Wikimedia reviews begging approach

Do you ever wonder why some stories or articles you write and publish online get more reader interest than others? I do, and sometimes the reason is obvious, sometimes not. Of course we expect our best work to get the most attention, but sometimes it does not. Sometimes we write about something that gets much more interest than we had anticipated. Why?

My best read story (at 350 reads), for instance, was a mundane piece of local history that I didn't even write. It was an early Large Language Model (LLM or 'lalamo') experiment with a commentary by me. I published this on Vocal two-and-a-half years ago:

AI capability: A history of the English town of Beckenham

The second most popular story of all time (196 reads), from the keyboard of Ray Taylor, was a dopey story about a stray dog we took in for the last few weeks of its life.

I know exactly why these two stories were popular with my readers. Not least because they were local stories I linked to a local Facebook group. There was a lot of interest in AI at the time, so no doubt lots of people were curious about the local history tale. Dogs and cats are a big interest on this particular group, hence the popularity of this one.

In a way, I found this 'success' irritating, as I would rather get more readers for my fictional and poetic efforts. The most popular fictional story to date (which I gave a local slant, just for the FB group) is one of my favourite pieces of writing:

House of ill repute: The story of a man who visits a brothel for the first time. Please note that this is not about me, despite being narrated in the first person. I have never (yet) visited such a house.

I was delighted when the number of reads hit 179, making it the third most popular of all my stories. I had hoped that it would continue to find readers and push itself at least to number two. I know that most of these readers have come from beyond the Vocal Media community, as the number of likes for this story was 10. Since only registered Vocal users can like or comment on a story, most readers were not registered, other than those who read and did not like. Experience suggests that, generally, no more than 50% of Vocal-registered readers will read an article and not like it.

My hope of pushing the brothel story up the chart have now been dashed by something I wrote in December:

Vocal kindly gave a top story award to this article, which helped to achieve much interest from the Vocal community, with 16 likes and 16 comments. This could not, however, account for the 196 reads to date, putting it in joint second place with the dopey dog story.

Here is a summary of the core points of the Wiki scam article, for your convenience and courtesy of Google Gemini:

Deceptive Fundraising: The "banners" imply Wikipedia is in financial danger or might "shut down," when in fact the WMF has massive cash reserves (over $200M) and an endowment.

Mission Creep: The WMF’s staff and budget have ballooned (from a few employees to over 700), with money going toward high executive salaries and expenses, rather than to developing the service.

Disconnection from Editors: The volunteers do the work for free, while the Foundation spends the donations on bureaucratic overhead and projects that many editors feel are unnecessary.

So where did these reads come from?

Not from me linking to FB or any other social medium. The story must have been picked up either by Wikimedia itself or by some blogger picking up on the critique of Wikimedia. There is a lot of online criticism of Wikimedia and its products, as one might suspect. I guess I have added to this with my article.

I had a long 'conversation' (an exchange of text string data input and output - not a real conversation) with Gemini about this. It produced some useful and interesting pointers but I was unable to identify a specific link or reference to my article.

If, reading this, you are aware of any online source that has linked or otherwise referred to my criticism of the Wikimedia Foundation, please let me know. I would be particularly interested in hearing from anyone at WMF, or any Wiki editors, volunteers or others. If you cannot comment on this story (you have to register with Vocal Media which is free to do) please contact me via my author FB page, which I am afraid is not very up to date.

Where is Wikipedia going?

This is a question that is under hot debate within the Wikipedia community itself, as this January 2026 special report indicates.

This report suggests that there is a two year window for Wikipedia to fix a chronic problem with loss of editors, loss of users, and lack of an adequate, sustainable funding model. On top of this, Wikipedia also has to contend with AI. Do we really need Wikipedia in an AI-fired world?

I, for one think we do. I think we need a global source of people-generated, people-edited, and people-curated knowledge. An Encyclopaedia Galactica.

"The Two-Year Window

By Wikipedia's 26th birthday, we need to have made fundamental decisions about revenue models, AI integration, knowledge equity, and contributor recruitment.

By Wikipedia's 27th birthday, we need to have executed them.

That's the window. After that, we're managing decline."

Wikipedia Signpost Special Report January 15, 2026

You read it here first folks.

Two years to fix it or die. if you are a Wikipedia donor, I would strongly suggest you withhold any further contributions until and unless you have been assured that Wikipedia has healed itself.

I wish all contributors, donors, volunteers, editors, and others at Wikipedia, every success in achieving this turnaround.

To the Directors and senior management at Wikimedia Foundation, I can only say it is time to stop riding the donor-funded gravy train and start to

Do your fucking job! Earn your big pay check and get it fixed!

Thanks for listening and thanks to all who have added to my reader stats.