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The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

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Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#2

Post by version_five »

This is a problem across charities it seems - political activism is not necessarily bad, but when it's all generic woke stuff that has nothing to do with the charity's mission, it becomes really frustrating. The ACLU is another obvious example (as is Canada's equivalent the CCLA that I stopped supporting). But even a hospital I used to support has gotten into the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the merit of that sort of thing, it's not anywhere near the top of causes people expect their hospital donations to go to. It would be nice to see charities much better stick with their mandates and not have this creep that happens where the current thing is somehow automatically an issue for them

Edit: I'm also very interested in the way this story has been ranked on Hn. It's had a lot of votes in a short time that would normally get it right up to the top, yet it's currently on the second page. I know enough that there's not some nefarious thing happening, though it's curious whatever quirk of the algorithm / moderation is keeping the story down in the ranking

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#5

Post by StevePerkins »

The Twitter thread devolves into various random citations of "wokeism", and that's all fine and well for those who care to argue such examples on Twitter.

But even aside from the culture war quagmire, the first few tweets in the thread are fascinating. Wikipedia is up to 400+ employees now? It's spending grew from $10 million in 2010, to $112 million in 2020? The actual website costs are only $2-3 million per year, and have declined over the past decade?

WOW. It's amazing how entities grow until they become more about themselves than the mission. I don't care about all of the specific grants that the author wants to Twitter-litigate. I'm just done donating money to Wikipedia because 2 cents on the dollar actually going toward the mission is absurd.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#6

Post by greyface- »

version_five wrote: post #2

This is a problem across charities it seems - political activism is not necessarily bad, but when it's all generic woke stuff that has nothing to do with the charity's mission, it becomes really frustrating. The ACLU is another obvious example (as is Canada's equivalent the CCLA that I stopped supporting). But even a hospital I used to support has gotten into the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the…

> Edit: I'm also very interested in the way this story has been ranked on Hn.

It was submitted and flagkilled a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33167393

I wouldn't be surprised if The Algorithm punished this for being a duplicate.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#7

Post by jwmcq »

version_five wrote: post #2

This is a problem across charities it seems - political activism is not necessarily bad, but when it's all generic woke stuff that has nothing to do with the charity's mission, it becomes really frustrating. The ACLU is another obvious example (as is Canada's equivalent the CCLA that I stopped supporting). But even a hospital I used to support has gotten into the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the…

No post body was provided.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#8

Post by vba616 »

version_five wrote: post #2

This is a problem across charities it seems - political activism is not necessarily bad, but when it's all generic woke stuff that has nothing to do with the charity's mission, it becomes really frustrating. The ACLU is another obvious example (as is Canada's equivalent the CCLA that I stopped supporting). But even a hospital I used to support has gotten into the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the…

  >the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the merit of that sort of 
  >thing, it's not anywhere near the top of causes people expect their hospital 
  >donations to go to
If I received a complaint along these lines, I would earnestly explain that we are looking into an electron recycling initiative to compensate for the extra letters in email signatures.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#10

Post by mike_d »

StevePerkins wrote: post #5

The Twitter thread devolves into various random citations of "wokeism", and that's all fine and well for those who care to argue such examples on Twitter. But even aside from the culture war quagmire, the first few tweets in the thread are fascinating. Wikipedia is up to 400+ employees now? It's spending grew from $10 million in 2010, to $112 million in 2020? The actual website costs are only $2-3 million per year, a…

I agree. I wish the thread had stopped two or three tweets in. The random right-wing "culture war" ramblings are not cool and they detract from the important message that Wikipedia has solved the problem it was aiming to solve and is now hopelessly lost as an organization.
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