Wikipedians are rebelling against “unethical” Wikipedia fundraising banners
twitter.com
twitter.com
(Fun trick: use this URL to turn on the summary headers that're why I know how many people are in the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos... )
Good URL trick. It helps to be a staffer. ;)
Single-purpose accounts are by definition repetitive and repetition is bad for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), as is any form of predictability. For this reason, we ban single-purpose accounts. Needless to say this doesn't have to do with the merits of your cause; it just has to do with the mandate of this site.
I'm not going to ban you right now but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and diversify your posts to HN and adjust so that you're using it in the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=akolbe
Looking at akolbe's contributions with the strongest plausible interpretation of what they've said, and assuming good faith, it doesn't look that way to me.
Also looking at akolbe's profile we see that they are deeply connected with Wikipedia, so it makes sense that some of their posts would involve stories about Wikipedia (presumably, they'd have more insight about what's happening at Wikipedia than the average reader).
Overall, akolbe is using multiple platforms to troll this particular issue. It used to be limited to wikimedia-l and to the community pump, but times change.
"WMF fundraising is deceptive: it creates a false appearance that the WMF is short of money while it is in fact richer than ever."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
One of these candidates (Mike Peel) was elected. The other successful candidate, Shani Evenstein Sigalov, said on the same page, "I do feel that the online campaign can be improved. See videos for more."
She did indeed comment further in the videos, saying (in reply to question 6), "The one thing that I think we can improve is our on-wiki campaign. It is sometimes too aggressive to my taste."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
The rest in your post you have made up. It does not reflect my opinions at all.
I did not make up the rest, and we've had numerous exchanges here, and on twitter, where you were pretty explicit about what things you dislike WMF funding, and most of those happen to be related to funding social issues related to Wikimedia (lack of representation, for example). You source from places with obvious bias that also include outright lies.
You specifically call out how much is being spent on hosting, even though it's been pointed out to you numerous times by numerous people that it doesn't include the cost of engineering, legal, HR, internal IT, etc. which are vital to running and maintaining the sites. You're purposely being misleading, to the point of being deceitful.
You point to a post by an old VP, that mentions a price wikipedia could be run for, but fail to take the word of folks (like me) who worked there at the time, that can tell you WMF was woefully understaffed (and poorly led by that VP) when he made that statement. Today's headcount is way more realistic in terms of what's needed to keep things going. It also doesn't take into account that the employees were woefully underpaid (and continue to be underpaid).
It's true that many of my discussion comments here – especially recently – have been about Wikipedia fundraising.
There are several reasons for this. For one, this is a topic I both care about and am knowledgeable about, and it's also something people often ask questions about in the resulting threads here. My submissions on other topics don't generally result in a lot of discussion of this type.
Another reason is that there simply has been a lot of controversy on Wikipedia about this topic during the past year. My contributions here have mostly focused on aspects of Wikipedia, as this is the area I am most knowledgeable about – from my work as a Wikipedia volunteer and as a contributor and former editor-in-chief of Wikipedia's community newspaper – and therefore the current controversies around fundraising often come up. (This said, many of my Wikipedia-related submissions have nothing to do with fundraising.)
And to be clear, I did not start the Request for Comment on Wikipedia that this thread is about.
There is a lot of great content here. I regularly read other threads and will endeavour to contribute more broadly to discussions. Regards.
2015-2016: $66M
2019-2020: $112M
2021-2022: $146M
Assuming a modest return of 5%, isn’t it the case they would need billions in their endowment to fully fund Wikipedia?
0: https://wikimediaendowment.org/
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...
The hosting bill is $2,704,842 per year, and the work is done by volunteers.
Yes, there are volunteer sysadmins, some with the exact same authorizations as WMF employees. With modern infrastructure as code, they can even contribute to how the site is deployed.
Some projects have good crossover between paid and volunteer Wikipedians. But the WMF tends to do the heavier lifts, even if sometimes they are ideas the community isn’t interested in.
If the endowment gets less than 5% returns it needs to be that much larger to cover expenses.
The Wikimedia Foundation itself reported assets of $239 million in addition to that, as of June this year:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...
I think WMF's budget history [2] also proves that it's possible to run Wikipedia with much less funding. E.g. they spent $2m in 2006-2007, vs $146m in 2021-2022. They were already a top 10 website in 2007 (per Alexa), so things like traffic growth wouldn't explain that much of their budget growth.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
I would argue that the other departments/teams you listed are also necessary to the long-term health of the Foundation and the sites as well. However, even if we hypothetically decided that your whole list of "non-essential" org departments/teams/functions were a complete waste of resources (and again, they're not, IMHO!), those still don't comprise all the "other half" of the org's non-tech/product headcount, as you're still missing other essential teams like Legal, Talent&Culture (HR), etc, which are also significant chunks (Legal alone is a little over 10% of staff and extremely important and impactful!).
As to your point about budget growth: it was a different site and a different Internet in 2006. The org is growing up and becoming more responsible. It's getting more resilient in the face of an increasingly hostile Internet, it's getting better at fighting technical and legal censorship battles around the world, and it's slowly replacing the externalities of burning out a handful of highly skilled and overworked staff with more robust and "normal" staffing where employees can have real work-life balance and vacation plans or departures don't cause undue risks, etc. We're also trying to reach out to and support the growth of underserved Wikipedian communities around the world (both in technical and non-technical senses) in ways that we couldn't even dream of in 2006. Increased costs and overhead are to be expected with all of this!
Even at today's Tech headcounts, if you compare us to any other major sites of this importance, scope, or even traffic level on the Internet, we're still operating on relatively-shoestring tech staffing levels, especially considering we don't outsource core infrastructure to 3rd party services or clouds, mostly due to our strong user privacy and legal stances.
Maybe WMF's budget is justifiable based on its impact. I think most of us just want WMF to be upfront about how donors' funds are used, i.e. to not imply that donations are needed to keep the lights on, so that donors can make an informed decision. Most editors agree that the current banner messaging is misleading, as per the linked proposal.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
"WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it's _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring. But I would argue that an endowment, to actually be worthwhile, should aim for a significantly higher base level of minimal annual operating expenses, more in the order of magnitude of $10M+/year, to ensure not only bare survival, but actual sustainability of Wikimedia's mission."
Revenue goal for the current year has been set at $175 million. The WMF more than doubles its expenses every five years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
This is not about keeping Wikipedia online – it's about financing the growth of the Wikimedia organisation. Donors by and large are left quite unaware of this fact; they mostly think Wikipedia is in some sort of trouble.
Non profits (WMF) grant money to programs that directly or indirectly affect the content of all products offered by the WMF. It’s not just Wikipedia. There are grants that goto volunteers to increase editorship/authorship of non English Wikipedia or in countries and culture where Wikipedia does not have as many articles.
Calling this culture wars and simply saying “the money doesn’t goto hosting” is low complexity thinking that fails to account for all the things the foundation does.
>What is the intersectional scientific methodology? The Intersectional Scientific Methodology (ISM) is the concept that your identities and experiences influence your science. We coined this term in our peer-reviewed article. You will need to address how your project incorporates embodied observation, embedded context, and/or collective impact in the additional information section of your proposal to be eligible for a boost.
This isn't nearly the bogeyman people would have you believe it is. One's "identities and experiences" can easily influence which questions they are and aren't addressing (intentionally or not). None of this "intersectional scientific method" seems, however, to degrade the scientific method itself.
Until this kind of thing gets successful pushback, we should assume they'll continue to reorient institutions around the culture war and there will be no outbreak of common sense.
You wouldn't use a thermometer that was always 10C too high to measure and reports temperatures, without pointing out that the thermometer has a 10C bias, would you? Why would you oppose introspection about oneself and one's own potential biases in knowledge production?
Maybe I'm engaging in FUD and these people will be content with some minor efforts towards restraining bias, but in my experience it's never enough.
You act like bias isn't actually a problem in science, but when I think back to the number of studies recruiting on campus at my Highly Selective Undergrad Institution (TM), and cross reference that with the student population, it's really easy to understand the claims that science is WEIRD[1].
If, in the spirit of the proposed "bias declaiming section", a social scientist made a point of saying that they're systematically biased against conservative and white/rural viewpoints, how do you think that would go over? Pat on the back for introspection?
Why don’t you think so? "Our own academic perspective limits us e.g. in our survey design and language, making it harder for us to connect with our respondents" is something I heard and learned over and over and over again.
My contention is that any "unbiasing" which said "we are going to lean conservative to counter our innate liberal bias" would not be welcomed.
(I'm a liberal, btw, I just believe in calling a spade a spade. Don't call one-sided activism "unbiasing".)
2. Even if it was, some people are assumed to be "biased" based on silly things like the color of their skin or what gender they are. The bias-checking process is biased.
Great argument
> Account joined 34 days ago
Nevermind, I'm sorry I said anything.
In fact we all benefit daily from scientific discoveries made in oppressive, violent, bigoted regimes.
If someone asked VanguardStem to fund a fluid dynamics project, what are you imagining they would have to say in order to pass the ISM criteria? This concern comes across like hyperbolic fearmongering.
It’s been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053149
In order to be considered for a job, you lead with a "diversity statement", this is looked at before your job qualifications even, and there are right and wrong opinions to put in it. "I want to treat everyone equally" is a Wrong Opinion.
This isn't new you have always needed to give a good reason why your research should be funded. The funding should be used to progress human knowledge or contribute to your community, save lives etc.
The days of righting "fluid dynamics is cool $500k plz" aren't behind us they simply never existed.
Unless you just want to blame people who were previously kids, (aka autonomous adults) for shifting global priorities as if they shouldn't be allowed to prioritise that. In which case, lolwat.
Maybe the woke people can go feed the homeless and stop making physics phds write ideological essays about social issues. Then everyone wins.
uhhhh, no.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim
> Its objective is to minimize, and eventually eliminate, the incidence of genetic disorders common to Jewish people, such as Tay–Sachs disease.
To wit: "Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which in his view is intentional, whereas natural selection is not."[1]
It seems like a science engagement project rather than an attempt to do actual scientific research.
I'm not a fan of the links to Twitter not because of the recent insanity but because a Twitter discussion is frequently fragmented, paywalled, vacuous, etc. It's usually a rung up from Reddit but that's not saying much.
As for Wikipedia, I regret giving them money in the past because i get endless breathless emails from Jimmy Wales now. I see their situation as tragic because with distributed teams and hiring people who are deeply motivated I'd think they could get dramatically better $ productivity than anybody else if they were willing to transcend their volunteer model and feed some money to Wikipedians to improve the product.
I'm reminded of the social entrepreneur Paul Glover who was the founder of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours
and frequently wrote "poison pills" into the bylaws of organizations he founded to prevent the "skim 90% of the money" situations that frequently cause successful NGOs to become separate from their constituents. For instance any organization he founded had a rule that the organization would never own a building.
The point is that a NGO should recognize that NGOs by default go bad in a highly predictable way and should be organized to resist this.
> If there is a consensus that the banners are not appropriate to run but the WMF tries to run them without implementing the required changes then our proposed method to enforce the consensus is for Common.css to be modified to prevent them from appearing.
edit: ... or not. It seems like there have been attempts at munity before (Spanish Wikipedia) and they haven't succeeded.
I think HN gets too tunnel visioned on the technical side of the project. Look at how many comments reduce Wikipedia to it's "hosting" costs. There's more to running an organization than the servers.
All large organizations experience waste and spend some money poorly. It's basically an operating expense at scale. The net value creation tends to still be positive.
I believe there's more to running a successful global comprehensive and free encyclopedia than hosting. To keep the content and community vibrant, to expand into new languages and communities. These things probably require more than just "hosting". I don't know what's required but I'll continue to donate to WMF and hope for the best.
The critique is not merely administrative bloat or waste. The critique is about the magnitude of these problems. There is always waste but WMF has more than comparable non-profits like Internet Archive and when you have board members kicking large sums of money around to their other non-profits then there are questions of a serious ethical breach. The critique is about the deceptive nature of the WMF ad campaign. The critique is about how the WMF does very little of the actual work in running Wikipedia but takes the lions share of the cash from the community of volunteers. The critique is pretty detailed and well articulated and it is not simply a technical objection that anything beyond servers is a waste. This representation is of the critique is pretty unfair given how much thought and effort people have put into spelling out their case against WMF.
Again it's your money but I would strongly suggest doing your homework before defending the WMF.
WMF cranks their popups every year around this time. I haven't found them to be any more obtrusive this year than every other year.
> The critique is about how the WMF does very little of the actual work in running Wikipedia
That's fair, I just disagree with the critique's I've heard. Most commentators are taking what I consider to be a very narrow view of what it means to "run Wikipedia."
The people who're most up in arms about it tend to focus on just the hosting costs, without considering the cost of paying even a skeleton devops crew, let alone paying for ongoing development (of which the WMF funds at least a pretty solid majority).
Reasonable people can disagree about whether the WMF is spending its money correctly, of course, or whether it's overspending on otherwise-necessary categories. I dislike the implicit argument that we shouldn't pay people to work on open source projects, though.
The issue is that relative to other projects WMF runs, Wikipedia is more popular and also inexpensive to run.
Fundraising to users of the popular product, while diverting the funds raised to ancillary products is already misleading by itself.
Making urgent claims that the popular product may suffer without funds, when diverting those funds elsewhere — now it’s not just misleading but gives me a strong stench of being unethical.
This reminds me of the emails the various US political parties send out around trending issues, ex. "You need to send us $5 TODAY to keep [opposing party] from [doing something that's in the news]." Obviously this money goes to the party fund and not to fighting the specific issue they're campaigning on and the wording of these is overly alarmist.
The WMF does a lot of interesting and good work, and I have no doubt much of it is vital to the mission of wikipedia, but they amount of money it consumes with zero transparency makes me wonder if it's being spent effectively. They need to open the books of the foundation so that people can be confident again that they're supporting useful work and not vanity projects of fund administrators who have an enormous pile of money to throw around.
>All large organizations experience waste and spend some money poorly.
Sure and if their advertising was in any way honest about their financial situation people would mind much less.
Personally I would never donate to an organization which repeatedly claims to be at the brink of collapse, while managing very significant amount of funds and investing them into vanity projects. If I wanted to donate money, why wouldn't I donate to anything else?
This, totally. That's the reason for me too.
They do good work but the way they ask really ticks me off. And it's been like this forever, when they still featured the sad-sam Jimmy Wales pic.
They do great work but I'll rather give to archive.org that also do amazing and important work, need it a lot more and don't cry about it so much.
This gets exacerbated when the management get all excited about their pet projects and reroute funding & resources to those instead of the main thing that the funds were supposed to be for. Mozilla is the classic example of this - the Firefox team is not a priority when the funds get low, because of the various hare-brained projects the management have come up with.
I'm completely fine with how they use their money and will continue donating as long as Wikipedia remains a valuable resource for me. I do not care much that Wikimedia is not directly Wikipedia and that they spend more money than Wikipedia would alone.
This feels similar to the Mozilla vs Firefox "why is Mozilla spending money on other things" argument.
I will continue donating to Mozilla, Wikimedia, and the Internet Archive because I think they're all doing important work beyond their core products. I don't have to pick one or the other, I can give to all of them.
I'm planning to not donate at all this year, (instead to Internet Archive) based largely on discussions I have read here at HN. But I thought the request to suddenly increase my typical donation five-fold was pretty outrageous.
"Struck by the immensity of the task being undertaken and achieved: to store and index everything that was on the Web, Kahle states: 'I was standing there, looking at this machine that was the size of five or six Coke machines, and there was an 'aha' moment that said, 'You can do everything.'"
"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said in 2011. "First it was in people's memories, then it was in manuscripts, then printed books, then microfilm, CD-ROMs, now on the digital internet. Each one of these generations is very important."
"It's not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen. Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation."
A small favor to ask: can you avoid using the word "wiki" as casual shorthand to refer to Wikipedia? It falls in the same territory (or nearby, at least) as someone who doesn't know better saying "Java" to refer to JS (JavaScript).
NB: I have tried to word this as politely and non-derisively as I can think to. If you have any improvements, please let me know.
PS: Thank you for 1. your support of Wikipedia, 2. your support of the Internet Archive, and 3. the signal that you send by pulling back from #1 right now, when it makes a lot of sense to do so.
sure wikipedia is one wiki, but there's nothing ambiguous about "look it up on the wiki"
edit: lol ok fine I'm wrong, let me amend to, "wiki is an easily disambiguated term depending on the context of the subject, and if the subject is not your internal work project or self hosted fan site, you probably want to look it up on wikipedia.org"
When someone says "look it up on the wiki" I assume they refer to a wiki specific to the topic at hand.
If you have a physical set and it's the only encyclopedia in the house, it might be fair. I've never heard anyone generically refer to Encyclopedia Britannica as simply "the encyclopedia" outside of this circumstance.
> sure wikipedia is one wiki, but there's nothing ambiguous about "look it up on the wiki"
Hard disagree. With thousands of specialized wikis and in-house corporate wikis, it can never really be assumed to mean Wikipedia specifically, unless you're already on Wikipedia.
That is ambiguous. I would assume you were running a personal wiki project, and you meant that, or you meant the wiki at your place of work. This isn't like "flexing on the Gram" -- most people don't run a personal Instagram, so if you're flexing on the gram, as the rap lyrics say, then I can guess what you mean. But most of us use wikis at work, so we all deal with a large number of wikis, so simply saying "wiki" is ambiguous.
If you Google things that don’t have their own wiki, though, you do tend to get Wikipedia.
I don't mean to offend you, but this is a poor analogy. Java and JavaScript are hardly related, the former a programming language developed by Sun employees and first implemented by Sun, and while the latter did involve collaboration with Sun by Netscape and used Java-like syntax, the JS name is more marketing than having any relation to Java. But more importantly, neither is a type of the other.
"Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia, and Wikipedia is, in fact, both of these things and the most well known, the largest and by far the most used implementation of wiki[1] ever.
> can you avoid using the word "wiki" as casual shorthand to refer to Wikipedia?
It's really ok that nearly everyone does this, and what you're asking is like asking New York Times employees to stop calling nytimes.com "the website." I would not be surprised if 99.9% of all wiki implementation ever is actually Wikipedia, iow, there are lots of wikis, but most of them, by volume, are Wikipedia.
"Tree's leaves are turning pretty colors. I think Tree looks nice today."
What you just wrote is a decent argument against anyone taking issue with someone saying "the wiki" or even "my/our wiki" where it makes sense to. With respect to the topic at hand, however, that makes it a total strawman, because no one is taking issue with those things. Shortening "Wikipedia" to "wiki" is nothing like exercising the grammar of the English language to construct ordinary sentences involving "the bus" or "my truck".
Please don't make bad faith arguments like this. It stands out especially when it comes from someone who's first remarks were an objection to the Java/JS example on the grounds of category error.
Shortening "Wikipedia" to "wiki" would be like shortening "Burger King" to "burger".* It shouldn't be done, and it shouldn't be controversial to bring it up. It was a polite request, after all.
* or if that example bothers you, shortening "Taco Shack" to "shack", to use an example that will withstand any criticism that Burger King is not a burger, whereas Wikipedia is a wiki—which (again) doesn't even matter in this case, since we're not claiming any faux pas over the appropriate use of "a wiki" or "the wiki" or "our wiki" or "some wiki", etc.
Please demonstrate any false equivalence that I employed and demonstrate how my reasoning is flawed in claiming equivalence. Using wiki for Wikipedia, specifically because Wikipedia is a wiki, is the same kind of substitution as using plane for Boeing 737, because examples like these replace the specific with the general, which is incredibly common.
> What you just wrote is a decent argument against anyone taking issue with someone saying "the wiki" or even "my/our wiki" where it makes sense to. With respect to the topic at hand, however, that makes it a total strawman, because no one is taking issue with those things. Shortening "Wikipedia" to "wiki" is nothing like exercising the grammar of the English language to construct ordinary sentences involving "the bus" or "my truck".
Whether a definite or indefinite article is used makes no difference here, they merely indicate whether identity is known, and when missing they are assumed: "(the) wiki is not a proper citation." In English, we often use the general group in which the object belongs to replace the object, such as "vehicle" for "truck," and "truck" for "Ford," or "Internet" for "website" and "website" for "reddit." I have not, in fact, invented any argument to attack, which is necessary for a straw man.
> Please don't make bad faith arguments like this. It stands out especially when it comes from someone who's first remarks were an objection to the Java/JS example on the grounds of category error.
Here is your straw man. I have not made any bad faith arguments, so you've invented one to attack instead.
> Shortening "Wikipedia" to "wiki" would be like shortening "Burger King" to "burger".* It shouldn't be done, and it shouldn't be controversial to bring it up. It was a polite request, after all. or if that example bothers you, shortening "Taco Shack" to "shack", to use an example that will withstand any criticism that Burger King is not a burger,
Burger King is not a burger and Taco Shack is not a shack. You are suggesting that wiki is an abbreviation of Wikipedia, but because Wikipedia is a wiki your argument fails. And because these types of substitutions are common, the request was unreasonable.
For all the reasons that I just said. If you dispute that, then any response by me (or anyone else) is already guaranteed to be futile.
> Burger King is not a burger
Gee, it's almost as if I already covered that.
> Taco Shack is not a shack
Bizarre claim, and a clear example of the futility involved here.
Your accusation was vague and your reply here equally unsupportive. You may claim anything you like, but if your claim is unsupported then it is unconvincing.
Likewise, your defense that it's fine to arbitrarily omit "a"/"an" or "the" is what's truly unconvincing. To say, "I took a bus here" is acceptable. To say, "I took the bus here" would also be acceptable. Saying, "I took bus here", however, is definitely not a reasonable way to construct a sentence, despite your unsupported claims to the contrary. At best, it's a forgivable mistake that you might encounter from a non-native speaker, but in no way is it standard English. To argue otherwise (again, as you have done here) is bonkers and, like the Taco Shack example, suggests a commitment to never admitting to being wrong and a prioritization of that commitment over the truth.
* I suppose if we were operating under the rules that you insist exist, this could have been worded as "Taco Shack is not taco"
I wonder what, in your estimation, makes a specific cause a "woke" one?
In any case the surrounding threads have copious examples.
I don't think that is accurate. "Woke" still retains its original meaning of "aware of racial discrimination," and its subsequent generalized meaning of "aware of social inequalities." What happened was very similar to what happened with the word "liberal," which also retains its original meaning, namely, "tolerant," in that those threatened by equality or inexplicably opposed to awareness of inequality inscrutably use it as a pejorative. This doesn't make a lot of sense because "woke" used pejoratively strongly signals, "I am a racist and/or sexist and/or opposed to equality and/or opposed to awareness of inequality."
You're confusion is imagining that we care that's what it signals.
Honest question - I've heard people using that line in all of those contexts.
The way I use it, it means "alert to injustice in society, especially racism". But I suspect a lot of people on a certain political team use it to mean "liberal and stupid". There's a wide range of uses of the term, which is why I asked.
Not meant pejoratively outside of how poorly this current example speaks of the movement.
If it's the same, why did you choose only to call out that "side" of the spectrum?
For anyone considering donating, read this first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611094
The BLM scandal and all the mansions is just one of the most recent examples that come to mind.
All of these huge companies and thousands of individual donors giving money to what they believed to be a just cause - only to end up buying mansions and sports cars for the organization leaders.
Another older example was the Red Cross shinanigans in Haiti.
These sort of things erode trust in opaque charitable organizations.
That has nothing to do with 'woke'ness though.
Wounded Warrior Project[1] or any other charity with poor ratings, can be candidates for this, including conservative and similar leaning groups. But your comment and examples at least imply, if not necessarily intentional, that this is a trait of 'woke causes', and not an issue across the entire spectrum.
[1] at least before they were forced to do a wholesale housecleaning after having one of the lowest percentages of funds donated to a 501(c)3 that reached or helped their designated recipients.
Having always donated to EFF, OpenBSD and FreeBSD but i completely forgot IA, will do that this year too.
Samesame ;)
Authors cannot stop libraries from buying their books and putting them on the shelf.
Or are you talking about ebooks?
In the USA, if any library pays more for a "library" price, that's voluntary. They have the complete legal right to buy an ordinary copy from any consumer channel that will sell ot them (new or used re-sold) and lend it out. And this is not a special right of things classed as libraries, it's a right anyone has. Traditionally, when it comes to physical copies, anyway.
In other countries, the "first-sale doctrine" does not exist, and this may not be true. I think in Europe libraries do pay "licensing" fees to be able to loan out books, that get redistributed to copyright holders based on use statistics, sort of how music playing licensing does work in the USA too. So argument here about whether libraries really do this or not may just be confusion over the fact that things really do work differently in different countries.
I suppose that gives us the opportunity to compare... has the right to loan out legally purchased books without licenses damaged the incentive to write books in the USA compared to Europe? Like even back in pre-ebook days? I suspect not.
But if libraries choose to pay more for a better binding, that is because of their determination that the value is worth it to them, not because there is any law that says they must to give more compensation to copyright holders. Nor is it proportionate to how many times they lend out the book or anything.
In the USA libraries are completely legally allowed to take a copy they bought legally anywhere at all, including a used booksale from someone else, and loan it out as many times as they want, without needing a license or to make any additional payments to original copyright holder. I am so so positive of this (although I am not a lawyer).
Had they not done that, the publishers knew they faced an uphill battle because of the first-sale doctrine. But once Pandora's box was opened, the publishers saw their chance to stamp out the whole thing by arguing "well they did it once, what's to stop them from doing it again?"
IA made a well-intentioned but ill-advised decision.
Perhaps you're thinking of e-books.
This comment thread gets to be part of today's lucky 10,000. :) (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
The point is that authors' revenue from books sold to libraries is the same as what they get from a retail sale.
>If people worked long and hard on something, they deserve the right to prevent it from being given away for free.
So FreeSoftware/OSS people don't work hard?
I think Ricard Stallman made a really good presentation why today's copyright is unfair for small authors but really good for the "harry potter".
That's not a fair conclusion from the parent comment at all. Software developers _do_ have the right to prevent their work from being given away for free. Them _choosing_ to develop FOSS is them voluntarily waiving that right.
But yeah its not a completely fair comparison.
I think it's a science of manipulation, and would hope that eventually it will bite them... but these sciences of manipulation are very effective. And pioneered by the industries that many of us work in, with all the A/B testing and funnel management etc. So if we want to point the finger...
There are organizations that I like and appreicate, but stopped donating to after they started spamming with me with 5-10 emails a week asking for increased donations, when I was already donating to them! I stopped. Even though I like the organization and think they do good work. but I bet they have correct reason to believe this spam will net them increased donations over all.
See https://www.charitynavigator.org/ or https://www.charitywatch.org/
Charity Navigator can be overly generous with their composite scores, but you can drill down to the specifics.
E.g. that WMF takes 25% of donations off the top for admin/advertising expenses: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
As opposed to, say, the Atlanta Community Food Bank, which operates with <5% overhead: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/581376648
If you're going to donate, make sure they're actually going to the cause.
This rubs me the wrong way. I want my money to go to wikipedia, with the amount of money they now have my donation will go to side projects. That's not what I want to donate to, and also not what they are advertising in their banner.
Right, the feeling I get now across a lot of their efforts is that they're becoming increasingly addicted and intoxicated by looking at their account balances.
The begging banner is deliberate, it is a data-driven marketing campaign, not unlike more traditional internet ads. A good thing about Wikipedia is that they are transparent about it, if you care to look. [1]
Now, the question "do they need that much money?" remains.
If only a link to this page was included in the banner...
That being said the lack of transparency is alarming why not be public about it all? Sure some will use it against you but the people that actually care and fund them won't really care what its being spent on as long as the quality of service remains good.
No I certainly don't. Why would you like their "platform" to grow. They should stick with the core mission of running Wikipedia.
oh please yes
But they left because they wanted to be independent and they had plenty of sponsorship money anyway. And they still do. They get much more from business and government than they'll ever get from us.
Like the other poster above I also donate to archive.org instead which really does need it.
WMF gives a small fractional amount to some causes some people disagree with. Nearly every charity I donate to imperfectly spends their funds.
The question I have is: reading the title of this post, how many wikipedians are taking this "rebellious" stance? How many wikipedians don't care or don't notice?
I even agree with many of these causes (possibly all, but I've not researched them all), but Wikimedia is advertising a specifically scoped project and then actually running a meta-charity
Maybe actually tell people it's going to those causes instead of Wikipedia?
Naaaaaaaaah
I'm assuming you don't have the answers, I certainly don't. I'm also assuming they have a pretty good sense of what those answers are.
You're absolutely right I don't know how much it costs to operate in perpetuity. If your point is about building up a trust that's a great idea. I can't see anything in the plan about this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
Like all donations, it's an abstraction - you donate to the thing you see, but behind the abstraction is a complex bit of machinery you do not understand.
I donate to the world wildlife fund. I assume my donations help wildlife both concretely and abstractly, and that they continue to keep the WWF operational. I have no idea where my $50 actually goes, nor do I particularly care.
Same with Doctors Without Borders, or whatever else.
I assume charities know better than me their needs and finances.
I hate to say this, but I think this is one reason why we anecdotally read reports of lottery winners relatively quickly returning to their original predicament. Some people are terrible at allocating resources. For Wikipedia, of all places, to take advantage of that is mildly.. well.. evil.
<<behind the abstraction is a complex bit of machinery you do not understand.
Not all people operate like that. Some like to understand where their money is going. If it is doing good, that is great! Can I see how you do it? Wait. This financial statement says you are not doing nearly as well as you just told me you did. Can you explain it to me?
It is a very different mindset. I restrict my donations to occasional EFF and IA, but I primarily focus on donating my time ( the nature of those varies as I am still searching for a way to make actual impact ).
Yeah you do: this is all in their financial reports. You can see exactly what it costs and what is needed. (Presumably that's what everyone reads before deciding to believe a random cry for money in an online banner ad.)
The costs for servers (with developers/admins that maintain them) are a tiny tiny fraction of the income. I'm fully in favor of also funding further development instead of only maintenance, but just look at the kind of things that more than half of the money goes to.
I last looked at this 2-3 years ago but simply from the fact that they're still collecting even more money annually than they already did 3 years ago (and the banners are more obnoxious if nothing else), they apparently have decided to do the opposite of starting to spend more appropriate and sustainable amounts.
> Wikipedia's servers cost around £2 million a year. WMF's assets are over £230 million. See the 2021 Audit Report. If the existing assets are invested, then Wikipedia could run till the end of time and live comfortably off the investment returns with plenty to spare. However, WMF staff costs are nearly £68 million, and there's money thrown around in all directions, very little of which has anything to do with Wikipedia itself. The fundraising has nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia going, it is about making WMF richer and more powerful.
All told their expenses are 145 million a year, of which 10% is "awards and grants".
Focusing on the server costs is like saying an engineer only writes code. It takes much much more than servers to make a site.
Probably a huge amount of fat and bullshit jobs able to be cut without affecting the Wikipedia service at all.
You think if WMF could run with half the expenses they have today but not lower income they'd just choose to run the way they do? I guarantee you they are looking at cost cutting daily, like every other corporation.
We have a pretty strong indication though, since Wikipedia ran with significantly leaner staff not long ago, and Wikipedia wasn't fundamentally much less useful then compared to now.
If you look at the financial reports, in 2012[1] they paid almost exactly the same in internet hosting fees and other operating expenses as in 2022[2]. However the salary expenses ballooned to ~6.7x (adjusted for inflation).
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL...
[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
Their own leadership has said, in as many words, that "demonstrably we are able to run with far less expenses than we have".
Surely no more than $20m/year. Hosting costs are $2m/year. $18m/year is plenty for the remaining staff you actually need.
If you look back through their accounts you can see that it did used to cost much much less than it does now.
But then you aren't paying for legal, hr, recruiting, admins, leadership, data center workers, etc.
To say nothing of the global operations teams you need to ensure Wikipedia is compliant with local laws.
18m to run Wikipedia would be absolutely threadbare.
There's zero reason for Wikimedia to be paying SV salaries. Nor do they need 50 engineers.
What are they doing 6x more of compared to ten years ago? 80% more of since last year?
For one, employing people to coordinate fundraising. Ten years ago there was 3-4 people involved, and now there's nearly 50 employees who work on raising funds... very Ouroboros-like.
I'm not sure any charity I donate to doesn't give to causes I oppose in some degree.
I used to donate every month. After discovering it I stopped.
[1]: Yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t be totally surprised.
I currently donate a monthly sum, but I might reconsider that depending on what they're using the money for.
No reasonable person who donated in response to a 'help keep wikipedia online' prompt would expect the money to be spent funding 'STEM as a tool for social justice'.
WMF passes 10% of it's donations on to small projects and grants. A small number of those are focused on, e.g., racial equity.
These salaries (which is where almost all the money wiki raises goes) are used to fund these kind of projects: https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/
I'm sure these projects are goodwork, but when people see a banner add on wikipedia, a plea from wikipedia to keep wikipedia alive, and then click the button to support wikipedia they aren't purposefully supporting writing software to detect harassment in online communities, increasing the diversity of the volunteer pool, suing the NSA to stop internet surveillance, etc etc...
Wikimedia has access to a pile of money and they're growing their mission to match the pile of money. Unfortunately the size of that mission will always outpace the size of the pile of money, and it's a never ending feedback loop. giant 'mega-corp' charities are rarely as useful as smaller, mission-focused ones. I don't want the EFF to fight child poverty - that's what UNICEF is for. If the EFF started to do that tomorrow I would have to question how well focused and effective their leadership was.
I have been a regular donator to Wikipedia but after the last round of HN articles prompted me to read their financial statements I regret to say that I won't be again until they sharpen their focus.
I suspect the average donator to Wikimedia and the HN audience are a pretty big overlap - I think wikimedia has a huge problem here, even if we assume that it's just one of perception. If they opened their books and were a little more transparent with how program funding at wikimedia works to demonstrate that this money is in fact pushing wikipedia forward I would consider restarting donations and I'm sure other people would as well.
WMF's disagreeable outflows are like, 70-95% of their spending.
Right now, they're seeing loads of x10 and above. And since Mastodon is inherently noncommercial, I'm glad to support the instance im on.
And it's so much more peaceful there. Fake viralness doesn't exist. Re-toots (re-tweets) don't exist as a intentional design ideal. And its chronological. No re-loading to see more forced psychological viral garbage for more forced interaction.
So far, it's calmer and much more pleasant than I had thought possible.
I don't care what their fundraisings are, I just know that they deserve a donation now and then.
(Also, they employ more than 500 people, and this is consistent with their donations volume, so I don't think they are burning money for nothing.)
Regardless of the reason, if a page I'm going to doesn't display the content I reasonably expected it to have, I consider that page broken, and try to find a replacement as soon as possible.
The cognitive load of cookie banners, newsletter prompts, paywalls, tutorials, and so on, is just not acceptable to me, and I choose to leave all of it on the other Web, the AOLWeb and FacebookWeb, the one which I rarely access, mostly by accident. The GoodWeb, the one with the content and fast, lightly formatted pages, is where I stay.
I vote with my browser, only allowing JS selectively, choosing to close the tab whenever the AOLWeb rears its head, using various proxies on the rare occasion AOLWeb has anything I actually want, clipping anything useful into my cliplog for others to access more easily.
It's refreshing, let me tell you.
Take a step back, and you realize that it's actually a very very positive thing to see this kind of news. We're seeing it because Wikipedians are not OK with this behavior, and they're trying to signal that to the folks running the show. I hope they listen more than Mozilla's management.
edit: I repeat my request more strongly. I've looked more and even "intersectional scientific method" gets almost nothing except a couple of posts on twitter claiming the same and a website https://battlepenguin.com/politics/wikipedia-is-a-source-of-... which doesn't back anything up - are you affiliated with either of these?
I am wondering if you are deliberately spreading FUD
And where is the evidence it's related to wikipedia?
To WMF. Right there on their webpage. They are proud of it:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/08/wikimedia-fo...
You see, science is actually eurocentric, so supporting other ways of knowing is choosing the side in the culture wars that says we trust science because it's white and society is racist, therefore we must find a new "intersectional" scientific method
I'm so sorry I explained this. I don't have the energy to find citations since my posts on HN always get flagged but I assure you that funding choice is absolutely part of furthering the culture war lol
IMO there's quite a bit to criticize in that approach, but calling it postmodernist relativism doesn't really fit.
Check out his wikipedia and read the section Influence and reception, specifically Critiques and engagements > Social constructionism and human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
This [intersectional] approach requires both student and mentor to acknowledge that true professional development, incorporating belonging, requires affirmation, not assimilation.
(The other striking example of affirmation, not assimilation I’ve seen in a textbook for future school teachers enrolled in SFSU credential program. There was a chapter in the textbook on how to recognize signs of a student belonging to a youth band culture - and how to respect and affirm it. No, I am not kidding.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...
That's all there is to intersectionality, any conclusions you make beyond that are your interpretation of intersectionality, not the general consensus of the "far left".
That's really not "all there is" to intersectionality. You are repeating the motte-and-bailey of far-left ideologues wherein you fall back on the official/original definition of the term, conveniently ignoring that its meaning has changed over time, and has been coopted.
To be clear: I'm being charitable in my interpretation, and assuming you are not intentionally doing this.
> Crenshaw used intersectionality to display the disadvantages caused by intersecting systems creating structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against minorities in the workplace and society.[15] Crenshaw explained the dynamics that using gender, race, and other forms of power in politics and academics plays a big role in intersectionality.
It’s not just the idea that multiple identities can be at play at once. It’s a tool in the postmodern toolbox.
Nobody even needed intersectionality to explain the idea that humans can’t be reduced to a single identity (that’s just common sense) until 3rd wave feminists convinced us as much in the first place.
It might be obvious now, but it took intersectional thought for people to begin to acknowledge these less overt forms of discrimination.
It really didn't. I was raised in conservative evangelicalism and was never exposed to "intersectional" thought, but it was obvious to me that someone in multiple disadvantaged categories had it worse than someone who was only in one of them.
It was also obvious to me that any hiring system which a priori debarred a given category of people at the start was discriminatory.
Intersectional thought undoubtedly has helped some people figure these things out, but it really isn't necessary to understand these problematic behaviors and situations.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-natur...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-institutions/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-knowledge-soci...
I am conflicted because I believe in the Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". Yet, from a 'culture war' standpoint the winning strategy appears to be intersectionality and saturating the movement's messaging in as many organizations and institutions as possible.
I'm Danish, I wonder what that those people would do if they knew that the viking culture they are appropriating was actually pretty "liberal". Homosexuality wasn't an issue, neither were mixing races or religions. They just recently discovered an Islamic Viking lord in Sweden.
Anyway. If one side of the "culture war" is Nazis, then why is it a war?
Don't get me wrong. It's not like we didn't have our share of village idiots who thought Bill Gates put Microchips in the Covid vaccines and thought the Face Masks were the end of democracy here in Denmark, but the vast majority of people who thought that Face Masks were stupid still wore them with the reasoning that they wouldn't hurt, even if they didn't help, and basically everyone above 18 got vaccinated.
On a side note, I do wish our own village idiots would come up with their own conspiracies though. I mean, why couldn't our Queen be behind the Microchips instead of Bill Gates?
the society solution is similar to how the body fights diseased cells: sure, try to avoid the corruption but also setup systems to replace corrupted companies/institutions.
Do you know if there is a good write-up anywhere of exactly why these organisations keep getting captured by this ideology?
It feels like it just came out of nowhere and took over, and we are all expected to agree with the whole thing, otherwise we are labelled as bigoted, evil, etc.
I know it's associated with being politically on the left, but personally, as a left-winger in a more traditional (class-based, economic) sense, I am baffled as to how it's been quietly switched to all this woke gibberish. I certainly didn't see it coming.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton [2]: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-bias/
The word on the street is that this has been pushed by the people who control Wall Street and mainstream media to subvert the Occupy Wall Street movement and the class war momentum it was gaining before and in 2011.
EDIT: I've really really searched, where is the culture war topics everyone in this thread is talking about? This sounds like editors being upset about fundraising banners since WMF is financially well off.
Potential explanation: was the link changed?
They're funneling tens of millions of dollars of donations into the US culture war.
I would urge people looking at this thread to think about the idea of "culture war," who is selling and profiteering from making it a front page issue (it's not).
The best thing you and I can do, instead or beyond donating, is to read Wikipedia and point out places with issues, if not become editors outright.
A title will suffice.
There was another list going around that was said to be satire that people retweeted seemingly unironically: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-book-bans-schools-...
I think a lot of people would find 9-10 years old a bit young for sex. One is also generally not a 'teenager' until 13 and indeed many of the age restrictions are for materials like these books with respect to pre-teens.
Age restrictions are arbitrary. Are there some 16-year-olds I'd trust more with a vote than 25 year olds? Yes.
In any case, and to reiterate my prior point, none of this seems to be "grooming" or "pedophilia."
So it's understandable that people are concerned by people who want to give sexually explicit material to preteens.
And some authors of children's works have long attracted controversy, like Piers Anthony who had that hotline to contact him in his books (1-800-HI-PIERS) and who wrote extensively about child sexuality both in children's books (the "adult conspiracy" in Xanth) and quite explicitly in his adult works, like Firefly which has explicit sex involving a 5 year old girl.
Quotes of that and some similar works of his can be found here, you have been warned:
https://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-w... https://hradzka.livejournal.com/392471.html
I think it's fair to be concerned about such things, and I say that as someone who read much of the Xanth series as a teenager and only figured out how damned creepy it was a very long time afterwards.
Note that I do not claim to have any proof that he's a pedophile, nor do I have any evidence of him harming any kids. But at the same time, I think it's fair for people to want to keep their children away from dirty old men like him and I wouldn't give any kids of mine a Xanth book.
And perhaps you have been so blinded by your moral panic, but you appear to not have been reading my posts: I agree with you that texts like this should be restricted for younger kids. (I haven't stated this, but I vehemently disagree with outright bans that make them unavailable to all.) I merely contend that this is not in fact grooming or pedophilia, and that what the right is engaged in is yet another example of the moral panics they gin up to gain political power. (See: war on drugs, satanic panic, et. al.[1])
The right is weaponizing this panic, and ultimately conflating pedophilia with the LGBTQ community. See: countless anti-drag legislation, armed militias showing up at pride events, et. al.
The fact remains that most child predation happens by a person the child knows [2]
Basically to sum up: I agree with you on restricting the availability of books with sexually explicitly content in regards to young kids. I disagree with outright bans. Kids are sexually active creatures--whether anyone likes it or not. Lack of education about this topic leads to suboptimal outcomes: teen pregnancy, sexual violence, etc. These books don't strike me as grooming or pedophilia, and in fact, they seem to be the basis of a moral panic being used to gain political power.
[0] https://mcasa.org/newsletters/article/comprehensive-sex-educ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic#:~:text=A%20moral%....
Regarding moral panics, those are at the root of most political activism. I don't find this surprising in any way.
Finally, regarding the 'armed militias', I assume that relates to the 'sniper' story, unless there was some other story I wasn't aware of (which is possible)? I'll just mention that the story appears to be dubious in terms of whether there were any actual 'snipers', and the original allegation was that they were there to protect the drag queen story hour, not to shoot them:
https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/12/09/did-snipers-really-g...
I think I also heard of a possibly different event that was similar, with a supposed Antifa militia protecting a similar event from protesters.
As for armed militias:
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/14/1104881726/police-in-idaho-ar...
But some of these things are pedo-adjacent, so while I agree that they're not pedophilia or rape, they can be concerning in that right.
In a related issue: is banning books going to lead to fewer bad outcomes? Unlikely.
Just out of curiosity, at what age do you think it is appropriate for a human to be sexually active by choice?
You can expect money to be used in some ways, sure, but it's not like WM uses 50% of your donation on vanity projects.
Personally, I wish WM would invest more in the quality of non-English articles. French "toponymie" sections tend to be brigaded for whatever reasons for instance. French linguists wage wars apparently.
It requires a lot of people and core knowledge to develop and run. To some extent Wikimedia is a research company too.
it is sad to say, but it is obvious that the general good name of the wikipedia project is parasitized by nonprofit sector careerists.
Programs totals are: $69,371,450 I was expecting to administrative totals to be higher: $11,531,675
[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
On this site, you will find many who will breathlessly insist that the only way to run a website at scale is through top tier engineering solutions developed by teams of highly paid engineers. I am not sure why the calculus changes so much for a non profit. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that they have $8 million in processing fees just for their donations.
I have no idea what is the right number they should be spending, but I know their costs are much higher than servers and bandwidth.
And this is exactly the problem everyone has had with Wikipedia's WMF-fundraising messages for years.
Any banner that says "This donation is needed for Wikipedia" is objectively false.
Wikipedia itself does not need donations.
And the WMF isn't even spending 50% of those donations it does receive on Wikipedia.
Certainly.
But WMF's banners begging for donations strongly imply otherwise. It's deceptive.
That’s the whole point of nonprofits?
From Wikipedia (ha!):
> Key aspects of nonprofits are accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to every person who has invested time, money, and faith into the organization. Nonprofit organizations are accountable to the donors, founders, volunteers, program recipients, and the public community.
Uh, people have gotten in a lot of trouble in the past for claiming to raise money for specific causes and using that money for something else. I'm guessing Wikimedia is on the legal side of this fairly gray area, but as a blanket statement, you're mistaken: Wikimedia is very much under a specific legal obligation to use funds collected through charitable fundraising for that charity.
It isnt alarmist to notice that Nice, Professional, Educated people have been guiding institutions that are ostensibly neutral (Wikipedia, or at risk of being spicy, the ACLU) taking great pains to support a worldview that is popular with only 8% of the US population, let alone the population of the world (https://hiddentribes.us/). They are doing so at the expense of their stated mission, in Wikipedia's case - this means taking money that could be used for hosting endowments, translations, original research and using it to forward the worldview and cultural dominance of a very small group.
> Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded
Feels like there must be more to the story... and was a million dollars spent on this? Or more like $5000? Again, feels like they're trying too hard to incite outrage. (Perhaps that's the way on Twitter)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
I suggest interpreting the Twitter thread as trying to convince you to read the full article.
That said, even if cherry picked, the example provided is sufficiently damning for me to refrain from donating if it was determined to be true ( I am not a donor to that cause so I have no horse here ).
<<Feels like there must be more to the story..
I agree with this wholeheartedly. There is a concerted effort to go after Wiki for one reason or another. The situation they find themselves in is not new, but has only recently became an issue in public eye. And I am saying this as a person, who is leaning towards saying 'Wiki does not NEED more money; other charities should get a slice'.
You would be surprised how amenable Republicans at the local level, who don't have to keep up appearances on Twitter, are to social justice -- doubly when someone in their family is a member of one of those disadvantaged groups.
You don't get to say "I don't like this so I'm going to say it's political and then demand you stay out of politics." Literally everything is political.
You killed someone. That's bad. Except they were dying of a terminal disease, so now it's good. Except you still killed someone, so that's bad.
However, I'd feel like sponsoring the Ben Shapiro superpac would be obviously over the line - not because they're "conservative" or "against social justice", but because the way in which it opposes "social justice" is not an incidental aspect of protecting freedom of information.
Similarly, funding the pre-2015 ACLU could have a similar argument made - even though they had a liberal bent well before the Harvard amicus brief.
It's plain wrong to put banner ads in third world countries like Brazil and India, sounding like wikipedia doesn't have money to run their servers.
It's plain wrong to funnel that money to executives.
People who make wikipedia great aren't even involved with this. They have enough money to run servers, and a potential donation doesn't create additional content. They are trying hard to hide that fact with some clever wording.
This is textbook example of __dark pattern__ which highly privacy focused people love to point out when a bootstrapped startup collects telemetry data from their little application.
The Wikipedia fundraising effort is sounds like a metric driven C suite executive desperately trying to make charts "stonk".
Post-modernist deconstruction of what is viewed as "white people culture" (meritocracy, high-trust societies, traditional gender roles and family) inspired by the Frankfurt School[0] of philosophy and older concepts[1].
>In the west, an advanced industry of NGOs, charities, and foundations has evolved which funds so much of the weirdness in our daily lives. A caste of activist-professionals have emerged, which inevitably capture any non-profit with spare cash. This is what is sometimes called The Blob: a powerful but inconspicuous force that has given us the dysfunction of the 21st century
Foolish me, I thought it was Gilded Age-level income inequality, and its subsequent funding of authoritarianism that was giving us the dysfunction of the 21st century. Good thing we have this crack journo to tell us it's...
checks notes
...Non-Profit Organizations!
I'd just like to remind you what happened when Brendan Eich had donated $1000 of his own damn money to a cause you found disagreeable.
Which is in somewhat stark contrast to some comments here which seem to be suggesting that Wikipedia's donations are fine because they're only ~$500k.
In 2014, this donation came to light after he was appointed CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. Much outrage ensued and Eich was more or less forced to resign.
> In August 2010, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the amendment was unconstitutional under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment,[6] since it purported to re-remove rights from a disfavored class only, with no rational basis.
I personally use Britannica.
I would be happy to make a donation to it and have the original wmf rot.
The Spanish Wikipedia had a considerable mutiny around 2011, when all admins quit en masse and moved to their own fork, but looks like they gave up the ghost around 2016:
http://enciclopedia.us.es/index.php/Plantilla:Art%C3%ADculo_...
The only successful wiki fork I'm aware of is Wikivoyage (a Wikimedia project) from Wikitravel, which was bought by a company that proceeded to cram it full of monkey punch ads and alienate its entire userbase.
These "benevolent dictatorships" all devolve into regular dictatorships after the benevolent dictator leaves (or finds a new partner who promises to make them rich), and the ivy MBAs show up with top tier salary expectations and a vision for what to do with the brand that has little or no relationship with what the brand became successful doing.
It's of course a collective action problem. The reason that wikipedia can be plundered for cash (such a precious thing, so much management risk) is the same reason Elsevier and others can collect billions on the backs of unpaid researchers and reviewers.