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Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

Here is the message wikipedia has on its donation page:

> 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.

> When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people told us we’d regret it. But if Wikipedia were to become commercial, it would be a great loss to the world.

> Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a community of people working to bring you unlimited access to reliable, neutral information.

> We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of €5, €20, €50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Whether or not one likes the causes they give the money to, if they spend $100 million and they only use $2.4 million for hosting, and they also give money for political activism, then this is a misleading message, making it sound like they are on the cusp of not being able to cover the costs that keep the site online unless they start having ads on wikipedia.

Oh I completely agree, misleading is the best way I'd describe this message as well.

But the idea that they're "going woke" or "going political" with their money because they support BIPOC journalists and presenting that as a waste of money ($250k, about a month of hosting), that's where you completely lose me.

Also I'm pretty sure Wikimedia does way more than just hosting.

Well, they apparently did donate to some woke-adjacent pseudoscience, which seems like a waste of money to me. Regardless, I agree with you that the question isn't where some $0.25 million went, but why they are spending $100 million and still asking for donations with that misleading message, while a few years ago they were spending a small fraction of that even though their hosting costs were actually higher back then. It increasingly looks like Wikimedia as an organisation has a parasitical relationship with Wikipedia, doing enough to keep its host alive with a small fraction of its budget, while benefiting from the work of volunteers and not even fixing longstanding issues with the software that the volunteers ask to be fixed. Even beyond fixing bugs, I'd be happy to add to their $100 million budget if they actually did useful things with it. I can easily think of 10 features that would improve Wikipedia. For instance, Wikipedia pages such as "list of countries by GDP per capita" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...) are useful, but the table UI is not that great and the map is a non-interactive PNG image. For $100 million, why can't we hover over the country and see its name and the exact GDP per capita number?

The Wikimedia Foundation collects money in places like India, South Africa and South America with those misleading messages:

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

Most of the money from the Knowledge Equity Fund so far has gone to organisations in the U.S. I think that indicates how much genuine thinking about diversity is taking place in the Wikimedia Foundation.

You asked, they answered, and then you dodged with a flippant reply. Even if I agreed with you, this is a terrible way to discuss things.

Oh shit, you're right!

I apologise, I'm sure there's a better, more cool-headed way to discuss giving money to a marginalized population to make a foothold in a marginalized field with someone that views that action as "woke politics".

I'm sure we've could've met in the middle (like only supporting some BIPOC journalists) if only I wasn't so gosh-darn divisive. My bad.

When people accuse someone of being "woke", I believe they do not mean literally that they consider those people to be more awake to social justice issues, that they disagree with fixing injustice, and they want it to continue. Rather, it can be an accusation of performative social virtue, a distaste for sanctimonious platitudes, or a disagreement regarding the source of a particular systemic issue and how to fix it.

Now, you can disagree with this, it is obviously impossible to tell for sure without reading people's minds, and many people will throw out accusations of "wokism" with little to no merit to the point where you lose the will to engage with any of them, but if you do argue against these accusations of "wokism" as endorsements of bigotry, you aren't actually engaging with what people are telling you.

In that sense, the "middle" between "woke" and "bigoted" isn't "slightly bigoted", it's "not woke and not bigoted".

Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of boosting marginalised groups, otherwise you're "too woke" because those marginalised groups tend to lean left? No, I don't think I can agree on that. Because, as I stated multiple times so far, marginalised people's existence != political.

Being a bigot is a choice (and using the term woke unironically is a pretty good, albeit not perfect tell), being black is not. I couldn't care less about finding a common ground with bigotry. I have zero interest in debating them, and I have zero interest in debating your "centrist position" to do nothing to elevate BIPOC people's position in marginalised fields. Hope that clears up my comment for you!

The is the most bad faith arguing I've seen here in a while. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The people that want to support those valuable causes should find their own supporters instead of hijacking the supporters of an encyclopedia without telling them. It's as simple as that and has nothing to do with being bigoted, it's about feeling cheated when you were asked for money for one thing and then they used it for another. You're intentionally being difficult because you believe you're right and that trumps everything else, but it doesn't.

> Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of boosting marginalised groups ... I have zero interest in debating your "centrist position" to do nothing to elevate BIPOC people's position in marginalised fields

Doing nothing might be a lot more conducive to minority achievement than some of the stuff that was ultimately funded by these grants. Such as SeRCH's YouTube videos about "intersectional scientific method" and "hyperspace".

> Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of boosting marginalised groups,

Well, yeah. That's what "neutral" means

You're purposefully misreading the situation.

A BIPOC receiving a grant is not the issue, the issue, and what might be considered "woke" is to give the grant because they are BIPOC. That's "equity".

Equity means awarding people based on immutable characteristics and makes every interaction in society a racist/sexist struggle.

Anyway, you may be in favor of it, which is fine. Just know that it's an incredibly unpopular movement that is widely rejected internationally, and also in most developed nations across the political spectrum, minus the far-left.

Even the idea to call said people "marginalized" is insulting.

This type of insufferable attitude isn’t in the spirit of HN civility and would make someone who might be sympathetic to your views much less so.

What is this BIPOC voting population (I just learned this term today)? Are we talking of the united states of america or does this somehow apply to other countries? Don't these journalists push american viewpoints anyway, and aren't they much better funded than almost any newspaper outside the USA? Why should most of this money going to one of the richest countries in the world?

I wonder whether you would post a comment similar to this if it turned out that the donation money had been funnelled to right-wing think tanks and had then subsequently been distributed to right-leaning commentators?

You are equating supporting minorities in journalism to right-wing think tanks? In your view that's a completely cool and normal comparison to make?

Yes, you're right. I wouldn't react the same way. One of those is clearly better than the other.

So because they're donating to your political leaning, it's fine. Do realise that half the population leans the opposite way to you, and you'll see why encouraging more organisations to get political is a disastrous thing for society.

It's far more than 50%. When specifically considering "woke" politics, centrists and moderate progressives reject it too. I'd say it's in the range of 70-90% rejecting.

Pretty much anybody outside California rejects it.

Can you please elaborate on why one is better than the other?

Cause being BIPOC while in journalism isn't a political ideology and their existence is not "woke" nor "political". On top of that I happen to believe a wider range of voices within journalism is incredibly important and see nothing controversial there.

That seems way better to me than giving money to those hostile towards damn near every marginalized and underrepresented minority. Does it not seem that way to you?

It's not my fault (nor is it Wikimedia's) that this specific historically marginalized and oppressed group of people as a collective leans a certain... less confederate-flag-waving way.

Were they supposed to find a hypothetical centrist group of BIPOC journalists that will therefore then over-represent right-wing BIPOC population?

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