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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#141

Post by emerged »

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…

you turned me from Wikipedia cynical to wanting a job there

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#142

Post by legitster »

nobody_nothing wrote: post #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…

A large part of my job managing email systems is dealing with unsubscribe issues. If the unsubscribe button doesn't work, it's probably one of these issues:

- "Unsubscribed" is not persistent. If they have a logic that subscribes you to their emails (filling out a form), you will get resubscribed.

- You are unsubscribing a different email than you subscribed with (This is like, 75% of cases we deal with. It could be a forwarder, or a POP download, or a DL, etc). - You are unsubscribing via the Google link and not the one in the email (not all systems are smart enough to recognize that).

- Something is broken or someone screwed up the logic. If you reach out and inform them, they may have someone seriously look into it (for our company, this would be me).

Or they are truly are scummy company and ignore unsubscribes or pull your address off of the same purchased list again. If they don't respond to you, pull the email headers and figure out who their host is and report them for abuse.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#143

Post by password4321 »

_3u10 wrote: post #128
DominikPeters wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

So the ends justify the means

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#144

Post by 5- »

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…

agreed with you on pre-header, but

> having a different from and reply-to

is not about what the op is complaining.

the offending header is

> From: "jimmy@wikipedia.org"

i.e. the address uses a display-name (in rfc2822 nomenclature) made to look like an unrelated, personal email address.

(and the reply-to actually matches from)

i wouldn't quite call it abuse but it is certainly deceptive.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#145

Post by junon »

easton wrote: post #104
junon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "make a book" function has been literally broken (see: non-functional, with a "sorry about that" message) for years now. It used to be my favorite part of Wikipedia and now you can't do shit with it.

Looks like it was uninstalled from the English Wikipedia a couple months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books

Sad. It was insanely useful.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#146

Post by rahimnathwani »

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 bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense.

No it's not. Emails can have both text and HTML versions, and the email client will decide which one to show in different contexts (e.g. if someone is on a device that can't show formatting and/or image content). Using the text part to include content that is never intended to be rendered as the full email is abuse of this feature.

> Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed.

What you're describing is from being jimmy@ and having reply-to as donate@

But this is not what the article describes. The emails do not have a separate reply-to address. They have a from line which is something like:

From: "legitster@legitster.com"

i.e. using the 'name' part of the from header to make it seem like the email is from a different email address.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#147

Post by mcguire »

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?

Wikimedia Foundation's financials are online: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#a1-...

Top expenses are: Salaries and wages ($56M), awards and grants[1] ($23M), professional services ($12M), other operating expenses ($10M), donation processing expenses ($5M), and internet hosting ($2M)[2].

[1] Still trying to figure out what goes into that.

[2] From my own experience and their size and availability, I would expect that to be at least an order of magnitude larger. I'm impressed.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#148

Post by unethical_ban »

oscribinn wrote: post #132
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?

Compare the opening paragraphs of this article in 2015 vs now: 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.

It's strange to see someone use "bipartisan" as a stand un for "fair" or "factual".

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#150

Post by unethical_ban »

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.

There are surely more venter right opinion columnists in the Post than the Times.
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