131–140 of 217 posts
That said, some of those email tactics are a little unsavory. But you can bet they test the hell out of them and they do what makes the most money.
Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My thoughts too, "living paycheck to paycheck" doesn't sound like it ensures Wikimedia's survival. We'd all be shouting "Save Wikipedia!" if they have a bad year were expenses are up and donations are drastically down and they end up going offline due to not having enough reserve to help it.
> 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.
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.
Donate once as a one-off and they will Never. Leave. You. Alone. You'll continue getting letters and emails and sometimes even calls for years and years after your last donation.
It puts me off donating.
> 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 email doesn't have a different From and Reply To, it has an email address where the sender's name should be. The author's complaint is that the sender claims to be one email, when it's actually from another.
I suspect this really comes down to spam filters. Most emails would generally avoid a shell game like this for fear of spam filters - but I imagine emails from Wikimedia have enough authority that they can get away with it more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is the same with most charities. Donate once as a one-off and they will Never. Leave. You. Alone. You'll continue getting letters and emails and sometimes even calls for years and years after your last donation. It puts me off donating.
A nonprofit using tricks to get your attention as they ask for donations? Say it isn’t so! In other news, NPR pledge drives are so annoying .
I'll take an NPR pledge drive over the 1-800-KARS-for-KIDS commercial any day.
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/
"Ad Fontes administers an internal political bias test to analysts, asking them to rank their left-to-right position on about 20 policy positions. That information allows the company to attempt to create ideological balance by including one centrist, one left-leaning and one right-leaning analyst on each review panel. The panels review at least three articles for each source, but they may review as many as 30 for particularly prominent outlets, like The Washington Post, Otero said. More on their methodology, including how they choose which articles to review to create a bias rating, can be found here on the Ad Fontes website."
From Poynter:
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2021/sh...
And here are a couple of links to their methodology:
https://adfontesmedia.com/white-paper-multi-analyst-ratings-...