Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia is not short on cash

unherd.com

451–460 of 500 posts

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#452

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…

About your edit: "we never got our national fibre network". I'm confused. No trolling. What about NBN (National Broadband Network)? That has spawned 100s of new ISPs that rent bandwidth on your amazing new national backbone and resell to retail customers. From afar, it sounds like a great national investment. Do I misunderstand?

NBN has been mutilated to be a so-called "multi technology mix" network that includes laying new copper wires (in 2010s!) instead of fibre.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#453
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I donate to Wikipedia. Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though. > I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world. Necessary how? For what? I donate to Wikipedia—as a Wikipedian. I've contributed a bunch of time editing content and doing lots of gnomish things to create value so that Wikipedia is a "great service". Milli…

> I donate to Wikipedia Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.

Yeah, I have.

Your (bad) attempt to be clever notwithstanding, my comment makes it clear that I'm not referring to donating money. That's not true of the person I responded to. Try again.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a JS-free Wikipedia? Looks fantastic; thanks for sharing. While we're on the subject, I'm a fan of Nitter[0] as a JS-free Twitter UI. Can anyone recommend any other JS-free frontends to popular apps? [0] nitter.net, and it's mirrored on many other URLS: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

The absolute irony of installing a JS-based browser extension to redirect to a JS free site.

I don't necessarily mind JS, but I do mind slow, heavy, janky, and abusive interfaces.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely don't donate to BLM, though. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/04/us/black-lives-matter-executi...

I definitively donated to some BLM org which may or may not be this one, and i'll keep doing it

Wait so you would keep donating even if you know they are thieves?

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#457
I don't care. Despite any warts of the organization, site, and/or its editors I think Wikipedia is the closest thing to an ideal that the internet has on offer. I will continue to donate to them monthly until I am somehow persuaded that doing so is actively harmful.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another solution is to use an ad-blocker such as ublock Origin with the following custom rules: wikipedia.org##.cn-fundraising wikipedia.org##.frb

Thanks! I wonder if Firefox sync copies these settings across machines as well?

Yes you can enable syncing in ublock origin settings. But you need to sync them manually. Have a look at https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#459

This 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.

Would you actually be interested in reading about Wikimedia finances though? Wikimedia is a non-profit and posts all of their financial data publicly [1], why not go read it there?

What's interesting is that you somehow know that the author is someone who hates wikipedia, yet you refuse to read his article(s). How did you arrive at the conclusion that the author is someone who is heavily biased against Wikimedia and shouldn't be trusted? Are you just memetically repeating something others have said on the internet about the author, or did you read other articles/claims from this author and independently arrive at your conclusion?

If the latter, how could you have not researched Wikimedia finances even a little to validate claims the author makes? In which case, you would have something substantive to communicate to others on the internet to be aware of about the claims of the author, instead of the anti-intellectual ad hominem approach you took here.

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actually makes a very basic factual error. > Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap. $1.9m is was the capital expenditure budget for 2012/3 (ie cost of servers etc). But I'm sure that his motivations had nothing to do with the fact that he found a conveniently small expense figure to mislead with.

Are you saying 1.9M is only the cost of the hardware, excluding the cost of bandwidth, power, etc.? Then what's the actual number? The misreporting is only relevant if the actual number is meaningfully different. EDIT: And I insist, all that's relevant is the error itself. The political affiliation of the person who made the error shouldn't matter.

See https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
Post reply on HN