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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

Stripped of jargon, that sentence is saying "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is basically true if you account for second-order effects. For example, a major reason why Haiti is poor and has few Wikipedia users is centuries of European and American prejudice and straight-up racism against former slaves.

Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.

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That is missing the point. The point is that Wikipedia baits people by begging for help to keep the site up. Then, the raised money is funneled through different layers of charities (each obviously taking a cut) to then end up in a vague, totally unclear cause.

"many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism" is not a thing you can pay money to fix. These are not server costs, where you can present the donor a bill for where his money went.

Who received the money ultimately? What happened because of that money? What could have been avoided because of that money?

Can you answer these questions? Would you donate to any organization which did not tell you these answers? Certainly I will not.

First up, I actually agree that the specific fund donation here is highly sketchy, especially the way it bypassed the usual processes and in particular the conflict of interest involved with the counsel hopping jobs between the WMF and the recipient. So I'm not even going to try to justify it.

However, the WMF also does have a history of concrete actions to improve access to Wikipedia: it funds chapters around the world, seeds obscure language versions that would otherwise not be sustainable, and does stuff like sponsoring flights for students and Wikimedians living in poor countries to various Wiki conferences. I'm totally on board with this and I think it's a fine use of a reasonable portion of the Foundations' money, as long as it doesn't imperil the main mission, which it clearly doesn't.

It's the culture at the very top of the WMF that has allowed this "sketchy" fund to come about. It's even worse with the Wikimedia Endowment at the Tides Foundation. That's over $100 million in donations collected over a period of 6.5 years without a single Form 990 disclosure, without a single audited financial statement ever published:

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

Transparency is being reduced more and more; stopping publication of the quarterly reviews is just another symptom.

People who donate, do it only for the website, not for any other cause. The donate banner is a lie. Now when they are spending elsewhere, they are deceiving the donors. Period.

If they want money for all these things, they should clearly mention this while asking money in Wikipedia. People will donate for that. This is the reason of the issue. Not because people hate any community.

> "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is basically true if you account for second-order effects

This kind of very shaky use of second-order effects is dangerous and is responsible for some of the most well-intentioned but also destructive policy changes in the last 20 years.

> the most well-intentioned but also destructive policy changes in the last 20 years

For example?

Too many examples to list and I encourage you to do your own reading, but a low-hanging fruit is the ongoing legal battle of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Policy which was intended to make admission standards more equitable have succeeded in making them shockingly discriminative.

As I said, everyone involved I assume was acting out of good faith, but it's incredibly easy to see in retrospect how misguided their decision making was.

> well-intentioned

I'm not so sure that's always the case.

Why not create, or donate to, a separate non-profit that focuses on improving access for poor people? Asking established entities to shift their focus to your favorite topic (or just making them, if you succeed to subvert them) feels like a sneaky way to bypass convincing people of your goals, and just redirecting funds that were meant to go elsewhere.

Because people wouldn't donate. They want to donate to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a highly successful product. So much so that people will voluntarily pay 100x what it takes to run it. In a normal business this would be profit, and the owners would be able to pocket it.

But, Wikipedia is a non-profit, so they have to be a bit more clever in how they pocket the money. First you create a parasitic management structure. But if your administrative expenses are 80% of donations, that looks bad. So you donate to another non-profit, and that counts in financial statements as money put to work as charity. Then that non-profit can siphon off its share of administrative expenses, and repeat the cycle.

> Because people wouldn't donate. They want to donate to Wikipedia.

Then convince people to donate. Re-appropriating their donations seems like a good way to throw out the baby with the bath water.

You can't blame racism and colonialism for countries being poor when they were also poor before that happened.

It’s Haiti. It doesnt exist before the racism and colonialism. Of course, something existed on the same land, but that wasn’t Haiti.

They have been independent for over 200 years. And who is left to be racist? The country is pretty much all black.

Worth a read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

Haiti finished making interest payments in 1947 (75 years ago). Apparently the Dominican Republic had the same GDP per capita as Haiti in 1950, so post-WW2 they roughly started off in the same boat. One of their economy's has skyrocketed (relatively) and the other has stayed completely stagnant, despite being on the same island and having access to much of the same natural resources:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/GD...

It's always been a curious contrast and a sad one.

> Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.

I'm pretty sure the foundation could fund such work with the full support of the community, if they went about it in a different way.

For example, if they transparently said they were going to try paying professional researchers/editors/translators to beef up articles on subjects that were under-represented; they took a systematic look at subjects and determined Haiti was under-represented; and they spent $x00k towards some concrete goal, like getting Haiti more articles/words/featured articles than Star Wars.

Or if paying editors is unpopular or ineffective, they could fund efforts to recruit more volunteer contributors to the Hatian-language wikipedia, spending $x00k and measuring success by the increase in article count, how long the newly recruited volunteers stay around for, and suchlike.

You know - transparent priorities, with goals expressed in terms of wikipedia contributions.

AFAIK they do provide grants to a bunch of independent chapters around the world which do things like organize events and outreach to encourage more people to participate in editing.

Haiti has been independent for a very long time.

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