221–230 of 500 posts
Is this the same person who every now and then appears on HN utterly outraged by Wikipedia's fundraising? I donate to Wikipedia. And I am glad they have lots of money. I do not feel outraged about it, I feel happy about it. I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world. Wikipedia is a great service, it should be valued. They should not always be…
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And why should Silicon Valley be any benchmark? Shouldn't they aim to some cheaper locale? Maybe Eastern Europe or Africa?
Wikimedia is based in Silicon Valley (San Francisco, really), so they're competing with other employers in the region for talent. The reason they shouldn't move their HQ somewhere cheap is the same reason Apple or Google shouldn't: there isn't the concentration of tech talent there.
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>Looks like urging people not to donate is in fact a right wing attack on Wikpedia That's muddying the waters. If Wikipedia has deceptive donation drives, then who reports it should be completely irrelevant.
It's relevant because he's not really disclosing his motivations. He clearly has other reasons for disliking wikipedia but he fails to disclose them in this article.
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>Looks like urging people not to donate is in fact a right wing attack on Wikpedia That's muddying the waters. If Wikipedia has deceptive donation drives, then who reports it should be completely irrelevant.
It's relevant because he's not really disclosing his motivations. He clearly has other reasons for disliking wikipedia but he fails to disclose them in this article.
If wikimedia was actually spending all donations on blackjack and hookers for execs, would it matter that the person reporting it was reporting it because he really hates wikis as a concept?
Like, I’d happily give them $5 to never show me the prompt again for a year. Happily. But they’ll continue to show you prompts unless you have an account that you log into and suppress.
And they already have cookies so they can show you how many times they’ve interrupted you to show you the nagware (at least they did last year), so it isn’t like they couldn’t set a cookie to not annoy me.
But as the article says, the money doesn’t go to the people that actually maintain Wikipedia, most of it doesn’t even go to the costs of hosting or employing engineers to keep it going. It goes to a huge staff of people, many of which are focused solely on fundraising.
That’s fine. Do you. But don’t try to guilt me into donating when I’m just trying to read a thinly-sourced page about some movie because the layout is preferable to IMDB. Especially if you are going to still bug me after I donate.
is this a joke? Wikipedia volunteers are also middle or upper class in most cases, they aren't editing Wikipedia as a means to their survival, they just like doing it. The comparison to Marxism is unhinged.
Good for Wikipedia. Try growing up in the 1970s when if you didn't know something, you just never knew it, unless it happened to be something the local library might have buried in a microfische somewhere and you had six hours to kill.
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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.
I agree, but with a warchest of $400m, their budget can seemingly be funded at 2.5% withdrawal per year, so there may be no need to ask anymore. (Though personally I'd rather they spent even more and had more full time editors and researchers improving the site.)
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno...
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.
Perhaps it's because it's deceptive, dishonest & undermines trust.
Unless of-course you don't care about such things, then what's the problem? You don't have to read my comment, 'just' switch off the website.
The problem is that Wikipedia goes to great effort to shill for the CIA-NATO propaganda machine - whilst deceptively claiming they're an independent factual source. The problem is that the youth of Western Europe & The USA are growing up where truth is forbidden by power; buried by Google then muddied by Wikipedia & co.
The problem is when trust is eroded we cannot have meaningful interactions, we cannot even communicate, to the point that: it doesn't matter if one says 'eric4smith is a rapist'; because (as you have conjectured): 'you don't have to read the comment'.
I 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.