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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely useful.

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.

View on HN

The issue is that they make it sound like they are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia running when they are actually wealthier than ever before.

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?

Indeed, it's highly manipulative. Wikimedia does way more than "just" Wikipedia, and the majority of the money goes to these other activities. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, some of those activities might be well worth it.

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.

Weird, I haven't seen any recent banners frame it in terms of demise of Wikipedia. The urgent banners I've seen are about the time to complete the fund drive. Along the lines of: If X% of users paid $Y then the goal would be reached in Z minutes.

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.

This is just another psychological trick. They vastly exceed even their own revenue targets. Compare goals and results:

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...

The banner shown in the article has a subtle tone of demise: if you don't donate, Wikipedia itself stops being independent, could not thrive, could not give reliable or independent info. And then the money is primarily spent in things other than Wikipedia. They never state or at least insinuate where the money go.

This sounds like the exact CTA of countless YouTubers asking for Patreon support. No level of coffers or ever increasing support changes their ask. (which to me is ok)

The difference is that most YouTubers are leagues smaller than Wikipedia. The message is the same but the context is wildly different.

Patreon supporters generally know where their money is going: Straight into the YouTuber's (or whatever) pocket. That's the goal of the contributor and there's generally no particular deception on the YouTuber's part either. I want to give them $5 even if they already have a lot of other $5, because that's the value I'm getting or whatever.

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.

> Wikimedia does way more than "just" Wikipedia, and the majority of the money goes to these other activities.

[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.

> Indeed, it's highly manipulative

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.

Marketing. They hired someone(s) with marketing experience.

Half-truths. They hired someone with half-truths (bordering on lies) experience.

Corporate wants you to find the difference between these two.

So. Marketing?

It is possible to raise interest in something without lying about it. Whether you will fully understand it or not is up to you.

This is loser logic. It's possible to play by self-imposed self-hindering rules, sure, but your competitors probably aren't. In business, you play the game that exists, not the game you want to exist. Politics is how you do the "game you want to exist" part.

This line of thinking is how we get dystopia.

*got

*git

Sounds like he read the acts of Purdue Pharma and DuPont as a manual for how to operate a business.

Since we're on the ycombinator chat -- do you think ycombinator disagrees? Do you think businesses incubated here are taught about "ethical and moral advertising at all costs" or taught about "finding market fit and scaling fast at all costs", even using aggressively successful a/b tested etc marketing that many would find distasteful?

And yet, the western capitalistic system that is built on private businesses acting in their own self interest, regulated by governments of the people enforcing social good, have created the least violent, least disease-ridden, most luxurious and incredible experience for humanity in history (or at least since civilization).

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?

I agree. It is possible. But this feels like a case of 'the exceptions prove the rule'.

We are what we are not.

Sounds like marketing

that sounds like a typical marketing though.

Wikimedia is vital to Wikipedia, they have little money and pay their exec too little for what they do. IMHO.

Then they should tell donors and prospective donors what they do. As ever, all the content is written by unpaid volunteers (or people paid by others), but still the Wikimedia Foundation's spending doubles every few years.

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...

> Tell donors what they're funding

Wikimedia has a 100/100 transparency rating.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

Notably none of the criteria measured in that rating consider their marketing. So yes their policies and filings exist, but those are not what they're presenting to potential donors, so do not prove the ads are not misleading

https://wikimediafoundation.org/

How is this misleading? They provide an incredibly large amount of information.

And more information can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Disputes

That is not the place donors get sent, nor the content of the ads shown to potential donors. The ads are screenshotted in the linked article and they lead here: https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...

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

"Elsewhere" in this case is the FAQ link at the bottom of the donation page. If a person has questions, that's what an FAQ is for.

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").

Yes, this is also why it lies, lying to make the situation seem more ominous also increases the odds of a conversion.

But effectiveness doesn't imply ethicality, so "but it's effective" is not a defense against criticism of ethics.

In that case, your comment is a lie, and I can freely dismiss it.

Your opinions are wrong.

Be careful, if you argue that your opinions are not wrong, you'll be admitting your comment here is wrong.

There are laws against fine print for a reason. The front page pop up ad tells a different story than a stack of text heavy articles that require no small amount of technical expertise to figure out.

> The are laws against fine print for a reason

Has Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation broken any?

They haven't broken any laws. And "text heavy articles" are bad now? They share this information, and it's very public.

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.

it’s not at all unusual for an organization to donate to support the society it operates in

"The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege..."

from the knowledge equity fund page. what the heck

Meh.

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).

The funny thing is that the Wikimedia Foundation is trying to get volunteers in Africa and India to edit and contribute content for free – content which then feeds the search engines and voice assistants of trillion-dollar US companies who do their damnedest not to pay tax in the countries in which they operate.

Yeah, let's get away from imperialism and patriarchalism ...

Just because some wikimedia activities (primarily legal compliance, financial management, contractual work for hosting) are vital to wikipedia does not mean others are (arbiter of other charities, social causes, events, etc). And by budget spend and headcount allocation, there's far more of the latter yet they portray it as if it's the former that is at risk

They don't though. The banner has a whiny tone, but never do they say that they are struggling to keep the site up.

Oh please, the mentions of having to seek alternative funding models like subscriptions and ads are clearly meant to raise the image of a site on the brink of unsustainability to potential donors

The implied subscription threat is a complete red herring. They should be ashamed for even mentioning it in their fundraising messages.

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."

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/

Much the same applies to the Mozilla Foundation.

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.

Sure. And if you accept those images or not is your thing. Their banners are super annoying at only 2% conversion rate. What will it be without those banners?

Read the screenshot: "... humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence", "if you donate... Wikipedia could keep thriving for years".

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".

I mean, it's basic English. "Independence" doesn't mean "just enough for server maintenance" and "thriving" doesn't mean "barely surviving".

They have enough money to fund wikipedia in perpetuity several times over. Wikipedia's independence and thrivingness aren't at any risk whatsoever, even if donations were to completely stop immediately.

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.

Well the risk is they'd invest too much into saving the side projects in the event of a downturn that they would put wikipedia at risk, which is why even people like me who don't have ideological squabbles with the content of the side projects are concerned by the bundling.

Again, problems with basic communication, it seems. Perpetuity means "forever". Because they have a finite amount of money and they are not generating money, they can't "fund wikipedia in perpetuity several times over".

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.

I suggest reading up about endowments. [1]

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%.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment

Read the donation page and see if you feel the same way:

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.

Yes, it's in a whiny tone. The fact that it will go down is your interpretation. An alternative interpretation could be "98% of people get asymmetric value out of Wikipedia, please make it less asymmetric".

In fact, if they stop begging, what percentage of their users will contribute? Will it remain at 2%?

What else would "We ask you, humbly, to help...We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online" mean if not to raise the possibility to go down is present?

That they are a non-profit funded by donations, maybe? Just a wild guess. /s

"...to stay online" is relevant in that clause.

Which is still true.

You mean, what percentage of users will pay for using a website advertised as "The Free Encyclopedia", written by unpaid volunteers?

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.

No, I'm asking how many people will donate, if everybody thinks that it's not urgent and somebody else will?

I agree with the other replies.

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).

Side note: No VPN needed, the video is not gebolocked, at least ffrom NL.

A significant amount of their donations came in during 2021 and 2022.

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.”

They were rich way before that. You can find older articles about it.

Back in 2015, the Washington Post published an article titled "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?":

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.

My reluctance to donating again to wikipedia lies almost entirely on the subtext of their communication. There's a dissonance between the class of the project, the alleged finances, the in-your-face popups (some years it was half the page).

It was greater than a half-page this year for me. It should be added to adblockers at This point

I mean I'd be more amenable if they had a less in-your-face donation option running year round.

I have the same idea. A tiny pastel margin block would make me donate easily. A simple 1 or 2 clicks process and that's it.

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..

For me, at least, the fundraising banner is drawn on the page after the main content. Which means that the main content loads, displays, and then is pushed downwards by the banner.

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.

I haven't seen those banners and the pushy appears from Jimmy Wales in a long time.

In some ways Charity Navigator is like the BBB, and people need to take those ratings with a grain of salt.

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

Hey, what is "the BBB" here ?

Better Business Bureau

Better business bureau

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau

BBB == Better Business Bureau a private organization in the US that "rates" business based on certain factors and customer complaints. It is often confused with having some kind of governmental authority, approval, or validity when in reality they just a non-profit trade organization.

Very similar to charity navigator but rating for-profit businesses

And it can become a bit of a scam where if you’re a “paying member” of the BBB you can “respond” to complaints and they disappear.

After fighting with Ford over a recall issue for over a year, I opened a claim with the BBB. Two months later they closed it with a note that Ford explained that my car had been determined to be outside the claim (even though it experienced the recall related failure). Four months later, Ford issued be a check for the full cost of the repair, with an apology note. Even though at that point, I had given up.

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.

Yeah it can work sometimes, especially if you get into the “marketing” budget of someone big - they often have some leeway.

That is one of things people do not understand why "Twitter" Customer service is different than regular customer service

Twitter "Customer Service" is marketing budget

Ford and most corps have a deny-deny-deny culpability policy until the complaint hits someone who can make a decision on the matter (they actually have queues/emails). There is a hard money limit for the peons to be able to admit that it's the company's fault, above that amount it is a blanket deny and delay policy. We had a recent President who also lived by the same policies; lawyers have ingrained into the DNA of business.

>In the videos they discuss issues in science like objectivity (they're against it) and bias (they're in favour).

Its a shame so much money is being funneled to these groups since that's exactly the opposite goal of most donators to Wikipedia.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you didn't verify, even slightly, anything that tweet-thread author said.

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

I agree, in part. That Twitter thread starts of really well but jumps the shark right towards the end.

Only if you read it in the most uncharitable way, and ignore the very real aspects of the "Culture War" around things like CRT, Anti-Racism, DEI, ESG, etc that have very real political and partisan aspects to them. Often intersecting with the very concept of what role government should play in people's life, what authority government should have, and how government should regulate both behavior and economies

I am uncomfortable with the video stills at the end that do seem to be picking on black people. Maybe I am doing the Twitter user an injustice, but there were four other grant recipients they could have been picking on as well:

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...

> I am uncomfortable with the video stills at the end that do seem to be picking on black people.

Ugh, what?

The videos are what they are claimed to be. The last one features the black lady talking about how get experiments killed octopuses (weird!). You sound like you didn't watch them and are just reacting to the fact that black women are being criticized?

That twitter thread is garbage start to finish. It starts with 'wikipedia started out in a basement on a shoestring, so clearly all the millions spent two decades later is being pissed into the wind', which is absurd.

...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=...

>>>really blows its dog whistle

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.

> Anyone talking about "dog whistle" gets an instant ignore from me.

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".

No, "dog-whistle" has become the same thing as "conspiracy theorist" but for the charge of racism. It is fraught with overuse to the point of dilution and misuse.

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.

> Anyone talking about "dog whistle" gets an instant ignore from me.

Yet you continue to engage

Yet the point overall of that twitter thread seems valid to me.

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.

> Guy Macon

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.

The problem with the highlighted organizations is not (only) that they are irrelevant to Wikipedia's mission and the intent of the funders, it's that they don't seem to be doing anything which raises the question of why this specific group is being given free money. The answer can well be corruption or nepotism. Whatever it is, it doesn't look good.

> for social issues not the spread of free information

In most cases, openly opposed to the spread of free information.

> 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

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.

I'd also add that while arguments that Wikipedia is bloated beyond their mission is worthy of discussion, saying that Wikipedia should only be funding their current site is too narrow. I think Wikipedia should be able to pursue projects such as their wiki textbooks idea (which was ultimately a failure, but still worth trying).

It's fine to pursue projects outside the core mandate, but don't do it with money you were given under the pretense that the core mandate was at risk.

Agreed. I'd appreciate it if there were a way to restrict the usage of donations to the causes I care about within the foundation.

That's essentially pointless though. They may earmark your $10 for the core mission, but that just means another $10 that wasn't specified doesn't have to be used for the core, and gets used for their political initiatives. It's entirely semantics and doesn't change behavior at all unless an overwhelming majority earmark their donations the same way.

That "unless" clause at the end of your comment is precisely the point though. Just because you don't want to support most of the things that WMF are doing doesn't mean that others don't want to. If a majority of donors earmark their donations, then they will collectively have rebuked the foundation. If a majority of donors don't earmark their donations, then they will have collectively approved of the foundation's actions.

I'm entirely fine for funds to be spend on developing technology or even hosting of such resources.

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.

I think that's fair enough, but there's also a reasonable criticism that they are a) not being straight about that ambition in their fundraising efforts and b) some of their projects are significantly more political than textbooks.

And trust me, agreeing with Unherd about anything does not sit naturally to me.

I'm fine with pursuing other projects, it gets weird when they end up spending huge amounts of their money by giving grants to other organizations. I'd have no problem donating knowing they use it to fund projects, but knowing that they pretty much redonate much of it makes it feel pointless.

Having worked at non-profits a lot, more money doesn't make them better. It brings in exactly the wrong sort of people.

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.

When I donate to Wikipedia I expect that money goes to keeping Wikipedia alive not for the Wikimedia organization to redistribute the funds as they fit.

Why do I need a proxy for charity? If I want to give to some cause I will do so directly.

It’s deceptive. People give money thinking they are supporting one thing, and it gets used for something else.

Charity Navigator is very narrow. They check that paperwork is up to date and that fundraising expenses are low. They don't check for effectiveness or if "program spending" is doing anything.

A low CN rating is bad, but a high CN rating isn't good.

The outrage is over misleading donators. Wikipedia is very cheap and in no danger of running out of money, but the ads make people think otherwise.

Additionally, only a small fraction of the money goes to wikipedia (including software dev for it).

Unfortunately, I think this is the most practical take to take here. WMF is "only" doing what pretty much all other large NGOs do, only they are in a highly visible position where: a) they operate on the Internet and b) their volunteer userbase is extremely obsessed about cataloguing and editing data, so it naturally follows they'd also be interested in the financial data around the organisation itself.

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".

Their communications about donations are just awful. As long as I get these sappy, puppy-dog-eyes appeals I will never donate to them again.

Yeah man, and how dare the Red Cross manipulate people with pictures of starving children in their famine relief ads? A graph showing the intersection between available calories trending down and required calories staying constant would land so much better on HN.

Wikipedia isn't a human in desperate plight. That's kind of the point I'm making.

You might be confused, we're talking about Wikipedia not the Red Cross.

Wikipedia doesn't help starving children in any way.

It's ironic that you use Red Cross as an example. An organization that has been proven again and again to be among the worst charity orgs you can donate to, repeatedly spends money on anything else but charity, and often does things that are both antithetical to their stated mission and unethical to boot.

They're terrible to their employees too.

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.)

I don't get the outrage either. It's almost like people want Wikipedia to be barely scrapping by which isn't good. Having some money in your reserves is fine.

If lifespan was the goal they would keep the extent of their organisational structure to the minimum. But this is obviously not the case with now more than 500 employees and some with big paychecks.

An organization that has the goodwill of the hacker community has to perpetually walk the line on the edge of pauper to maintain its virtue, lest it be seen as selling out and no longer worthy of the goodwill of the hacker community.

It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.

If they were running ads that said, "Hey we sort of have the money we need to keep doing this for a while, but you can give us some more money if you want to help", then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

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.

If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money. The psychology of fundraising is extremely well researched.

> If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money.

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.

There is plenty of evidence, in the form of the hockey-sticking donation revenue for the organization, that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past.

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.

In part this is a cumulative effect. People are invited to set up a recurring donation, or include the Wikimedia Foundation in their will, so naturally there is a growing base level of steady income each year, with first-time donors on top of that.

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...

> There is plenty of evidence[...] that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past.

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.

I thought "any" would be understood to be rhetorical exaggeration; my apologies. My actual position I've posited is an org loses support of the hacker community when it becomes successful even if nothing about what it's doing fundamentally changes. If their ads are different now, it's because they refined their approach; the goal was always to get people to give them money to be used as they saw fit.

The banners have become more intrusive and obnoxious as the organisation has become richer. Ten years ago, they were quite mild by comparison. You wouldn't get ten reminders, the banners didn't cover your entire screen, and they didn't beseech you not to scroll away.

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

Sure, a classic motte-and-bailey. I'm familiar.

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)

Sure. If you don't want to discuss hacker bias against success via using the tools that are demonstrated successful because they're not "virtuous" tools, I can't force you. It's the only piece of this I'm interested in though.

In other words, what you're ostensibly here to discuss has nothing to do with WMF's campaign in light of the actual circumstances, and you've shown a willingness to make a bunch of indefensible claims along the way—only to say that you were never really serious about those things. There's no good reason for anyone to attempt to discuss anything with you when the only thing you seem to actually be committed to is the use of misdirection while hoping no one notices.

They can start running the ads again once they only have enough cash to keep wikipedia running for the next five years rather than 35 years then.

Why leave donor money on the table for the ExxonMobil Foundations of the world to pick up?

These are charitable donations. That money wouldn't have gone to ExxonMobil et al, it would instead go to thinks like the Against Malaria Foundation.

They can keep lying and misleading people if they want, and they will get money from people who are okay with being lied to and misled. If they want the money and respect of people who place an incredibly high value on truth (like myself), then they need to tell the truth.

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.

I want Wikimedia, and Wikipedia to be a Neutral historian of world data and events, to preserve facts and promote the free access of those facts to everyone in the world.

They have strayed far far far far far from that goal

1) Is there a neutral historian version of world events?

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?

>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.

I'm sure we all agree that Wikipedia has a ton of biases in all sorts of directions, but I'm not following that Wikimedia has anything to do with. They rarely make any editorial choices, usually only following legal decisions.

Maybe it doesn't, but a commenter further up mentioned wanting both Wikipedia and Wikimedia. So in turn, I'm not following why Wikimedia alone is the focus here.

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.

The Human page, is quite neutral too (/s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Gender

Whats wrong with that blurb? The only bit missing a citation is "most societies have men over women", and that seems fairly unproblematic

> Whats wrong with that blurb?

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?

> Typically? Nope.

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?

"Human societies typically exhibit gender identities".. Nope, as the linked page explains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity, it started in the 60s, but until 2015, nobody heard of that. "Non-binary" didn't exist until recently. I'm not judging it, but it's for sure not typical. But to write that it is typical, is a farce. It's atypical, but exists and should be respected.

> 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.

> Nope, as the linked page explains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity, it started in the 60s

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?

> 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.

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?

> 3) In what way are they strayed far away from it?

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'm sure this is not what people thought they were funding when they donated to Wikipedia

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.

Firstly, you asked how they strayed far from their goal of being a "neutral historian of world events", at least in idealistic terms. Those grants are specifically funding activism which many would argue is not neutral, so your question has been answered.

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.

> you asked how they strayed far from their goal of being a "neutral historian of world events",

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Is there a neutral historian version of world events?

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...

All this outrage on this thread is like teenager thinking.

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!

I agree, but with a warchest of $400m, their budget can seemingly be funded at 2.5% withdrawal per year, so there may be no need to ask anymore. (Though personally I'd rather they spent even more and had more full time editors and researchers improving the site.)

> more full time editors and researchers

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.

Yeah, I didn't mean original or scientific research, more working on missing citations, integrating information from newly discovered original sources, or maybe even attempting to discover such original sources. I guess Wikipedians prefer to call this editing!

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.

Sure, there are paid editors performing PR services on Wikipedia (both above-board, declared, and flying under the radar, undeclared).

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...

Interesting story in that last link, thanks.

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.. ;-)

> may be able to get better access to many source materials.

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.

You're labouring under a severe misconception. Wikipedia is written and curated by unpaid volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation itself "does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects":

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno...

There are no full time paid editors and that would severely distort the character and incentives of the encyclopedia.

I'd rather Wikipedia not turn into another Mozilla.

Not having a ton of extra money is a good way to prevent that kind of bloat.

In the absence of Mozilla, Google and Microsoft decide how you interface to the web.

Who will decide how we interface to encyclopedic facts in the absence of Wikipedia?

Have to disagree, it makes them more dependent on a few mega doners (Google, Microsoft, etc.).

These campaigns are great to diversify and prevent Wikipedia from being beholden to them.

The author of this has a decades long history of really disliking Wikipedia, so it seems unlikely that he's genuinely concerned about their funding levels. It's just another thing to attack them with.

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...

The irony of his outrage being documented on his Wikipedia page

Orlowski was acting very polite in this article (and presented some compelling points) compared to most of his work at The Register, but he’s always been a beacon of “yellow journalism” [0]. I’ve always thought it was less a crusade than a favourite target.

[0] “journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.”

This is kind of a cheap ad hominem attack. There is a lot of legitimate criticism of the WMF, and it has been a problem for a long time so I don’t see why the criticism should stop.

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.

Here's a site with faceted search on WikiData: https://wikipedia.peerdb.org/

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.

Be wary of the cogs grinding in the background that can lead to an article like this hitting popularity.

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.

> There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia

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.

That makes a lot of sense. I don't like to characterise 'left' and 'right' as being more or less factual, but we've experience a distorted massaging of facts in my country from papers like the Daily Telegraph. There are a bunch of people who like to say things to persuade people of their point of view, and are upset when the evidence doesn't agree with them. I can see something like wikipedia making these people upset.

The question is not whether WMF is good, the questions is whether more money will make them better or worse. I think it's clear that the wealthier WMF gets the worse it will be.

According to a recent SA post here - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397?..., :

"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?"

It’s a free service with no advertising and people don’t like that it asked them for money a few weeks out of the year.

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

Just to add one more point of context, nearly every commercial service does a ton of advocating and donating to causes that is not related to their core business.

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.

They will do this to all (relatively) open systems because its easier to criticise when things are open. Wait till they get ad enabled version of Gikipedia (by Google) shoved down their throats in the future.

I think the point is that they're misleading about where the money is going. Most people assume it's to keep the website going, not for sponsoring political interests of the people running wikimedia. It's the same reason people get mad at Mozilla.

Wikisource is also nice functioning as a public library. For reference Wikiquote may also be useful.

More useful questions to ask are how much good they do and how much harm they cause. I use wiki daily. I gain so much from it that the 10 quids a month seems like a bargain.

The wiki outrage looks like a variation of bike shedding, the more people know, they more opinion they have

> The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go

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?

I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues.

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.

> When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.

What was this ad that was so objectionable?

I don't remember it, but I was assuming that they felt like it was still requesting white Americans.

The thing with those sorts of requests is that a lot of the push for diversity is literally skin deep - they want people who look different, but think the same. They're not trying to say "hey, we'd like more electrical engineers, nurses, priests, political conservatives, etc." to contribute.

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.

> 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.

You do know that any traction you are getting with these arguments goes out the window when you start using terms like "woke".

I really don't even care that much about skin colors.

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.

Mostly because I'm tired of these U.S.A. “diversity” efforts which come down to “more persons from the U.S.A.” overlooking most of the world.

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.

Wikipedia definitely has a gender problem. And a racial problem. And numerous cultural problems.

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.

It is my perspective that gender and race are completely insignificant compared to culture and it annoys me how often Anglo-Saxons think otherwise, probably because of never really having interacted with a foreign culture.

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.

To be clear, your complaints are:

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.

They're not trying to recruit contributors outside of the Anglocentric perspective; they're not in any way trying to mitigate that problem.

How did "female contributors" become "contributors with a broader range of perspectives"?

It's kind of sad of anglo-centric their pages are for some countries and historical events. I'm European, and even I can see some bias in there.

I could believe it. Next you see it, can you share a link here? It might be nice for discussion.

Indeed, that's a common issue too with historical events.

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.

Truly an unnecessary dig at oncologists. If that happens it is not frequent. The more relevant association for clinical oncologists would be ASCO, which has its annual conference in Chicago this year.

> 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

Is there a reference here that I'm missing?

Apparently medical conferences are the biggest days of the year for the sex industry, although IIRC it was actually cardiologists who held the top spot.

I don't think ACS is paying for the sex and drugs tho.

They kind of are, because they sponsor research and conferences.

So, are web-admins and WP contributors getting to "snort blow off hookers" then?

How much did we pay them to add max-width to the CSS?

"oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas"

Hyperbole / slander?

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