Ask HN: Why is the Wikipedia Foundation's begging tolerated?

Fundraising is unfortunately something where the commons has been deeply polluted. My Congressmembers regularly send me emails which are outright lies, purporting to be a "membership renewal" or a "special survey" or an "urgent petition" until you click in and see they want money. So when I see something like the Wikipedia banners, which are restricted to their own site and don't explicitly say anything untrue, it's hard to get worked up over it.

It's worth acknowledging that they've been willing to moderate their tone in response to things that seem overly misleading (https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...). If you could sit down with Jimmy Wales and the WMF bosses in private, I suspect they'd tell you that they don't want to trick anyone, but that you have to do some kind of attention-grabbing stunt to effectively fundraise these days. And really, is that wrong?

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All that's said there is "they have money and still ask for money". That's what I do at my job, too.

The Foundation is my client, but these views are only my own:

This is not to say there's no excess, or that resources couldn't be allocated internally more effectively - I'm not going to put up some kind of strawman - but:

1. I took a 20% pay cut so that I could do more work for the Foundation. Worth it.

2. Posts that say "Wikipedia only has [x] more articles but budget has gone up [y]" are beyond stupid. Any idea how many projects besides Wikipedia are run by WMF - for instance, ever heard of Wikimedia Commons? Any idea how litigious and heavily-regulated the world has got, and how much effort has to be poured into softening some of the emerging laws, mounting judicial challenges against the rest, etc? Any idea how much funding every usergroup and chapter (sometimes more than one per country, e.g. in Spain) is asking for? Any idea how much effort is put into developing features that encourage new people to start editing, not just consuming? Any idea how expensive it is to support and facilitate the big "Movement" discussions (aimed at decentralising the movement!) and the User Code of Conduct discussions? How hard it is to have a viable Trust & Safety team for so many projects, 300+ languages, and people from all over the world to support?

3. After a big outcry about the banners a month ago (that was a long time coming, no denial), the drafting and design of the banners is much softer this year than the last. And guess what, they're much less effective, and now projects are being cancelled, staff departures aren't being backfilled, and jobs are at stake. That may be worth it, but let's at least be honest about the downsides.

Accountability and criticism are fine - but when absolutely no intellectual effort is put into keeping that criticism balanced and on-target, then all you've ended up doing is making people who work here, rather than raking in the big bucks working for Big Tech, feel shitty. And guess what: you lose extra marks for bringing up cancer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...) when many people working here will be dealing with actual cancer, either personally or among their friends or family, at the moment.