Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 February 16

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February 16

Videos

I want to watch these two videos on this website, however they don't play for me. It says "stream not found". Is this a problem with my computer or the website? Can you find me these two videos on some other website where I can watch them? Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.56.221.19 (talk) 00:46, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Do you have Flash? I also could not play the videos, but that could well be due to my use of NoScript to prevent me doing stupid things. However, it is clear that that the Flash plug-in for your browser is required (though it was difficult to make out the actual message on the display screen). Incidentally, the computing desk is usually better informed on these kinds of things. I'm not quite sure what the videos were of, but it sounds like the kind of thing they might have on the Internet Archive; searching that might be fruitful, though of course YouTube is the de facto leader. Matt Deres (talk) 01:43, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm seeing the same problem as you, and I'm reasonably sure my computer is functioning ok. So the problem is on the web server, probably a typo in a link, a missing video file, etc. I'm seeing this on other sites too, sometimes it's fixed quickly, sometimes not at all. An email to the site may help. Jahoe (talk) 15:03, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

What happened to the $ 100 million Wikipedia endowment fund?

In January 2016, the Wikipedia Foundation announced that it is launching a fund-raising program to raise $ 100 million as endowment fund that will enable it to operate its projects without annual fund-raising. [1] What happened to that? How much money have been raised till now? --IEditEncyclopedia (talk) 03:42, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm having a really hard time finding anything about this fundraiser from the WMF itself. There's plenty of information on the 2015-2016 fundraiser, but I haven't seen any mention of a "fundraiser to end all fundraisers". Someguy1221 (talk) 04:01, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

See this. --IEditEncyclopedia (talk) 04:26, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I can't find any official communication from the foundation that Juliet Barbara ever said anything like that. I also notice that Inverse's article is the only one to use that quote, anywhere on the internet. There is nothing about this at the WMF's blog, which seems odd for such an ambitious proposal. Maybe something like this was said somewhere, but I can't find out anything about it in the obvious places. It would probably be quickest to just ask at the contact page for the Foundation. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:46, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Some basic info behind the endowment at meta:Endowment Essay, [2] and [3] with contact details to find out more. Nanonic (talk) 08:05, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Business Insider has some information about it [4]. Apparently Wikipedia has assets valued at 92M, and it's not run with a deficit. That is, each year it builds up its cash reserves (That was +6M last year). Considering that it needs 66M yearly to keep running, this does not seem like a crazy big amount. NGOs have endowments, and these are obtained through donations. Nothing new under the sun here. Llaanngg (talk) 19:27, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

It does not need $66 million yearly to keep running. The cost to keep all Wikimedia projects operating at current traffic levels is only a few million dollars yearly. (The difference between Wikipedia and other top-10 sites is that the overwhelming majority of traffic comes from static files served by caching proxies.) You can see the latest budget here. Most of the money raised each year is spent on the salaries and other expenses of the Foundation's 277 employees (up from 2 employees in 2005, when they served ~1.4 billion page views per month; they currently serve ~17 billion per month). They spend more on fundraising (~$7M) than they do on their data centers (~$5M). There's a good article/answer here by Andreas Kolbe about the WMF's wasteful spending and deceptive fundraising practices, but the short version is that people donate too much money to them because of their high profile and it's gone to their heads. -- BenRG (talk) 03:48, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Russian roofers

There seems to be regular news reports about Russians sneaking onto, and then taking photos from, the tops of tall buildings, sometimes travelling quite some distance to other countries to do so: e.g. this or this or this. Is this activity in fact more popular amongst Russians than in other countries? If so, is there any analysis of why that is? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:15, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article urban exploration covers the general pastime of people exploring abandoned buildings or the forbidden parts of cities like sewers and rooftops. That article doesn't seem to suggest that it is particularly popular in Russia. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 15:53, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

(EC) Our relevant article is at Urban_exploration. It mentions a few prominent Russians, who may have attracted followers and copycats. But the hobby is also popular to some extent in Japan, USA, France, etc. There may be some influence of Russian buildings tending to be less locked down, or Russian law being less harsh on trespassers, but I don't have any refs to support that. Here [5] is a list of cool places to explore, tagged by country. Here [6] is a list of the best legal places. Here [7] is a stubby article on Wikitravel. Note haikyo as the Japanese term. WP:OR I first heard of this sort of thing at a large state university in the USA, students breaking in to steam tunnels. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:57, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

A possibly associated activity is Buildering "the act of climbing on the outside of buildings and other artificial structures". A fairly recent documentary in the UK called Don't Look Down followed a British "urban free climber" who went to Russia to meet his heroes, whose hobby is to dangle by their fingertips from the highest buildings they can illegally access (here is a still from the programme). Hopefully, Darwin was right :-) Alansplodge (talk) 19:20, 16 February 2017 (UTC)