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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway.

The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.

There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.

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I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.

They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?

> No one's being conned into donating

You've never seen the banners asking for money to cover the costs of the servers?

They're saying its not a con because they agree with it and its a good thing. It's doublespeak, maybe even to themself.

Sophists railing against Socrates seems about right.

People get annoyed at them for their massive banners begging for money making it seem like wikipedia is on the verge of being closed down unless you donate despite the fact they have a ton of money they have saved away which could keep wikipedia running for decades. Even long running wiki editors and donators get pissed off with the behavior of the wikimedia foundation as not enough of this money actually seems to get spent on Wikipedia. Kinda similar to the whole Firefox situation now I come to think about it.

> No one's being conned into donating

They are. The banners are dishonest every year, making it seem like they can barely keep the lights on.

If the donation is given on the false belief that the donations are necessary to keep Wikipedia running, I'd argue donors are being conned into donating. And that is exactly the message the donation banners convey.

> I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.

> No one's being conned into donating.

These statements are consistent but they are what's getting in your way of understanding.

For a lot of people, what the Wikimedia does to raise donations does constitute conning people into donating. Hence the angst.

> AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway

The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.

Every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that enables them to better sabotage Firefox development actually. If they were starved like cancerous tumour the body might heal and survive.

"If we destroy the organization responsible for this thing I like, then only the bad parts of the organization will die and the thing I prefer will become better!"

No, if you destroy the flawed-but-sometimes-okay organization you just wind up with something worse. There is no magic save-the-thing-you-like fairy.

Large bureaucracies don't "learn their lesson" from being torn down.

Vote against increased taxes because the road department already has "such a large budget" and "maybe this will teach them to cut the administrative fat"? No, you'll just wind up with more potholes.

Vote for Donald Trump because you think the Federal Government is wasteful and the Democrats need to be taught a lesson? No, you'll just get billionaire tax cuts, erosion of civil liberties, and absolutely no behavior change from the people you wanted to "punish". Everything just gets worse.

And eventually, out of the blue sky, Kali will reach with her crimson palms.

> The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.

I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

wikipedia still being around after all this time and still maintaining links to just download the entire thing and having no ads makes whatever they're doing good to me, ha.

I love other wikimedia projects like Wiktionary and wiki commons too.

And they do experiment and i think the passion for the society upholding project that is the encyclopedia is still there. Its the same wirh web archive.

Wikimedia is run transparently which is great but I dont really believe they need the money when you see their financial statement (link below) and think about what they need to run. Plenty of really deserving charities running on the sniff of an oily rag not paying 100m in salaries plus travel, conferences etc.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikim...

Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.

They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in short term investment, why do they need to run giant screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging for money and making it seem like everything will be gone tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki community and always cause pages of arguing every year.

Because you don't have to pay and most people don't, + the reasons from my previous comment.

On the other point: Discussions are at the core the movement, and how to do fundraising "right" and how to use funds is worth discussing and gets discussed. But that it is needed in general is obvious I think. What else should be done? Let all the projects run out of funds and call it a day? That would mean the end - and today Wikipedia is more needed than ever.

As a liberal I've always had to fight the tendency we have to not see legitimacy sinks in the name of politeness. Lately I think people are willing to listen and I'm working on ways to explain this to people who don't bellyfeel them already.

Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a political science level these run side by side with ads promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The trouble is that small donations don't give voice, but large donations do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really the money confirms this feeling.

Retching from drops of com in the aguaclara of edu (or sci or org) is possibly a biological reflex by now. Debt, but 10,000 years?

Top of my idea stack is: should gov disintermediate the debt transfer?

"There be no middleman but Gov", translated for the nirvana of all

(In a sense, the Fed does exactly this, but the procedure needs to be orders of magnitude sharper/faster before it should be thought safe for bellies)

a lot of engineering positions at WMF don't pay particularly competitively - you do take a pay cut working there to run/manage k8s clusters than you would elsewhere (even some public sector gigs pay better in big cities).

Mozilla's setup feels more like a shell game

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