I donate to Wikipedia.
And I am glad they have lots of money. I do not feel outraged about it, I feel happy about it.
I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Wikipedia is a great service, it should be valued. They should not always be living close to the edge of going out of business. How they spend their funds raised is their business.
This anti Wikipedia person is really annoying and I wish they would stop their crusade.
EDIT: it seems the outraged guy is a right wing Murdoch journalist. Enough said, it all adds up. I still remember how Murdoch ran a successful campaign here in Australia to sink the planned national fibre to the home broadband network - 10 years down the track we never got our national fibre network. These guys hate tech, especially free information services like Wikipedia and national broadcasters like the ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Murdoch wants to own it all and hates free.
From the authors Wikpedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski
"Writing for The Daily Telegraph in May 2021, Orlowski said that the Wikimedia Foundation was "flush with cash" and passing money to the Tides Network, which he described as "a left-leaning dark money group"; he referred to Wikipedia as "Wokepedia" in an allusion to the term "woke".[24] In another article for The Daily Telegraph, in December 2021, Orlowski said the Wikimedia Foundation's urgent fundraising banners on Wikipedia were "preposterous" given that it held assets of $240 million and had a $100 million endowment, and the Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director had said in 2013 that the Foundation could be sustainable on "$10M+ a year".[25] In August 2022, Orlowski claimed that Wikipedia had "become a tool of the Left in the battle to control the truth", referencing the recent controversy over Wikipedia's definition of a recession.[26]"
Not everyone shares your opinion on high pressure misleading sales as a persuasion method being acceptable.
HBomberguy has a good video on the subject. You can use people ranting about 'wokeness' to make money, and while it's amusing and gratifying to indulge that 'ha, I showed you, I don't agree with your ranting against this thing!' it's engaging in pseudo-political behavior that's in a sense wasted. Throwing more money at Wikipedia isn't really helping them be more woke, it's helping them be better at using that to ask for money.
I'm not actually going to give them money today but that's because I gotta tend to my own affairs: if I had a bunch extra I'd send some Wikipedia's way on the grounds that at least they're annoying the right people?
Could you elaborate on that? I really don't want to believe this is true, WMF is clearly being manipulative and a world where being manipulative is necessary sounds...extremely dystopian.
That's muddying the waters. If Wikipedia has deceptive donation drives, then who reports it should be completely irrelevant.
I use Wikipedia a few times a week, my kids use it, I am happy to pay for it, and to give them some room to fund new related efforts.
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
> I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Necessary how? For what?
I donate to Wikipedia—as a Wikipedian. I've contributed a bunch of time editing content and doing lots of gnomish things to create value so that Wikipedia is a "great service". Millions of others have, too. But neither I nor any of the other people have anything to do with your donations.
Don't misunderstand: this is not a call-to-action for revenue sharing in the vein of the articles constantly appearing about the sustainability of FOSS; I'm not saying "give us a cut". What I am saying is that the Wikimedia fundraising tactics are thoroughly unnecessary to the actual production costs of Wikipedia that Wikimedia is responsible for.
Am I outraged? No. Do I recognize what WMF is doing as borderline slimy? Yes.
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From a Twitter thread on a scientific research project funded through Wikimedia:
> In deciding who to fund, the key criteria was use of the Intersectional Scientific method. Everything else - a scientific background, data - was optional. What could possibly go wrong?
> One of the projects was into spatial learning in the California Two-Spot Octopus, for which the researcher got 12 hatchling octopuses.
> Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded.
If he's not presenting a factual summary of what's going on, his "motivations" are likewise irrelevant.
If you can refute his claims, by all means do so, but vague ad hominems don't impress me.
Don't conflate wikipedia and wikimedia.
You may be glad wikipedia has a lot of money, but are you glad wikimedia does? Are you happy with the proportion of your wikimedia donation that goes to wikipedia?
If wikimedia was actually spending all donations on blackjack and hookers for execs, would it matter that the person reporting it was reporting it because he really hates wikis as a concept?
Either his claims are factual, or they aren't.
If they are not factual, they should be refuted, but appealing to his "motivations" or "track record" is not a refutation. It is an ad hominem attack, i.e., a logical fallacy.
His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
As I said above:
> So when an oil company writes a report on the viability of solar power then that doesn't affect how we should view the report?
> His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
Why do they need 550 employees? I think it's fair to question what the foundation has decided to do with your donation, because basically all of your donation goes to the "not-Wikipedia" parts.
But yeah the fact that this was written by some radical right-winger makes sense. The weird red-scare stuff at the end was so out of place, I should have realized it was by a right-wing propagandist, they have to shove that tripe into everything.
The truth of that claim has no causal relationship with his opinions. I mean, obviously someone who disagrees with funneling donations to left-wing causes would be more likely to complain about it, or even possibly make something up. But that in itself has no bearing on whether the claim is actually true.
Does Wikipedia funnel donations to left-wing causes or not?
You have presented no evidence one way or the other. Instead, you have attacked his "motivations" and "track record". That is a textbook ad hominem.
Did you actually read the article? This point is not made anywhere in the article.
No point in discussing this further.
But why do you think it does affect how you view the report? Because the company is likely to lie, right? So you should perhaps examine the report more carefully. But that has nothing to do with the report's factuality. It may affect how likely it is to be true, but once you've determined it to be one or the other, who reported it is completely irrelevant.
Likewise, if Wikipedia is in fact dishonest when it asks for donations, and you first heard that completely true fact from a Nazi, are you going to conclude that actually it was false all along? In other words, is your reality determined by the opposite of what your political adversaries say?
> Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap.
$1.9m is was the capital expenditure budget for 2012/3 (ie cost of servers etc).
But I'm sure that his motivations had nothing to do with the fact that he found a conveniently small expense figure to mislead with.
EDIT: And I insist, all that's relevant is the error itself. The political affiliation of the person who made the error shouldn't matter.
Your (bad) attempt to be clever notwithstanding, my comment makes it clear that I'm not referring to donating money. That's not true of the person I responded to. Try again.
"The Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund is a new US$4.5 million fund created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, to provide grants to external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge."