personally don't believe this.

How I Fell Out Of Love With The Metric System

2025-08-03T00:00:00-04:00

This blog post is heavily inspired by jan Misali's excellent video essay on the topic.

A perennial topic on the internet is that America should go completely metric. It's actually something that people get weirdly heated about, and something that some Americans get weirdly defensive about. Here in Canada, we use the metric and the imperial systems depending on the use case, one of the few countries in the world to do so. I used to feel that we should also try to get rid of the imperial system, but lately, I've started to feel like there's real flaws that come with metrication. This isn't a hit piece on the metric system, but I want to explain why I don't buy into metric supremacy.

The Metric System Is Unwieldy

The great promise of metrication is that having a single system to measure everything is convenient, especially when you need to compare, say, the weights of different objects. This is true, but it comes at the cost of ease and elegance. Under the metric system, length is measured in metres, or units that are metres multiplied or divided by powers of 10 (e.g. millimetres). Historically, the metre was defined as being 1/10000000 of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris. Later on, it was redefined in terms of the wavelength of Krypton atoms, and then once more redefined in 2019 to be in terms of time and the speed of light. Either way, the length of the metre has been essentially the same outside of extremely precise measurements. This is great for if you need to measure the distance between things, because that's what the metre was created for. The problem is when you try to use it for more than that.

I went to Italy a few months ago, and when my cousin asked me my height (I'm quite tall by my family's standards), I could only give it in feet and inches. In Europe, height is measured in centimetres, so they were confused about how tall I really was. Now, this is obviously subjective, but having to give a triple digit number to state my height feels a bit awkward to me. More than that, it just feels like an unnatural way to think about height. Why base my height on the distance between the North Pole and the equator? For that matter, why should I base it on the wavelength of Krypton atoms or universal constants? A much more intuitive way to think about height is to measure it based on human features, such as feet.

Again, I get that this is all subjective, and Europeans probably don't feel that measuring height in feet is natural. Still, I feel like that's because of cultural conditioning on their part instead of metric actually feeling natural here. Another example where the metric system fails is in measuring font size. The standard unit for fonts is the point, which is defined as being 1/72 of an inch. I don't care how European you are, you don't ask for fonts to be 4.2336mm wide, you ask for them to be 12 points wide. Trying to use the same measurement system for fonts, people, and large distances is ridiculous because there's never a situation where you actually need to compare them with each other. Despite the inconvenience of having multiple systems, it feels a lot more natural than just having one.

But What If I Don't Have a Calculator?

The metric system is great if you need to change units without changing the quantity of whatever it is that's being measured, since you just need to multiply or divide by a factor of 10. The problem is when you need to actually divide the quantity and you don't have a calculator on hand, which was everyday reality for everybody up until 15 years ago. This is where the imperial system actually kinda rocks. Take my previous example about how height is given in feet and inches. There's 12 inches in a foot, and 12 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Dividing by 5, 8, and 10 only results in one decimal point, which isn't too hard for most people if they really apply themselves. Dividing by 9 gives an infinite number of decimal points, but if you think of it as a fraction to be reduced, it's not that hard to see that the answer is 4/3. The only digit that's hard to divide 12 by is 7. Now compare that to 10. This is only easily divisible by 2 and 5, and reasonably easy to divide by 3 and 4. That leaves 6, 7, 8, and 9 as hard digits to divide with (math types might disagree with that, but the average person is REALLY bad at mental division). If you're in a situation where you have to quickly divide in your head, feet is better than metres.

Nobody Uses Imperial When Metric Is Better

Despite what some people may say, Americans absolutely do use the metric system. Like, high school students don't learn about Poundals in physics class, they learn about Newtons. The only real difference is that they (and to a degree us up in Canada) use imperial in situations where it doesn't actually matter. A pretty common counter-example is NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed because the software used imperial units when the engineers were expecting the output to be in metric. What this ignores is that the problem code was outsourced to Lockheed Martin rather than done in-house. NASA requires all code to use metric, but Lockheed Martin didn't follow the specifications. By NASA's own admission, the problem was that their checks and balances failed to catch the error, not that the code actually contained an error.

Imperial Is Important, Sometimes

Even though the metric system is the standard for some purposes, there's other circumstances where the imperial system is internationally used. For example, shipping containers are always measured in feet (not cubic feet, oddly enough). If you want to create a metric replacement, you would have to violate the ISO standard and find a different country willing to do the same. For what? Because you're obsessed with a system of measurement? That's ridiculous, just use the imperial system if it works well. That brings me to my final point:

This Doesn't Really Matter

There's times where one system is better than the other, but it's never really a huge deal. It's not like a measurement system isn't going to measure things in a consistent way. Just use whatever system is more convenient, no need to overthink it, much less advocate for a radical overhaul of how we measure things.

A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia

2025-04-04T00:00:00-04:00

Introduction

In a single sentence, Wikimedia is an online movement dedicated to making access to knowledge equitable. Because Wikimedia is a grassroots movement, this means that almost of the information comes from random users that generously volunteer their time to develop projects, not paid experts. To make sure that the projects are used for benefit of the public instead of a corporation's bottom line, the content is given under a free license while the code is all free and open source. You're almost certainly familiar with Wikimedia's most popular project, Wikipedia (how did you end up here if you aren't?), but how familiar? At first, this was supposed to be a short article about Wikipedia and its policies, but as I've dug deeper, I discovered that Wikipedia was merely a single part of an unfathomably complex online ecosystem. This blog post will go over everything that I found in broad strokes, but I strongly encourage everybody to click on the links I provide to get a deep understanding of the subject matter.

Part 0: The Foundation Vs The Movement

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit founded by Jimmy Wales after he founded Wikipedia. Its goal is to provide infrastructure for the Wikimedia projects, offer legal services for Wikimedia, provide critical technical support where necessary, and provide funding for people working on tasks that are important for Wikimedia's health (more on all of that later). The projects and the communities that sprung up around the foundation or were otherwise inspired by the foundation are collectively called the Wikimedia movement. By necessity, these two groups constantly interact with one another to promote their agenda, sometimes blurring the lines between the two. This can be confusing, so throughout this blog post, I'll explicitly say whether or not I'm referring to the foundation or the movement.

Part 1: The Wikimedia Projects

The Wikimedia projects are the core of the Wikimedia Foundation, where information can be freely disseminated. There's 12 projects in total, and they each have their own unique mission. While they're all built with the same MediaWiki software and are hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, they mostly run independently from each other, with a few major exceptions. These projects vary widely in usage, history, and quality.

Besides being dedicated to the free distribution of knowledge, a common unifying feature of the Wikimedia projects is that they're entirely run by the community. That doesn't just mean the content in the projects are created by users, it means that the policies that guide the projects are as well. Despite hosting the projects, the foundation does virtually nothing for them except to maintain the software. While the Wikimedia movement isn't explicitly political, the emphasis on communal effort over an ingrained hierarchy can be seen as a natural extension of the libertarianism of both Jimmy Wales and the broader Free-culture movement that Wikimedia sprouted from.

As you can imagine, there's quite a bit of similarities between the projects, despite being independently run and having different purposes. To avoid being redundant, I'm not going to repeatedly mention shared features like how anybody is allowed to edit. Instead, I'm only going to mention things that I found interesting while I researched the projects, and then explain the features shared by all the projects in part 2 and 3.

Wikipedia

You already know what Wikipedia is. This is the flagship project of Wikimedia and easily the largest online encyclopedia. It introduced 3 major improvements over traditional encyclopedias: it's free to use, it leverages the collective knowledge of the userbase by letting everybody edit at any moment, and it freely uses citations whenever making a claim, something most encyclopedias didn't do because it took up too much space. These are all things that we take for granted now, but these changes were so revolutionary that Wikipedia essentially set a new standard for encyclopedias, which has almost completely killed traditional print encyclopedias. Wikipedia has grown so large that most people think that it's the only thing that the Wikimedia Foundation does, but not many people know exactly how it works behind the scenes.

Wikipedia As A Community

The Wikipedia namespace is the namespace for Wikipedia pages that deal with the internal workings of Wikipedia, but not the Wikipedia articles about Wikipedia. Pages in this namespace tend to fall into 3 different categories:

Pages for communication between Wikipedians. The Village Pump page that's linked to on the front page of Wikipedia contains other links to these sort of pages, where people ask questions about how Wikipedia works, suggest policies, or get help with references, among other things.
Essays about Wikipedia. People have LOTS of thoughts about Wikipedia, and occasionally they take to Wikipedia to write an essay about it. Essays that authors don't want others to edit are written in user namespace, but essays in Wikipedia namespace are designed to be collaboratively written. There's over 2000 of them, so you're sure to find at least 1 essay that you find interesting.
Pages clarifying policies. Wikipedia is big, and that means that you need to have policies to handle day-to-day activities. These pages tell you how to properly select sources, what belongs on Wikipedia, and how conflicts are handled, among many, MANY other things. There's over 300 policies that you are expected to abide by, bringing me to one of the most contentious parts of the Wikipedia community.

The Bureaucracy

While you're obviously going to need at least some policies to run a website as large as Wikipedia, and despite official Wikipedia policy that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, it's pretty clear that the number of rules that you're expected to know if you want to edit is ridiculous. This creates a hierarchy between the average user and the powerusers that actually take the time to learn these policies and track them as they get updated. As anybody who's ever done a fair bit of editing on Wikipedia can tell you, some of these powerusers treat the pages that they've worked on as a fiefdom. If you dare try to correct anything wrong that you see on a page that they think they own, they will often use their superior knowledge of Wikipedia to shut you down by quoting obscure policies, a practice known as Wikilawyering. Besides that, powerusers tend to have more power than casual users because of their willingness and capacity to become admins or other important people in the Wikipedia community.

The actual process to become an admin on the English language Wikipedia is bizarre, to say the least. Rather than a straight-forward democratic election, admins are elected based on consensus. People give arguments for or against the nominee becoming an admin, and then a bureaucrat (which is like an admin but with the authority to appoint admins or other bureaucrats) weighs the arguments based on quality. Not only is there not any rubric that the bureaucrat has to use to weigh the arguments, there isn't even a set amount of consensus that the nominee needs to have. All that's mentioned is that 75% support means that the nomination is likely to succeed and 65% support means that it's unlikely (nominees for the bureaucrat role are said to require around 85%). While anybody can be a nominee, it's very rare for somebody to actually get the role with an edit count of less than 10000.

When Wikipedia does use democracy, it does so in a way that disenfranchises the majority of the community. The main election in the Wikipedia community is the one for the Arbitration Committee, which handles disputes. To simply cast a vote, you need to have had 150 edits in main namespace. For context, having 100 edits puts you in the top 1% of all users. To actually run as a nominee, you need to have made 500 edits, which puts you in the top 0.25%. Either way, there's no way for the average user to actually impact a committee that might make a judgment affecting them. At the same time, Wikipedia does need some sort of barrier to keep out vandals. It's not a simple problem, although I personally think that the barrier's are too high.

Bots

Having a small minority of users handle most of the management of such a large website isn't very easy. To make the process easier, certain users have created bots designed to automate some of the work that would have otherwise been impossible for people to do at scale. A prominent example of this on the English Wikipedia is ClueBot NG, an automoderator designed to detect and revert vandalism. From what I understand, this is a major reason why vandalism, which used to be a common sight on Wikipedia, is now very rare. As you can imagine, the community doesn't want just anybody to create a bot that can modify pages, since it's way easier to create a bot that vandalizes than it is to revert the vandalism. To have your bot accepted for usage, you have to make a request, where your bot will be evaluated to make sure that it follows established policy.

Edit-a-thons

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia obviously doesn't want to not have an article on something important. Unfortunately, Wikipedia tends to have gaps in certain areas, like women's history and art. To cover these gaps and improve the diversity of the overall Wikipedia community, some people organize something called an edit-a-thon, where people get together to collectively edit Wikipedia while learning about how to contribute to the website.

WikiProjects

Not everybody has the same interests, but since there's so many people on Wikipedia, people can form tinier communities within the larger Wikipedia community. These are the WikiProjects, which help maintain and create articles within their sphere of interest. There's tons of them for just about anything that you can think of, and they all have so many different cultures that it's impossible to write about them all. It's interesting stuff, so I recommend diving in head first and seeing all the WikiProjects out there.

Wikipedians In Residence

While the Wikimedia movement is mostly represented by the Wikimedia Foundation, traditional establishments often also want to help out and contribute. One of the ways they do this is by hiring what is known as a Wikipedian in residence. This is a job position where somebody works to make Wikipedia contributions related to an institution's mission (e.g. an art museum hiring a Wikipedian in residence to write articles about art history). Besides their contributions to Wikipedia on behalf of their employers, Wikipedians in residence can also represent Wikipedia's interests by promoting outreach and helping to establish the website as a legitimate source of information.

The Newsletters

A lot of things are happening on Wikipedia, and you probably don't want to go looking for all the news by yourself. Instead, the people that do often create newsletters for the community to read. The biggest newsletter by far is The Signpost, which gives an exhaustive overview of the state of the website every 2 weeks. There's many newsletters across the Wikimedia movement, with several active newsletters being maintained by WikiProjects to keep enthusiasts up to date about the WikiProject and the subject matter.

The Wikipedia Library

Making edits requires citations, and a lot of good sources are hidden behind paywalls. Solution: partner with universities around the world to give Wikipedia editors free access to academic articles. This is The Wikipedia Library. This is technically part of the Meta Wikimedia platform instead of Wikipedia, but its purpose is to be used by Wikipedia editors, and only Wikipedia editors. To access the database, you need to have made 500 edits in total and at least 10 edits in the last 30 days. On one hand, this is an incredible effort to improve Wikipedia and democratize research, but on the other, the high barrier to entry increases the disparity between average users and powerusers. Despite what the description may have you believe, the edits don't actually need to be on Wikipedia. I myself got access to the library primarily for edits that I made on other projects. It also uses a somewhat loose definition of "library". While there's many academic papers, there are also un-paywalled newspapers and access to genealogy records like Ancestry.com. You can learn more about the library on its newsletter, Books And Bytes.

Philosophy Of Editing

There's a big debate on what the role of an editor should be. On one hand, there's an ideology called deletionism, which believes that articles with very low views should be deleted. On the other hand, there's an ideology called inclusionism, which believes that articles should be kept whenever possible. In my eyes, both of them have some pretty good points. On one hand, the inclusionists argue that Wikipedia isn't paper, so it doesn't make sense to prune articles the way that paper encyclopedias used to. While rarely viewed articles only get a few views a day, they collectively get a large number, so removing them would degrade the overall user experience. On the other hand, while Wikipedia isn't paper, storage space is still finite. An individual article is pretty negligible, but there's millions of articles on Wikipedia, which adds up. In addition, every article not deleted is an article that has to be maintained, which takes up energy that could be directed elsewhere. What the community wants is the best of both: countless articles about any niche topic that you can think about but with countless maintainers that can quickly reverse any vandalism and write new articles. Unfortunately, a trade-off has to be made, but nobody can agree on what it should be.

Mascot

While Wikipedia doesn't have an official mascot, the unofficial mascot is widely recognized to be an anime girl called Wikipe-tan. She occasionally shows up in certain Wikipedia articles (particularly articles about anime culture) and is occasionally cosplayed at Wikimedia meetups. She also serves as the official mascot for WikiProject Anime And Manga. Wikiquote and Wikimedia Commons also have their own anime girls, but they aren't really featured that much outside of this incredible image.

Wikivoyage

This is my favourite of the sister projects. Like the name implies, Wikivoyage compiles information about travelling, containing information about different locations, guides, and itineraries for you to use. Unlike Wikipedia, which expects citations to back up the information you add, Wikivoyage doesn't have citations at all. Instead, you're expected to use your own background knowledge when writing articles. Another neat thing about Wikivoyage is that unlike any other project, Wikivoyage doesn't let you directly create pages. Instead, you're expected to link to an empty page and then edit the page from there. The idea is that every page should be connected to another, creating what the community calls a breadcrumb trail between all of the articles. Like every other smaller Wikimedia project, Wikivoyage also has WikiProjects and policies that are similar to Wikipedia's, but less of both because of its smaller size. However, WikiProjects are called expeditions rather than WikiProjects.

Origin Story

Unlike the other Wikimedia projects, Wikivoyage wasn't directly created by the Wikimedia Foundation. Instead, it's an offshoot of a different website called Wikitravel, which has never been affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikitravel was purchased in 2006 by a for-profit organization called Internet Brands, which caused the community to become upset over the monetization of their labour. Shortly after, the German Wikitravel forked to become Wikivoyage, which still wasn't part of the Wikimedia Foundation. However, when Wikimedia expressed interest in creating a travel site, the Wikitravel and Wikivoyage communities voted to move all their content over to the new Wikimedia project. IB tried to stop that with a SLAPP suit, but since Wikitravel content is licensed under the CC, IB couldn't stop the fork.

Depth Of Information

This project is the one with the highest barrier to entry, since getting information to add to this project usually requires you to travel somewhere, a huge investment of time and money. Understandably, a lot of the articles don't have quite as much information as you might hope. However, there's usually something, and many articles are surprisingly detailed. Since I use the English Wikivoyage, there's an obvious bias towards Western locations, while other locations are usually more sparse. Still, even dangerous countries with very little tourism will usually have some information for you to use. Overall, I personally consider this comprehensive enough that you can probably get by just by using Wikivoyage unless you're travelling somewhere obscure.

Ratings

Every article will have an associated rating the quality of information, the quantity of information, and if the writing conforms to the manual of style. Wikipedia does this too, but the rating is usually only shown if the article quality is good, a stub, or if it was ever a featured article. Showing the rating no matter what lets people know if the article is should be avoided or taken with a grain of salt, an important feature when doing something as potentially dangerous as travelling.

Wikisource

Okay, so you can't access the Wikipedia Library, but you still want to find a source for something. Enter another one of the Wikimedia projects, Wikisource. This is a huge repository of freely licensed or public domain texts that can be used as a source, whether it's a book, legal proceeding, or poetry. This project requires a lot more effort than may first meet the eye. A lot of sources are obscure articles that only exist in print, so Wikisource is often the first point where they're digitalized. That requires a lot of proofreading, which is done in the page namespace. To make sure that digitalized texts are properly validated, digitalized texts have to be proofread by at least 2 different people before the text is moved to main namespace. To drum up support for what's a very intensive task, the Wikisource community has monthly challenges to finish proofreading key texts. Wikisource sorts texts by subject and author, which makes it easy to find what you're looking for. Wikisource users also translate certain texts and transcribe films, but this is much rarer because of the high level of effort needed to do that.

Wikiquote

This is a repository for quotes by famous people, TV shows, books, and more. This can be thought of as the intersection between Wikipedia and Wikisource. All quotes have to be verified, famous, and have endured the test of time. However, quotes that can not be attributed to a person are exempt from the verification requirement. While the main purpose of Wikiquote is to record the quotes that a person has said or written, it also gives information about quotes that a person is widely but incorrectly assumed to have invented.

Wikinews

What would happen if there was a project where people around the world could write news articles that anybody can edit as major events evolve? Turns out, not much. This is the graveyard of the Wikimedia project. Even though there's so much news coming out all the time, Wikinews is lucky to get more than 3 articles a day. Even on the English Wikinews, a lot of attention is given to Russia, with most of the rest being given to America. Even parts of the 1st world like Australia get very little coverage, let alone 3rd world countries. Embarrassingly, Wikipedia has totally outshined Wikinews by having an infobox on the front page that gives more information about the news than Wikinews itself, a fact that it mentions on the somewhat gloaty article for the project. Despite its overall irrelevance, I think that there's still a few interesting things about it that's still worth mentioning.

Sourcing

Wikinews blends the sourcing requirements of Wikipedia and Wikivoyage by allowing for articles that get information from other news reports and actual original reporting. Both of these are pretty interesting. Blending new reports may make it seem like you're just rehashing news reports made by other outlets, but many news reports often have information that's missing in others. A blended news report could be more objective than one published by traditional agencies. Also, the collaborative writing process could allow for conservatives to challenge any perceived left-wing bias, potentially leading to more bipartisan and neutral reporting. The original reporting could have also helped foster citizen journalism and provide more information on niche events that happen in the author's city. It's not hard to imagine a different future where Wikinews took off and citizen journalists made WikiProjects for their city, with an accompanying newsletter to rival traditional local news.

Accreditation

To get access to certain events, a journalist needs a press pass. To help citizen journalists, Wikinews will accredit high-quality contributors so that they can get press passes to access restricted areas. Once again, a really cool idea that could have been major if Wikinews took off. Sadly, while there's still users that have accreditation, most of them have lost it because of inactivity.

Informal Dictatorship

The intense bureaucracy in Wikipedia is a product of its huge size and scope. Here, in a digital wasteland, all that's left are a few extremely dedicated users who dominate the project by default. There isn't really any power struggle, or even any form of hierarchy, since there's very few editors outside of them. A crucial aspect of online communities is that the majority lurk, a minority contribute, and a minority of contributors contribute a lot. Wikinews needs a lot of contributors to keep up with the 24/7 news cycle, which means way more users. Without the contributors, the project bleeds users, including users who sometimes contribute a bit here and there, leading to a chain reaction that destroys the project. After that, the project just becomes a group of diehards who work for fun without any expectation that anybody will read their articles. Once they're gone, so is the project. Well, with one exception...

Russia

Remember how I said that Russia is a huge part of what gets reported on Wikinews? That isn't a one-off sort of thing. The Russian Wikinews has almost 1.4M articles, more than all the other languages combined. That's with roughly 55,000 users and a mere 8 admins. I've heard some people suggest that the Russian government uses Wikinews to spread disinformation, but I haven't done a deep dive into this. All I can say is that this certainly looks suspicious.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia projects tend to make heavy use of images, audio, and video in articles. If you have a duplicate of a piece of media that's already used in a different project, then you waste storage space. In a totally unrelated issue, people often need to find a piece of media to use, but can't because of copyright issues. The Wikimedia Commons is the solution to both problems. It's a repository of media files that are freely licensed or public domain, which other Wikimedia projects use to add media to articles instead of locally uploading. While Wikimedia projects sometimes have to use non-free media in their articles, the Wikimedia Commons has done a very good job at making sure that there's almost always a free media file on Wikimedia Commons that editors can use instead. At the time of writing, there's over 100,000,000 files that have been uploaded.

Wikibooks

Despite the name, this isn't a repository for published books that are freely licensed or public domain. Instead, this is a place where people can collaboratively write textbooks for a variety of subjects. If you use Lichess, you've probably used Wikibooks without even realizing: whenever you use the opening explorer, Lichess fetches information about the opening that you're looking at from the Wikibook Chess Opening Theory. It's a cool idea, but unfortunately, writing a textbook is a lot of effort, which runs into the same problem that Wikinews has where very few people are actually willing to put real work into contributing.

The Cookbook

If there's one area where Wikibook really excels, it's The Cookbook. If I had to take a guess, this is because it leverages how shallow books on Wikibooks tend to be. Since a cookbook only really requires you to write a short recipe, the barrier to entry is a lot lower than contributing to something like a math textbook, which requires specialized knowledge and a deep explanation about the subject matter. However, I don't think that's a full explanation about what's going on here. The Cookbook is far too broad and detailed to say that it only took off because it's low-effort. Instead, I think that The Cookbook has spawned an entire sub-community on Wikibooks, having its own namespace and several categories within the namespace that deal with different cuisines, ingredients, and even more abstract ideas like seasonality. While there's a few troll recipes, I would overall say that this is perhaps the best cookbook on the internet.

Wikiversity

This is a place where people can collaboratively create courses to teach people about a wide variety of topics. As with most Wikimedia projects, the overwhelming majority of learning material is in text, not video or audio. That creates a huge level of overlap with Wikibooks, but without The Cookbook to drive traffic. However, unlike Wikibooks, Wikiversity encourages active participation from learners by promoting a philosophy of "learning by doing". Besides courses, a major part of Wikiversity is learning projects, where users get together to discuss certain subjects. Some of the courses can be good, but most courses are sparse on details or focused on more fringe ideas.

WikiJournal

The peer review process for academic articles can be opaque, and accessing articles after they've been published can be expensive. Wikiversity's answer? Create academic journals that are totally transparent and always free. While anybody can comment on articles that are in preprint, people who want to be recognized as a peer reviewer have to contact the editorial board and show them proof of expertise. It's certainly an interesting idea, but it's held back by the fact that articles can be edited by anybody. There's absolutely nothing stopping me from changing the conclusion to an article to fit any particular agendas that I may or may not have, and actually citing a WikiJournal paper must be a nightmare when things can change in ways that you can't predict. All in all, its an interesting experiment, but that I don't think is ever going to catch on. If it does catch on, it might move away from Wikiversity and become an official Wikimedia project, as it's currently applying to become.

Wiktionary

This is one that you probably used before. Wiktionary was originally a dictionary that anybody can contribute to, but it's grown to be so much more than that. Wiktionary is now also a thesaurus and gives the etymology of every word. Despite the name, a better way to think about it is the Wikipedia of language. An cool aspect of Wiktionary is that by letting people add whatever word they want, you can also get information on new and slang words, allowing the dictionary to rapidly evolve alongside the language itself.

Wikidata

If you've been looking at the different Wikimedia projects while reading this blog post, you might have noticed a link on the sidebar called "Wikidata item". This takes you to Wikidata, where information is stripped of all unnecessary details and reduced to structured data. This can be thought of as Wikimedia Commons for facts instead of media. While you can browse this project the same way that you can browse the other projects, it's better used to scrape data for machine learning or as the backend for some sort of Wiki viewer. The primary use of data hosted here is to be used by the Wikimedia projects, where they can all receive up-to-date information by a single change to the linked item on Wikidata. This also helps to ease the problem of maintainability, which is a lifesaver for smaller projects.

Query

Let's say that you need to query Wikidata. Instead of having to write your own scraper, Wikidata has a built in way to access the data using SPARQL. While using this tool isn't necessarily the most intuitive, Wikidata has material to help you learn the language. Because you can directly submit your query to this URL, it's easy to write a script that accesses Wikidata instead of using the GUI.

WikiCite

As you might have guessed, getting citations for academic resources is important to contribute to Wikimedia projects, especially Wikisource. To that end, an initiative called WikiCite has started to add citation data to Wikidata so that there can be a centralized database for users to draw from. At the time of writing this, over 41 million items are instances of "scholarly article", and most of them have at least some citation data such as "author" or "DOI" added. Part of the WikiCite initiative is Scholia, a tool that lets you search for academics or academic articles to see their citation data. It also does some other interesting stuff, like automatically generate a citation graph for each academic article (if applicable) and listing the number of citations the article received every year, as well as how many of those citations were made by one of the authors.

The Limits Of Wikidata

You start to run into problems when your database gets too many queries, and it's begun to seriously affect the Wikidata project. At the time of writing this, the Wikimedia foundation has begun to separate the WikiCite dataset apart from the main Wikidata dataset because the strain on Wikidata servers has become too much. What that means is that you have to specify whether or not you want to search the WikiCite dataset when you use the query service from now on. However, this only scales the Wikidata dataset back to 2018 levels. It's not clear what Wikidata will do to make sure that the project can handle the increased load as more and more data is added. In the mean time, there's an WikiProject to quantify and estimate the various limitations on Wikidata's scope.

Wikispecies

This is a project designed for biologists needing to look up information about species and other taxons. Specifically, information about animals stripped of all unnecessary details and reduced to a database of species. Hmm, where have I heard that before? As you might have guessed, this is pretty much Wikidata but for biologists and without an easy way to scrape information. The main reason it exists, it seems, is because it was created before Wikidata was conceived of. Wikidata doesn't seem to have quite enough information to totally replace Wikispecies yet, but I feel like Wikispecies is the project that's most at risk of getting deprecated.

Wikifunctions

This is the newest Wikimedia project. This is a repository of computer functions, which are written in Python and Javascript. Despite first appearances, this isn't meant to be some sort of FOSS replacement to Github. Instead, it's meant to be used for an upcoming project called Abstract Wikipedia.

Abstract Wikipedia

It's easy to take it for granted if you speak English, but some of the Wikipedias for other languages can be pretty lacking in information. Also, smaller Wikipedias are at risk of being taken over by bad actors who want to push an agenda or pretend to be Scottish. Something clearly needs to be done, and what the Wikimedia Foundation thinks should be that something is Abstract Wikipedia, which is meant to be language-independent. This project is still in its infancy, but the idea is that the functions on Wikifunctions could be used with the data on Wikidata to create an abstraction of an article, which is then made readable by using a program called a renderer. This should provide more information than can be provided by normal integration with Wikidata. This isn't on the table yet, but there's no reason to think that this couldn't be deployed for other projects if it proves to be successful.

Part 2: The Technology Behind Wikimedia

As an online organization, The Wikimedia Foundation obviously makes heavy use of software and hardware. Unlike most organizations of its size, however, the foundation tries to document or open source as much of the technology as possible. While maybe not for everybody, looking at the technology behind Wikimedia can be interesting enough that I decided to give it its own section.

Wikitech

As a foundation that runs one of the largest websites in the world, it's not a surprise that Wikimedia has a very complex tech stack, which is totally documented on Wikitech. To be totally blunt, there's parts of this that I just don't understand. I'm only going to look at the parts that I actually understand and think is noteworthy, but Wikitech has way more detail about everything that I'm going to write and not write about in this section.

Grafana

To monitor the health of the Wikimedia infrastructure, Wikimedia has 100s of publicly available dashboards at Grafana. Some of these dashboards link to documentation about what the metrics mean, but others don't. Of course, you probably aren't going to spend much time looking at these dashboards unless you already understand this stuff.

Open Source

Whenever possible, Wikimedia uses free and open source (FOSS) software, which anybody can contribute to. Some of the code is hosted on Gitlab or Github, but most of it is hosted on Gerrit. Once you get a developer account to get access to Gerrit, there's tons of different projects that you can work on. Information about contributing to the infrastructure can be found directly on Wikitech, while information about the other projects can be found on the Wikimedia Developer Portal.

Phabricator

On top of the Git host, most software projects will have an associated Phabricator page. This is used for managing work, but people who don't develop can also use it to report bugs, issues, or to request features. It's somewhat analogous to the issue page for a Github project.

Cloud Services

Yup, Wikimedia has its own cloud computing platform, which is for developers who wanted to create programs to improve the projects. To provide hosting, the Wikimedia Foundation offers a cloud service called Toolforge. True to Wikimedia form, anybody can make an account and start writing their own tools, as long as they follow a fairly basic set of rules. However, this is far from the only cloud service offered by Wikimedia. There's also PAWS, which hosts Jupyter notebooks for analysis of Wikimedia projects and small bots, Cloud VPS, which is similar to Toolforge but is an Infrastructure as a service solution instead of a Platform as a service solution, and Quarry, a web interface to run SQL queries against Wikimedia projects. There's also Superset, which is also a web interface for SQL queries, but with the additional benefit of being able to create dashboards.

Data Dumps

We tend to take it for granted that the Wikimedia projects are always up and accessible. However, that isn't true for everybody. Some countries have censorship laws that prevent citizens from using these websites, while other people have unreliable internet that makes it impossible to access any website whenever you want. Thankfully, the Wikimedia Foundation dumps every single project every 2 weeks, as well as various statistics. Not only can you download the contents of these websites, you can also download the revision history and statistics as well. This also makes it good for research and archival in the unlikely event that Wikimedia goes down. These dumps can't be read directly, but they can be read with FOSS tools such as Kiwix.

Mediawiki

I already mentioned that the Wikimedia projects are run using a piece of software called Mediawiki, but I never actually explained what that is. Mediawiki is a FOSS software system that was developed in 2002 to better run Wikipedia after the pre-existing software was found to be too limiting. Knowing how to use Mediawiki well can massively change your user experience in ways that you wouldn't expect from how old-fashioned the UI looks. It also comes with an API that can be used to scrape Wikimedia pages.

How It Works

MediaWiki is essentially a no-code solution to modify a website. Instead of using HTML, it lets you write in plain-text and has built-in functionality to let you link to different pages on the website. Specifically, it uses a markup language called wikitext, which ironically doesn't necessarily have to be text (a change made to accommodate Wikidata). All changes made to a page are recorded in a public revision log, which can be used to revert bad edits.

Extensions

There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Very often, users or admins will want to customize the UX for MediaWiki to either fit their own needs or the needs of the community. For that, you usually turn to extensions, which range from mere cosmetic changes to adding new functionality.

Templates

Templates are pages designed to be included in other pages. This is useful for when you need to frequently repeat an action while editing a project.

Namespaces

Namespaces are groups of pages, which are all connected by their name. When using a Wikimedia project, the pages that you're going to look at the most are the ones that make up mainspace, which is the name space dedicated for whatever the project is actually about. However, there's usually also a namespace for all the user pages, a namespace for discussion about the articles in mainspace, and a namespace for templates. As a general rule of thumb, you'll have to do a lot of searching to truly become acquainted with all the namespaces that a project has to offer.

User Rights

An important feature of Mediawiki is user rights, which restricts or grants rights to certain groups. Mediawiki allows for admins to create groups and assign them rights, but there are also groups that are created by default. The 2 big ones are the admin and bureaucrat groups. Like the name implies, users assigned to the admin groups, well, administrate the website. They modify the CSS, ban malicious users, and do whatever else is needed to keep the community functioning properly. The bureaucrats are similar to the admins, except they can add or remove anybody from any group, including the admins.

Part 3: The Other Stuff

There are many aspects to the movement that are deeply important, but not part of the main projects whatsoever. Some of those things will be given their own section, but this part of the blog post will exclusively deal with the miscellaneous stuff that doesn't neatly fit in any other category.

Metawiki

This is the wiki for the movement as a whole, rather than any individual project. Here, you can find details about what Wikimedia is doing, how it's doing it, and what it plans to do in the future. This is also a good place to find events and documents explaining various initiatives that Wikimedia has tried or are currently ongoing. While contributing to this wiki might seem harder than the official projects, Metawiki is always looking for volunteers to help translate content. There's always a lot that needs to be translated, even for common languages, so it's a good entry point for bilingual people who want to help out the movement. Alternatively, if you're the kind of person who's better with computer languages than human languages, you can also volunteer to provide tech support to the various communities that make up Wikimedia.

Stewards

These are the admins of admins. They can access any public Wikimedia project and change the user rights of anybody. The idea is that they can serve as admins to projects that have yet to appoint their own admins and to act in emergencies where the proper admin is incapacitated or too slow to act. There's annual elections, but only admins who have at least 600 edits on one project and 50 edits made in the last month can run. Similar editing requirements also apply to anybody who wants to vote, but you don't need to be an admin. To be elected, candidates must receive at least 30 supporting votes, and at least 80% of the votes must be supporting.

Wikimedia Incubator

Most Wikimedia projects have different language versions. Rather than go through the effort of making a version that nobody ends up using, potential new versions are instead prototyped on Wikimedia Incubator. From there, the community can contact a group called the Language Committee for approval to become a new project. In true Wikimedia fashion, anybody can create a new language version of any project besides Wikidata, which is language-agnostic, Wikifunctions, also language-agnostic, Wikiversity, which hosts new language versions on Beta Wikiversity, and Wikisource, which hosts new language versions on the multilingual section of the website. The languages that get prototyped depend on the project. Wikipedia has already covered all the major languages, so all that's left is languages that just barely have enough speakers to justify a new language version. Meanwhile, the less popular projects often have major gaps, particularly Wikivoyage, which has major languages like Indonesian and Czech stuck in the incubator.

The Project Proposal Process

The Wikimedia projects are created through a proposal process. People interested in creating a new project propose it for the community to debate on, create a demo, and hopefully get proper recognition. Similarly, Wikimedia projects that seem to be dead can be removed by the community if someone proposes to delete it.

Wikispore

Wikispore is an experimental project where people can create their own miniwiki centred around particular topics like art or biographies. This makes it similar to Fandom, but without the ads or bloat. Because Wikispore is a collection of separate wikis, searching for things can be hard. However, it has a small but decently sized community, and by far the top contender to become a new Wikimedia project.

Research

At this point, I've hoped that I've convinced you that the Wikimedia movement is massive. Because of its scope, there's a lot of potential for research about online sociology, data science, and natural language processing. As part of this, Wikimedia has a dedicated page where researchers can publish the work that they've done or are in the process of doing. A fairly large number of these projects are commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation itself in order to create products and improve the user experience, which offers an exciting insight into what Wikimedia projects might look like in the coming years. There's a monthly newsletter if you want to receive regular updates about the research that goes on (this newsletter is also published as a section in The Signpost).

Outreach Programs

People have different interests, which means that the level of information you can get about certain topics can vary widely. Because of this, there's occasionally campaigns to encourage efforts to edit articles in underrepresented areas and programs to help teach people not used to Wikimedia how to participate. These campaigns and programs can be found at the Outreach Dashboard, which also contains information on how to create and run a campaign or program of your own. These campaigns will openly publish metrics about their impact and level of participation, which is helpful for seeing if your campaign is the worth the effort it took to run it. Some of these campaigns have prizes, so it's definitely worth looking through and seeing if there's one that you find interesting.

WikiEducation

Despite what your middle school English teacher might have said, Wikipedia is actually a pretty decent source of information. More importantly, if you're in the 3rd world, you might not have access to more traditional forms of information like books. To that end, the Wikimedia Foundation has been putting a lot of effort into promoting the use of Wikipedia (and the other projects) in educational settings. As part of its commitment to transparency, the programs funded by Wikimedia are publicly listed alongside their goals and the institutions running them. The flagship program is Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom, which teaches teachers on how to use Wikipedia as an educational resource. A pilot program that educated 7000 teachers in the Philippines, Bolivia, and Morocco found that the program drastically improved teachers's view of Wikipedia and their willingness to use it in the classroom. This program has only been done in 7 countries, all of them 3rd world, but the training material can be freely accessed and used by everybody.

A very closely related initiative is the Wiki Education Foundation, an organization created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2013 in order to handle the pre-existing Wikipedia Education Program. The Wiki Education Foundation has programs for universities to assign Wikipedia writing assignments, to teach researchers about how to use Wikipedia, and for institutions to develop an initiative to add their specialized knowledge to Wikipedia.

Finally, there's WikiLearn, an initiative by and for Wikimedia users to learn about leadership within the community, such as teaching grant recipients how to run a program safely or to help onboard people who are considering whether or not they want to run for a seat on the WMF Board of Trustees. This is done by offering courses that can be used by anybody for free, even if the course is only meant for a niche audience. The courses are currently only made by staff and trusted affiliates, but once a governance model is made for WikiLearn, there's plans to let everybody create courses.

Meetups

People like community, and while most Wikimedia communities are obviously online, there's still an appetite for meeting people IRL. The most prominent Wikimedia meetup by far is Wikimania, an annual conference where editors and interested parties can learn and discuss about various issues surrounding the projects. However, this is far from the only way to meet other editors IRL. There's tons of meetups happening in major cities around the world, which you can find at a dedicated Wikipedia page, and if there isn't one near you, you can always start your own.

GLaM

This is a movement to work with Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums in order to provide content for the Wikimedia projects. This is often done by having these institutions appoint a Wikipedian in Residence to write articles, but they can also integrate Wikimedia content into the institutions themselves, like by pairing exhibits with QR codes that link to relevant Wikipedia articles. The people behind GLAM maintain their own outreach page for people who want to contribute and have a monthly newsletter for people who want to monitor the progress of this movement.

Part 4: The Future Of Wikimedia

Wikimedia is immensely large, but it's not done growing. The community has ambitious plans on how to improve the features that the Wikimedia projects already have and to innovate to improve the user experience.

Annual Plan

Rather than just have a plan for a single year, the annual plans that the Wikimedia movement drafts straddle 2 sequential years (e.g. 2021-2022). Because of that, this section showcases 2 plans, not one.

2023-2024

Every year, the foundation devises and releases a plan for short-term goals, which is ratified by the community. For the 2023-2024 period, the Wikimedia Foundation prepared for radical shifts in the movement that will be caused by the rapid adoption of the internet by the 3rd world and generative AI, among other things. At a high level, the foundation planned to continue its commitment to equity, to prioritize the user experience of established editors so they can better run the projects, and to prepare for long-term changes in its financial model. Of course, there's a lot more to the plan than that.

External Trends

Wikimedia doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the foundation has to plan accordingly. A surprising trend that the plan is shaped around is the tendency of younger audiences to use social media to get information. Many social platforms now have built in search features, which threatens traditional search engines and potentially harms the SEO of Wikimedia projects.

Besides losing market share to social media, both search engines and the Wikimedia projects also suffer from people directly asking LLMs for information instead of looking it up. The foundation would like to leverage LLMs where possible, but there's difficulties caused by copyright, hallucinations, and cost. LLMs also cause damage by allowing bad actors to spread disinformation at scale. All in all, it's clear that LLMs are going to have a major impact on the movement, but nobody knows whether or not it'll be positive.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure goals for the 2023-2024 period are heavily based on a listening tour undertaken by Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, after she was hired. Broadly speaking, the goals are to improve the experience for volunteers (whether technical or otherwise), to provide better insight into Wikimedia using the data collected by the foundation, and to increase the spread of Wikimedia into new demographics, particularly people who live in the 3rd world.

Equity

As part of a larger drive to increase equity within the Wikimedia movement, the foundation has several equity goals for 2023-2024. To begin with, the foundation focuses on each of the 8 main regions of the world and decides on initiatives for every one of them. For example, a goal for Sub-Saharan Africa is to increase editor retention, while for North America, where many Wikimedia editors come from, the goal is to work with large-scale organizations like the Digital Public Library of America to create contribution pipelines. On top of that, there are thematic goals that improve equity across the board by encouraging volunteers to contribute content relating to culture and heritage.

Safety

In a similar vein to the push towards equity, the Wikimedia Foundation also wants to make sure that every user feels safe and welcome within the movement. Part of that is lobbying politicians around the world to inform them about how Wikimedia communities work so that they can pass laws that protect them. This has become incredibly important in recent years as governments around the world create regulations for Big Tech, which affects Wikimedia projects without considering their unique needs and purposes.

Disinformation is also treated as a safety issue within the annual plan, since the Wikimedia Foundation sees efforts to prevent people from accessing truthful information as a human rights violation. This is particularly difficult because the open nature of Wikimedia makes it exceptionally easy to intentionally add disinformation compared to more traditional projects. The foundation plans to use machine learning to help volunteers to identify disinformation and to increase the reliability of sources, but maintains that the best way to counter disinformation is a safe and diverse community that can fill in knowledge gaps and identify disinformation themselves. Accordingly, the foundation also plans to find ways to prevent surveillance of volunteers so they can't be intimidated or forced to add disinformation by bad actors.

Effectiveness

A big problem with running a foundation as large as Wikimedia is that inefficiencies tend to creep in. This problem is made even worse by that fact that the foundation has multiple projects that more or less act independently of each other, which means that multiple teams often work to solve the same problem without collaborating. Because of this, a major goal for the foundation this year has been about improving effectiveness. Additionally, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue to work on refreshing and implementing their new values, which have been progressively adjusted for years with collaboration with the community.

Foundation Details

To improve transparency, the 2023-2024 plan comes with an explanation on what the foundation actually does. This is essentially a breakdown on how money and human resources are allocated, as well as an overview of what every group in the foundation is doing this year. Additionally, the report also gives details about how salaries for employees are determined and gives some interesting stats about how many employees there are, among other things.

Reports

As part of their continuing dedication towards transparency, the foundation publishes quarterly reports so the community can be assured that the foundation is adequately meeting their needs. Metrics were only reported up to quarter 3, but the progress report for Q4 was included in the foundation's annual review.

2024-2025

Overlapping with the 2023-2024 plan is the more forward-looking 2024-2025 plan. Because this is more forward-looking, it's not as fleshed out as the 2023-2024 plan. However, there's a clear overarching theme of sustainability. Specifics aside, the plan for this period is to make Wikimedia "multigenerational" by improving the technical infrastructure, encouraging new editors to join, and decreasing reliance on donations.

2030 Movement

These annual plans are part of a much broader plan enacted in 2017 to revamp Wikimedia by 2030. The 2 goals are to offer knowledge as a service and to make access to knowledge equitable. To fulfill the goals, the community has decided on 10 recommendations and 10 principles to guide development year over year. Additionally, the community has settled on a list of almost 50 initiatives to implement before 2030 arrives. By design, the 2030 movement has been a 4 stage process. The first stage was the previously mentioned 2017 discussions, where it was established that the community wanted Wikimedia to become essential infrastructure for the ecosystem of free knowledge. After establishing a vision to work towards, the community began to develop the previously mentioned recommendations and principles during the second stage of the 2030 movement. This was spearheaded by several designated groups who focused on key areas such as diversity and community health. The current stage is the transition stage, where the community goes from coming up with ideas to actually developing ways to implement ideas. The last stage will the implementation stage, where the ideas will finally be actualized.

Part 5: The Wikimedia Foundation

The role of The Wikimedia Foundation in this article has been like the foundation's role in the movement: omnipresent yet in the background. Now, I want to look at the foundation as something deserving of study on its own.

Leadership

The foundation is run by a board of trustees composed of 16 people. Under current regulations, the board is made up of Jimmy Wales, 7 people appointed by the board, and 8 people elected by the community. The board votes on resolutions, with assistance from various committees. By regulation, the committees must have members from the board, but they also accept volunteer members if the board judges them to be sufficently qualified. A list of all the committees that the board is involved with, as well as the list of trustees, can be found here. A list of board meetings and their recorded minutes can also be found here, but they seem to be incomplete.

Foundation Wiki

Unsurprisingly, the foundation has chosen to make information about itself available as a wiki. Not only does this include all the minutes and resolutions of the board, it also includes the resolutions and documentation for the Endowment and Enterprise product as well. There's nothing here that's particularly interesting if you're not a lunatic that decides to write a blog post about all of Wikimedia, except for one thing...

The Memory Bank

Recognizing the importance of preserving historical information about Wikimedia, the Foundation Wiki has a memory bank to record key events, collect stories from individuals, and develop a cohesive narrative for how Wikimedia came to be. Call this a bold claim, but I think that this will be an incredibly important resource in the future when academics begin to study Wikimedia as something deserving of study in and of itself.

Financials

So, I don't think I need to say this, but running an organization of this size and scope is pretty expensive. In the past couple of years, the Wikimedia Foundation has caught flack for perceived mismanagement and waste of funds, so I want to dedicate a section of this blog post to look at how the foundation gets and spends money.

Grants

You've probably noticed by now that there's a lot of people outside of the foundation that are doing important work, online and offline. The way they get the money to do these things is by asking the foundation for a grant. There are several different types of grants with different application processes, but they generally focus on funding people or organizations that foster Wikimedia communities, doing research on Wikimedia, working on a task aligned with the Movement Initiative, running non-profits aligned with the Wikimedia movement in sub-Saharan Africa or ESEAP, running a conference about Wikimedia, miscellaneous short-term projects, or promoting equity within the Wikimedia community. The last category started in response to the BLM protests of 2020, which made it immediately controversial for its perceived politicization of Wikimedia.

The application process differs across the various grant categories, but the general process is submit your proposal for review by the community at large, which will be used by the relevant committee of volunteers and designated Wikimedia employees to determine if your proposal should be accepted. Grants given to promote equity are a notably opaque exception to an otherwise exceptionally transparent process, which is deeply concerning given that these grants are typically 6 figures while other grants usually max out at 5 or even 4 figures. Notably, many of the other grants also support equity, which makes a dedicated equity fund even more odd. As we'll see later, these grants are a major source of controversy for critics of the foundation's spending.

Fundraising Banners

If you use Wikipedia without adblock or disabling them in your account settings, you've probably noticed the banner ads begging you to donate to keep the website running. Despite the ads, Wikipedia isn't in danger of running out of money anytime soon. Instead, the need for funding is for all the other things. These ads have gotten some heated criticism, and for good reason. Even as an unapologetic Wikimedia stan, I have to admit that it's scummy to act as if you're going to run out of money to get donations from ordinary people. To make matters worse, an executive director admitted that money isn't a limiting factor for the foundation all the way back in 2012. As far as I can tell, there isn't really a coherent reason for why the foundation decided to seriously harm their reputation with these misleading banners. Is it as scummy as selling user data for profit? Eh, probably not, but that doesn't make it okay. Even if it gets them funds in the short term, in the long term, this strategy alienates people and potentially harms the foundation's ability to secure funding in the future.

The Endowment

For its part, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on reducing its dependence on donations. Part of this has been the Wikimedia Endowment, which generates revenue for the foundation to use indefinitely. The endowment was launched in 2016 with the goal of raising $100,000,000, which it did ahead of schedule in 2021. However, it reached its goal by receiving substantial donations from the Wikimedia Foundation itself, which made it a burden that caused the foundation to spend so much to begin with.

Wikimedia Enterprise

Another way that the foundation is reducing its dependence on donations is through a product called Wikimedia Enterprise. This provides APIs for accessing data from Wikimedia projects, like snapshots of an entire project or the contents of an entire article at any moment. To be blunt, there isn't any real direct benefit to using these APIs, since they can be easily replicated by a scraper or downloading from the free data dumps. The true reason why somebody would want to use these APIs is because they come with official support, which at the very least let's you CYA if something goes wrong and your boss wants answers. The product made $3,200,000 in 2022-2023, which makes up almost 2% of Wikimedia's revenue.

The Wikipedia Store

A more mundane way for the foundation to make money is by selling merch. Despite technically being for the movement as a whole, it almost exclusively sells merch with Wikipedia labelling, which is an awful snub to the other projects that desperately need name recognition. The store even has its own travel section, but for some reason, nobody thought to sell some stuff that has Wikivoyage's symbol printed on it. That may sound like a small thing to get worked up over, but for somebody that's immersed themselves into every project for this blog post, the bias towards Wikipedia is genuinely appalling.

Does Wikipedia Have Cancer?

Whenever talking about Wikimedia's financials, it's difficult not to mention a famous essay called Wikipedia Has Cancer. It's worth reading the essay in its entirety, but the gist of it is that the Wikimedia Foundation has been rapidly increasing its spending year after year without any obvious need to spend more money. The concern is that one day, the foundation will start to spend money that it doesn't have, harming or possibly even destroying the movement. You should draw your own conclusion about this essay, but here are my thoughts. First of all, deciding that the Wikimedia Foundation has nothing to do because Wikipedia is mostly the same as when the foundation started is simply wrong. Even back in 2005, which the author lists as a time when the Wikimedia Foundation was "healthy", the movement already included Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, and Wikinews. The mission was always to make the world's information globally accessible through the internet, and Wikipedia is just one part of that. Also, the cost of running several of the largest websites (one of which is in the top 10 most visited websites in the world) doesn't scale linearly with usage. Instead, there's overhead from having to hire people to manage data centres, and then even more overhead from having to hire managers, HR, and people to do fundraising to pay for all these salaries. I'm also not convinced by the concern that the Wikimedia Foundation will take on debt to fund the ever-increasing spending if the fundraising dries up. It wouldn't be pleasant, but the Wikimedia Foundation can tighten its belt, lay off some people, turn down grant applications. It's never said exactly why the Wikimedia Foundation would take on debt, but I think that the author is assuming that the increased spending is because of incompetence, not because of self-contained programs that can be shut down in hard times without affecting the main projects. Even though I have a pretty negative view this essay, I still think it brings up a very important point about the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation's vision. A huge portion of its spending is towards grants, which doesn't directly help the main projects. The expenses for the foundation is incredibly large, and it's worthwhile to question if the foundation is growing too fast.

The Impact Of Spending

I've spent quite a bit of time listing all the things that the Wikimedia Foundation spends money on, but I didn't go that much into impact. While there's less information on how much certain features are used, there's enough to paint a pretty pessimistic picture. Quarry has had less than 9000 users in it's entire lifespan at the time of writing, outreach campaigns rarely get more than 1000 editors participating, and there are entire projects that feel borderline unusable. Is this worth the money that's spent on it? I genuinely don't know. For starters, it's often not really possible to get a good estimate on how much things even cost. For example, Quarry and PAWS were both developed by a very talented user called Yuvipanda, but were then worked on by actual staff members as part of their job. There's no good way to quantify the amount of money that indirectly went into the project because of the foundation's support. Another thing is that impact isn't easily defined just by the number of people who use the product. ClueNG is only used by Wikipedia admins, but its impact is felt by everyone. At the very least, it's okay to spend money while revenue keeps increasing. Unfortunately, when people see this amount of spending without a good explanation, it feels like the foundation is just throwing money away. To a small degree, when you're a foundation this large, that actually does happen because there's always some level of false negative when trying to weed out scammers. In 2022, there was a viral Twitter thread where somebody discovered that Wikimedia gave a fairly substantial grant to an organization who made questionable content as part of its drive for racial equity, which in turn gave a grant to a person who did an experiment that accidentally killed a few octopi. This was then followed by countless people saying that they were no longer going to donate to Wikipedia because they were outraged over this misuse of money.

It would be easy to criticize these people for unquestioningly accept what a random person on Twitter told them, but that misses the point. People aren't just getting fed up with Wikipedia because of a random person on Twitter or "Wikipedia Has Cancer", they're getting fed up with Wikipedia because these match up with their very legitimate impression that Wikipedia is the exact same now as it was 10 years ago. Regardless of whether or not the money that the Wikimedia Foundation is spending has enough impact to justify the costs, users certainly have to believe that it does. Because the foundation has failed to effectively state the breadth and importance of the Wikimedia movement, they're facing backlash, which ironically affects their ability to get donations in the future.

Transparency

A major complaint from the essay was that the foundation isn't sufficiently transparent about how the money they get is spent. Particularly, the author feels that the foundation doesn't do enough to explain what the grants are and why they're given, even though the grants are one of the foundation's largest expenses. However, the foundation publishes their annual plan and a Q&A about their audit every year. Because of its open nature, even small expenses can often be found if you look for them, though it's difficult because of the massive breadth of Wikimedia (should have thought about that before writing this blog post...). To the author's credit, the Wikimedia Foundation could compile some of this information themselves and provide it to the community for better understanding. To the foundation's credit, they already go above and beyond when it comes to transparency by publishing as much financial information as possible and doing Q&A's about their finances. The fact that they allow for the community to actually get involved with the grant approval process is also incredibly unusual and totally solves the author's complaint that the community doesn't have enough say in how the foundation's money is spent.

Part 6: The Other Groups

Besides the foundation proper, there's a whole cottage industry of organizations that are centred around the Wikimedia movement. These groups usually either represent the interests of certain geographic areas (most commonly entire countries) or exist to ensure accurate and exhaustive information about a particular subject (e.g. art). While it's difficult to quantify and research them all, there's many organizations that are officially approved by the Affiliations Committee. Strictly speaking, you don't actually need to be recognized to form a group focused on Wikimedia, but recognition provides you the right to use official trademarks and recieve funding from the foundation. Since these organizations can be considered part of the Wikimedia movement, and virtually all of them have a significant prescene on at least one project, they deserve to be discussed.

User Groups

These are the most basic kind of affiliates. The only requirements to join are to have at least 3 active editors that have an account with more than 500 edits on a Wikimedia project (800 if it's Wikidata), at least 10 members overall, and to agree to the code of conduct. Even these requirements can be waived in the application. Because of its flexible structure, it's the most common type of Wikimedia affiliation. The downside is that they only get to use Wikimedia trademarks and are only eligible for the Community grant.

Chapters

These organizations are dedicated to geographical regions, most commonly entire countries. Not only do they get all the benefits of being a user group, they also get Wikimedia merchandise to hand out, access to the Annual Plan grant, and scholarships to send 2 members to Wikimedia, among other things. The downside is that the requirements are much more stringent. They have to be legally incorporated, show that their motives are in line with the movement's mission, have at least 10 editors with accounts over 6 months old that have 300 edits to a single project, and have already existed for 2 years, preferably as a user group.

Thematic Organizations

These affiliates are very similar to chapters in what they get and what they have to do. However, instead of being focused on a geographical region, these organizations are focused on an overarching thematic purpose. There's only 2 of these affiliates: Amical Wikimedia, which focuses on the Catalan language and culture, and the Wiki Project Med Foundation, which is focused on providing accurate medical information on the Wikimedia projects.

Reporting

Chapters and thematic organizations have to provide annual financial reports, while all 3 types of affiliates are expected to provide annual reports about their operations to make sure that they're still contributing to the Wikimedia mission. As part of Wikimedia's undying commitment to transparency, all of these reports are made available for public viewing. This is the main hub for people who want to learn more about the extended Wikimedia movement and how they interact with the official projects.

What They Do

There's undoubtedly some really cool things that are going on in the affiliated organizations, but I simply can't do a deep dive into all of them. There's almost 200 organizations, and many of them aren't even in English. Instead, I've lightly browsed each and every one of them, looked closer at them if I see anything particularly interesting, and reported it here. As for the ones that I don't mention here, most of what they do is host edit-a-thons, workshops, and sometimes collaborate with educational institutions to have Wikimedia projects used in the classroom.

Wikimedia Sverige

This is the chapter that represents all of Sweden. Despite the many things that they do to foster the Swedish Wikimedia community, I feel like the most interesting thing that they're currently working on is Wikispeech, a text-to-speech MediaWiki plugin. To be frank, it's not that good at the current moment, but once fully developed, it could help many people with literacy problems to access the Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Deutschland

This chapter, which represents Germany, is unusually political. Whereas many organizations try to maintain an air of neutrality, Wikimedia Deutschland meticulously lists the various ways that it represents the Wikimedia movement at the national and continental level. While I can only go off of what they say, it seems like their intense lobbying efforts have led to real improvements in how the government treats access to knowledge as a human right. Additionally, this chapter is large enough to have their own funding program to foster various initiatives, although I can't tell you anything about the initiatives themselves because all the information is in German. While it can be hard to quantify the impact that a group has, it seems like Wikimedia Deutschland is likely the most powerful organization in the extended Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia Tunisie

The chapter that represents Tunisia has collaborated with the University of Sfax to create the Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit, which does research on knowledge graphs like Wikidata.

Wikimedia Turkey

Somebody from the chapter representing Turkey made a 10 video course teaching beginners how to edit Wikipedia. The audio is in Turkish, but it has English subtitles.

Wikimedia Morocco

Besides contributing content, this user group has a project to improve the organization's technological capacities. So far, the main focus has been to develop bots that automate repetitive tasks for Wikis in Moroccan languages.

H-GAPS User Group

Unlike most user groups, these people are chiefly focused on Wikiversity. Their main mission is to make accurate information about psychological science freely accessible through the Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia France

This organization runs a project called Lingua Libre, which is dedicated to recording and preserving audio of people speaking. The goal is to preserve endangered languages by creating databases that people can study from. That being said, they also welcome audio recordings of people speaking common languages as well.

MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group

Unlike virtually every other user group, the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group isn't active on any of the Wikimedia projects. In fact, it's explicitly for people outside of the WMF and the projects. The mission is to work with developers and users from outside of Wikimedia to guide the development of MediaWiki in a way that doesn't hurt the user experience for non-Wikimedia websites built with the software. They also run a website that tracks every 3rd party website that uses MediaWiki, but it wasn't working at the time of writing this article. Predictably, this user group hosts information about itself on a wiki built with MediaWiki.

Wiki Project Med Foundation

I talked about them briefly before, but this organization is surprisingly complex on its own. They have several different projects and get funding from groups besides the Wikimedia Foundation, such as the World Health Organization. If I were to describe them, I would say that they're a group aspiring to create a version of the Wikimedia movement that's entirely focused on medical knowledge. They're surprisingly obscure for who they are, so I decided to do a deep dive into the work that they do.

MDWiki

MDWiki is the organization's equivalent to Wikipedia. As you probably guessed, this website is heavily focused on medicine and topics adjacent to medicine, like biology and funding. As with Wikipedia, there's also a namespace to handle articles written about the website itself and how it's run. Unlike Wikipedia, or any of the Wikimedia projects, you have to apply for the right to edit pages, presumably to prevent any trolls looking to cause potentially fatal vandalism. The process doesn't seem too intense, but they do reject people from time to time.

NC Commons

This is Wikimedia Medicine's answer to Wikimedia Commons. It's a repository for medical images that are NC or ND licensed instead of being under a truly free license. In other words, NC Commons is how Wikimedia Medicine handles medical images that can't be stored on Wikimedia Commons.

The App

In collaboration with Wikimedia Switzerland, Wikimedia Medicine has a mobile app called Medical Wikipedia to allow offline access to health information from both MDWiki and Wikipedia. This is essentially the same as getting a data dump and viewing it with Kiwix (which is what the app is built on). The app size depends on what language you download and whether or not you want video, but several versions clock in at over 1 GB. The focus of the app is obviously on mobile usage, but there's also mirrors for Windows and Linux, while iOS users have to download the ZIM file and just use Kiwix directly.

Internet-In-A-Box

If you don't have good enough internet access to download the app, Wikimedia Medicine also sells an Internet-in-a-box. This is a small device that serves as a hotspot for people within a 100m radius so that people can access Wikipedia and medical content. You can purchase one from Wikimedia Medicine, but that could take several months to ship. You can also build one, but the instructions are pretty barebones. Better guides can be found online, and the guide does link to them.

VideoWiki

For quite a while, many people in the Wikimedia movement have wanted an equivalent of Wikipedia that used video and audio instead of just text, in no small part to make information available to illiterate users. Enter VideoWiki. While this project was created by a user called Pratik.pks, the project has since been adopted by Wikimedia Medicine, who run it to this day. The project uses Wikipedia as the editing platform and Wikimedia Commons as the source for background visuals, as described in the tutorial. This is still in beta, but it could be fairly big if it's completed.

Research And Outreach

Like the Wikimedia Foundation proper, Wikimedia Medicine conducts research on itself. MDWiki has an entire page on research conducted by members of the organization on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Medicine's ability to democratize knowledge, but ironically, most of these articles are paywalled. Besides conducting research, Wikimedia Medicine also tries to spread information through the educational system as part of WikiEducation. Besides educational material, Wikimedia Medicine has also done important work advising major health organizations about the potential of the Wikimedia movement in medicine.

Conclusion

When I decided to make this blog post, I did it assuming that I already knew most of what there was to know about Wikimedia, and all I had to do was write it down. After doing an absurd amount of research and looking into various rabbit holes I had no idea even existed, I realized that I knew nothing and I still know nothing. Even though this blog post is called "A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia", it still feels shallow. There's things that I don't really understand, and because I'm only fluent in English, I can't explore any of the rabbit holes in non-English projects. More than that, I've come to the conclusion that Wikimedia can't ever really be understood by any one person. Sure, Jimmy Wales and a few other highly prominent people probably have a very thorough understanding of what's going on at a high level, but can they tell you all the FOSS software they use, the people who maintain them, or the degree of support that they've received from actual employees? No, they can't. They can't tell you how the many communities that spawn around Wikimedia interact with the projects either, and it seems that nobody really can, considering how many grants the foundation give specifically to fund research on the movement. There's just too many moving parts, so many things that change faster than you can learn them. That's not even getting into the history of Wikimedia, which is surely rich and possible to piece together from the many archived documents scattered around the projects, if you have the time. At well over 5000 words, I've merely scratched the surface of what there is to know about Wikimedia.

I'll be honest here, when I first came up with the idea to investigate the movement and how it works, I planned for my blog post to be negative about the movement from the outset. I was going to be the cool-guy contrarian that showed off how much he knew by pointing out how much it sucks that Wikipedia has a bureaucracy, that Wikipedia has annoying powerusers, that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't need as much money as they pretend to. And yeah, those complaints are totally valid. As I learned more about the movement, I found other flaws that I could focus on, like how amazing projects were just straight up abandoned, or how the foundation is too focused on Wikipedia to the point where it's almost a detriment to the rest of the movement. There's a lot that's wrong in the movement, but you know what? I don't care. What I've learned from doing this blog post is that I'm glad that Wikimedia exists. I'm glad that I can get free encyclopedic information without being nickel-and-dimed by a corporation. I'm glad that in a internet taken over by ragebait meant to make people miserable in exchange for engagement, there's a place online where people can peacefully benefit from projects designed for the betterment of mankind. I'm glad that somebody is trying to make an academic journal that doesn't charge readers to see the latest research, even if it seems ill-advised. I'm glad that people are actually trying to improve education in 3rd world countries through the internet instead of snobbishly looking down on non-traditional sources of information. And you know what? I'm glad that I can see parts of the movement that I don't like, because that means the movement is transparent enough that they don't try to hide or sugarcoat their flaws. It's easy to be a hater that talks about how Wikipedia isn't accurate enough or that "Wikipedia has cancer" because you don't like how the foundation spends its money, but it's even better to be a fixer that works to make the movement better today than it was yesterday, and I'm glad that Wikimedia lets me have that opportunity.

When I started this blog post, I said that Wikimedia is an online movement dedicated to making access to knowledge equitable. That's certainly how the movement presents itself, but honestly, I don't think that fully captures what the movement is about. To end this blog post, I want to introduce a new paradigm for understanding and interacting with the movement. Rather than being a place to provide equitable access to information, I want Wikimedia to be seen as a place for people to innovate and create new ways of sharing information. The Wikimedia movement is a sandbox where anybody can experiment with new ways of learning, both as the learner and the teacher. Some experiments will fail, but others will succeed, and people can carefully contribute to the experiments that work until they become mainstream sources of information. Rather than seeing the Wikimedia projects as websites that passively provide us with content, we should see the content as the product of people and organizations actively building and maintaining an entire educational ecosystem. People who contribute to Wikimedia projects shouldn't be seen as volunteers, they should be seen as leaders taking control and ownership of the projects. Researchers should look at the Wikimedia movement as a subculture with its own unique history and form, not as mere set of websites used to learn about things. Last but not least, we should stop looking at Wikimedia as being something totally separate from us. By virtue of its open nature, so many of us have contributed in so many ways to this wonderful, impossibly ambitious movement. Even if you haven't, you've at least used Wikipedia before, and therefore allowed yourself to be influenced by the people who work to provide information to the world. From here on out, I want everybody reading this blog post to stop looking at Wikimedia as something that's static and start looking at it as something that's dynamic. Don't take anything that you see for granted, think deeply about who wrote the content, wrote the code, and hosts the software. Question their motives, but also don't become paranoid and start instinctively distrusting one of the the greatest movements in internet history. Above everything, see Wikimedia as a collection of people doing amazing things, not just pixels on your computer screen.

Just Found About "Eat Pray Love", That Shit Sucks

2024-04-27T00:00:00-04:00

If you're lucky enough to not know what "Eat Pray Love" is, it's a book/movie about this incredibly successful woman who feels bored in life, so she divorces her husband and goes on a trip to "find herself". The first 4 months are spent in Italy eating, the next 3 months are spent at India praying in a Hindu monastery, and the rest of the year is spent in Bali, where she meets a Brazilian businessman that she goes on to marry. Right off the bat, you gotta feel bad for the dude that she divorced just so she can go on a massive vacation. Speaking of which, what exactly was the point here? If you're feeling in a rut at work, then yeah, a year long vacation is going to feel good, because YOU'RE NOT WORKING. Like, this vacation probably cost 200k, you better be having fun if you're spending that kind of money. The destinations don't really make much sense to me, either. Okay, if you're looking for good food, Italy is a natural choice, but I don't see why gorging yourself on pasta will help you on your journey to self-discovery. Living in a monastery sort of makes sense, considering this vacation started with her developing a vague but real belief in God, but why go to a Hindu monastery? I know that some Hindus are monotheistic, but most believe in multiple gods, not just one. Okay, I'm obviously nitpicking here. Sure, she might have started this journey by developing a belief in God, but like I said, it was more of a vague belief in some sort of higher power than a well-developed belief in a deity. It's possible that maybe she wanted to see if she believed in Hinduism, but it doesn't really seem like she actually converted at the end of her India section. That's fine, but she didn't really learn anything from her experience if she didn't convert. In fact, she didn't really learn anything if even if she did convert. Religion is really more about your belief in the world around you rather than learning about yourself (e.g. if you believe in a god that controls the world, if you believe in angels, etc, etc). All she did was pray, and while that can definitely be fulfilling, it doesn't help you learn about yourself.

For the rest of the year, the author goes to Bali with no real goal in mind. While there, she meets a man, falls in love, and then eventually gets married. Cool, but once again, she hasn't really discovered anything about herself, which was supposedly the whole point. The story ends without her really saying anything other than that she got to go on a really cool vacation, and that you, the person who probably could never afford to do something like this in your entire life, should feel inspired to do the same.

The problem, as is often the case with memoirs, is that the story continued after the memoir was published. After the publication of EPL, the author revealed that she was a self-described "seduction addict" who quickly lost interest in men once the honeymoon period was over, only to then cheat on them, break up, and then repeat. The man she met and married at the end of EPL was no different. They divorced in 2016, and so ends the romance that infatuated millions of women around the world. I think the reason I hate EPL so much is because it sells this feel-good idea that spending as much money as possible on luxuries isn't just a good idea, it's an idea that makes you better than others. The book would have you believe that people like the author are self-actualized by virtue of being rich while ordinary people are forced to live life as lower people who can never be liberated by the experience of eating pasta in Italy and praying in India. Of course, that isn't true. The author ended her vacation the exact same person that she was when she started it, and EPL began the exact same way that it ended, with a broken marriage. The truth is is that none of this stuff really matters. You can eat anywhere, pray anywhere, and love anywhere. Somebody who feels the need to travel to a different country for all 3 of these has missed the point of all of them.

Monopoly Is Pretty Good, Actually

2024-02-10T00:00:00-05:00

A lot of people hate Monopoly, but I think it gets a bad rap. A big reason why people hate it so much is because they don't understand the main game mechanic, which is scarcity. The game is intentionally designed to make it so that you're constantly having to budget your cash and fight for houses and hotels, which are limited. Because people don't understand that, they invent house rules to inject more cash and houses into the game, like having a pool of money in the middle that goes to whoever lands on "Free Parking". This makes the game run for hours, because these house rules intentionally make it hard to go bankrupt. If you're playing Monopoly like that, it's not a surprise that the game is miserable. If played properly, however, it's only 1 hour, which is just enough time to not get bored of it.

I Made Heston Blumenthal's Chicken

2023-11-26T00:00:00-05:00

Have you ever seen a recipe that looked so wild and out there, you can't help but feel like you need to try it at least once in your life? That's how I felt when I saw Heston's recipe for crispy roast chicken. You start off by brining the chicken in an 8% salt solution for 6 hours, soaking the chicken in clean water for 1 hour to remove the excess salt, removing the wing tips, boiling the chicken for 30 seconds to tighten the skin, plunging the chicken in ice water to stop the cooking process, boiling the chicken for 30 seconds again, plunging in the ice water again, leaving it to dry out overnight in the fridge, roasting at 140F (60C) for a couple of hours, searing with a pan fry, browning a large dollop of butter with the wing tips to create chicken-flavoured brown butter, and injecting the chicken with the butter. No, I'm not joking. I did make a few modifications to the recipe to suit my own needs. First of all, I roasted the chicken on the stovetop using Adam Ragusea's trick to cook the legs without overcooking the breasts. Second, I broiled the chicken on top of searing the breasts with a pan fry to crisp the skin. Third, I had to put the chicken in at 170F because that's how low my oven goes. Finally, I skipped the butter injection.

My experience was kind of meh. For starters, either I was using a bad chicken or Heston neglected to mention how tearable the chicken's skin becomes after blanching. I accidently ripped a large part of the breast skin while pulling it out of the boiling water, and I noticed that the skin around the leg joint was also ripping just from its own weight. In hindsight, I should have left the chicken tied up until it was time to serve. Another thing is that Heston really understated how hard it is to sear the chicken. Letting your chicken go low and slow is great if you love to undercook your chicken, but it does absolutely nothing for the skin. I knew that would be the case, but I didn't realize how hard it would be to compensate for. Heston said that deepfrying the chicken would be a step too far, but I think that it would be a great if you happen to already be deepfrying a side. If you have a convection oven, hanging the chicken and blasting the chicken at the highest temperature will do wonders. A rotisserie would also be good, but most people don't have one. A much more serious thing that Heston didn't mention is that the low and slow approach keeps the chicken in the danger zone for a long time. Despite cooking the chicken very thoroughly, there is some risk involved in this. I consider the risk to be small for me, but this shouldn't be given to the elderly or the immunocompromised. (A more detailed chart for the danger zone suggests that this cooking method isn't actually dangerous at all, but I don't know enough about food safety to tell if this is sound. This isn't a mainstream view among food safety experts, so make of that what you will). Something that's my fault, and something you have to be very careful to avoid, is not leaving the chicken to dry for long enough. I only left the chicken in the fridge for a couple hours, but you really want to leave it for half a day, maybe even a full one. The dry skin is what makes the chicken crispy, and like I said, you're already facing an uphill battle on that front. When I did this recipe, I actually ended up with a chicken that was less crispy than when I do it normally. Really, no point in trying to rush a recipe that requires over 10 hours no matter what.

I don't know if it was because of the brine, but I found the chicken slightly tough. I wouldn't call it bad at all, but the breasts weren't as tender as I'm used to. Having meat that's salted all the way through is nice, though. The wings were ridiculously tender. It would be extreme to make this recipe just for the wings, but if you like wings, definitely factor that into your decision about whether or not to make this. The meat was evenly cooked all the way through, which wasn't a big thing for me, but I could understand how that would be major for other people. The browned butter wasn't my thing. I never make brown butter, so the nutty notes threw me off. That's obviously something that depends on the person, though, and it's not like you have to make the butter if you don't want to.

I think the major takeaway that should be had from this recipe is that the quality of the meat matters. I was just using a normal supermarket bird, which was raised to be cheap protein for a normal meal. A recipe this refined is really best used on a heritage chicken, or at least a farm chicken that's packed with flavour. I don't regret making this recipe with a normal chicken, and I honestly might do it again to see if I can get that crispy skin I crave so much, but this isn't the kind of thing that you would have the energy to do on a regular basis. If you're making a special occasion chicken dinner, it only makes sense to have a top-quality chicken.

What Is Going On With Youtube Ads?

2023-10-31T00:00:00-04:00

I've recently found myself watching a lot of Youtube videos on my flip phone because I have no audio on my new desktop (thanks, Linux). This means getting hit with ads designed to be seen by people with no viewer history, since my phone doesn't have enough RAM for cookies. I've found that Youtube ads can be split into 3 main groups:

Shilling. There's a bunch of long ads designed to sell you dropshipping courses and other get-rich-quick schemes. There's nothing really interesting to say about them, but they're everywhere.
Outright scams. Now that audio deepfakes are a thing, I sometimes get ads that use AI generated clips of Elon Musk saying that he developed a program that trades crypto for easy profit. These scams scare me. I'm savvy enough to know that any voice I hear online can be faked, but a lot of people don't.
LOLWTF? These are the interesting ones. There's a singer in my city that makes these songs about being happy that I find really cultish, and he put out a massive ad campaign to have them played to just about every single person in my city. That means I'm constantly getting these full songs I hate from some random dude. I've also gotten a few blindness denial ads, which is the main reason I decided to make this blog post. It's so weird, it's this mineral that's supposed to fix your vision by treating some sort of neurological problem. This ad is extremely insistent that bad eyesight is because your brain can't process information, not because your eyes actually suck. It also negs you into buying the mineral by saying that your family will start to think that you can't take care of yourself if your eyesight gets worse. Really awful, bizarre stuff.

Youtube is trying to stop adblockers to make more money, but the flipside of this is that they let anybody take out whatever kind of ad they want. If they really want to make us watch ads, there needs to be a filter to keep out the trash ads, which seems to be most of them at this point.

Something I'm Doing With ChatGPT

2023-09-20T00:00:00-04:00

I literally just finished playing around with ChatGPT, and I found that it's really good at making stories, especially in other languages. Since I'm trying to learn Italian, I made it give me some simple Italian stories to practice off of. Before, I had to use complicated news articles, so this is a major improvement.

A Funny Thing I Noticed About Western Culture

2023-08-28T00:00:00-04:00

I have a bit of an interest in fashion, and I've been thinking about why we don't really wear formal clothing that much. It clicked to me that the reason is because western culture isn't really that formal. Maybe that sounds obvious to some people, but as somebody who's been exclusively raised in western culture, it actually came as a bit of a shock. Fashion is pretty much the only place in western culture where there's a big focus on adhering to strict social protocols, but because formal clothing is worn based on how formal an event is, these social protocols literally don't matter at all. No matter how formal an event is, you're probably going to be wearing a suit and tie, which is actually considered casual. There's a few circumstances where you're expected to wear a tuxedo (which is considered semi-formal), but there's very few people that will ever be invited to a white-tie event, which is full formal. This is all a carryover from a time where western society cared about formality. I honestly think it's good that we don't focus so much on formality anymore, but I think it's cool that we can see how society has evolved through small details and understand things about our culture that we normally take for granted.

Why I Undercook My Poultry

2023-08-14T00:00:00-04:00

The title is partially clickbait: I only undercook the white meat. Because dark meat is full of fat and connective tissue, it needs to be very well cooked to get a nice texture. White meat doesn't have that, so it's very prone to drying out if you overcook it. I'm sure everybody knows what it's like to eat a chicken breast that's dry and stringy, which is just an awful experience. The problem is that people get very scared around chicken, so they cook it for a ridiculous amount of time instead of using a meat thermometer to make sure the chicken reached a safe temperature. Officially, the safe internal temperature for chicken is 165 F, which is what most recipes tell you to aim for. The problem is that even this is slightly overcooking the chicken, leading to a meal that's not bad but kind of just meh. Believe it or not, this is by design. The government's goal is to find a foolproof temperature to recommend to people, not to help people actually make tasty chicken. That means they can and do recommend cooking temperatures that are higher than required to make sure nobody messes up, at the cost of us actually enjoying dinner. Also, unless you're cooking your chicken with sous vide, the outside of your chicken will be hotter than the inside, so the chicken will be hotter than the recommended internal temperature when you actually eat.

According to studies posted by the Food Safety And Inspection Service of USDA, poultry instantly achieves a 7-log10 relative reduction in Salmonella for all levels of fat when the meat reaches an internal temperature of 163 F. Since chicken breasts are lean, you can get an instant 7-log10 relative reduction with 162 F. The thing is, why do you want an instant reduction? Cooking to a lower temperature and maintaining it gives you the exact same safety without compromising on quality. Is it really a big deal to pull your chicken out at 160 F (a full 5 degrees below the recommended amount of time) and wait 17 seconds at the absolute most? What about at 155 F and waiting a single minute? Unless you eat your meat straight out of the oven, you're probably already waiting that long. Besides, you're supposed to rest your meat for at least 10 minutes to let the juices redistribute. Like I said before, the outside of the chicken is hotter than the inside, so the internal temperature won't drop while it rests on your counter. You can easily "undercook" your poultry by a full 20 degrees as long as you patiently rest your meat (although if you try this with a smaller chicken, you should tent the meat to keep it from cooling off too fast and constantly check the temperature to make sure it doesn't fall until you know the meat is safe). For literally 0 risk, I get chicken breasts that are so juicy and tender, you'd almost want to cry thinking about all the dry and stringy chicken breasts you used to be content with.

Why Blockbuster Was Right To Not Buy Netflix

2023-08-13T00:00:00-04:00

Every now and then, you see people talk about how Blockbuster not buying Netflix was one of the worst financial decisions in history. That's arguable, but what people are usually trying to say is that Blockbuster made a stupid decision, and anybody with a brain would have taken the deal. I want to push back on that.

The deal in question was an offer to buy Netflix for $50,000,000 back in 2000. It's been quite a while, but I'm sure most people who were alive back then have some vague memory of dialup internet. If you don't, the key takeaway is that it was slow, very slow. You weren't watching any shows you got online unless you spent literal hours downloading it. Streaming requires downloading footage at least as fast as you watch it, so that wasn't an option at all. Even though it's now known for streaming, the business model for Netflix at the time was to mail out DVDs that were ordered on the internet. When the customer was done with them, they mailed the DVDs back. It worked well, but it wasn't the revolutionary change that made Netflix into a billion dollar company. At the time that the offer was made, the economy was in a recession because the dot-com bubble burst and countless promising internet startups were going under. From the perspective of Blockbuster, you have an internet startup with an easily replicated business model that had a massive chance of going under in a year offering to let you buy them so they won't become a competitor in case they survive. Even though they were wrong, it made perfect sense to think that Netflix wouldn't become an issue for them in the future.

As anybody who was alive at the time can tell you, Blockbuster didn't quickly die after passing up that deal. Shortly after this happened, Blockbuster entered the online DVD rental business themselves, even becoming a serious competitor to Netflix. They also started to offer streaming services in 2007 as soon as the technology was ready, just like Netflix. The reason why people don't mention this, I think, is because streaming was still rare back in 2007 and because Blockbuster was already starting to lose its popularity before streaming even became a thing. Either way, it's not like Blockbuster stubbornly sat still while Netflix (and nobody else) went ahead to pioneer movie streaming. If Blockbuster actually had purchased Netflix, there's a good chance that some other company would have beaten Blockbuster on streaming and killed the company themselves.

The real reason for why Blockbuster died isn't really clear. Some people say that it was bad leadership, other people say that it was because of excessive late fees, but I don't think anybody who wasn't there when it happened really knows. Personally, I think Netflix had fairly little to do with it. All I know is, the death of Blockbuster wasn't because of a small mistake that only seems dumb in hindsight.

Board Game Engines Are About Trees, Not Evaluation Functions

2023-07-31T00:00:00-04:00

Lately, I've been flirting with the idea of making a game engine to evaluate Brazilian Draughts, which I plan to do with alpha-beta pruning. Since I might be spending a bit of time working on tree searches, I want to write about something that I've noticed for a while: whenever people talk about game engines for perfect information board games, they only focus on the evaluation function, which makes it seem like the evaluation function is the most important part. AlphaZero is a good example of this, since most articles focused on the neural network while completely ignoring how it worked with the Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is the important part. In this article, I want to explain why the evaluation function isn't as important as the tree search and why you might even want to weaken your evaluation function sometimes.

For a perfect information board game, the optimal algorithm is a brute-force search of the entire game tree. This perfectly solves every single position, but it requires too much time and memory to actually be practical for anything but the smallest games. That means that we have to make an approximation for our brute-force tree search, which we do by creating an evaluation function. That's why focusing too much on the evaluation function is misguided: it's just there to help approximate the exhaustive tree search, not actually tell you what your next move should be.

When somebody tries to create a game engine without remembering that they should be focusing on the tree search, they sometimes end up over-engineering the evaluation function to be as strong as possible, at the cost of making the evaluation function very expensive to call. Since the evaluation function isn't there to tell you what the best move is, this focus on power over cost can actually make your engine weaker. You obviously don't want to make your evaluation function be bad, but if you increase the cost of calling your evaluation function, you might end up not being able to search enough of the game tree. You can get around that by using a tree search that doesn't require the evaluation to be called many times, like Monte Carlo Tree Search, but you still need to stay focused on the tree search instead of the evaluation function.

Another way of looking at this is that the further into the game tree you can look, the cheaper you can make your evaluation function. In a brute-force search, you just have to check if a position is won, lost, or drawn after the game has ended. The more shallow your search is, the more the evaluation function has to do to compensate for the lack of depth. The catch is that positions are more complicated the earlier into the game you are. That's because every piece (or empty space on the board, if you're playing Go or Tic-Tac-Toe) is a degree of freedom, and the number of pieces (or empty spaces) is highest at the beginning of the game. That means your evaluation function will have to become exponentially more powerful the more shallow your search is, which means the cost of your evaluation function will exponentially increase, unless you can figure out how to solve the game mathematically. Going to extremes and trying to completely replace the tree search with an evaluation function gives you the same problem of requiring too much time and memory like the brute-force approach.

The temptation here (and the reason why I'm writing this article for me just as much as for everybody else) is that there's a lot of ways to make strong but expensive evaluation functions. If you have the resources, it wouldn't be difficult to feed millions of sample games to a big neural network and use that as the evaluation function, but that would only worsen your engine unless you use a tree search that's designed for expensive evaluation functions. These resources would be much better spent optimizing the tree search by creating endgame tablebases and transposition tables, which reduce the number of lines that need to be evaluated.

Recap Of The Reddit Blackout

2023-07-24T00:00:00-04:00

The blackout seemed to have taken the internet by storm, but not much has been heard about it since. Now that things seem to have mostly been resolved, I want to give an overview of what happened and my thoughts about it all.

Why The Blackout Happened

In case you don't remember or didn't hear about it when it was happening, the Reddit blackout was a mass protest over Reddit's API changes. Previously, access to the API was free, which allowed 3rd party developers to use it to create bots and their own apps for Reddit. However, the CEO of Reddit announced that anybody using more than 100 API calls a minute would have to pay $0.24 for every 1000 API calls. This meant that a very popular 3rd party iOS app for Reddit called Apollo would have to pay $20,000,000 a year. Obviously, not exactly spare change. The developer announced that he would shut down the app on June 30th, which prompted a massive backlash against Reddit. The mods for most of the largest subreddits decided to take all their subreddits and make them private for 2 days, effectively shutting down the entire website.

Why Do People Care This Much About An App?

A few years ago, Reddit got a redesign that proved to be very unpopular. Not only did the redesign replace the classic UI that Reddit had from the start, the redesign was a lot more resource-intensive than the older UI. This made for a website that was a lot less responsive and downright inaccessible for people with old hardware or bad internet. The redesign was widely considered ugly and filled with antipatterns, prompting many users to avoid it as much as possible. To put it in the words of /u/all_copacetic, "Words can't describe how much I hate new reddit. I was actually deeply saddened by the thought that I'd never be able to experience old reddit again. As if a friend had died. I hope to fuck they never remove the option of opting out of the ugly, slow new design.". Unfortunately, while it's still possible to use the old UI, it occasionally forces you into the new UI, which makes it annoying to use. At the same time, part of the new redesign was constant notifications asking you to use the offical app, which many users considered to be annoying and an antipattern. This could be prevented with 3rd party apps, but the API change was going to ruin all that, and many users felt that the API change was designed solely for that reason.

Why That Isn't Why People Cared

The previous section wasn't wrong, but it lacks context. Most people didn't use 3rd party apps, especially Apollo, which is only available on iPhones anyways. A lot of the backlash boiled down to an aversion to what is seen as corporate greed, Reddit's classic love of using the website for mass protest movements, and just because the users with the most power on the website were dragging everybody along with them. The last reason is an important one. Reddit relies on volunteer users to moderate the subreddits, which gives a minority of users a lot of power over how the website is run. Even if people disagree with what the mods do, they don't really have a choice but to go along.

Why Reddit Wasn't Entirely Wrong

The API change came way too fast, but charging for API access isn't unreasonable. These changes only affect heavy users, and apps designed for accessibility will be exempt. If I was a CEO of a massive company, I wouldn't want people to make money by using my infrastructure without paying anything back, either. The pricing is definitely too high, but not enough to completely kill the apps. All you would need to do is kill the free-tier for your app, reduce the number of API calls as much as you can, and you'd still be able to profit.

Why The Mods Were Very Wrong

Like a lot of people pointed out, a 2 day strike is nothing. Some of the mods understood that and decided to go on strike indefinitely, but a lot of them reopened their subreddits as planned. This completely killed the strike, but that's not what I find interesting about all of this. Apparently, a lot of the mods ultimately decided to reopen their subreddits because the CEO threatened to take away their mod rights. That's right: they reopened their subreddits because the Reddit CEO threatened to take away their unpaid job. Wow, such a scary situation to find yourself in /s. Another weird thing that the mods did was coming up with alternative means of protesting, like spamming pictures of John Oliver. I don't know what the plan was there, but Reddit corporate doesn't care that you've posted a picture of John Oliver. What they do care about is increasing the number of people that post on Reddit, so you're literally just rewarding them. All in all, this strike reflected very poorly on the mods.

The Twitter Situation

As I started to come up with this post, Twitter began to rate-limit itself, causing a massive drop in usage. As I began to write this paragraph, Twitter killed its iconic brand. Now that Meta has created Threads to be ~~Twitter's~~ X's first major competitor, it's clear that ~~Twitter~~ X will never be the powerhouse it once was, if it even survives the next couple of years. It's just a coincidence that this happened at the same time as the Reddit fiasco, but it does show that social media is changing massively all at once. Nobody really knows what the future holds for social media, but it certainly feels like we're moving even further away from the era where social media was about the users. Hopefully this leads users to move away for greener pastures, because a website designed to extract as much value out of you at all costs isn't a website worth using.

Fire

2023-06-26T00:00:00-04:00

Yesterday, I went on the shortest walk I've been on in months. The smoke from the forest fires not too far from my town was extremely bad, so my eyes began to burn after just a few minutes outside. Growing up, I assumed that we would have figured out global warming before it really began to affect us, but that clearly didn't happen, and now we have massive forest fires because everything is too hot. I hope this will be the wakeup call everybody needs before things get even worse, but I doubt it.

The Tragedy Of Mobile Gaming

2023-06-21T00:00:00-04:00

I was taking a look at my old GBA, and I couldn't help but think about how much technology has advanced since it came out. It's been 20 years since that came out, so according to Moore's Law, modern hardware is 1024x better now. Seriously, our phones are better than our computers from just a decade ago. If that's the case, why has mobile gaming been so awful? I know nostalgia is a huge factor for why I look so fondly at the GBA, but mobile gaming being an absolute garbage fire is a very common opinion, and with good reason. Most mobile games (at least the successful ones) are more focused on increasing metrics like retention and downloads instead of actually being fun, with profits coming from actively ruining the player experience by shoving ads down your throats or literally making you addicted through in-game gambling. It's such a shame that an avenue for gaming that's over 1000 times as strong as the GBA is being put to waste like this.

Why Does Mr Beast Do This?

2023-06-11T00:00:00-04:00

While I was watching yesterday's MrBeast video, I noticed that the picture from Chris's coming out tweet was taken while filming for the $1,000,000 yacht. That tweet came out April 27, so MrBeast waited over a month to upload this video. I know that you need to edit and all that, but does it seriously take that long? I wouldn't make a post about this, if it weren't for that fact that he announced the release of his "biggest burger" video for Feastable customers, when he mentioned having that video already in his Antarctica video. Far be it from me to question how the biggest Youtuber handles Youtube, but I just found that a little strange.

Draughts Is Great

2023-06-02T00:00:00-04:00

I've noticed that a lot of posts I make here tend to be negative, so I decided to write about something that I like. If you don't know, Draughts is a family of games centred around diagonally moving pieces. If that sounds like Checkers, that's because Checkers is just an American/English form of Draughts. Draughts tends to be misjudged as Chess for people who aren't smart enough for Chess, but that assumes that Draughts is supposed to be like Chess in the first place. In reality, they're different games with different strategies. Chess requires you to look at a broad array of potential moves, while Draughts requires you to look deeply into the possible lines that are available. The main feature of Draughts games is the way you're forced to make captures. While you're sometimes forced to make moves in Chess, Draughts will routinely have you finding yourself in a position where you're helplessly forced to make bad move after bad move while a more skilled player prepares a devastating attack that'll destroy your position. It's great fun, give it a try.

A Weird Detail I Noticed

2023-05-29T00:00:00-04:00

I entered a Kaggle competition, and I noticed that nobody from Crimea, the Donetsk People's Republic, or the Luhansk People's Republic was allowed to enter. This is obviously part of the sanctions over the Russo-Ukrainian war, but they don't actually ban Russian residents from entering. What was the point of banning the residents of occupied areas but not residents of the occupying country? That's all I wanted to say, there wasn't really a bigger point to this blog post.

I Hate The Tiktokification Of The Internet

2023-05-27T00:00:00-04:00

I think Tiktok was one of the worst things to happen to the internet. Social media and the like have always been bad for you, but short form content like literally everything found on Tiktok is like cyanide for your attention span. I refuse to use the app, but it's hard to avoid the problems of Tiktok when the internet is being consumed by Tiktok. This isn't Tiktok's fault, they're just running their own app, but it's hard to ignore how the content that originates on Tiktok spreads. Just about every video-sharing website (including websites you don't normally think of as video-sharing websites, like Reddit and Facebook) has been flooded with mirrors of Tiktok videos. These videos tend to be the ones that blow up the most, because short-form content is the most addictive, creating a feedback loop where people only look for videos that match Tiktok's short-form style. Youtube is awful for this, since it shoves Youtube Shorts down your throat. I try to block them, but Youtube won't let you, since they know these videos are the ones that keep you glued to the website. I know some people have the self-control to avoid clicking on any of them, but I don't. I know that there needs to be personal responsibility and all that, but you can't tell people to exercise personal responsibility when websites literally go out of their way to make it difficult for you to block addictive content. I might just cut Youtube out of my life, honestly. I've already deleted accounts for a lot of social media sites, and while it can be pretty boring without a dripfeed of content at all hours, I don't think a more boring life is a worse one.

I Don't Believe AGI Will Happen

2023-05-18T00:00:00-04:00

With all the hype (and fear) about ChatGPT and existential threats caused by AI, I think it'd be good for society as a whole to take a step back and calmly analyse what AI are. No matter how advanced they are, they're just really big equations filled with matrix multiplication and non-linear activation functions. No matter how accurate they are, I don't think an equation can ever be called intelligent. I don't think an equation can even emulate intelligence that well. For an equation to be used to solve a problem, an intelligent agent has to actually decide that the equation can be used to solve the problem and then use a computer to do the calculations. I think that autonomy is an essential aspect of intelligence, which an equation will never emulate, much less have. I don't want to say that AI doesn't have the potential to be dangerous, especially in the hands of a bad actor, but I don't think we'll ever have to worry about one of the AI programs becoming sentient.

Why I Don't Like Minecraft's Cave Update

2023-05-17T00:00:00-04:00

As I get back into Minecraft, I'm reminded by how awesome the cliff update was. It's genuinely breathtaking to see the new overworld terrain generation while exploring my world. Sadly, I've found myself in a situation where I have to be reminded that the cliff update was paired with a cave update. I can understand why people (maybe even most people) would like the cave update, but it's caused me nothing but grief. I have a horrible sense of direction, so bad that I struggled to navigate caves with the old world generation. Now that caves are massive, trying to not get lost is pointless. Instead, I minimize the amount of mining that I need to do by using automatic farms that get me the things that I need. Still, I do sometimes have to go mining, so I dig quarries. This was hard enough back in the good old days, but at least you would only have to deal with fairly small pockets of space beneath your feet. Now, you have to deal with a massive cavern that you're going to drop into. When you've dug up all the upper part of the quarry, you either have to leave the quarry unfinished, or you have to jump into the cavern and finish it while mobs surround you. I have actual, clinical OCD, so leaving it unfinished isn't an option for me. That means jumping in, mining, and desperately trying to find a way out. Like I said, you're in a massive cavern, so you can't climb up the walls with a bucket of water anymore. You can leave a stream of water running from the top of the quarry, but that'll make it hard to mine. Like I said, I don't usually need to do this, since I'm automating even more of my resource collection, but it's such a pain when I do.

Facade Was Underrated

2023-05-15T00:00:00-04:00

Yeah, it was definitely janky, but it's incredible that the devs were able to make an AI that could respond to what the player says all the way back in 2005. Another problem was that the devs were limited by the number of lines that they could get the actors to record, so the dialogue had to be constricted. It would be amazing if somebody tried to make a spiritual sequel that uses audio deepfakes for voice acting and some sort of LLM to handle the responses.

When Adding A Recovery Option Makes Things Worse

2023-05-05T00:00:00-04:00

A couple of years ago, I added a recovery phone number to my gmail so that I could get into my account if I ever forgot my password. Fast forward to the present day, and I need to get back into the account. Even though I have my password after all these years, I couldn't get in without a verification code sent to my old phone number, which I no longer had. I was able to get my account back by contacting my old phone number, but that was pure luck. I don't know why somebody would come up with such a horrible anti-pattern, but don't do this if you're in charge of a website and you want to give your user an option to add a recovery phone number. Seriously, there's no reason to think that somebody coming back to an account after a few years is suspicious, unless you have a good reason to think that your company was hacked. Pro-tip, you can keep your users's passwords from getting cracked if you enforce a reasonable password policy. That way, you can keep your users safe without locking them out of their account. I'll never get how Google doesn't understand this.

An Overview Of My Wine AI

2023-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

I decided to make an AI that predicts the quality of red wine recently. The first step I took was to remove unnecessary features, which I did by using an ANOVA test. I found that residual sugars didn't have an impact on wine quality, so I removed it to make my data less sparse. After that, I removed the wines with a quality of 3, 4, and 8. The rationale was that there should be 10 observations per feature, which means a minimum of 100 observations a label. There were less than 100 wines with a quality of 3, 4, and 8 combined, so they weren't usable. After that, I used a Knn algorithm to classify them. It took a bit of playing around with the code, but I was able to get an AI that recorded an accuracy of 72.5%. Based on looking through the code of other people who used the same dataset, it seems that this is something of an upper limit for accuracy with this dataset.

Nope, Not Done Ranting About Laptops Yet

2023-04-29T00:00:00-04:00

After uploading yesterday's post, I learned that laptops aren't repairable anymore because they're so thin nowadays. To make them that thin, laptop manufacturers customize the hardware components, making it impossible to change or upgrade. I noticed that SATA hard drives aren't used anymore in laptops, which means that I can't just get a cheap drive and put it in my laptop, which is my main way of saving money when I buy a computer. Not only that, but you can't get a good cooling system in a thin laptop, because size = power for fans. If you didn't read my post yesterday, the only reason I'm even looking for a new laptop is because my current laptop's cooling system is dying. Why are laptop manufacturers screwing over their customers like this? Is there some huge demand for thin laptops that I don't know about? I know that the average consumer doesn't look too closely at the way that their laptop was built, but I'm sure that they would rather have a good laptop than a thin one, if they were forced to pick. At this point, I think I'm going to start advising people to only use their old laptops for as long as possible.

Do Laptops Even Die? (or, Why You Shouldn't Throw Out Your Laptop)

2023-04-28T00:00:00-04:00

My laptop isn't in the best of shape (i.e. it's in the active process of dying), so I've found myself window browsing laptops a fair bit. Every time that I do, I always come back to the feeling that I don't really have to do this. If you look online, the conventional wisdom is that the average lifespan of a laptop is 3-5 years. My laptop is 4 years old, so about the time you would expect for it to die, if you follow the conventional wisdom. The thing is, I don't. My hot take is that even a cheap laptop should last you 10 years if you maintain the hardware components well. From what I can tell, when people say that their laptop is dead, they don't actually mean that it died, they just mean that it's slow. The few articles that explained why laptops only last 3-5 years follow the same line of thought, saying that laptops have to be replaced after that amount of time because the hardware wouldn't be able to keep up with Windows updates. Well, I use Linux, so that's not a problem for me. The main reason why my laptop is dying is that the fans are failing, which threatens to make my already hot computer have uncontrollable thermals eventually. With the way my fans sound, that might happen in a month, but my laptop might stabilize and crawl along for up to a year. Again, still within the 3-5 year estimated lifespan, but not for the reasons that are usually given. Also, it ignores the circumstances behind my laptop failing. I'll admit it, I did not take good care of this thing. I knew that this laptop had bad thermals, but I never even attempted to change the thermal paste until after my computer was no longer able to keep the CPU temperature below 95 C, which it was idling at for years. I'm not talking about normal years, I'm talking about culmative years of usage. I play a lot of games that benefit from AFKing, so I would just leave my laptop running over night, every night, for about 2 years, never dipping below 95 C. All in all, I'd say that my laptop's fans have done about a decade's worth of work in the past 4 years. While I couldn't replace the thermal paste because the screws holding my fan down have seized, I was able to get the heat down by cleaning up the dust that built up inside, removing the battery (which was generating a ton of heat and could barely hold a charge anymore), and getting a cooling pad. I know that not being able to change the thermal paste will come back to bite me down the line, but at least I bought my laptop a month (and counting).

I think that's why I've been a bit obsessed with laptop life expectancy for the past few weeks. Being able to buy at least another month from worn-out fans is impressive, and exactly what every tech article says that I shouldn't be able to do. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because the tech articles aren't written for more advanced laptop users that want to extend their laptop lifespan as much as possible, they're written for a broad audience that wants the best user experience. I get it, but I don't like it. Replacing a laptop is expensive, contributes to e-waste, and probably means getting a laptop that's lower quality than your current one (looking over all the laptops I've seen online, I haven't seen a single good one). Compared to that, spending $50-70 on peripherals to keep my laptop running for a bit longer is a no-brainer.

I haven't even gotten into replacements for hardware components yet. While I would never even think about trying this, I've seen people with my exact same type of laptop add a water-cooling system to keep a temperatures down better than a fan ever could. A less extreme example would be replacing the hard drive or RAM as your needs evolve. That's how the used Thinkpad community stays thriving despite everybody there using a laptop that's over 10 years old, although a lot of them have replaced so many components, they ended up with a laptop of Theseus that may or may not be the original laptop. Whatever the case may be, it's clear that laptops are a lot more durable than people give them credit for, as long as you're willing to put in a bit of effort to keep them running.

Personally, I plan on using a laptop that's already 10 years old as my daily driver once my current one is unusable. For some reason I don't understand, my mom has kept my sister's old laptop from 2012 hidden away for all these years, so I took it to use as a secondary laptop, not realizing how good it is. Like most laptops from that time period, it has a much better build quality than laptops made nowadays. On top of that, the specs are surprisingly good. A 1 TB hard drive, decent CPU, and only 4 GB of RAM, but an option to upgrade to 8 GB (don't buy the fear-mongering about needing 16 GB of RAM, 8 GB is plenty for most people). I've already played around with it, and it's nice and responsive. With a bit of maintenance, I expect that laptop to last me for years to come.

Rust Broke My Manjaro Installation (And How I Fixed It)

2023-04-24T00:00:00-04:00

You ever have a bad day and think to yourself "I really just want to play old Flash games right now?" I did last night, so I attempted to install a CLI Flash emulator called Ruffle. This is built on top of Rust, so I had to install that as well. Unfortunately, I was having trouble with Rust not finding a file called "cargo.toml", so I uninstalled Rust. When I went to boot up my laptop today, I found that my computer was getting stuck at the login GUI. I could enter the password, but when it would go to log me in, it froze for a second and brought me back to the GUI. After doing some digging in the TTY, I discovered that this was happening because bash was looking for .cargo/env, which no longer existed. Reinstalling Rust didn't help either, so I fixed the bug by manually creating a ".cargo" directory and adding an env file. Bash executes whatever's written in this file every time you open a terminal, so I just wrote "sleep 0". I know that there's probably a better way to do this, but my internet's out right now and I don't feel like spending time fighting with my computer over something I've already jerryrigged a solution for.

A Weird Image Compression Program

2023-04-23T00:00:00-04:00

If you're like me, you clogged up your entire hard drive with memes. I decided that I needed to clean up my computer a bit, so instead of doing the sensible thing and delete as many memes as I could bear, I decided to code an image compression program to free up space without degrading quality too much. I came up with this convoluted plan to convert images into 3D fourier transforms, remove low-frequency waves, and then convert back into an image. That was a bust, but I did notice something interesting. When I converted an image into a 3D array and converted it back into an image, the size went down without me actually doing anything to the image. I don't know why that happens, but I suspect it's at least partially because any metadata that the picture has is erased. The degree of compression depends on the image, but I've gotten over >80% reduction of size with particularly large and detailed images. For all the jpgs in my main directory, the total size went from 224 MB to 130 MB after compressing, a nice >40% reduction. The only problem is that some images end up completely destroyed. I don't know what causes it, but it seems to have to do with images being almost completely black to begin with. Still, I'm very pleased with the results.

Look, I'm Just Going To Say It

2023-04-20T00:00:00-04:00

"Neon Genesis Evangelion" was mid. I enjoyed it, and I certainly didn't regret watching it, but it's not the groundbreaking anime that everybody seems to think that it is. It's just a normal mecha with slightly deep themes. The plot was convoluted and a lot of questions get left unanswered, which gives a lot of room for fan discussion but ultimately just made it a pain to watch at times. The ending was actually fantastic and redeemed the entire show for me, but then the studio decided to undermine that with a series of movies designed to please the fans that hated the ending. To be fair, I've heard that EoE was really good, but I've also heard a lot of bad things about Rebuild. I'll probably do a review of EoE one day, but that still doesn't change the fact that the original anime was underwhelming compared to its reputation.

Oh, and it's super creepy how the fanbase is obsessed with discussing which 14 year old is hotter. Even if I was a hardcore fan, I would shy away from revealing that just because the fanbase is seriously that obsessed and I wouldn't want people to think that of me.

An Unusual Git Error I Got, And How to Fix it

2023-04-16T00:00:00-04:00

Note: This article was originally written on Feburary 21, 2021.

I was working on this game I've been programming for a while when I decided to add a little feature to let the player check how good the armor that they're wearing actually is. I commit, check the 'git status' to see if there was anything that I was missing, found nothing, and pushed to my Github repo. All in all, a pretty normal experience, until I noticed an extremely abnormal bug. Instead of pushing my code, Git said "fatal: unable to read 'messed_up_hash'". For some reason I still don't understand, Git expected the commit to be under a different hash than the one it was actually under. A bit unusual, so I look up solutions. I find several solutions to fix corrupted objects, but none of them worked for me, since they assume that the hash is actually there (I checked my .git directory, there really wasn't a hash there). This brought me to what looked like the only solution I hadn't tried: delete the repo, pull from Github, and accept losing your unpushed commits. This isn't exactly a bad solution, since it works and it's easy to do, but it assumes best practice. I have (or at least had, now that this scare has fixed me up) a habit where I let commits pile up before pushing. This is not best practice. I had 8 commits piled up, one of which was extremely important and took a considerable amount of time to figure out. Dumping it wasn't an option as far as I'm concerned.

Here I decided to keep looking for solutions to my problem. Thankfully, I found one other person who had my exact same problem: Jim Schubert. In a 2012 post on his website, almost down to the exact same day that I had the problem, Jim outlines a way to fix the problem by writing the hash to Git. It's a reasonable fix, but with one problem: it didn't work on my repo. Again, no idea why, since there's no reason why it wouldn't work, but computers don't always act in logical ways. Yet again, I had to search for answers.

Suddenly, it hit me: why not just get rid of the commit? I use 'git reset' to remove it, only to find out that it needs the non-existent hash in order to remove it. Great. At this point, I'm trying to find out how to remove a commit without directly interacting with the commit when I finally find my solution: backup the problematic file, use 'git rm' to get rid of it, use your text editor of choice on the copy to undo whatever changes you made, rename the copy as the original file, use 'git add', and then run 'git commit --amend --allow-empty'. Your commit still stays, and will probably always stay, but now Git won't give you any problems about missing hashes. After running those commands, I was finally able to push to my Github repo. Here's hoping I never have to do this again.

Free Software Isn't Free

2023-04-16T00:00:00-04:00

Note: This article was originally written on December, 12, 2020.

The title for this post sounds like a contradiction. How can something be free yet not free? That's because English is a little bit weird. Other languages (like Italian) don't have a word for free. Most romance languages have a word called (or derived from) "gratis", which refers to no price, and a word called (or dervived from) "libre", which means no restrictions. You've probably noticed that many free software have "libre" in their name. That's because the "free" in free software is about the freedom given to the user, not that the software is gratis. When I say "Free software isn't free", I mean that libre software isn't gratis and gratis software isn't free.

Of course, there are times when software is both libre and gratis. I'm not entirely sure I've ever seen libre software that wasn't also gratis, although I've seen many, many software that is gratis but not libre. I feel like this ambiguity has actually been one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of free software. I constantly see criticism of free software from people saying that you're the product when you use free software, people saying that free software advocates are just cheap, and even people saying that free software is communist. At the same time, programmers feel like it's not worth their time to program free software, because they think it's gratis and programmers obviously have to get paid if they want it to be a full-time job. Don't get me wrong, I love that I don't really have to pay for any of my software, but being gratis is just a secondary benefit of free software. If the Linux Foundation were to turn around tomorrow and say that they were going to charge people a fee to use any future version of the kernel (and they absolutely could under the GPL), I would probably pay for it. That's because what I ultimately want is software that respects my freedoms as a consumer.

According the the Free Software Foundation, free software has to obey four freedoms: the user must be able to use it however they want, the user must be allowed to study the source code, the user must be allowed to redistribute the software, and the user must be able to modify the software. You don't even need to make the code open-source, since the GPL itself even says that it's okay to make the code available to customers on request only, so long as you don't charge more than the cost to send it to them. These aren't radical new freedoms, if you really think about it. Let's say you buy a record player (if they even still make those). Obviously, the company can't sell it to you if it doesn't work, and the customer can always use it in unconventional ways like using it as a really large paperweight or for benchpressing without restriction by the company, so it follows freedom 0. If the customer wants, they can always take the record player apart and see how it works inside, so we also have freedom 1. You can always give it away or sell it if you don't want it anymore without restriction, so the user also has freedom 2. Finally, the user can make a new piece for the record player in his very convienent blacksmithing forge and use it to modify the record player, so the user has freedom 4. The idea that a customer wouldn't be able to have all four of these freedoms is a pretty new idea, and one that I don't like.

Of course, software is different from a record player, since a record player requires a lot more effort to duplicate than software. However, people have had a long history of distributing intellectual property. Every library you go to is based on the belief that books can and should be available to everybody free of charge. In fact, libraries even profit off of books by charging fees if you don't return them in time. Now that we have ebooks, libraries even give away the books for the "borrower" to keep, free of charge. In many ways, librarians were the free software advocates before software was invented. Of course, people have been able to get software for free (gratis) for a long time now, thanks to torrenting. Still, the companies who made the software (or the song, game, movie, etc etc) still do just fine, because a significant amount of people still choose to buy the software out of ethical reasons. Removing restrictions on redistributing software shouldn't change this all that much. If somebody takes your software and improves it by such a significant amount that people buy their version instead of yours, then it's your fault for releasing an inferior product and you should release a new patch so your software is even better than the fork. That's just how the free market works, baby. Either way, the consumers come out on top from this, since the increased competion means that companies have no choice but to make their software even better instead of staying mediocre.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with non-libre software is that you're the product. Just look at Windows. Even though you pay for it (probably not directly, but it's bundled into the cost of your computer), it still gives you ads and comes pre-installed with awful games that paid off Microsoft. Not only that, they collect your data through telemetry to use for market research and then sell it to all sorts of companies who also want to use your data to study. You are paying to be a walking commodity for massive corporations who risk YOUR data being stolen or falling into the wrong hands so THEY can turn a profit. You can't do that with free software. If somebody tries to create software that shoves unskippable ads down your throat or steals your data, then somebody will modify the software to disable these features and distribute their version themselves. Maybe you disagree with me, and that's okay. All I know is is that my experience with computers have gotten much better since I've started to use free software.