121–130 of 500 posts
Brah… What’s the problem? Wikipedia will always be free to use. Some people will always support it, others won’t. Life will go on. This is exactly like trying to cancel someone on YouTube. Just don’t watch the channel.
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> the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas Is there a reference here that I'm missing?
Apparently medical conferences are the biggest days of the year for the sex industry, although IIRC it was actually cardiologists who held the top spot.
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I don't get the outrage either. It's almost like people want Wikipedia to be barely scrapping by which isn't good. Having some money in your reserves is fine.
An organization that has the goodwill of the hacker community has to perpetually walk the line on the edge of pauper to maintain its virtue, lest it be seen as selling out and no longer worthy of the goodwill of the hacker community. It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.
Wikipedia's current ads are both misleading and more intrusive than ever.
550 employees is huge, especially for an organization that doesn't even pay those employees to create and edit the content on the site. It's so far away from "on the edge of pauper" that the point you're making—even if true for other, non-Wikimedia realms—is completely irrelevant here.
I found Wikimedia's financial statement for 2020[1], in case anyone interested in details. They have over 500 employees[2]. Not sure why they need so many, considering average salary is $100k/yr. [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim... [2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/#prod...
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They don't though. The banner has a whiny tone, but never do they say that they are struggling to keep the site up.
Oh please, the mentions of having to seek alternative funding models like subscriptions and ads are clearly meant to raise the image of a site on the brink of unsustainability to potential donors
Wikipedians wouldn't work for free for a subscription service. The whole project would fork to a new host. The Wikimedia Foundation's own mission statement says, "The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity."
Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely usef…
In some ways Charity Navigator is like the BBB, and people need to take those ratings with a grain of salt. What is not said here, but I think it was started this article there was a break-down on Twitter [2] recently where someone broke down the grants Wikimedia Foundation gives to other charities, A lot of Wikimedia has become advocacy for social issues not the spread of free information. Some of those Social issue…
...then attacks SERCH claiming they've done nothing but release 'youtube videos with 50 views', attacks them for not having produced any within the last year (maybe their grant ended?) when if one google "SERCH foundation" they'd quickly see "Our signature program is Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, an online platform and monthly web series focused on women of color in STEM." and further:
> WHAT WE DO
> Produce a live web-series with timely and relevant content
> Celebrate women of color with weekly #WCWinSTEM features
> Publish original content written by and for women of color in STEM
> Foster support and networking via our online platform
> Convene as a community virtually and at in-person events
> Advocate for ourselves + our STEM interests
....and then the big bad boogeymonster really blows its dog whistle when the author associates a foundation distributing grants to journalists who are people of color with "bankrolling the inescapable American culture war." You hear that sound? That's the sound of my eyes rolling, hard. Grants to people of color who work in journalism is furthering a "American culture war." Gosh, those pesky people of color, spreading their "culture war."
The author of the thread then mentions Guy Macon, who, from a quick google, appears to be a transphobic bigot and a troll who made a point of purposefully misgendering a trans wikipedian just to get a rise out of them, and then made a huge scene when he wasn't allowed to erase history and pretend the whole thing didn't happen, and demanded that the person unblock him. Good lord, what a fucking child. https://www.reddit.com/r/RealWikiInAction/comments/rv9x94/gu...
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=292896
....and then it ends somehow vaguely tying wikipedia to an experiment involving octopii hatchlings getting killed, or something.
It's a gish-gallop mess, and what a giant surprise it was to find that the author has a long, rambling thread about police killings in the UK that seems to say "that, really, if those black people just stopped committing crimes, they wouldn't get arrested and shot and stuff": https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1574101120347168770.html
...and their response to "uh, who exactly is this person" is to troll people by giving them the name of an anime: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeKtlilX0AAqnKA?format=png&name=...
Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely usef…
I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues. When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw. I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “c…
1. Wikipedia is biased toward Anglo perspectives.
2. Wikipedia is trying to recruit contributors with a broader range of perspectives.
This doesn't seem like a problem with WMF.
It’s not just they are flush with cash. It’s they are funding and fanning the culture war despite claiming to be a neutral party. Some of their funds are being routed to political entities that are not neutral. Edit: here’s a link to a thread about what I mean: https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633?s=46&...
Free access to knowledge isn't a neutral position. But I gather you think wmf is doing something beyond this? Which side, of which culture war do they support, in your view?
I found Wikimedia's financial statement for 2020[1], in case anyone interested in details. They have over 500 employees[2]. Not sure why they need so many, considering average salary is $100k/yr. [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim... [2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/#prod...