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Wikipedia is not short on cash

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Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#261

Post by denton-scratch »

concordDance wrote: post #237
i_like_apis wrote: post #196

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.

Note that wikipedia is 99.9% the volunteers selflessly putting in their time, not the 0.1% who are getting your money.

For what it's worth, I enjoy editing WP. I'd enjoy it less if I were paid. I'd love to be able to edit some of the crap that the MSM pump out.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#262

Post by chrisweekly »

rippercushions wrote: post #21

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…

"oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas"

Hyperbole / slander?

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#263

Post by Turing_Machine »

klelatti wrote: post #239
Turing_Machine wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His "track record" has nothing to do with whether his claims are true, either. Either his claims are factual, or they aren't. If they are not factual, they should be refuted, but appealing to his "motivations" or "track record" is not a refutation. It is an ad hominem attack, i.e., a logical fallacy.

No one has said it's a refutation but it's entirely relevant and not an ad hominem at all - unless you think that his record is something to be ashamed of? As I said above: > So when an oil company writes a report on the viability of solar power then that doesn't affect how we should view the report? > His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and choo…

The point in contention appears to be whether or not Wikipedia funnels donations to left-wing causes.

The truth of that claim has no causal relationship with his opinions. I mean, obviously someone who disagrees with funneling donations to left-wing causes would be more likely to complain about it, or even possibly make something up. But that in itself has no bearing on whether the claim is actually true.

Does Wikipedia funnel donations to left-wing causes or not?

You have presented no evidence one way or the other. Instead, you have attacked his "motivations" and "track record". That is a textbook ad hominem.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#264

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #231
klelatti wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why accurately reporting his track record of attacking Wikimedia with a clear - and self admitted - right wing bias is a 'vague ad hominem'.

His "track record" has nothing to do with whether his claims are true, either. Either his claims are factual, or they aren't. If they are not factual, they should be refuted, but appealing to his "motivations" or "track record" is not a refutation. It is an ad hominem attack, i.e., a logical fallacy.

You can claim completely true things, while also omitting other completely true things that radically change the situation. Examining whether or not someone is presenting facts in order to argue a political stance vs neutrally reporting is an important and basic media literacy skill.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#265

Post by MichaelApproved »

akolbe wrote: post #113
_glsb wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

A significant amount of their donations came in during 2021 and 2022.

That episode of the Daily Show was around April 2021. So, their funds were much smaller then.

From the article: “In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase.”

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#267

Post by akolbe »

shadowgovt wrote: post #205
cxr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In part this is a cumulative effect. People are invited to set up a recurring donation, or include the Wikimedia Foundation in their will, so naturally there is a growing base level of steady income each year, with first-time donors on top of that.

The reason the story is coming up now is that the Wikimedia Foundation is currently "testing" the fundraising banners, in time for the big annual fundraising campaign in December. So at present, a certain percentage of Wikipedia readers in major English-speaking countries are shown the fundraising banners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#268

Post by soundnote »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #149
mgamache wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They clearly support a left ideology by the editors, but I’m not even talking about that. I mean they send money to support far left anti-science groups. https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579779097278181378?s=46&...

You have a strange definition of far-left, didn't see a single Maoist insurrection in that Twitter link. Curse of American politics, I guess, when one considers the Democrats to be "left leaning", then your whole political perception is skewed. (The Democrats are significantly to the right of our centre-right party. People who call them lefties or socialists or commies amuse, confuse, and bemuse me.)

They are leftists. The woke ideology has a clear geneaology to Marx. Of course, they are not economic class focused leftists by any stretch of the imagination - bourgeoisie champagne socialists who've re-engineered the Marxian thinking style to focus on social identities, which makes it really easy to purport to care for the oppressed. It's very high quality champagne socialism.

But it's still leftist in origin and in ideology. Saying the modern wokified U.S. Left isn't leftist is just a No True Scotsman argument. Leftism and rightism are not narrow, specific things, they're more like inchoate moral intuitions that are given more concrete form by ideology and realpolitik. Individual leftist or rightist ideologies are often contradictory with each other. But the underlying sentiment is usually still recognizable as one or the other.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#269

Post by denton-scratch »

Levitz wrote: post #234
EdwardDiego wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't? Why not? Have the unique users peaked? Are people accessing it less? I'm pretty happy to wager real money that Wikipedia has had to scale significantly in the last ten years. But, hey, if you've got evidence to the contrary, I'll happily read it.

It's not about usage going up. It's about the cost of usage going up v the cost of operations going down. As an example, if we are to trust this site ( https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm ), a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars in 2012. You can purchase 8TB for 130 dollars now. From this wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics ) we can see the amount of English articles has about double…

> a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars

As far as I can see, the text of Wikipedia is about 10GB. I don't know how much space the images occupy, but if we assume they take up roughly the same space, then a single 2TB disk would accomodate 1,000 Wikipedias.

This isn't about the cost of disk storage.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#270

Post by was_a_dev »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #244
rippercushions wrote: post #21

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…

The author of this has a decades long history of really disliking Wikipedia, so it seems unlikely that he's genuinely concerned about their funding levels. It's just another thing to attack them with. Why he's so consistently angry with Wikipedia is still a bit of a mystery to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski#Criticism_of...

The irony of his outrage being documented on his Wikipedia page
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