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Wikipedia is not short on cash
201–210 of 500 posts
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think ACS is paying for the sex and drugs tho.
They kind of are, because they sponsor research and conferences.
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't though. The banner has a whiny tone, but never do they say that they are struggling to keep the site up.
I agree with the other replies. Also, last year, the then-Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. (The wife of the WMF’s PR consultant, the Clinton Foundation’s Craig Minassian, works on the show as a producer.) In the interview, Noah put it to Maher that the downside of being a non-profit is that “you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running. So, two parts. O…
Side note: No VPN needed, the video is not gebolocked, at least ffrom NL.
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#204I give money to Wikipedia occasionally and will gladly continue, thanks. Wikimedia makes the world a much better world place. They should have the funds to do whatever they want. You’re mad at them for some reason because they have 400 mil? That’s not even half a billion. I want a world where the Wikimedia foundation is a multi-billion dollar entity.
> Wikimedia makes the world a much better world place. They should have the funds to do whatever they want.
No doubt the world is better off with Wikipedia and Wikimedia, but the attitude that "they can do no wrong" is extremely dangerous. Any powerful organization, especially ones bringing in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from the public, must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism. It is unhealthy not to do so.
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money. The psychology of fundraising is extremely well researched.
> If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money. Bullshit. To repeat: the ads today are more misleading and more intrusive than ever. In years past there were ads that were unlike the ones used today. (People complained about them, but I was not among them.) Those ads were successful. There's no evidence to argue that they wouldn't be successful today, too.
There is plenty of evidence, in the form of the hockey-sticking donation revenue for the organization, that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past.
As I said, hacker ethos of biasing in favor of the scrappy underdog. It was fine to fundraise when they were small and their strategy was unproven, but as they grow and their strategy is demonstrated as effective, they lose our favor.
ETA: speaking of human psychology... It's an election cycle in the US. It's interesting that this story, the facts of which have been known since last year (according to a cursory search of news story dates) is suddenly again making the rounds right now. May be simple coincidence.
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they were running ads that said, "Hey we sort of have the money we need to keep doing this for a while, but you can give us some more money if you want to help", then we wouldn't be having this conversation. 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…
If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money. The psychology of fundraising is extremely well researched.
They can start running the ads again once they only have enough cash to keep wikipedia running for the next five years rather than 35 years then.
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#207Eh. 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…
It's kind of sad of anglo-centric their pages are for some countries and historical events. I'm European, and even I can see some bias in there.
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very good choice, because the Internet Archive is financially far less secure than the Wikimedia Foundation and provides a vital service, by archiving Wikipedia sources before they go offline. This makes sure you can still see in five years' time what someone has cited in an article. They also pay their executives far less.
what about archive.vn ?
Forgivable for not knowing this if you're using an ad blocker, but archive.today has (commercial) ads on the site.
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#209This is a hit piece by someone who hates Wikipedia. It should be ignored. If and when someone with far less bias writes an article on Wikimedia finances, I might be interested.
Your comment is the definition of an ad hominem argument: the author is a Bad Person so we should disregard anything he says.
Why don't you respond to the actual claims?
Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash
#210> The NGO world of which the Wikimedia Foundation is now part uncannily follows Marx’s prediction that the middle class would devise an infinite number of ways of enriching themselves, while ensuring the proletariat, the volunteers at the Wiki-face, don’t share the riches.