Infrastructure isn’t free. Happy to donate to Wikipedia on a yearly basis. And the emails are only once a year.
Food isn't free either, but I haven't been sending Bill Gates money every year to help him buy his own food.
Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
21–30 of 217 posts
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#22[deleted]
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#23Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
I share similar sentiments as the article's author: I donated once ~4 years ago, and have been *completely* turned off donating again (despite wanting to, and knowing I should for such a fantastic resource) by such agressive emails, because I feel it's rewarding such behaviour.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#24I have always found Wikipedias begging for money weird.
Even if they chose to be driven by donations, I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money.
Is it really that bad for non-profits on the internet?
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#25As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million. https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/22/wikimedia-fo... (sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation )
Yale University has an endowment of $30 billion. That’s an endowment 300 times bigger than Wikipedia.
https://investments.yale.edu/
Apple, in comparison, has $200 billion in cash reserves. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-companies-most-cash-reserv...
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#26What to do with a problem like Wikipedia. It’s ultimately a fantastic source of information like nothing else on the internet. That has to be worth something right? Problem is that people probably don’t bother to donate as much as they could or should. I know I haven’t donated. Is there another way it could be monetised without ads?
The problem, as other posts allude to, is it has too much money and not enough interesting, useful projects to do with it. It's a great example of how a fantastic resource very much can be - and is - funded purely through donations of time and money. They just try to tell you it isn't doing well.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#27Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
The high value of Wikipedia is the (only?) reason why so many people tolerate really annoying donation solicitation practices.
If it were any other way, it wouldn't be this way.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#28As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million. https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/22/wikimedia-fo... (sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation )
Yale University has an endowment of $30 billion. That’s an endowment 300 times bigger than Wikipedia. https://investments.yale.edu/ Apple, in comparison, has $200 billion in cash reserves. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-companies-most-cash-reserv...
What’s a hardware manufacturing private company have to do with the Wikipedia foundation?
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
With NPR, does the aggressiveness match the need?
NPR has become a race baiting mouthpiece, sadly. The quality of the overall programming has sharply declined over the last 10 years. No more driveway moments for me.
Agreed they've been infected by the PC police/woke mob... Quite a shame because they used to do real hard-hitting reporting.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
With NPR, does the aggressiveness match the need?
NPR has become a race baiting mouthpiece, sadly. The quality of the overall programming has sharply declined over the last 10 years. No more driveway moments for me.
Agreed, I used to love some of their programming, but the NPR of today is completely unlistenable to me.