(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).
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.
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).