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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#171

Post by loeg »

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.

I don't donate to Wikimedia anymore because they get plenty of donations and have demonstrated that they don't use the funds wisely. Wikipedia doesn't need more donors. Give your limited charity dollars to a more deserving organization.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#172

Post by loeg »

mattlondon wrote: post #136
berkut wrote: post #23

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.

Donor-Advised Funds are nice in part because they make it easy to give charities money anonymously. They can't spam you if they don't know who you are.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#173

Post by loeg »

btilly wrote: post #92

For another good article on Wikipedia's aggressive soliciting, see https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... which was previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 . In 2016 a prominent Wikipedian saw the exponential trend and wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... , aka "Wikipedia has Cancer".

The article copied in Signpost has been updated annually since 2016, too, at the original source (see prominent "UPDATED VERSION AT" link at the top).

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#174

Post by loeg »

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!

Yeah, your bitcoin remark is totally dumb, but the idea of funding wikipedia by perpetual endowment consisting of some blend of stock and bond index funds is a good one. And indeed, they could have already created an endowment to fund wikipedia in perpetuity, if they didn't ramp up their spending to match their revenue every year.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#175

Post by HKH2 »

3maj wrote: post #11
avalys wrote: post #2

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 .

To be fair, this is one of the few non-profits that benefits most people and that is actually used day-to-day by the majority of people with an internet connection.

Two extremely bold claims.

Do you know how many people in the world have an internet connection?

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#176

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

tw600040 wrote: post #89
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?

The same answer they have now which is "give us more money."

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#177

Post by nicbou »

legitster wrote: post #142
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…

There's another: a business creates new lists and adds old customers to it. Some popular websites have multiple categories of marketing lists that can be unsubscribed from one by one.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#178

Post by squarefoot »

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?

Just take a look at how fast people around the globe are editing it.

https://wikistream.toolforge.org/

Not that I like those tactics to beg for money but, yes, keeping it running while ensuring accuracy requires a lot of staff.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#179

Post by bellyfullofbac »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #146
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 rep…

In theory the message representation can probably be video, audio (for display-less devices), HTML and plain text. The content of the message should be the same for each version (e.g. a CEO announcing a buyout, it'd be silly if a different version announces bankruptcy instead), but that's probably not a must since it can't be policed.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#180

Post by xtracto »

inferyes wrote: post #24

I have always found Wikipedias begging for money weird. Even if they chose to be driven by donations, I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money. Is it really that bad for non-profits on the internet?

They should do a "non free wikipedia week": once year for 1 week place a paywall that allows you to pay/donate whatever amount via PayPal, card, crypto or whatever other payment options, so that you can read the articles during that week.

That way everyone will learn its value to them and they could collect some $$$

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