Wikipedia fundraising banners paused over weekend in response to complaints | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia fundraising banners paused over weekend in response to complaints

meta.wikimedia.org

55 pointsakolbe22 comments

The worse is that I started to stop contributing and caring for Wikipedia once the nagging fundraising started to be a regular thing.

Because it does not make any sense to pretend to do something so that it can stay free and ad free, when half of the year there is constantly the fundraising banner that takes half of the screen of any displayed page.

And the bad thing is that a lot of people are doing the same thing.

All of that to support power/fame/hungry administrative employees/leaders that don't give a shit about the root goal of the project.

Just look how many top paid people are needed and the inefficiencies compared to do the exact same job as a few years ago.

I agree that there is a complete culture mismatch. People come in with a mindset shaped by Silicon Valley and the nonprofit sector. It all seems to be about "organisational growth" and making money, money, money. Lots of committees, bureaucracy, policies written by people who have never contributed one word to Wikipedia, pages and pages of management-consultant-speak on Meta.

The "Universal Code of Conduct" for example which they are intent on ramming down the community's throat is a complete disaster. But rather than looking at the problems with the text, they are busy having another committee write enforcement guidelines for it ... even though no community has approved the UCoC.

Generally speaking, the Wikimedia Foundation has had some really poor leadership over the years. Well, let's say "mixed" to be charitable.

Also, something stunning when you read the replies and reflexions of the one in charge is how egoistic all of this is.

They are thinking like this: people that donated should not see the nag screen anymore for some times..., and otherwise it is that there is a bug. But it is completely normal for all the non 'financial' donators.

But, in my opinion, it is hugely egoistic, if I pay (do a donation) just for me being adfree,' it is like subscribing to a news paper.

On my side, if ever I donate to them, it is to support the goal that other people will not have to be annoyed by the ad!

Thanks. That's a very interesting way of looking at it actually that hadn't occurred to me:

"The (Ad-)Free Encyclopedia (If You Pay For It)".

Still, I can understand people who have just been suckered into donating being irked if straightaway the same banner comes up again (Hi! This is the fifth time ...) and again (Hi! This is the sixth time ...) and again ...

I would rather pay the Internet Archive to persist the corpus, Cloudflare to front it (CDN), and directly pay the devs and editors. The Wikimedia bureaucracy has needlessly grown to meet the needs of the ever growing bureaucracy, having captured users with the centralized library.

I don't know what the Internet Archive's financials are like, but donating to the Internet Archive arguably aids Wikipedia as well. It prevents link rot. This is becoming ever more important over time.

I used to give to Wikipedia but stopped when I discovered that they were claiming that The Grayzone / Moderate Rebels were a special fourth category of untrusted in their three tier system of source ranking.

I still like and use it, but that smacks of an especially sneaky variant of censorship.

The Grayzone / Moderate Rebels definitely take an independent, outsider slant on important stories with an upfront, stated intent of being anti-imperialist, but they do not fabricate stories. That makes them a superior source to the NYT (let's invade Iraq) or any of the CNN, MSNBC outlets pushing anti-Russia and anti-China hysteria.

Wikipedia is too useful and important to be left in the hands of people with marked political biases.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... "The Grayzone was deprecated in the 2020 RfC. There is consensus that The Grayzone publishes false or fabricated information. Some editors describe The Grayzone as Max Blumenthal's blog, and question the website's editorial oversight. " I.e. it's "banned" for the same reason the Daily Mail is "banned".

That is exactly what is under dispute and it is un-sourced and worded very loosely. Not impressive for an organization that encourages citations of original source material.

AIUI the decision was made via standard procedure (a Request for Comments sub-page), and it was the consensus of the editors (that is, the ominous "they" in your comment) that it is unreliable as a source.

Now there is an obvious need for quality control of accepted sources in a project like Wikipedia, the process was transparent, and its conclusion is up for debate (hence being conducted through a Request for Comments). What would you propose instead?

These are the specific accusations from the Grayzone: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...

I thought the Grayzone ban was interesting too. There is always the option of leaving it up to editors, and/or explicitly attributing any opinions or fact claims so the reader can see where they come from.

However, I wonder how much the Wikimedia Foundation as the solicitor and recipient of reader donations has to do with it. For all its faults, the Wikimedia Foundation does not edit Wikipedia directly (its own article, i.e. the Wikipedia article on the Wikimedia Foundation, is crap for example, because they won't edit it and nobody else really cares to).

So a decision like banning Grayzone is down to the volunteer editors that congregate around a topic area rather than the Foundation. (Grayzone is a curious case because the Blumenthal family has close links to the Clintons, and so does the Wikimedia Foundation, because some of the consultancy firms listed as major suppliers in their Forms 990 (Williamsworks, Minassian Media and Trilogy Interactive) are run by people with close personal ties to the Clintons.)

Jimbo Wales is a right cheeky monkey. He just trousered $750k for his imaginary "First Edit" NFT.

Fair play, there's one born every minute.

More alarmingly, he never donated the $500k prize given to him by the UAE, as he promised he would, over seven years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#2014_UAE....

His constant e-begging for a finacially secure website should be commended for sheer brass-necked temerity.

It's such a shame they wised up and stopped using Jimbo's creepy, bug-eyed, sex-pest death-stare to intimidate donors into giving...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/224/806/sta...

People complained then, in a light-hearted way. Lots of funny memes. But in those days, the banners were tiny, and other than the pupils of the death stare, they didn't follow you around and keep count of how often you'd seen them, as they have been doing these past few years. Ah, good times.

The section title for the announcement is:

20 Update on Annual Fund Campaign

Direct link: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Update_on_A...

See sections preceding the announcement for some of the complaints in question.

Good, it's irritating as fuck, especially on mobile. The constant dunning from Wikipedia puts a real sour taste in my mouth.

I think users have only tolerated it to date because they genuinely thought the Wikimedia Foundation was struggling to keep Wikipedia ("The Free Encyclopedia") up and running ... rather than trying to collect hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its organisational footprint and mission.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#(more_pile-...

This completely spurious notion, that the Wikimedia Foundation "often struggles to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running", was nicely parroted by Trevor Noah here in this interview with then-Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher earlier this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdn1s9Sjfo&t=270s

As you will note, nothing is said in this interview to dispel that notion.

Apparently, fundraising banners will be back on Monday, asking for money for the Endowment.

The Endowment, started in 2016, was originally envisaged to raise $100 million by 2026. It reached its target this June, five years early:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#W...

Here are some more facts and figures – with sources for your reference, in proper Wikipedia style.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia platform (but does not write or curate the content, a bit like YouTube provides the platform, but users provide the content), is constantly looking for revenue growth and has been very successful in that endeavor.

They just released their 2020/2021 audited financial statements:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

These show:

– Total assets (p. 2): $240 million (not counting the $100+ million in the Wikimedia Endowment)

– Increase in net assets over the previous year (p. 3): $51 million

– Total support and revenue in 2020/21 (p. 3): $163 million

Their own original revenue year goal for 2020/2021 was $108 million:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimed... (first quarter)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimed... (fourth quarter)

For 2021/22, the revenue goal is $150 million; that is almost a 40% increase over the previous year's (far exceeded) goal of $108 million:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...

The Wikimedia Foundation's VP of Engineering and Development said in 2013 that Wikimedia's mission would be sustainable on $10+ million p.a.:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...

Today a Wikimedia fundraising manager thinks a billion a year would not be too much:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...

The Wikimedia Foundation's top fundraising manager's salary increased by 50% in four years, to $252k plus $33k "other" compensation in 2019 (the latest figure available):

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...

The wording on the fundraising banners has always been controversial with the unpaid volunteers who write the articles, with the Wikimedia Foundation accused of manipulative tactics or outright lying to the public:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

The Wikimedia Foundation has never struggled financially, but has always wanted to grow its organisation. It has beaten its own revenue record every year of its existence and added over 500 paid staff since Wikipedia first became a top-ten website. Further details are available in the following article:

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

To support this financial growth, the banners have over time become ever larger and more guilt-inducing and nagging. Wikipedians by now are fed up, especially given the perceived mismatch between the Foundation's wealth and the language, size and design of the banners:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#(more_pile-...

Fuck those banners. I love Wikipedia and am totally willing to give them money, but stop screaming at me even if I just did.

I'd donate a hell of a lot more of they had a permanent donation button in some corner instead of borderline personally attacking me.

Just let them be. I think they're worth it

Wikipedia is worth being stewarded by people who do NOT use it to mislead hundreds of millions of people.

Think about it.

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