201–210 of 217 posts
Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
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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.
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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…
I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of…
Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for using aggressive tactics. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find another organization whose reserves are double both revenue and expenses. So it's rather silly to assert that Wikimedia is in a precarious position.
If the organization is really concerned about not having enough cashflow or reserves, then maybe they should stop giving away 20% of their revenue. Charitable contributions are great, but that's not the proposition being made in the fundraising tactics, which all aim to convince us that Wikipedia is going to die any minute unless every user immediately donates. These are the same tactics that PACs use, and are based on classic social engineering methods with the sole intent of manipulating people into feeling concerned or even panicked. An organization like Wikimedia should not be engaging in these tactics, especially when they provably don't need to.
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> Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia? I think Wikipedia's standards are fairly reasonable there: their main criteria is actually traceability to a source , not actual truth. If "truth" was the main criteria, they'd actually destroy themselves because there'd be no practical way to resolve disputes about what that is. That's a limitation of their institutiona…
The problem is their sources on living persons is usually clickbait and tabloids. If you feel like you've been treated unfairly, then there's no authority you can appeal to at Wikipedia. Even if you know an admin, they use a consensus process where if one of these anonymous accounts doesn't like you then they do nothing, and doing nothing for them means all the cruel, biased, misleading, false, and harassing content…
I'm pretty sure those aren't considered good sources on Wikipedia (for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NYPOST), and you'd probably have a decent argument for getting something removed because it was sourced to something like that. IIRC, their standards are even pickier for biographies of living people than for regular articles.
> Even if you know an admin, they use a consensus process where if one of these anonymous accounts doesn't like you then they do nothing, and doing nothing for them means all the cruel, biased, misleading, false, and harassing content written by guys with names like Dingolover6969 remains as your #1 google search result.
Do you have an actual example of that?
The actual issue with Wikipedia here is that it has all kinds of weird inscrutable bureaucratic processes that are confusing to outsiders (and often require herculean patience/obsessiveness to navigate to a desired result even when you know them). As far as I can tell, you have no idea how it works and are imagining a bunch of stuff (maybe to explain a bad experience?).
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 .
But at least they're (mostly) honest? They take up some time, but they're clear about what's happening. The only "deceptive" practice they have is the two-for-one matching grants, which I'm dubious about whether they exist or not.
Year goal 20/21: $108M https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikim...
Year goal 21/22: $150M https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
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I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of…
You seem to be suggesting that removing the aggressive fundraising from the equation automatically means the revenue goes to $0, and the organization runs out of reserves in one or two years -- except that's not how anything works, and you know it. Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for…
I get that the article and other comments are about the fundraising, but my comments are not trying to address anything particular about fundraising methods/tactics.
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You seem to be suggesting that removing the aggressive fundraising from the equation automatically means the revenue goes to $0, and the organization runs out of reserves in one or two years -- except that's not how anything works, and you know it. Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for…
Sorry, I'm not suggesting anything about the fundraising methods or tactics. I'm just talking about the general idea, floated often in comments on threads like this one, that our budget and/or reserves and/or endowment are unjustifiably large already, as typified by comments of the nature "How much does it take to run a few servers?" and similar. I get that the article and other comments are about the fundraising, bu…
To boil it down, somebody asked "are their expenses really that high" and you responded with "yes" even though the evidence says otherwise. You can name all of the individual expenses you want, but their existence does not automatically equate to justification.
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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The problem is their sources on living persons is usually clickbait and tabloids. If you feel like you've been treated unfairly, then there's no authority you can appeal to at Wikipedia. Even if you know an admin, they use a consensus process where if one of these anonymous accounts doesn't like you then they do nothing, and doing nothing for them means all the cruel, biased, misleading, false, and harassing content…
> The problem is their sources on living persons is usually clickbait and tabloids. I'm pretty sure those aren't considered good sources on Wikipedia (for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NYPOST ), and you'd probably have a decent argument for getting something removed because it was sourced to something like that. IIRC, their standards are even pickier for biographies of living people than for regular arti…
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>>> As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million. >> It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff. > It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise. How much of that money and staff goes to actually running the site and maintaining the soft…
Hosting and actual sysop expense is quite limited. I think 15ish years ago when Brion Vibber started to do it full time, he ran the whole Wikimedia operation pretty much on his own, with an annual spend of low six digits (and that included his salary, hardware, hosting, the whole shebang). Spending $100m a year on dev work, conferences, grants, D&I staff etc is a luxury, the site could be kept running for less than 1…
A lot of people are willing to spend big money to shut down truth.