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Wikipedia is not short on cash

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Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#301

Post by denton-scratch »

samloveshummus wrote: post #157
lupire wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spending on adversiting is wasteful and socially destructive. It's deception to donors to not tell them that only 10% of their donation goes toward the mission, and 90% is wasted that could be directed elsewhere.

No, it's not wasted; that's my point. Why don't you think Disney's investors demand a $7bn annual saving by cutting the "waste" on advertising? The spend on fundraising does go towards the mission, because it increases the amount of money for the mission. You're making the incorrect assumption that donations are constant. Imagine that a charity hiring a fundraiser for $50k garnered $150k of additional donations. Let'…

> The spend on fundraising does go towards the mission

But which mission?

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#302

Post by akolbe »

Jwarder wrote: post #283
magicalhippo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's highly manipulative. Wikimedia does way more than "just" Wikipedia, and the majority of the money goes to these other activities. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, some of those activities might be well worth it. But the banners I've seen have invariably been about the imminent demise of Wikipedia. Not that they got lots of other side projects they want funded.

Weird, I haven't seen any recent banners frame it in terms of demise of Wikipedia. The urgent banners I've seen are about the time to complete the fund drive. Along the lines of: If X% of users paid $Y then the goal would be reached in Z minutes. If you assume the fund drive exists to help keep the lights on then I think it is natural to treat it as an existential issue for Wikipedia, but that doesn't seem to match t…

This is just another psychological trick. They vastly exceed even their own revenue targets. Compare goals and results:

2020/2021 revenue goal: $108M, increased to $125M, total at end of year: $154M

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikim...

2021/2022 revenue target: $150M, already exceeded by end of quarter 3, weeks before the start of the fundraiser in India, South Africa and South America:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AF%26A...

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#303

Post by fluoridation »

p0pcult wrote: post #285
Turing_Machine wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's presenting a factual summary of what's going on, his "motivations" are irrelevant. If he's not presenting a factual summary of what's going on, his "motivations" are likewise irrelevant. If you can refute his claims, by all means do so, but vague ad hominems don't impress me.

An editor or author can, in a biased way, choose to disclose things that are all true, but incomplete, thereby giving a false impression of a larger picture. I think it is absolutely in the consumer's (of any given text) interest to understand the potential biases of the content producer, even if all of the content itself is "facts".

Are there any examples of such facts being incompletely disclosed, or are we just assuming their existence without further analysis based on the writer's political affiliation?

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#304

Post by soundnote »

happymellon wrote: post #166
Ensorceled wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw. What was this ad that was so objectionable?

I don't remember it, but I was assuming that they felt like it was still requesting white Americans.

The thing with those sorts of requests is that a lot of the push for diversity is literally skin deep - they want people who look different, but think the same. They're not trying to say "hey, we'd like more electrical engineers, nurses, priests, political conservatives, etc." to contribute.

People with actually different experiences and backgrounds, somewhat the way how the ideal model of science is set up - individual humans are fallible and partisan, get your work checked by someone who disagrees because they're the ones who most want it to not be true.

They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do.

If you write about, say, the controversies around the Latin Mass in the Catholic Church, getting a liberal woman to check a liberal man's work is useless - they're both likely to either have a dim view of the conservative sects that prefer the Latin Mass, to be just utterly unable to understand the religious conservatives' POV and worldview, or both. I know I did until I actually befriended some, it was something you could liken to moral colorblindness - the modern secular liberal is aggressively morally colorblind and lacking in understanding of others - again, speaking from experience.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#305

Post by wasmitnetzen »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #275
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sc…

I'm sure we all agree that Wikipedia has a ton of biases in all sorts of directions, but I'm not following that Wikimedia has anything to do with. They rarely make any editorial choices, usually only following legal decisions.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#306

Post by zzzeek »

denton-scratch wrote: post #298
zzzeek wrote: post #226

"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. Understandably, the relationship between the unruly Wikipedia workers and their bourgeoisie betters at the Foundation is strained." is this a joke?…

> or upper class Not sure what you mean by "upper class". The kind of people that term refers to for me, is a group of people that would never lower themselves to donating labour for nothing, and on the whole aren't sufficiently well-educated to even read a Wikipedia article. I agree the comparison to Marxism is unhinged!

> Not sure what you mean by "upper class"

for the US, it refers to income above $156K, here's an explainer

https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finan...

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#307

Post by pelasaco »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #275
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sc…

The Human page, is quite neutral too (/s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Gender

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#308

Post by greyhair »

bombcar wrote: post #116
phpisthebest wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BBB == Better Business Bureau a private organization in the US that "rates" business based on certain factors and customer complaints. It is often confused with having some kind of governmental authority, approval, or validity when in reality they just a non-profit trade organization. Very similar to charity navigator but rating for-profit businesses

And it can become a bit of a scam where if you’re a “paying member” of the BBB you can “respond” to complaints and they disappear.

After fighting with Ford over a recall issue for over a year, I opened a claim with the BBB. Two months later they closed it with a note that Ford explained that my car had been determined to be outside the claim (even though it experienced the recall related failure). Four months later, Ford issued be a check for the full cost of the repair, with an apology note. Even though at that point, I had given up.

I have to believe that the BBB claim had some effect on that. The BBB may have accepted Ford's word, and closed the claim, but it resulted in some messaging up the consumer complaint chain.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#309

Post by shadowgovt »

cxr wrote: post #284
shadowgovt wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is plenty of evidence[...] that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past. You just moved the goalposts. (In this case, moved them such that your "argument" is just restating the substance of the complaint.) Wikimedia is bringing in a lot more money doing this sort of thing. That's well understood—by all, i.e., those on both sides of the issue. Your job is not to defend the…

I thought "any" would be understood to be rhetorical exaggeration; my apologies. My actual position I've posited is an org loses support of the hacker community when it becomes successful even if nothing about what it's doing fundamentally changes. If their ads are different now, it's because they refined their approach; the goal was always to get people to give them money to be used as they saw fit.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#310

Post by naasking »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #176
phpisthebest wrote: post #102

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?

Even if you agree with the spirit of these grants, I'm sure this is not what people thought they were funding when they donated to Wikipedia:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Grant_...

Edit: consider spending on the above vs. hiring more people to translate some of the 6.5 million English articles to other languages that typically number only ~1.5 million or so.

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