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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#211
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? It takes a lot of people and money to raise $150m/year ;->

According to their 2019/2020 statement they spend 5M$ in "donation processing" and an additional 5M$ in wages for the donation campaigns. 10M$ in expenses to get 120M$ really isn't so bad. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...

Thanks! I checked on Charity Nav https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703 It says they spend 9 cents to raise every dollar, almost exactly your numbers. Overall, they are rated superbly.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#212

> 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…

I don't even bother unsubscribing anymore, I just add a Gmail filter to auto-delete all messages from that address.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#213
Once I had a conversation with somebody that works for Wikipedia email campaigns and she told me she hates this tactics but unfortunately are very effective to raise money. Apparently they test campaigns and they know the style to make people open their wallets.

I used to hate this emails as well but now I get it's the small tradeoff for having an ad-free and free project.

I think Wikipedia is more valuable than Netflix. Thus ideally I should be giving more money to Wikipedia than Netflix so they continue developing and growing. For some reason if I'm not encouraged/pushed I don't give money. And looks like many people/companies tend to give money to companies and products that lock them in, instead of giving money to support free/libre projects that would give them more freedom and without lock in.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#214
post #31
post #7

Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?

Wikipedia is incredibly valuable, but the Wikimedia foundation is not known to spend money wisely. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12... A very small fraction of the money is going to keep the servers running. The editors of Wikipedia are unpaid. The software projects ran by Wikimedia have not been very impressive. What happened to proper discussion pages, for example? That has been going on…

Have you seen Wikidata? https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

Super awesome project methinks

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#215

> 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…

I don't even bother unsubscribing anymore, I just add a Gmail filter to auto-delete all messages from that address.

Gmail rules are powerful and underutilized. I have a bunch of them set up to handle different tasks that used to be manual.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"MediaWiki is free software. No guarantee or warranty of any kind is provided." Sounds about right!

We've run our internal corporate wikis on it for years without any major problems. It's a great example of free self-hosted software that just works.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#217

Infrastructure isn’t free. Happy to donate to Wikipedia on a yearly basis. And the emails are only once a year.

If only it were once a year. Every quarter I get a whole thread spread out over a couple weeks. "Did you see our last email?" "There's still time to save Wikipedia!"

Hey I came across your comments pertaining to AWS confidentiality agreement. I just got an offer from AWS, would love to chat! Dont see your email on your profile
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