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Wikipedia is not short on cash

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271–280 of 500 posts

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#271
The next time Andrew Orlowski writes an article about Wikipedia, ignore it.

I'm being flippant to some degree, but he's not someone you can trust to have an balanced opinion on Wikipedia and anything he says on that topic should be taken with a large dose of salt.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#272

> Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising. Can someone corroborate this claim? Cause any way you look at it, these salaries are unethical for a non-profit organisation.

These people can earn millions in executive positions of for-profit companies, why would they work for this supposed company of yours that pays "ethical" salaries?

For the love of Wikipedia. Just like the hundreds of thousands of people who edit articles for no pay at all. It makes no sense believing that building an online encyclopaedia can be done for free but that managing it would require top dollar salaries.

The implication of your comment is that Wikipedia wouldn't function it if didn't generously compensate its executives because it would fail to attract competent staff. That view has been vindicated by, for example, European left-wing parties who cap their politicians' and administrators' salaries at the national median. No evidence suggests that left-wing parties therefore attract less qualified candidates than right-wing parties.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to raise interest in something without lying about it. Whether you will fully understand it or not is up to you.

This is loser logic. It's possible to play by self-imposed self-hindering rules, sure, but your competitors probably aren't. In business, you play the game that exists, not the game you want to exist. Politics is how you do the "game you want to exist" part.

This line of thinking is how we get dystopia.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want Wikimedia, and Wikipedia to be a Neutral historian of world data and events, to preserve facts and promote the free access of those facts to everyone in the world. They have strayed far far far far far from that goal

1) Is there a neutral historian version of world events? 2) Who chooses which facts show up, or how do we know if certain critical facts are missing? 3) In what way are they strayed far away from it?

>3) In what way are they strayed far away from it?

By introducing political bias into the selection and presentation of information.

If I check pages on feminism or even radical feminism, I wouldn't see any information on how some prominent early feminist figures advocated mass genocide of men. Most of the pages are generally shown benign.

If I check a few pages on prominent manosphere subcultures, I don't have to scroll far before the word 'misogynist' pops up, despite the fact both cultures are fairly similar (both contain a small extremist population and a large population of idealists), and feminism having far, far more text written, both per page and across Wikipedia as a whole.

Personally, I'm fairly certain spreading a few more words on the bloodlust of early feminists would shine a fairly different light on the movement without changing the ideology of the majority. It's not just information hidden away from high traffic pages, it practically doesn't exist if you don't know exactly what to look for. Yet any kind of filth is practically at the front for anything related to the countercultures. That reeks of tone setting.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla isn't even using the donations they collect themselve for browser development.

its a fucked up situation but do you have any alternatives? wikipedia keeping amasing all that money while mozilla sinks deeper and deeper into being dependent on google ad money, reducing costs which means laying off developers?

Mozilla was a highly effective organization when Mozilla Corporation had in the range of 150–200 people (or even less) on payroll. The increase in (paid) headcount has been mainly correlated with:

- the removal of features in the name of smaller surface area (while at the same time adding telemetry and analytics[1])

- other lame fixtures of soulless corporations like cringy/dishonest PR babble

There's also stuff like breaking incoming links to content on mozilla.org; making it steadily harder to contribute; keeping things closed source (whereas before everything was licensed under MPL or some other FOSS license); being willing to cut deals with partners that come with strings attached and NDAs; wasting probably a billion dollars on obviously doomed things like Firefox OS and calling it a "moonshot"; etc.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178875>

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#277
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they should tell donors and prospective donors what they do. As ever, all the content is written by unpaid volunteers (or people paid by others), but still the Wikimedia Foundation's spending doubles every few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial... What's it for? Tell donors what they are funding. And somehow the priorities are wrong. The Wikimedia Foundation has annual 8-figure s…

"The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege..." from the knowledge equity fund page. what the heck

Meh.

A good encyclopedia would present information from myriad perspectives, not just whatever happened to be "dominant." I want my article about Christoper Colombus to talk about how 19th century immigrants to America, especially Italians, found him inspirational, but also about how he was brutal, greedy, and ineffectual.

(The current Wikipedia article is actually not bad on that front).

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#278
I humbly suggest that if you are a person whose interests would push you toward donating to Wikipedia, your interests would be better served by donating to the Internet Archive instead.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wikip…

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

Did you actually read the article? This point is not made anywhere in the article.

No point in discussing this further.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#280
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is worth hundreds of dollars per year to me. I occasionally throw $20 at them. It is a steal. I never asked myself if they have too much money or if they are using it "correctly".

The main donation page doesn't seem bad to me. Nowhere do they claim they are struggling or may go under. In fact, they say "thriving" and that a small donation will keep it thriving for years to come.

To those upset with them, what would you do? All of their other projects are about free information. Are people upset about wikidata or wikiversity exist? Should they have only done Wikipedia and stopped? Should they not ask for money until they are desperate and in a dire situation? Should they not use any marketing speak and say, "we have hundreds of millions of dollars but would like more please."

Comparing them to FAANG/MAMAA, it is no comparison at all. The value is great and pure: nice, fast, simple, useful interface. They don't have malware, ads, tracking scripts, popups, spam, or dark patterns. Unlike social media there is no envy/depression side effects. They don't try to get you addicted and gamify it. They don't push controversial news just to boost engagement. They respect your privacy, ublock origin has nothing to block on their site.

It seems like Wikimedia is getting hell on here for having very high standards and maybe not quite living up to people's expectations. Whereas the FAANGs have zero standards, don't respect users at all, are 100% profit driven (and already have vastly more money), but they are ok because... some reason.

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