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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#111

Infrastructure isn’t free. Happy to donate to Wikipedia on a yearly basis. And the emails are only once a year.

If only it were once a year. Every quarter I get a whole thread spread out over a couple weeks. "Did you see our last email?" "There's still time to save Wikipedia!"

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#113
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. I always wonder if the complainers do the same deep analysis and whining about how for-profit companies spend their income, or if they just plunk down $120 for Xbox Game Pass and leave happy. Is Wikipedia worth $20 a year to me? Yeah. So they can have it and spend it how they like. Just like Microsoft can with my Game Pass subscription.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#114

> 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 do…

I just looked through my email, and you're right that many companies use preheaders (though usually with display: none). But I would classify most of them as summaries of the email content. The email from Jimmy Wales, in contrast, uses it for deceptive purposes: it shows a completely different text fragment that sounds like a brief personal email.

Also, just because the "email industry" routinely uses bad practices, that doesn't make it okay for wikimedia to do so.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#115
> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before.

Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.

Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.

(And no, the company is not Wikimedia) :P

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#116

> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before. Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the…

It's definitely possible I'm misremembering. I've donated multiple times and it'd be reasonable for them to re-add me upon donation. But I'm pretty sure I've unsubscribed since my last donation in 2019.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. I'm on "the left", but I don't need a media outlet confirming my biases or stroking my ego. I was originally drawn to NPR precisely because it seemed like a relatively neutral news source (still discernibly left-of-center, but not aggressively so) and because it frequently exposed me to other perspectives; however, it seems to have been dragged into the swamp of "activist journalism" just like ever…

NPR and PBS both are among the most accurate/neutral according to a media study. [1] I honestly worry that we're having a political disparity in truth that's pushing a choice between politically neutral and factually accurate. [1]: https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

I mean... you can put anything you want on the internet. I looked up their "methodology" and it's sort of just whatever they think a source/article is. Not really rigorous.

And anyways, they put the WashPo right of NYT? That hasn't been true since ol Jeff B took over.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#120
I kind of agree with the article, but on the other hand, I don't think I would I have ever donated without their aggressive campaign... Or I maybe would have once and then forgot about it. When I receive their email I'm like, "oh yeah! I should donate, totally forgot in a long time."
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