zlacker

>>nickpa+(OP)
Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely useful.

For what it's worth, Charity Navigator gives them 4 out of 4 stars with a 98.33/100 rating: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas, but nobody cares.

>>ripper+m8
I don't get the outrage either. It's almost like people want Wikipedia to be barely scrapping by which isn't good. Having some money in your reserves is fine.

>>rany_+v9
An organization that has the goodwill of the hacker community has to perpetually walk the line on the edge of pauper to maintain its virtue, lest it be seen as selling out and no longer worthy of the goodwill of the hacker community.

It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.

>>shadow+ud
If they were running ads that said, "Hey we sort of have the money we need to keep doing this for a while, but you can give us some more money if you want to help", then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Wikipedia's current ads are both misleading and more intrusive than ever.

550 employees is huge, especially for an organization that doesn't even pay those employees to create and edit the content on the site. It's so far away from "on the edge of pauper" that the point you're making—even if true for other, non-Wikimedia realms—is completely irrelevant here.

>>cxr+Lf
If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money. The psychology of fundraising is extremely well researched.

>>shadow+5k
> If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money.

Bullshit.

To repeat: the ads today are more misleading and more intrusive than ever. In years past there were ads that were unlike the ones used today. (People complained about them, but I was not among them.) Those ads were successful. There's no evidence to argue that they wouldn't be successful today, too.

>>cxr+rk
There is plenty of evidence, in the form of the hockey-sticking donation revenue for the organization, that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past.

As I said, hacker ethos of biasing in favor of the scrappy underdog. It was fine to fundraise when they were small and their strategy was unproven, but as they grow and their strategy is demonstrated as effective, they lose our favor.

ETA: speaking of human psychology... It's an election cycle in the US. It's interesting that this story, the facts of which have been known since last year (according to a cursory search of news story dates) is suddenly again making the rounds right now. May be simple coincidence.

>>shadow+Ym
> There is plenty of evidence[...] that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past.

You just moved the goalposts. (In this case, moved them such that your "argument" is just restating the substance of the complaint.) Wikimedia is bringing in a lot more money doing this sort of thing. That's well understood—by all, i.e., those on both sides of the issue.

Your job is not to defend the position that the aggressive ads bring in more donations, but that if they weren't using them then "they wouldn't make _any_ money". Please leave dishonest sleights of hand at the door.

>>cxr+1x
I thought "any" would be understood to be rhetorical exaggeration; my apologies. My actual position I've posited is an org loses support of the hacker community when it becomes successful even if nothing about what it's doing fundamentally changes. If their ads are different now, it's because they refined their approach; the goal was always to get people to give them money to be used as they saw fit.

>>shadow+0B
The banners have become more intrusive and obnoxious as the organisation has become richer. Ten years ago, they were quite mild by comparison. You wouldn't get ten reminders, the banners didn't cover your entire screen, and they didn't beseech you not to scroll away.

A couple of years ago a Wikimedia Foundation fundraising report explained why that "Don't scroll away" phrase was added:

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“Don’t Scroll Away”

A simple, yet effective phrase that we were surprised to see resonate with readers worldwide was simply asking readers not to “scroll away” from or “scroll past” the fundraising message in the banner. We believe that addressing the context in which people donate helps improve the donation rate.

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Quoted from this report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2019-20_Report