Wikipedia is not short on cash
unherd.com
unherd.com
For what it's worth, Charity Navigator gives them 4 out of 4 stars with a 98.33/100 rating: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas, but nobody cares.
On other hand, as any of it is spend on political propaganda while they have huge reserves... No money from me. If you want to do lies and propaganda start a new charity.
And trust me, agreeing with Unherd about anything does not sit naturally to me.
The whole premise of Wikipedia (or aspiration, at least, and yes, not always fulfilled ...) is that people should have information so they can't be manipulated.
It kind of sucks to see the very organisation hosting the site do the opposite, don't you think?
But the banners I've seen have invariably been about the imminent demise of Wikipedia. Not that they got lots of other side projects they want funded.
If you assume the fund drive exists to help keep the lights on then I think it is natural to treat it as an existential issue for Wikipedia, but that doesn't seem to match the specific language used.
2020/2021 revenue goal: $108M, increased to $125M, total at end of year: $154M
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikim...
2021/2022 revenue target: $150M, already exceeded by end of quarter 3, weeks before the start of the fundraiser in India, South Africa and South America:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AF%26A...
I agree with others that Wikipedia very carefully makes it sound like they've got a sob story where if you don't donate they're going to shut down, so they probably get a lot of donations made with the belief that they're funding Wikipedia, but instead it gets shunted out to something else. Maybe something the donor is OK with, but maybe something not.
[Citation needed]
And by citation needed, i mean i think this is a false statement. Unless you count things that help multiple wikimedia sites as not helping wikipedia because it is not just wikipedia. After all, all of these sites run the same software, a bug fix affects all of them pretty equally.
Charities seem to do do that sort of thing to raise money, probably because it works and also because the current activities are already funded.
When donations are sought after a disaster the implication is that the money is going to directly help the victims, but the reality is that it will fund other efforts, possibly including helping the victims of a future disaster.
Frankly, calling it dystopic that businesses play by the laws as written is ridiculous. Change the laws instead of expecting businesses to self-regulate out of the goodness of their hearts. Why is that dystopic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
What's it for? Tell donors what they are funding.
And somehow the priorities are wrong. The Wikimedia Foundation has annual 8-figure surpluses, but volunteers are writing open letters to complain that the Foundation fails to update and maintain critical aspects of the software:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Think_big_-_open_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol/Coo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
What the WMF does produce, however, is reams and reams of words about "strategy", "leadership", "codes of conduct" etc.
And millions of dollars are given away to progressive organisations that have nothing to do with Wikipedia:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
Wikimedia has a 100/100 transparency rating.
How is this misleading? They provide an incredibly large amount of information.
And more information can be found here:
Yes, users can go elsewhere to find the information. The records are on file in the metaphorical filing cabinet downstairs. But if the messaging you're putting front and center contradicts said records, their existence doesn't counter criticism of the messaging
Calls to action are kept intentionally short because the research on human psychology is clear: every additional sentence beyond the first few decreases the odds of a conversion (that's adspeak for "closing the deal").
But effectiveness doesn't imply ethicality, so "but it's effective" is not a defense against criticism of ethics.
Be careful, if you argue that your opinions are not wrong, you'll be admitting your comment here is wrong.
Has Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation broken any?
Prove to me they are lying. Nothing on their donation page seems to be a lie.
Your comment on the other hand is very misleading.
from the knowledge equity fund page. what the heck
A good encyclopedia would present information from myriad perspectives, not just whatever happened to be "dominant." I want my article about Christoper Colombus to talk about how 19th century immigrants to America, especially Italians, found him inspirational, but also about how he was brutal, greedy, and ineffectual.
(The current Wikipedia article is actually not bad on that front).
Yeah, let's get away from imperialism and patriarchalism ...
Wikipedians wouldn't work for free for a subscription service. The whole project would fork to a new host. The Wikimedia Foundation's own mission statement says, "The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity."
You can't contribute donations to Firefox; you can only contribute to the Mozilla Foundation, which spends most of the money it gets from donations on things that aren't Firefox.
The question as to whether this is manipulative isn't "is there are any clear statement of fact that is unambiguously a lie even in the most charitable possible interpretation?", it's "will this make ill-informed readers think their donations are necessary for Wikipedia's survival, and is this impression created deliberately?"
I think that's a very obvious "yes and yes".
The donations are used for side projects almost all donors are completely unaware of, whose existence and nature are not hinted at in the ads soliciting donations.
They way they DO stay online for a resilient amount of time is by generating money, i.e. through donations.
In fact, they used to say exactly how many months they have left. Now they don't say that, because they feel they can allow themselves that. Does that mean that it makes sense to stop fundraising? No. Because the minute the public doesn't feel that there's an urgency in donating to your cause, then it's someone else's problem, meaning it's nobody's problem and that's how you kill NPOs.
Money generates money. To fund something in perpetuity you need enough that the returns from investing it (taking into account tax, costs, inflation, etc) exceed the annual payment needed. This is not an infinite amount.
I haven't checked the figures but the article claims the foundation has $400 million cash and Wikipedia costs under $2 million per annum. There's no easy way of calculating the maximum annual sum that can be taken out in perpetuity from a well managed endowment but it's certainly a lot more than 0.5%.
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...
We ask you, humbly, to help.
We'll get straight to the point: Today we ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence.
We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online and thriving, but 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way. If everyone who reads Wikipedia gave just a little, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of a cup of coffee is all we ask.
...
We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
In fact, if they stop begging, what percentage of their users will contribute? Will it remain at 2%?
Just saying. If the WMF were working flat out on serving the volunteer community it would be a different matter. But it's taken on a life of its own, with Wikipedia as its cash cow.
Also, last year, the then-Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. (The wife of the WMF’s PR consultant, the Clinton Foundation’s Craig Minassian, works on the show as a producer.)
In the interview, Noah put it to Maher that the downside of being a non-profit is that “you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running. So, two parts. One, is that true and how does it affect you, and then, two, why would you make this thing if it’s not going to make you money?”
Maher’s cheerful answer made no reference to the WMF’s vast money reserves, but emphasised that Wikipedia’s lack of ads was responsible for the site being so trusted today.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
If you are in the US, you can view the interview clip here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdn1s9Sjfo&t=270s
If you're in the UK or Europe, use a VPN (Opera e.g. has got one built in).
That episode of the Daily Show was around April 2021. So, their funds were much smaller then.
From the article: “In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
At the time they had reported net assets in excess of $77 million. Even by mid-2020, that had increased to $180 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
The Wikimedia Foundation had an 8-figure surplus in 9 of the last 10 years. The only exception was 2013/2014, where the surplus was "only" $8.3M. That was their "worst year" in the last ten years. The Wikimedia Foundation has beaten its own annual revenue record every year of its existence.
I don't know how much experience they have, maybe stats say that subtle UX don't generate enough donations, while massive hated popups still bring massively more money. I hope so..
I don't know whether this is intentional, but if it is, then I would classify it as a dirty, attention-grabbing, dark-pattern-esque, trick. It would be more honest if they just used the blink tag.
It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.
Wikipedia's current ads are both misleading and more intrusive than ever.
550 employees is huge, especially for an organization that doesn't even pay those employees to create and edit the content on the site. It's so far away from "on the edge of pauper" that the point you're making—even if true for other, non-Wikimedia realms—is completely irrelevant here.
Bullshit.
To repeat: the ads today are more misleading and more intrusive than ever. In years past there were ads that were unlike the ones used today. (People complained about them, but I was not among them.) Those ads were successful. There's no evidence to argue that they wouldn't be successful today, too.
As I said, hacker ethos of biasing in favor of the scrappy underdog. It was fine to fundraise when they were small and their strategy was unproven, but as they grow and their strategy is demonstrated as effective, they lose our favor.
ETA: speaking of human psychology... It's an election cycle in the US. It's interesting that this story, the facts of which have been known since last year (according to a cursory search of news story dates) is suddenly again making the rounds right now. May be simple coincidence.
The reason the story is coming up now is that the Wikimedia Foundation is currently "testing" the fundraising banners, in time for the big annual fundraising campaign in December. So at present, a certain percentage of Wikipedia readers in major English-speaking countries are shown the fundraising banners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
You just moved the goalposts. (In this case, moved them such that your "argument" is just restating the substance of the complaint.) Wikimedia is bringing in a lot more money doing this sort of thing. That's well understood—by all, i.e., those on both sides of the issue.
Your job is not to defend the position that the aggressive ads bring in more donations, but that if they weren't using them then "they wouldn't make _any_ money". Please leave dishonest sleights of hand at the door.
A couple of years ago a Wikimedia Foundation fundraising report explained why that "Don't scroll away" phrase was added:
------------
“Don’t Scroll Away”
A simple, yet effective phrase that we were surprised to see resonate with readers worldwide was simply asking readers not to “scroll away” from or “scroll past” the fundraising message in the banner. We believe that addressing the context in which people donate helps improve the donation rate.
------------
Quoted from this report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2019-20_Report
Feel free to provide an actual argument against any one of the following:
- Wikipedia is not short on cash
- The current ads are misleading and intrusive
- The ads of years past were successful despite not being this misleading or intrusive
- The point you're trying to raise, when you're not being mercurial about it (the point about "support of the hacker community" for causes "on the edge of pauper") is, even if we assume it to be true, has no place in this discussion, in light of the circumstances (i.e. what's true about the subject we're discussing—and what isn't true, either)
I will sooner give $20 to someone begging who tells me that he intends on spending it on booze, than I would a well meaning non-profit who attempts to snow me with rhetoric honed on manipulating millions of other people before me.
They have strayed far far far far far from that goal
2) Who chooses which facts show up, or how do we know if certain critical facts are missing?
3) In what way are they strayed far away from it?
By introducing political bias into the selection and presentation of information.
If I check pages on feminism or even radical feminism, I wouldn't see any information on how some prominent early feminist figures advocated mass genocide of men. Most of the pages are generally shown benign.
If I check a few pages on prominent manosphere subcultures, I don't have to scroll far before the word 'misogynist' pops up, despite the fact both cultures are fairly similar (both contain a small extremist population and a large population of idealists), and feminism having far, far more text written, both per page and across Wikipedia as a whole.
Personally, I'm fairly certain spreading a few more words on the bloodlust of early feminists would shine a fairly different light on the movement without changing the ideology of the majority. It's not just information hidden away from high traffic pages, it practically doesn't exist if you don't know exactly what to look for. Yet any kind of filth is practically at the front for anything related to the countercultures. That reeks of tone setting.
That said, it seems like a no-brainer that using a hands-off approach in a subculture known for being biased is an open invitation for articles to become biased. That doesn't mean Wikimedia is at fault, either.
well, the agenda trying to be pushed.
"Human societies typically exhibit gender identities and gender roles that distinguish between masculine and feminine characteristics and prescribe the range of acceptable behaviours and attitudes for their members based on their sex.".. Typically? Nope.
"The most common categorisation is a gender binary of men and women.[422] Many societies recognise a third gender,[423] or less commonly a fourth or fifth.[424][425] In some other societies, non-binary is used as an umbrella term for a range of gender identities that are not solely male or female.".. Many societies recognise a third gender? Nope.
Just some hyperbolic mischosen words right?
What? How is it not typical to have general men and women roles in different societies? Those roles aren't always the same but the existance of such roles is more than typical is almost ubiquitous.
> Many societies recognise a third gender? Nope.
Is the problem there the word "many"? There is a citation with the number of societies they found that have such a mention.
They do say the most common is just two and its primarily associated with the sex of the person, how is the acknowledgement of cultural genders beyond that binary "an agenda"?
> Just some hyperbolic mischosen words right?
So you think the problem is two quantitative words (many/typically) that make certain social constructs seem more common that what you believe is fair? Is that what it boils down to?
> Is the problem there the word "many"?
Yup, the right is "few". Few countries recognize it. From 195, 16. But again, to create a new reality to support an agenda, is wrong.
You probably should read it a bit better then. The existance of the term gernder identity and the existance of gender identities are not the same thing. The word "sex" came slightly later than the first time humans reproduced.
> "Non-binary" didn't exist until recently.
no gender identity existed until recently, but thats because identity is a late 18th century concept. Historically people didn't think of themselves as individuals so they did not separate into identities.
The existance of people who did not "belong" to their prescribed sex, has a long history though. From the non binary page on wikipedia you can see someoone called "not a man or a woman" in the us in the 1700s.
> Yup, the right is "few". Few countries recognize it. From 195, 16.
Thats not what the quote said, the quote said many societes recognise a third gender. It doesn't say current existing nations. if you followed the citation you would have found the book the quote came from where it lists examples:
>> The existence of a third sex or gender enables us to understand how Byzantine palace eunuchs and Indian hijras met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated practices such as self-castration, and how intimate and forbidden desires were expressed among the Dutch Sodomites in the early modern period, the Sapphists of eighteenth-century England, or the so-called hermaphrodite-homosexuals of nineteenth-century Europe and America.
The book I am assuming cites even more historical examples in different ancient and modern societies of non conforming binary roles in society. Enough examples that the author feels warranted to claim there are "many" in the wikipedia summary of the book.
You are claiming wikipedia is biased because they used the word "many" in a concept you feel there isn't enough examples to warrant it. Is that what it boils down to? Your feelings about quantitative adjectives? Thats a loose definition of "agenda pushing" dont you think?
So you think they missed critical information, which related to my second point, who gets to decide. Currently is unpaid moderators, so wikimedia can hardly be blamed for it. no?
> I'm fairly certain spreading a few more words on the bloodlust of early feminists would shine a fairly different light on the movement without changing the ideology of the majority.
But that seems to be intentionally deciding what people should believe. If you think that the ideology of early feminists is irrelevant to the larger movement but might help to turn people to your side, you're not keeping wikipedia unbiased, youre just biasing it more no?
> Yet any kind of filth is practically at the front for anything related to the countercultures.
What countercultures?
Even if you agree with the spirit of these grants, I'm sure this is not what people thought they were funding when they donated to Wikipedia:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Grant_...
Edit: consider spending on the above vs. hiring more people to translate some of the 6.5 million English articles to other languages that typically number only ~1.5 million or so.
I do not think your argument follows. Wikipedia as a whole is untrustworthy because at one point they donated 1 million bucks divided between 5 NGOs through their fundation?
It would be like arguing that Exxon has strayed far far far away from their mission because they donated 20 million to the Amazon conservation. Exxon is still extracting oil and maximising profit for its shareholders, and wikipedia is still a free open encyclopedia. I don't think miniscule donations (related to revenue) mark a departure from the mission worthy of betraying their core intention.
Secondly, Exxon is not a charitable organization so you're drawing a false equivalency. Wikimedia is asking for donations with ads that suggest donating is about keeping Wikipedia running. Most people donating then arguably think they're keeping Wikipedia running and/or expanding its usefulness, such as with translations. I think most people would be quite surprised to see some of that money going to activist DEI initiatives that many would consider to be far from the goal of increasing Wikipedia's utility.
I asked him how they strayed far far far away from being free, neutral and preserving facts.
> Those grants are specifically funding activism which many would argue is not neutral, so your question has been answered.
this does not follow again. I mean first of all, free and preserving facts would be fulfilled so the only part that could be compromised as you said is neutrality. But their grants affect future events not the ones recorded and wikimedia aren't even the people writting the text on wikipedia, they are unpaid moderators. So you would have to prove how the parent company donating to some company can affect volunteers in a way so blatant they would stray "far far far away" from those three missions.
> Exxon is not a charitable organization so you're drawing a false equivalency.
how so? The non voting shareholders of exxon and the donators in wikimedia have the same role, financing the operation.
> I think most people would be quite surprised to see some of that money going to activist DEI initiatives that many would consider to be far from the goal of increasing Wikipedia's utility.
Sure, but that is still not proof of them not being neutral though. You are implying things and letting people read between the lines but even if you try and prove ideological bias in the grants given, there is not logical throughline into the unpaid moderation of the content of the pages.
At most you could argue they betrayed the trust of donors by using those donations for paying for things beyond the server costs of wikipedia. Which is fair, but from that to calling their mission compromised seems a leap a tad far
Yes, which was a requirement the OP specified alongside the others. Abdicating neutrality was not acceptable.
> But their grants affect future events not the ones recorded and wikimedia aren't even the people writting the text on wikipedia, they are unpaid moderators.
Wikipedia only posts information with citations. The grant is funding organizations that will provide citations from a certain viewpoint ("shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege"), thus affecting the information that will show up on Wikipedia in the future. This follows trivially so I'm not sure exactly what doesn't follow.
> how so? The non voting shareholders of exxon and the donators in wikimedia have the same role, financing the operation.
The returns shareholders are expecting is money. The returns Wikipedia donors are expecting are improvements to Wikipedia in its role as neutral historian. Money and those expectations are not commensurate, so the comparison isn't really valid on its face.
Furthermore, if you accept that Wikimedia funded activism that's not strictly in line with being a neutral historian, then you must conclude that they abdicated that role contrary to donor expectations.
If you wanted a proper comparison to Exxon, then it would be comparable to Exxon making a series of choices that reduce shareholder value, which gives shareholders grounds to sue. There is no such recourse for Wikimedia donors as far as I understand so they still aren't directly comparable, but the "betrayal" of violated expectations as you termed it, is of a similar kind.
Lets follow that example. You assume those grants can provide citations, and the mission of the grant is to shift away from eurocentricity. So theoretically there are enough eurocentric citacions already in Wikipedia, and they would provide a different analysis on the same topics.
This would improve wikipedia neutrality rather than diminish it. If OP wanted a neutral wikipedia then those grants would help that mission (if we believe that the grants actually generate content that promotes views not currently cited, and that people who update the affected pages will find, or cite those materials in the future. Two big ifs)
The only way this could affect neutrality is if you think a biased eurocentric telling is neutral but thats a circular argument where the status quo is always neutral and any new information is straying away from neutrality.
Just because there's no truly neutral version doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for neutrality. There are clearly anti-neutral approaches which we should always try to eliminate.
> Who chooses which facts show up, or how do we know if certain critical facts are missing?
Wikipedia already has a pretty good policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...
Wherein a lack of nuance allows a person to be obsessed with “phoniness”—any perceived moral breakdown in an idealized person or organization—
To want a neutral historical is one incredible demand. And then to really suggest that Wikipedia has strayed 5xfar from that!
By "full-time" you mean paid?
Researchers can't contribute to Wikipedia at all, unless the "research" consists of a literature review.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
And if there were full-time paid editors, I'd stop editing immediately, and instead contribute my efforts to the fork that would inevitably result.
With the foundation's resources and clout, someone working on their behalf may be able to get better access to many source materials.
And if there were full-time paid editors, I'd stop editing immediately
So, I'm guessing you know a lot about Wikipedia.. but aren't there already full-time paid editors, just not from the foundation? I struggle to believe there are not well funded interests out there investing money into improving Wikipedia (whether such improvements are objective or subjective) in the same way that some tech companies fund, say, programming language core teams.
What the WMF does do at times is fund community "organizers" trying to get unpaid volunteer editors to work on its content. See e.g.:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/09/22/join-the-organizer-lab...
Direct editing paid for by the Foundation was tried once, with bad results:
https://thewikipedian.net/2014/04/02/bats-in-the-belfer-a-be...
I guess what I was thinking more of was philanthropic organizations paying mathematicians, geologists, and various other types of academic to improve the quality of Wikipedia's entries on a full time basis. Maybe I am being hopefully naive about the allocation of capital though, and thinking merely the sort of things I'd like to fund if I were a billionaire.. ;-)
As an established Wikipedia editor, you can sign-up for free access to a variety of source materials that "civilians" would have to pay for. You don't have to be employed by Wikimedia.
> but aren't there already full-time paid editors, just not from the foundation?
There are two kinds of paid editor: people who are employed by WMF, and also edit (but they're not actually paid to edit, at least in theory); and lobbyists, reputation-managers, marketing consultants and so on, who are allowed to edit within limits. Personally I would like those pluggers removed with extreme prejudice, but WP is very relaxed about these things.
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno...
Not having a ton of extra money is a good way to prevent that kind of bloat.
Who will decide how we interface to encyclopedic facts in the absence of Wikipedia?
These campaigns are great to diversify and prevent Wikipedia from being beholden to them.
When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.
I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.
What was this ad that was so objectionable?
People with actually different experiences and backgrounds, somewhat the way how the ideal model of science is set up - individual humans are fallible and partisan, get your work checked by someone who disagrees because they're the ones who most want it to not be true.
They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do.
If you write about, say, the controversies around the Latin Mass in the Catholic Church, getting a liberal woman to check a liberal man's work is useless - they're both likely to either have a dim view of the conservative sects that prefer the Latin Mass, to be just utterly unable to understand the religious conservatives' POV and worldview, or both. I know I did until I actually befriended some, it was something you could liken to moral colorblindness - the modern secular liberal is aggressively morally colorblind and lacking in understanding of others - again, speaking from experience.
You do know that any traction you are getting with these arguments goes out the window when you start using terms like "woke".
White, black, purple Americans tend to have similar perspectives on things, so do white, black and purple Swedes.
The issue is that the articles on many international things are clearly written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, often citing purely English sources on events that happen in, say, France or Syria.
That they apparently think gender defines perspectives more than ethnicity and cultural background is the problem. Apparently they can make an effort towards gender but not toward the issue that plagues English-Language Wikipedia that only English-language sources are used in the end, often even about subjects that are fundamentally not in English such as the critical response of non-English media, being phrased as though it's a global consensus.
Again, I've seen some places where his has recently improved, but it's annoying to, say, see on Wikipedia that for instance “criticism was mixed” on a French film that was overwhelmingly positively received in France because English-language criticism was more negative due to cultural differences.
That they decided to highlight the gender problem first doesn't mean that Wikipedia thinks the other problems are ok as is.
Someone having different priorities for fixing problems is not necessarily your enemy.
In the end, from my perspective, Anglo-Saxons from whatever gender or color tend to think very much alike and very different from persons from entirely different countries. The country one is born in influences one's perspectives far more than one's gender or skin color, how could it not really?
That they prioritize such minutiæ over bigger problems is something I found a slap in the face, or rather, a reminder of the issue that they're probably barely aware of it and don't realize how different the perspective of other culture can be.
1. Wikipedia is biased toward Anglo perspectives.
2. Wikipedia is trying to recruit contributors with a broader range of perspectives.
This doesn't seem like a problem with WMF.
But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally.
From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.
Wikipedia doesn't help starving children in any way.
And related to that, some of the practices raise eyebrows.
(For example, letting children play in your freezers and around your blood and plasma donations.)
What is not said here, but I think it was started this article there was a break-down on Twitter [2] recently where someone broke down the grants Wikimedia Foundation gives to other charities, A lot of Wikimedia has become advocacy for social issues not the spread of free information. Some of those Social issues many of the donors to Wikimedia may not agree with, and it being redistributed to some pretty controversial organizations. People donating to Wikimedia thinking they are advancing Wikipedia but in reality the bulk of the foundation spending is issuing grants to other charities.
>>Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget
I am reminded of this TED talk[1] from several years ago that talks about fundraising and charity
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579778161889652736.html
Very similar to charity navigator but rating for-profit businesses
I have to believe that the BBB claim had some effect on that. The BBB may have accepted Ford's word, and closed the claim, but it resulted in some messaging up the consumer complaint chain.
Twitter "Customer Service" is marketing budget
Its a shame so much money is being funneled to these groups since that's exactly the opposite goal of most donators to Wikipedia.
Either that, or like the author, you agree with their claim that grant money going to journalists who are people of color is 'furthering the inescapable American culture war.'
Jeez, how dare those black people engage in journalism that isn't about white culture. They're declaring war on American (white) culture!" /s
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Grant_...
This said, I agree with the premise that the Wikimedia Foundation is partisan. Its General Counsel came from the Tides Foundation, which is as partisan as any of its equivalents on the right, and its Chief Advancement Officer, responsible for fundraising and strategic partnerships, had a long career in political philanthropy before joining Wikimedia:
https://sfgov.org/civilservice/sites/default/files/Documents...
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/greening-the-left/
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/COMMUNITY-Growing-ch...
Ugh, what?
...then attacks SERCH claiming they've done nothing but release 'youtube videos with 50 views', attacks them for not having produced any within the last year (maybe their grant ended?) when if one google "SERCH foundation" they'd quickly see "Our signature program is Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, an online platform and monthly web series focused on women of color in STEM." and further:
> WHAT WE DO
> Produce a live web-series with timely and relevant content
> Celebrate women of color with weekly #WCWinSTEM features
> Publish original content written by and for women of color in STEM
> Foster support and networking via our online platform
> Convene as a community virtually and at in-person events
> Advocate for ourselves + our STEM interests
....and then the big bad boogeymonster really blows its dog whistle when the author associates a foundation distributing grants to journalists who are people of color with "bankrolling the inescapable American culture war." You hear that sound? That's the sound of my eyes rolling, hard. Grants to people of color who work in journalism is furthering a "American culture war." Gosh, those pesky people of color, spreading their "culture war."
The author of the thread then mentions Guy Macon, who, from a quick google, appears to be a transphobic bigot and a troll who made a point of purposefully misgendering a trans wikipedian just to get a rise out of them, and then made a huge scene when he wasn't allowed to erase history and pretend the whole thing didn't happen, and demanded that the person unblock him. Good lord, what a fucking child. https://www.reddit.com/r/RealWikiInAction/comments/rv9x94/gu...
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=292896
....and then it ends somehow vaguely tying wikipedia to an experiment involving octopii hatchlings getting killed, or something.
It's a gish-gallop mess, and what a giant surprise it was to find that the author has a long, rambling thread about police killings in the UK that seems to say "that, really, if those black people just stopped committing crimes, they wouldn't get arrested and shot and stuff": https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1574101120347168770.html
...and their response to "uh, who exactly is this person" is to troll people by giving them the name of an anime: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeKtlilX0AAqnKA?format=png&name=...
if you want to know where you lost me, this is where....
Anyone talking about "dog whistle" gets an instant ignore from me.
At the end of the day, my problem with wikimedia is the same problem I have with United Way, and other such "charities". I do not support charities of charities. I want to give directly to a cause I support, The fact that wikimedia is soliciting donations for one thing, then using that money for another is very misleading and IMO unethical, People do not donate to Wikipedia to support SERCH or any of the other organizations, they do so to support wikipedia, that is where the money should be spent.
I take it you think a "dog-whistle" is something the left criticizes the right for doing; and I suppose you are of the right. In fact a dog-whistle could be uttered by a politician of any colour; it's simply a message that is more likely to be heard by one particular political group than others.
There are evidently what you might call "anti-dog-whistles": messages that are not likely to be heard by some group. Apparently you belong to the group that can't hear messages containing the term "dog-whistle".
In the same way that anyone that dared suggest that COVID could have been a lab leak before "authority" validated the possibility was marked as being a "conspiracy theorist", anyone that dare challenge the current trends in the arena of ESG, DEI, CRT, and anti-racism must clearly be a racist, and "dog-whistle" to their racist friends because no one could possibly object to these things for any other reason.
In this usage of the term dog-whistle it is likely a Left political cause, however that this not my opposition to the use. dog-whistle is often used in an effort to side-step having to confront the actual issue, and instead lay a charge upon the individual instead of the idea being presented. It is almost like saying "when did you stop beating your wife", any response to the charge will be seen as an admission of guilt.
Yet you continue to engage
If widipedia is asking me to donate to support it, but most of the money isn't going to support wikipedia, then that is a bit deceptive. It's especially deceptive when that money isn't just going to the wikimedia foundation's other projects, but as grants to a variety of other organizations that have very different missions.
I think much of the criticism of SeRCH is valid. Their "signature program" hasn't released a video in over 5 years and none ever got over a thousand views. The unclearly related "Vanguard Stem" (I think it is a parent or partner organization) hasn't put out video in over a year. To be clear, a quick google isn't enough to write this organization off, but it did fail to find any information that made SeRCH seem like a legit organization to fund.
I have no idea about the other stuff, but I knew the name from The Insult File: https://micans.org/stijn/haphazard/flame.txt
I think he's since removed it from his personal site, but there's plenty of copies, floating around.
In most cases, openly opposed to the spread of free information.
I dont like the knowledge equity grants either, but it was still a tiny portion of Wikimedia foundation's budget. Describing it as "a lot" is outright misleading.
This is not to say they shouldn't be held accountable, but I do wonder what's the percentages of large charities that are "much worse" in terms of "we exist mostly to pay pretty good salaries to people whose purpose is to fundraise so we can repeat the loop".
Is there a reference here that I'm missing?
A low CN rating is bad, but a high CN rating isn't good.
There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia - disagreements with the way certain topics are represented, and the way wikipedia has become a huge resource for information and news is not good news for everyone.
I spend way more money on entertainment being piped into my TV, or deliveries happening a day quicker than I do on a website I use several times a day.
Check the wikipedia page for the author of the article, he has been against wikipedia for 20 years now. Got his job in the Daily Telegraph by insulting Google and wikipedia repeatedly about how woke they are.
Additionally, only a small fraction of the money goes to wikipedia (including software dev for it).
The wiki outrage looks like a variation of bike shedding, the more people know, they more opinion they have
And here's an alternative way to browse Wikipedia and WikiData: https://conze.pt/
These sites are possible because the Wikimedia Foundation puts a lot of effort into making it easy for others to retrieve the data and reuse them.
I would never donate to the university I went to, because the endowment is too !@#$$ big. It's more than enough to sustain itself, and the remainder goes into wacky financial schemes which hurt the whole organization.
Why he's so consistently angry with Wikipedia is still a bit of a mystery to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski#Criticism_of...
[0] “journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.”
The most vituperative critics of WMF are typically active Wikipedians. When a nonprofit is consistently acting against the desires of the community they are set up to support and when you as an unpaid volunteer feel like they are putting your work in jeopardy for their own benefit then you might be upset.
Hyperbole / slander?
"Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead?"
Why do I need a proxy for charity? If I want to give to some cause I will do so directly.
That’s just a damning argument against most charities. Like, you can say “the US is still a good place as far as human rights go”, yeah, ok, is it a good reason to stop talking about rights?
If they listen to the radio NPR pledge drives must irritate them to the point of flames coming out their ears.
Or if they read free newspapers like the guardian online they must loath it as much as Wikipedia, or more because it doesn’t just do ask a few weeks out of the year.
No one is forced to use Wikipedia. If Being occasionally asked to chip in is too much to bear then don’t use it.
I’ll confess I’m not totally enthused by the way they frame it, but I’ve used it for decades so I have donated one time. I mean it’s free and useful and I’d feel cheap if I use something for decades and never chip in
I have no choice but to provide some Cell phone and internet providers money to do those things because paying them is necessarily to function in society.
I donate to Wikipedia.
And I am glad they have lots of money. I do not feel outraged about it, I feel happy about it.
I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Wikipedia is a great service, it should be valued. They should not always be living close to the edge of going out of business. How they spend their funds raised is their business.
This anti Wikipedia person is really annoying and I wish they would stop their crusade.
EDIT: it seems the outraged guy is a right wing Murdoch journalist. Enough said, it all adds up. I still remember how Murdoch ran a successful campaign here in Australia to sink the planned national fibre to the home broadband network - 10 years down the track we never got our national fibre network. These guys hate tech, especially free information services like Wikipedia and national broadcasters like the ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Murdoch wants to own it all and hates free.
From the authors Wikpedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski
"Writing for The Daily Telegraph in May 2021, Orlowski said that the Wikimedia Foundation was "flush with cash" and passing money to the Tides Network, which he described as "a left-leaning dark money group"; he referred to Wikipedia as "Wokepedia" in an allusion to the term "woke".[24] In another article for The Daily Telegraph, in December 2021, Orlowski said the Wikimedia Foundation's urgent fundraising banners on Wikipedia were "preposterous" given that it held assets of $240 million and had a $100 million endowment, and the Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director had said in 2013 that the Foundation could be sustainable on "$10M+ a year".[25] In August 2022, Orlowski claimed that Wikipedia had "become a tool of the Left in the battle to control the truth", referencing the recent controversy over Wikipedia's definition of a recession.[26]"
HBomberguy has a good video on the subject. You can use people ranting about 'wokeness' to make money, and while it's amusing and gratifying to indulge that 'ha, I showed you, I don't agree with your ranting against this thing!' it's engaging in pseudo-political behavior that's in a sense wasted. Throwing more money at Wikipedia isn't really helping them be more woke, it's helping them be better at using that to ask for money.
I'm not actually going to give them money today but that's because I gotta tend to my own affairs: if I had a bunch extra I'd send some Wikipedia's way on the grounds that at least they're annoying the right people?
That's muddying the waters. If Wikipedia has deceptive donation drives, then who reports it should be completely irrelevant.
If he's not presenting a factual summary of what's going on, his "motivations" are likewise irrelevant.
If you can refute his claims, by all means do so, but vague ad hominems don't impress me.
Either his claims are factual, or they aren't.
If they are not factual, they should be refuted, but appealing to his "motivations" or "track record" is not a refutation. It is an ad hominem attack, i.e., a logical fallacy.
As I said above:
> So when an oil company writes a report on the viability of solar power then that doesn't affect how we should view the report?
> His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
The truth of that claim has no causal relationship with his opinions. I mean, obviously someone who disagrees with funneling donations to left-wing causes would be more likely to complain about it, or even possibly make something up. But that in itself has no bearing on whether the claim is actually true.
Does Wikipedia funnel donations to left-wing causes or not?
You have presented no evidence one way or the other. Instead, you have attacked his "motivations" and "track record". That is a textbook ad hominem.
Did you actually read the article? This point is not made anywhere in the article.
No point in discussing this further.
"The Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund is a new US$4.5 million fund created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, to provide grants to external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge."
His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
But why do you think it does affect how you view the report? Because the company is likely to lie, right? So you should perhaps examine the report more carefully. But that has nothing to do with the report's factuality. It may affect how likely it is to be true, but once you've determined it to be one or the other, who reported it is completely irrelevant.
Likewise, if Wikipedia is in fact dishonest when it asks for donations, and you first heard that completely true fact from a Nazi, are you going to conclude that actually it was false all along? In other words, is your reality determined by the opposite of what your political adversaries say?
> Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap.
$1.9m is was the capital expenditure budget for 2012/3 (ie cost of servers etc).
But I'm sure that his motivations had nothing to do with the fact that he found a conveniently small expense figure to mislead with.
EDIT: And I insist, all that's relevant is the error itself. The political affiliation of the person who made the error shouldn't matter.
If wikimedia was actually spending all donations on blackjack and hookers for execs, would it matter that the person reporting it was reporting it because he really hates wikis as a concept?
Not everyone shares your opinion on high pressure misleading sales as a persuasion method being acceptable.
Could you elaborate on that? I really don't want to believe this is true, WMF is clearly being manipulative and a world where being manipulative is necessary sounds...extremely dystopian.
I use Wikipedia a few times a week, my kids use it, I am happy to pay for it, and to give them some room to fund new related efforts.
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
> I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Necessary how? For what?
I donate to Wikipedia—as a Wikipedian. I've contributed a bunch of time editing content and doing lots of gnomish things to create value so that Wikipedia is a "great service". Millions of others have, too. But neither I nor any of the other people have anything to do with your donations.
Don't misunderstand: this is not a call-to-action for revenue sharing in the vein of the articles constantly appearing about the sustainability of FOSS; I'm not saying "give us a cut". What I am saying is that the Wikimedia fundraising tactics are thoroughly unnecessary to the actual production costs of Wikipedia that Wikimedia is responsible for.
Am I outraged? No. Do I recognize what WMF is doing as borderline slimy? Yes.
f8376c7f9d4e7f2c03d4dc6e7ced48bdc5f9b4019d94e7dc77c048226dbce9aa
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
Your (bad) attempt to be clever notwithstanding, my comment makes it clear that I'm not referring to donating money. That's not true of the person I responded to. Try again.
From a Twitter thread on a scientific research project funded through Wikimedia:
> In deciding who to fund, the key criteria was use of the Intersectional Scientific method. Everything else - a scientific background, data - was optional. What could possibly go wrong?
> One of the projects was into spatial learning in the California Two-Spot Octopus, for which the researcher got 12 hatchling octopuses.
> Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded.
Don't conflate wikipedia and wikimedia.
You may be glad wikipedia has a lot of money, but are you glad wikimedia does? Are you happy with the proportion of your wikimedia donation that goes to wikipedia?
Why do they need 550 employees? I think it's fair to question what the foundation has decided to do with your donation, because basically all of your donation goes to the "not-Wikipedia" parts.
But yeah the fact that this was written by some radical right-winger makes sense. The weird red-scare stuff at the end was so out of place, I should have realized it was by a right-wing propagandist, they have to shove that tripe into everything.
No silly 25MB framework, no hype, no popup banners (except the donation), no ads, no tracking, doesn't ask to sign up when I scroll down, no paywall...
Just doing it's thing providing all the world with all knowledge for free, in a lot of languages.
These managers can earn $4 million for all I care.
Hell, I work for a mid-sized company that doesn't even come close to being as useful as Wikipedia and our C-suite earns a million a year.
> "It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers," observes one regular Register reader, which seems as good a description as any to us.
https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/07/khmer_rouge_in_daiper...
> "You think the BBC is biased? Check out Wokepedia"
https://archive.ph/20210527073503/https://www.telegraph.co.u...
In a rhetorical line consistent with the "Khmer Rouge in diapers" and "Wokepedia" snipes, the writing in this second piece is strikingly petty and polemical:
> If Karl Marx was alive today, perhaps he wouldn’t be touring Manchester slums with Engels, but peering in astonishment at the upstairs-downstairs world of Wikipedia. Instead of Das Kapital, he’d be writing Das Wiki.
It's revealing that Orlowski chooses to single out Wikipedia as a remarkable examplar of extreme wealth inequality, when many of the outlets he mentions in his very first sentence are headed by far wealthier individuals than Jimmy Wales:
> Who would you name as the most influential media company in the world? Some might offer Fox, Disney or the BBC. Or AT&T and Comcast, the largest media giants by revenue. In fact, the real answer may be hidden in plain view: Wikipedia.
Evidently, Orlowski is simply a right-wing journalist who dislikes the public having access to information with an ideological bent which is even sometimes different than he would like to see online, and therefore takes potshots at Wikipedia using standards he doesn't apply to other outlets.
Personally, when I want information on a topic that's received widespread attention, I almost always find Wikipedia an extraordinarily informative source, usually much more neutral in tone and much more fact-loaded than anything else found online. Even when the writing suggests a viewpoint I don't agree with. And yes, sometimes the viewpoint is to the political left of my personal viewpoint.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not a little "Khmer Rouge diaper baby" who is helplessly swayed to the evil communists by the slightest bias in Wikipedia's tone. I'm an adult who finds it to be one helpful source as I draw my own conclusions.
If such a viewpoint is unpalatable to Andrew Orlowski, perhaps he belongs on Conservapedia, the onetime self-styled "trustworthy" encyclopedia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski
[note: minor edits for clarity + expanded analysis]
Note that citations don't make bias impossible or claims true, they just make it easier to decide whether to trust information. E.g. If I cite the BBC in my statement and you trust the BBC you're more likely to trust my statement.
A lot of right wingers believe that most news sources (and particularly a lot of the ones the wikipedian collective thinks of as reliable) are grossly misleading or lying, so they won't be very convinced by, say, a Vogue citation.
Your point, while valid enough in general, is a red herring in this case.
Not just right-wingers. With few exceptions, Wikipedia "reliable sources" are mostly mainstream media, which most lefties regard as locked-down, neo-liberal propaganda cannons.
In closing, one small joke: About dark / annoying patterns: You forgot my least favourite: When you move the mouse out of tab, lightbox pops up: "Don't leave yet... blah blah blah... sign up for our newsletter!" As if that is going to keep me on the page!
The main donation page doesn't seem bad to me. Nowhere do they claim they are struggling or may go under. In fact, they say "thriving" and that a small donation will keep it thriving for years to come.
To those upset with them, what would you do? All of their other projects are about free information. Are people upset about wikidata or wikiversity exist? Should they have only done Wikipedia and stopped? Should they not ask for money until they are desperate and in a dire situation? Should they not use any marketing speak and say, "we have hundreds of millions of dollars but would like more please."
Comparing them to FAANG/MAMAA, it is no comparison at all. The value is great and pure: nice, fast, simple, useful interface. They don't have malware, ads, tracking scripts, popups, spam, or dark patterns. Unlike social media there is no envy/depression side effects. They don't try to get you addicted and gamify it. They don't push controversial news just to boost engagement. They respect your privacy, ublock origin has nothing to block on their site.
It seems like Wikimedia is getting hell on here for having very high standards and maybe not quite living up to people's expectations. Whereas the FAANGs have zero standards, don't respect users at all, are 100% profit driven (and already have vastly more money), but they are ok because... some reason.
Maybe in the pure STEM subsections but anything to do with humanities is highly subjective and biased.
Even in the hard sciences I find that Wikipedia is a just good starting point: scan the references for the real material. It helps if you have access to real libraries, both physical and digital.
Personally I stopped donating to them when I discovered how difficult it was to correct errors in literally my own family's history; there's always some "editor" sitting there to roll it back in seconds.
On that same note, could that be why your family history gets rolled back? No doubt it would be frustrating to have a change you know is real get rolled back but it would make sense from an objective editorial standpoint. That said, I get why you wouldn't want to donate. I personally come from a long line of nobodies (and am proudly carrying on that tradition) so I will never have this problem!
The second time was something more esoteric, which I can't remember.
Then Wikipedia deleted my account during some transition and I lost interest in the whole thing.
That's the second time today someone has said that to me. Is this the prescribed mantra to justify their obvious lack of objectivity?
Take Trump's entry for example: looks like a blog, walks like blog, talks like a blog.
I suggest you have a look at what the co-founder of Wikipedia has to say about it. Larry Sanger, not that Wales fellow.
As it should be. Wikipedia is not your personal blog. If you cannot prove what you say is true to an acceptable standard it should be reverted. That is how it wikipedia stays reliable.
Hi there. I have a bridge on Mars to sell you.
However, given you did not include a citation for the sale of that bridge that meets wikipedia's guidelines on appropriate sources, i am not sure it is quite the comeback you think it is.
Edit: here’s a link to a thread about what I mean:
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633?s=46&...
But I gather you think wmf is doing something beyond this? Which side, of which culture war do they support, in your view?
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579779097278181378?s=46&...
Curse of American politics, I guess, when one considers the Democrats to be "left leaning", then your whole political perception is skewed.
(The Democrats are significantly to the right of our centre-right party. People who call them lefties or socialists or commies amuse, confuse, and bemuse me.)
See Lysenkoism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Marx's ideas were refined by Antonio Gramsci who offered social Hegemony as a means to achieve the utopia. To the extent that science is a sense-making part of society it must be taken over by pro-marxist/communist forces. It's the only way to assure the success of marxism.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.93001...
Stalin had thousands of Lysenko's critics imprisoned, I dunno how Marx would feel about that, but I have a feeling it wouldn't be particularly positive.
What does Hegel have to do with anything here? Adam Smith was also "routed in Hegel"...
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations when Hegel was 5 years old, and died when Hegel was 19, and hadn't published anything yet.
Lysenkoism still isn't evidence that Marx was anti-science.
But it's still leftist in origin and in ideology. Saying the modern wokified U.S. Left isn't leftist is just a No True Scotsman argument. Leftism and rightism are not narrow, specific things, they're more like inchoate moral intuitions that are given more concrete form by ideology and realpolitik. Individual leftist or rightist ideologies are often contradictory with each other. But the underlying sentiment is usually still recognizable as one or the other.
As someone who is a communist, the Dems have nothing to do with Marx, and they are about as capitalist as they come.
I stopped donating when I saw how politicised they were.
People are people, and will have opinions about things. People of a kind will naturally group together. This is all fine, but it becomes a problem when one of the things that make what you produce worthwhile is neutrality, and you can't keep your politics in your pants.
I'm sure you have some though, otherwise commenting as you did would mean you'd be as guilty of "not keeping your politics in your pants" as you accuse Wikipedia of being.
I expect this would qualify.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
which also links to:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/06/03/we-stand-for...
Most people would probably place a lot of this firmly in the "woke" category.
Well then. That makes it perfectly clear that Wikimedia is under the sway of partisan activists.
True neturality is basically an impossible target.
There's a comic out there, one side advocates for genocide, the other opposes it; the centrists are like "let's have a little genocide, as a compromise".
That's probably true, but Wikipedia isn't even pretending to try.
They also pay their executives far less.
That's at least in part because the IA board are idiots however.
* some bundles/deals are locked to specific charities
However, I do feel that an internet where we pay for the things we use is to be preferred over an internet full of advertisements.
> Many supporters like you who understand the usefulness of planning ahead have chosen to include a gift to Wikipedia in their will. They want to do more to protect free knowledge and are invested in building a legacy with Wikipedia to ensure their values live on for many years to come.
"If you understood the importance of planning ahead, you'd already have WikiMedia in your will, bozo"
2021 2011
Current Assets 208,678,345 20,784,992
Donations 153,096,642 23,020,127
Salaries 67,857,676 7,312,120
Internet Hosting 2,384,439 1,799,943
I'm one who is seeing these Wikipedia donation links currently (apparently not everyone is yet) so I'm glad this article raised the issue. The WMF probably has enough assets to run itself on a shoestring budget in perpetuity.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/ac/FINAL...
Mozilla ended up wasting an insane amount of money on things other than Firefox.
The Red Cross has also been mired in controversy (eg [2]). Eventually such organizations just seem to collapse under the weight of their bloat and have very little effective spending on the things they fund raise off.
I'm also reminded of Yes, Prime Minister [3].
[1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
[2]: https://www.propublica.org/article/disturbing-things-about-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
The actual fundraiser will come at the end of the year, when the banners will follow everyone visiting Wikipedia around for over a month (29th of November – 31st of December).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising#Current_fundrais...
Your donors often feel generous as the giving or holiday season approaches. Many will also be looking to make year-end donations for tax relief." [0]
If you donate in March, when no ads are running, that will lead to the ads being seen as less effective.
To be fair to Wikipedia here, quoting a nearly ten year old figure and comparing it to current earnings in order to prove that their required expenses are low is not that honest.
Note I made the same argument in Wikipedia's community newspaper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Read the comments from Wikipedians underneath. No one claimed it was a dishonest argument to make.
I'm pretty happy to wager real money that Wikipedia has had to scale significantly in the last ten years.
But, hey, if you've got evidence to the contrary, I'll happily read it.
… But have they had to scale to a degree commensurate with the amount of money they are spending? Absolutely not. The "Wikipedia has cancer" article makes that point handily.
"Technical Infrastructure" includes "all the engineering and technology" though. I'm not sure if a breakdown which includes server costs is available? I remember it being a pretty small piece of previous budgets.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Wikimedi...
As an example, if we are to trust this site (https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm), a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars in 2012. You can purchase 8TB for 130 dollars now.
From this wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics) we can see the amount of English articles has about doubled since then. Chances are that storage costs have not only not gone up, they have gone down.
As far as I can see, the text of Wikipedia is about 10GB. I don't know how much space the images occupy, but if we assume they take up roughly the same space, then a single 2TB disk would accomodate 1,000 Wikipedias.
This isn't about the cost of disk storage.
"As of 21 September 2022, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 21.23 GB without media."
(Note that's gzipped, so the actual size is much higher in-use.)
Media is, of course, vastly larger. Sadly, the last number given was from 2014, so I'd expect it to have increased massively since then:
"The size of the media files in Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias was described as well over 23 TB near the end of 2014"
OK; I did a quick dig to see how big Wikipedia is, but you've dug deeper.
You can still stick the whole English Wikipedia on a single disk, probably with all linked media (I suspect that a lot of what's on Wikimedia isn't linked from Wikipedia articles). So the main cost issue is serving content to the network; and there are lots of server farms that would cheerfully do that for the love.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
Annual revenue was $163 million. Of course hosting costs alone don't cover the entire outlay, but Wikimedia's budget and money demands have absolutely exploded in recent years.
> After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March
> “WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,”
> He put the running costs at $10 million a year. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years.
> So where does the money go? Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course.
> Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising
etc.
Wikimedia makes the world a much better world place. They should have the funds to do whatever they want.
You’re mad at them for some reason because they have 400 mil? That’s not even half a billion.
I want a world where the Wikimedia foundation is a multi-billion dollar entity.
No doubt the world is better off with Wikipedia and Wikimedia, but the attitude that "they can do no wrong" is extremely dangerous. Any powerful organization, especially ones bringing in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from the public, must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism. It is unhealthy not to do so.
One of the strongest aspects of Wikipedia is that authors are not on anyone's payroll. (Though editing can be a competitive endeavor with monied interests occasionally involved).
All the editors of Wikipedia couldn't possibly be compensated, and no one expects that anyway.
The problem is that the donation campaign is falsely being advertised as if to keep Wikipedia, the site itself, alive but is instead given to Wikimedia
Isn't that misleading, even if you support Wikimedia and what they do?
Special report: "Wikipedia's independence" or "Wikimedia's pile of dosh"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Opinion: The Wikimedia Endowment – a lack of transparency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment/Updates/...
(Note, I don't have any stakes in that debate, besides occasionally uploading drone photography to Commons)
This take is so incredibly bad. It's good that they're not struggling financially - and people stopping to donate is a great way to change that. They aren't struggling, until they are. I don't want to live in a world where the foundation behind Wikipedia struggles with financing, so continuing to donate is the only sane way forward.
I mean I would't be surprised if one of the big cloud provider offers them free hosting; it'd be a great goodwill move, and cloud providers are competing HARD with each other.
This also got rid of the annoying "preview" feature.
While we're on the subject, I'm a fan of Nitter[0] as a JS-free Twitter UI. Can anyone recommend any other JS-free frontends to popular apps?
[0] nitter.net, and it's mirrored on many other URLS: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
Here is a more exhaustive list: https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect
Why don't you respond to the actual claims?
"In some cases, a successful argument against the person can render an arguer's impartiality, sincerity, or trustworthiness open to question. This may be a weak form of argument, but it may be enough to alter the burden of proof on a controversial issue. And therefor it can be a reasonable criticism" -- Informal Logic, A Pragmatic Approach, Douglas Walton
> Why don't you respond to the actual claims?
Because I have zero obligation to take seriously any claims from heavily biased sources. Also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle. "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
People should feel free to research the author's past and decide for themselves if any article he writes on Wikipedia will be a fair assessment that includes both positives and negatives or more likely to be a heavily biased hit piece.
I would be just as uninterested in an article from Wikimedia themselves on how great they are.
I already said what I would be interested in: factual reporting that makes a reasonable and unbiased effort to uncover all the facts and give the full context. Everyone has the right to ignore "reporting" and "sources" that do not fulfill even the bare minimums of journalist integrity.
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Likewise even more evidence of their re-gifting from a source that hates them has value.
What's interesting is that you somehow know that the author is someone who hates wikipedia, yet you refuse to read his article(s). How did you arrive at the conclusion that the author is someone who is heavily biased against Wikimedia and shouldn't be trusted? Are you just memetically repeating something others have said on the internet about the author, or did you read other articles/claims from this author and independently arrive at your conclusion?
If the latter, how could you have not researched Wikimedia finances even a little to validate claims the author makes? In which case, you would have something substantive to communicate to others on the internet to be aware of about the claims of the author, instead of the anti-intellectual ad hominem approach you took here.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
The next natural question that I asked is how you arrived at the conclusion that the article/author is heavily biased (or filled with 'bullshit' as you have stated)? You respond by implying what I was asking is 'bullshit', and you don't need to answer any questions about it.
Overall, this thread/tangent has not been constructive. I was responding to your ad hominem on the author and shallow dismissal (which is against HN guidelines) of the article with no supporting arguments/remarks/evidence. Yes, my tone was more direct, as I'm not a fan of shallow dismissals based on ad hominem attacks. Probably my mistake for even engaging given the content of the comments that were posted to others.
Like you have stated a number of times here, you don't need to read/respond to anything you don't want to and you don't owe anybody anything. For future reference, this is just an implied rule in life, and doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Feel free to ignore this comment as you have stated you will, and I definitely don't expect/want anything else out of this conversation.
Both of which are factual.
> The next natural question that I asked
You didn't just ask the next "natural" question. You were snarky, made accusatory questions, and broke HN rules.
> You respond by implying what I was asking is 'bullshit', and you don't need to answer any questions about it.
You left out the part where I said don't owe you the answers to your accusatory style questions. Which is the crux of the problem.
> For future reference, this is just an implied rule in life, and doesn't need to be explicitly stated.
Thanks for the advice. Here it is again explicitly stated because I'll continue to use my style of communication:
I don't have any obligation to reply to heavily biased "journalism" or the cross-examining style questions you used.
> I was responding to your ad hominem on the author and shallow dismissal (which is against HN guidelines)
It was ad hominem, but of the useful kind. It was not a shallow dismissal because I gave a solid reason folks should ignore his writing on that specific subject. That's the opposite of a shallow dismissal. All of my comments got a lot of up-votes. People here clearly found my observations useful. And my defense of my observations useful.
In contrast to comments similar to yours which got flagged.
> Feel free to ignore this comment as you have stated you will
Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said I'll ignore any future comment you make. I said something different. Which anyone can re-read and make up their own mind about.
> While I am a very low income Senior [ live in Gov't. H.U.D. Apt.], I do still try to contribute to certain causes. Wikipedia is 1 such Group. I believe that I have given Wikipedia small donations for about 3 years now. While I do not have much to give, It is important that You know we appreciate the great work you undertake.
> I do, respectfully, need to point out 1 "process" that Wikipedia implements that "disturbs/upsets" me. I just, accidentally, got rolled over to Wikipedia on a matter I am researcing. The Wikipedia "overlay" writing asking for Donations said this was 4th time You have asked me.
> THAT "NOTICE" MADE ME FEEL VERY "GUILTY/BAD"....... Right now, I have $18.00 in my bank account ! That's It !
> Soon, I will get my only source of Income [ a monthly Social Security Check] & will try to make a donation at that time.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk/Archives/2...>
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978>
For me, there are two completely separate arguments here:
1. Is Wikipedia currently run by people that I think have the right strategic direction and priorities?
2. Does Wikipedia greatly contribute to the world and could they contribute more?
On the first point I'm, um, politely, a little skeptical. Trying experiments is great, but mission bloat means that a lot of money is wasted on things that aren't at least presently making the world better.
On the second point I do not know how anyone could come to more of a resounding YES to. English Wikipedia is awesome, the Wikitionary project has helped me in multiple languages ranging from Russian, Greek, Chinese, and of course English. Would I personally prefer if they put more effort into getting Wikipedia English translated into other languages more thoroughly, especially the languages of poorer countries? Yes. Of course.
But the thing is, even if the ninety cents of a donation to Wikimedia is spent on what I personally consider to be less effective projects, the dime that is spent on things that I really agree with still buys WAY, WAY, WAY more impact than even a $20 donation anywhere else on education. So if you're going to donate $20 to your alma mater then I recommend either writing for Wikipedia or donating to it, because the impact is real.
But "hel×4a creepy"? That feels like it's, just, you know, your opinion man.
I dunno bra, I write code because I like being the guy behind the guy, not the face on the window. You do you boo, whatever, but I've got my opinions and I'll express them whenever I want, however I want, and wherever I want.
I'll also add to this that they've got an incredibly incompetent recruitment department. The recruiter I dealt with really, really, really likes to use big words to show off her English lit degree.
I posted about it on twitter, 5 people responded with "Did she use the word perspicuous at least 3 times in every e-mail? Did she ghost you for 2 months, then send you angry messages that you haven't been more proactive in chasing her down? When you turned her down, did she say "I'm very disappointed, I saw something special in you?"
They have over 500 employees[2]. Not sure why they need so many, considering average salary is $100k/yr.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
[2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/#prod...
https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
According to the Form 990, there were 320 US employees and a small number of non-US employees in 2020:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
Note the explanation of what's included in the salary costs here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRS_tax_related_information/...
So I reckoned the average salary cost is more like $200k per person:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
Top earners are here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
I would be totally fine with them hiring hundreds of translators to expand Wikipedia in other languages. English Wikipedia has 4x as many entries as most other languages. They clearly have the cash that they're spending on weird grants and projects that seem more tangential to their original purpose.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/defund-wikipe...
wikipedia.org##.cn-fundraising
wikipedia.org##.frbI wonder if Firefox sync copies these settings across machines as well?
You'll then just need the URL to your filter and paste that it into your different instances of Firefox.
"You do have to filter out some stuff unfortunately – but even academia, scientists and historians are now confessing that they are tailoring their output to ‘fit in’ with wokeness and sensitivities."
At best, it will be less useable and more liable to influence once its source of funding is at the behest of advertisers. And with a subscription model, presumably it would then be pay-to-play which is antithetical to the idea of Wikipedia in the first place.
I also don't agree that Wikipedia has to a significant degree departed from "impartiality, openness and academic freedom", or at least I'd need some sources/examples.
I think the comment that best describes it is further down, on the guy who cannot fathom why New York Post (a tabloid) is not allowed as a source but NPR (the most trusted news source in america according to several surveys) is.
When you start off from not separating tabloids from journalism well then yeah you can call out Wikipedia for being "woke".
The first page of DDG results doesn't have much to say about this search-term. "Intersectionality" is a term that I think originates in some fields of sociology, referring to the idea that the problems of queer people, black people, and other excluded groups shouldn't be treated as distinct sets of problems.
I haven't the first notion what that has to do with "scientific method" (a principle that I don't happen to think has much to do with sociology).
- the removal of features in the name of smaller surface area (while at the same time adding telemetry and analytics[1])
- other lame fixtures of soulless corporations like cringy/dishonest PR babble
There's also stuff like breaking incoming links to content on mozilla.org; making it steadily harder to contribute; keeping things closed source (whereas before everything was licensed under MPL or some other FOSS license); being willing to cut deals with partners that come with strings attached and NDAs; wasting probably a billion dollars on obviously doomed things like Firefox OS and calling it a "moonshot"; etc.
Like, I’d happily give them $5 to never show me the prompt again for a year. Happily. But they’ll continue to show you prompts unless you have an account that you log into and suppress.
And they already have cookies so they can show you how many times they’ve interrupted you to show you the nagware (at least they did last year), so it isn’t like they couldn’t set a cookie to not annoy me.
But as the article says, the money doesn’t go to the people that actually maintain Wikipedia, most of it doesn’t even go to the costs of hosting or employing engineers to keep it going. It goes to a huge staff of people, many of which are focused solely on fundraising.
That’s fine. Do you. But don’t try to guilt me into donating when I’m just trying to read a thinly-sourced page about some movie because the layout is preferable to IMDB. Especially if you are going to still bug me after I donate.
Wikipedia's refusal to go ad-based and rake in Billions (while polluting the space) is the gold standard.
If Wikipedia has enough money to fund youtubers who deny the scientific method, I'm a lot less inspired to donate.
I'm being flippant to some degree, but he's not someone you can trust to have an balanced opinion on Wikipedia and anything he says on that topic should be taken with a large dose of salt.
If one must insist on using JavaScript then make an exception for Wikipedia—deny all scripts on Wiki domains.
Problem solved.
If huge profit-making companies like Disney, Coca-Cola and McDonald's spend so much on marketing and sales, then it must be profitable. Similarly, there's no reason that fundraising spend wouldn't be financially advantageous to a non-profit.
If you support Wikipedia enough to donate, then it makes sense to want them to raise as much as they can. In which case you should enthusiastically support them running like a business-savvy organization.
The spend on fundraising does go towards the mission, because it increases the amount of money for the mission. You're making the incorrect assumption that donations are constant.
Imagine that a charity hiring a fundraiser for $50k garnered $150k of additional donations. Let's say without that fundraiser, they got $100k in donations. So with the fundraiser, they got $100k + $150k - $50k = $200k net to spend on the charitable purpose.
20% of all donations go to the fundraiser's salary while she's employed. But if the fundraiser is sacked, then 100% of donations go to the mission, yet the mission takes a loss of 50%.
But which mission?
Wikipedia has become a disgrace.
It’s the only ad on a site that is entirely free to consume.
You can donate, or you don’t have too. Either way, they still allow you to use the entire service at no cost.
It’s their right to ask.
What’s the problem? Wikipedia will always be free to use.
Some people will always support it, others won’t. Life will go on.
This is exactly like trying to cancel someone on YouTube. Just don’t watch the channel.
Perhaps it's because it's deceptive, dishonest & undermines trust.
Unless of-course you don't care about such things, then what's the problem? You don't have to read my comment, 'just' switch off the website.
The problem is that Wikipedia goes to great effort to shill for the CIA-NATO propaganda machine - whilst deceptively claiming they're an independent factual source. The problem is that the youth of Western Europe & The USA are growing up where truth is forbidden by power; buried by Google then muddied by Wikipedia & co.
The problem is when trust is eroded we cannot have meaningful interactions, we cannot even communicate, to the point that: it doesn't matter if one says 'eric4smith is a rapist'; because (as you have conjectured): 'you don't have to read the comment'.
What exactly are you saying? Are you suggesting that thousands of Wikipedia editors have all been subborned by Western military agencies? Or are you just referring to the overpaid Wikimedia C-suite?
Of course some Wikipedia editors are shills. Most MSM journalists are shilling for someone; if you pay attention to current affairs, you'll bump into a shill within seconds. But Wikipedia is largely self-correcting; even if the mainspace articles are biased, (a) there's page history; (b) there's per-editor contribution history; and (c) there's talk pages. I don't know of any other information source that provides so many tools that a critical reader can use to judge the content of an article.
The Wikimedia Foundation control Wikipedia, the subbordination is done by them. Editors are only as free as they permit - the two are inseparable, to suppose otherwise is as supposing chromium is independent from Google.
Of-course Wikipedia is a useful tool, so what? Are they exempt from criticism?
What is it you are saying? You abuse the English language; by definition a journalist is not a shill. Many mainstream shills may claim to be journalists, but that does not make them so.
Well, your definitions are eccentric. For example, Luke Harding is accredited as a senior journalist at The Guardian; he shills for the UK security services. I'm not sure whether we disagree as to what a shill is, or what a journalist is. The only journalists that I know of that are not shills are independent writers, like Jonathan Cook and Peter Hitchens.
Vote with your dollars and attention.
I’m sick of people trying to cancel the things that they do not like and does not affect their lives.
The post made some good arguments until it through this in. I have sympathy for the editors on wikipedia who make nothing for their toil, but it is, after all, their choice to do so, for many different reasons. So, please don't make this into a story about oppressive victimhood. Perhaps changes to the wiki governance or even an alternative model. But Marx doesn't bring a whole lot of credibility to the discussion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Always check the talk tab.
That's a very good reason to not contribute.
is this a joke? Wikipedia volunteers are also middle or upper class in most cases, they aren't editing Wikipedia as a means to their survival, they just like doing it. The comparison to Marxism is unhinged.
Good for Wikipedia. Try growing up in the 1970s when if you didn't know something, you just never knew it, unless it happened to be something the local library might have buried in a microfische somewhere and you had six hours to kill.
Not sure what you mean by "upper class". The kind of people that term refers to for me, is a group of people that would never lower themselves to donating labour for nothing, and on the whole aren't sufficiently well-educated to even read a Wikipedia article.
I agree the comparison to Marxism is unhinged!
for the US, it refers to income above $156K, here's an explainer
https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finan...
It's not a question of "politeness" - the upper classes curse like troopers, and generally can be very coarse. It's just a particular kind of manners, that they recognize. It's not a question of wealth, and certainly not a matter of exceeding some annual income threshold. Many people that would be considered upper class are not very rich, and most very rich people certainly aren't considered upper class.
Really, the UK upper class is defined by blood - who your mum and dad were. That affects where you go to school, which determines what manners you learn (and might influence how much you get to earn).
From a Washington Post article a while back:
Justin Anthony Knapp doesn’t necessarily mind that: With nearly 1.5 million contributions, the 33-year-old Wikipedian is more active on the site than literally anyone else — including members of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s paid staff.
Every day, Knapp drives his 15-year-old car from Indianapolis’ poorest neighborhood, where he lives, over to a restaurant on the city’s West Side; he delivers pizzas to pay his bills, in between piecemeal work at a grocery store and a crisis hotline.
Every night, Knapp logs onto Wikipedia ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07...
And the Wikimedia Foundation is undertaking great efforts to get people in developing countries to edit for free, in part so that Google, Amazon and Apple have Wikipedia articles for Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant to read out and make money in those countries ... same with Google's and Bing's knowledge panels, which are largely based on Wikipedia.
And I would, and I did, contribute to Wikipedia.
Until it became clear to me that they'd allowed antisemitic, anti-Israeli politics to warp their articles about things like the Holocaust, the 6-day war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the point that no neophyte could get a neutral recitation of facts, but would be confronted with an enormously racist and biased perspective at every step.
Essentially, they became like the UN general assembly. A body pretending to represent free speech and human rights that's stuffed with illiberal violators of human rights. And I don't need to contribute to that, or even care if it exists.
UN literally never pretended to do such a thing - it's just a forum for countries to meet and discuss issues, with no power to really do anything other than agree or disagree with each other on whatever is being discussed. Kicking out say Russia or China or North Korea from the UN makes no sense in that context, because you can't have an international forum for discussion if you are not letting countries in to actually you know, discuss.
I think it stems from the idea of UN that people have in their head, maybe it's embedded by the popular media or otherwise, but I see people complaining that UN doesn't force countries to do X or Y. That's literally not how it works - it's just a forum to talk, nothing less nothing more.
TL;DR, the UN's discussions serve now only to grant the veneer of liberal discourse to illiberal states by implying that their collective authoritarian voices should be taken seriously by the democracies, when in fact they should be given no platform whatsoever. Let alone one upon which to expound on human rights!
See, this is where we disagree.
Let's say that Russia was kicked out of the UN for their recent actions - what's the point of UN then? Just everyone else discussing Russia but without Russia being present? That's a joke then, not a discussion forum.
>> by implying that their collective authoritarian voices should be taken seriously by the democracies
I don't see how you can even come to that conclusion. Look at what's happening recently - yes Russia is being given a voice, Lavrow comes out and says whatever drivel Kremlin told him to say, then literally every other country stood up and said how much they disagree with that statement. The last thing that would come to my mind upon seeing this is that they are "being taken seriously by democracies" - they are a country, so they have a place at the table. Doesn't mean that anyone else automatically agrees or respects what they say.
>> there's no reason whatsoever to allow them to continue to have the pretextual cover of international approval from a body that
I literally don't see where you think that having a seat in the UN gives anyone an "approval" for anything. It's literally just a seat at a discussion table, nothing else nothing more.
>> has accepted a declaration of human rights.
Which is great and all, but again, it's not UN's mission statement to enforce that - it's a forum where countries can agree or disagree on things, it has no executive power. If you would like it to have some, then that's a different discussion altogether.
And when a member state does break the declaration of human rights(or any of the other things that UN has agreed on) - it is discussed, it is brought up, and countries to voice their disapproval or agree on collective action. "UN" as an organisation does not, because that's not why it exists.
This claim would really benefit from some examples.
Can someone corroborate this claim? Cause any way you look at it, these salaries are unethical for a non-profit organisation.
The reason they shouldn't move their HQ somewhere cheap is the same reason Apple or Google shouldn't: there isn't the concentration of tech talent there.
The implication of your comment is that Wikipedia wouldn't function it if didn't generously compensate its executives because it would fail to attract competent staff. That view has been vindicated by, for example, European left-wing parties who cap their politicians' and administrators' salaries at the national median. No evidence suggests that left-wing parties therefore attract less qualified candidates than right-wing parties.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
I would rather give my money to The Grayzone than to the Wikimedia foundation. And frankly, regardless of what your political predilictions are, giving money to independent journalists will always be better for society than giving money to the Wikimedia foundation.