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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#121

Post by CamperBob2 »

berkut wrote: post #23
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?

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.

Couldn't agree more. As a longtime donor, I feel uncomfortable not donating, but even more uncomfortable at closing a positive feedback loop on bad behavior.

New management is probably the only answer, as Wales clearly feels this is the best way to run this particular railroad. But what will we give up when that finally happens?

The whole situation sucks. It would be so much better if they just knocked off the shady shit.

Lately I've been redirecting donations that would have gone to Wikipedia to the Internet Archive, as I feel their work is at least equally important. But IA's reckless legal behavior is likely to result in my donations going straight to their defense counsel and/or plaintiffs, which is also not something I want to be part of.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#122

Post by bryans »

ff317 wrote: post #98
rich_sasha wrote: post #18

What are their expenses btw? Are their hosting costs so high? Do they have paid staff beyond some fairly trivial admin? Do they curate articles for cash?

Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to: Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity. The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good use. Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The tech stack runs on its own bare metal…

Except the organization already has liquid assets nearing twice its annual expenses, on top of the endowment, and >20% of the revenue is simply redirected to other organizations. It's also a little ridiculous to suggest that the infrastructure is substantial, given that the costs are only I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which the rest of us could learn from, but it's almost irrelevant in regards to the bottom line of the organization.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#123

Post by moralestapia »

colechristensen wrote: post #38
toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

As 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 )

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?

Maybe we could ask Mozilla. /s

At least Wikipedia is not actively working on sabotaging their flagship product.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#124

Post by throwaway894345 »

DoctorOW wrote: post #101
throwaway894345 wrote: post #42

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/

It's not hard to be "most accurate/neutral" when comparing against every batshit blog and podcast, which is what your source does. In fact, NPR and PBS are clustered among the mainstream news sources, which only supports my "NPR is in the swamp with everyone else" claim. That said, I don't put much stock in JPGs that look like something a high schooler put together with PowerPoint 20 years ago.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#125

Post by throwaway894345 »

eric_b wrote: post #119
DoctorOW wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe WashPo's fondness for "austere religious scholars" was counted as 'conservative points'?

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#126

Post by Swenrekcah »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #103
toomuchtodo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alexa rank for wikipedia is 13, OSM is 4550. It's not on the same planet. No, not on the same galaxy. Wikipedia is not only read and written by the entire planet of humans, including the smallest 3rd world countries, it's also a bot feast, and busy powering APIs all over the world. It got hundreds of links in some articles, which are automatically connected to all other articles in a gigantic graph of data. Oh, each…

Thanks, it’s always so easy to forget how much work has to be done so that things seem easy and effortless.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#127

Post by pfortuny »

legitster wrote: post #82

> 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…

The from: address trick is nasty, though, deceitful according to the expected usage.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#128

Post by _3u10 »

DominikPeters wrote: post #114
legitster wrote: post #82

> 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,…

It's not a bad practice, it's the preferred method by their customers.

You can tell people's real preferences by the actions they take based on messaging. In aggregate a hard sell like this is people's preferred way of buying. The people who aren't going to buy unsubscribe increasing deliverability, the people who are going to buy are pushed off the fence into buying.

On every email a sale is made, either you close them on a reason they can donate, or they close you on a reason they can't. Make no mistake, a sale is made.

Guy says he'd donate if he didn't get emails like this, 5 years of not donating, and not donating before their email campaign, proved that was a lie.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#129

Post by _3u10 »

blowski wrote: post #85
lancesells wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Donations are the worst idea ever. They are hard to solicit and then when you do get one people have incredibly unreasonable expectations.

How many people complain about non-profit execs making $200k but will happily buy nike's made by Chinese slave prison labor with out a thought as to how much the exec makes, or what the labor conditions are.

Wikimedia is guilty of allowing people to volunteer their time. If you don't volunteer, nothing bad happens. Compare with try not volunteering your time to make Nike's in the Chinese prison system.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#130

Post by legitster »

DominikPeters wrote: post #114
legitster wrote: post #82

> 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,…

The ideal use of preheader is to cut away some of the chaff in the head of the email - text about logging in, account info, etc. They are tough to consistently plan for as each email client chooses a different length of text to preview.

We've tested some pretty funky attention-grabbing ones, but nothing as blatantly exploitative as these. I really only see this kind of stuff coming in donation emails - I suspect recipients are more forgiving of it when it comes from a non-profit.

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