https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1579776106034757633 - that's all you need to read.
They're funneling tens of millions of dollars of donations into the US culture war.
They're funneling tens of millions of dollars of donations into the US culture war.
> 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'.
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.
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".
>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!
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].