I swear I googled to see if Jimmy Wales died first before reading this post.
That's what I thought too. The title of this article is as much clickbait as Wales' emails.
Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
51–60 of 217 posts
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#52I 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?
You end up building your product for who gives you your money.
With advertisers you build your product to sap as much attention as possible.
With corporate sponsors you start to let them moderate your product.
With annoying users for money you at least want your users to like you instead of making them a product of some kind or another.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#53I don't resent them doing what they need to do.
Wikipedia is one of the few things on the Internet that feels right.
If they need to play the same shit game as everyone else, so be it.
The tone of resentment here from the commenters is disappointing - it's like Wikipedia needing money is somehow not OK.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Car Talk tho.
Hasn't had a new episode in almost ten years, sadly, and likely will not have a revival as Tom passed away. Apparently radio distribution was slated to stop at the beginning of last month
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#55I’ve said many times if they had just bought Bitcoin with their pledges long ago they would never have had to annoy us with this. I remember saying this when Bitcoin was $1800 in 2017. Even a less risky investment like the SP500 should surely have been enough. It has 4x’d in ten years. It doesn’t take $100 million and 500 employees to run some light Wikipedia pages. All the content is provided by users!
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#56As 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 )
That's not a lot of money in context.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#57The reality is this person was never going to donate anyway and so they found their excuse to not do so. Do you suppose they use wikipedia any less as a result?
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#58Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
Yes. As I wrote, I have donated to Wikipedia and love the project. I think the methods they use to solicit donations undermines their trustworthiness.
Wikipedia is great but I similarly don't trust their cries for help anymore.
I won't donate till they communicate more honestly or Wikipedia - not wikimedia - needs help. It feels a lot like my local food bank begging for food but it turns out it's only their side venture composting food that's in need.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#59Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
Yes. As I wrote, I have donated to Wikipedia and love the project. I think the methods they use to solicit donations undermines their trustworthiness.
I'll donate to the annual email every year to keep them from adding ads or other forms of monetization.
Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
#60Unfortunately not all donors donate without being asked/motivated.
The majority of people don't donate without being asked. I'd estimate a ~70x increase of donations during a donation campaign.