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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

cyounkins.medium.com

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#81

Post by belval »

ZetaZero wrote: post #72
colechristensen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff. I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that. That much spend seems unsustainable long term.

> I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? It takes a lot of people and money to raise $150m/year ;->

According to their 2019/2020 statement they spend 5M$ in "donation processing" and an additional 5M$ in wages for the donation campaigns.

10M$ in expenses to get 120M$ really isn't so bad.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#82

Post by legitster »

> But open the email and you don’t see that text anywhere!

In the email industry, we call this a "pre-header". The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense. If you put any text above the body, it won't render in the email but will still be parsed by the inbox preview function (since it ignores any html it sees). This was mostly an exploit back in the day, but clearly email clients love it because they doubled down on supporting it.

Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed. Both of these features are built into every email client and service.

I thought this was going to be a complaint about their clearly hyperbolic messaging, but OP is really frustrated about some of the most basic features of email. I wonder if he has yet learned that the letters he gets from the White House are not actually sent from the White House.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#84

Post by andrewstuart »

loeg wrote: post #67
andrewstuart wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a lot of money in context.

It's quite a lot of money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

I read the page. It's very angry about Wikipedia's finances.

I still don't resent their asking and I still donate.

Wikipedia is a truly worthwhile service and I'm happy they have much more money than they need to scrape by.

You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by. I think that is a bad way to run any operation.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#85

Post by blowski »

lancesells wrote: post #59
cyounkins wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s incredible how many people say they’d love to support an ad-free social network, frequently use Wikipedia, and don’t donate to Wikipedia.

This is a problem for so many charities. People passionately agree with the mission, want to donate, can afford to donate… and yet don’t donate. And then complain when the charity is too aggressive in requesting donations.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#87

Post by dylan604 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #80
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise. And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!

For comparison, OpenStreetMap has roughly $800k in reserves and their expenses are a couple hundred thousands dollars per year. I agree there are probably more justifiable expenses at Wikimedia than that, but that there is a middle ground between the high water mark they're targeting and what other non-profits are operating with. The Internet Archive's annual budget is ~$10 million. EDIT: @dylan604 (replying here due…

What's the legal expenses associated with Wiki? I could see some people wanting to sue for information linked to/about them. OSM probably doesn't have that same type of exposure.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#88

Post by throwawaysea »

I've donated thousands to Wikipedia over the years, but I've noticed an increasing amount of bias in the website that made me hit the pause button. At first I saw it in a couple random examples, where I just thought "that's weird" and dismissed it as a random issue. But then I started to look for bias and noticed it much more frequently. And I don't mean just on the left-right American political spectrum, but also in other more complex ways, for example favoring Western scholarship over other scholarship. When I look at the Talk pages, I see regular bad faith application of policies that were written with better intentions.

I'm not the only one to note this issue in recent years. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote a blog post titled "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" last year (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). Although Wikipedia is decentralized, it is an institution. And I feel like we need more than one.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#89

Post by tw600040 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #55

I’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!

And if bitcoin had crashed to 0 their answer to the donors will be what?

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#90

Post by myself248 »

hammock wrote: post #27
wly_cdgr wrote: post #7

Wikipedia 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.

I either found a way to unsubscribe from these, or I found a way to filter them. I now make a monthly donation, and I see the receipts from those transactions, and that's it. Just the way I like it.

Contrast with the Red Cross, whose annoyance-to-value ratio is far worse, IMHO, to the point that I refuse to donate. Yes they're providing literal life blood to people who may die without it, but have you SEEN their firehose of email?

I don't understand why this continues. It must work better than the alternatives, which is awful.

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