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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#181

Post by lovecg »

loeg wrote: post #169
toomuchtodo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, OpenStreetMap has roughly $800k in reserves and their expenses are a couple hundred thousands dollars per year. I agree there are probably more justifiable expenses at Wikimedia than that, but that there is a middle ground between the high water mark they're targeting and what other non-profits are operating with. The Internet Archive's annual budget is ~$10 million. EDIT: @dylan604 (replying here due…

Section 230 means you eventually win the lawsuits, but you still have to pay lawyers to defend them.

Correct me if I’m wrong, I was under the impression that Section 230 means most lawsuits are summarily dismissed. Without it you have the first amendment which as you say means you probably eventually win but it’s a much bigger hassle.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#182

Post by dr_dshiv »

loeg wrote: post #168
joshuaissac wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Wikipedia is living paycheck to paycheck despite getting a lot of donations. That is what Guy Macon's article is complaining about.

Yeah. The paycheck is rising exponentially every year, and yet they find a way to spend it all every year. The vast majority of those expenses are not Wikipedia. Wikipedia's cancer is the Wikimedia organization.

Cancer? Wow. Personally, I expect they have a lot of good they can do in the world. And I believe they need resources to do it. What do you do that is so virtuous that you can call Wikimedia a cancer?

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#183

Post by _3u10 »

password4321 wrote: post #143
_3u10 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a bad practice, it's the preferred method by their customers. You can tell people's real preferences by the actions they take based on messaging. In aggregate a hard sell like this is people's preferred way of buying. The people who aren't going to buy unsubscribe increasing deliverability, the people who are going to buy are pushed off the fence into buying. On every email a sale is made, either you close t…

So the ends justify the means

it’s market preference. No sane company caters their marketing to people who aren’t buying.

For instance Nike customers like social justice marketing, many of their non-customers find the tactics abhorrent.

Customers of Wikipedia like information being at risk non-customers find it abhorrent.

Does the email not contain an unsubscribe link? Or any other illegal practice? Are they harvesting emails off the internet or did the OP enter their email and continue to remain subscribed to content they dislike?

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#184

Post by loeg »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #182
loeg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The paycheck is rising exponentially every year, and yet they find a way to spend it all every year. The vast majority of those expenses are not Wikipedia. Wikipedia's cancer is the Wikimedia organization.

Cancer? Wow. Personally, I expect they have a lot of good they can do in the world. And I believe they need resources to do it. What do you do that is so virtuous that you can call Wikimedia a cancer?

> What do you do that is so virtuous that you can call Wikimedia a cancer?

That's a very caustic statement, and it's not your place to judge, but if you're inviting me to soapbox:

Personally, I give my charitable dollars to Against Malaria Foundation to buy insecticidal bed nets. They've raised $342 million in total since their founding and distributed ~137 million nets. GiveWell estimates the program costs about $3000-5000 per life saved; or to put it another way, they've saved roughly 68,000 lives.

The WHO estimates that 409,000 people died of malaria in 2019 alone; there's a lot left to do here.

WMF has raised more than double that (~$800 million), over a similar time frame. Of that, Wikipedia's current hosting expenses and compensation for authors and editors totals something like $2.5 million annually.

If you think that's a good use of your charity dollars, great. We can agree to disagree. If you have any spare capacity, though, I would highly encourage giving to Against Malaria Foundation, or any of GiveWell's other top charities.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#185

Post by doublepg23 »

oscribinn wrote: post #132
wly_cdgr wrote: post #7

Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?

Compare the opening paragraphs of this article in 2015 vs now: https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.

Echoing the other comment, I'm unsure what's wrong with the opening paragraph in the second link.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#186

Post by tablespoon »

jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #164
tablespoon wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed... Yeah, table stakes for editing Wikipedia on anything even remotely controversial is an obsessive personality, limitless time, and patience for an huge amount of toxicity. > ...instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes…

> IMHO, it's quite sensible to not allow people to edit pages about themselves, because people tend to have a strong-well understood biases on that topic. Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia? There is no way to rectify that information as far as I heard, probably only the legal way, suing for libel, with uncertain outcome facing a multimillion dollar company…

> Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia?

I think Wikipedia's standards are fairly reasonable there: their main criteria is actually traceability to a source, not actual truth. If "truth" was the main criteria, they'd actually destroy themselves because there'd be no practical way to resolve disputes about what that is. That's a limitation of their institutional structure that they know they have.

So if there's a blatant falsehood, you have to point to a valid source with the correct information (or that shows the falsehood to be false). I suppose it might be possible to get something struck if you made a convincing behind-the-scenes case that it is in fact false (though I don't think you could get something included that way).

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#187

Post by tablespoon »

Beldin wrote: post #162
tablespoon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Between content moderation....I can easily see how Wikipedia can grow to 500 people. IIRC, nearly 100% of all content moderation is done by Wikipedia volunteer editors, so that's not actually an operational expense of theirs.

True, but I don't think you can keep the volunteers if you're in maintenance mode. The scale of volunteers needed requires some responsiveness, some support.

> True, but I don't think you can keep the volunteers if you're in maintenance mode. The scale of volunteers needed requires some responsiveness, some support.

Some, but not much I'd wager. My point is it's not like they have a big line item for paying full-time 100 moderators or something, so "moderation" doesn't belong with the other items on that list.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#188

Post by MagnumOpus »

tablespoon wrote: post #156
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise. And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!

>>> As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million. >> It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff. > It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise. How much of that money and staff goes to actually running the site and maintaining the soft…

Hosting and actual sysop expense is quite limited. I think 15ish years ago when Brion Vibber started to do it full time, he ran the whole Wikimedia operation pretty much on his own, with an annual spend of low six digits (and that included his salary, hardware, hosting, the whole shebang).

Spending $100m a year on dev work, conferences, grants, D&I staff etc is a luxury, the site could be kept running for less than 1% of the cost (and dozens of big companies would do it for free just for the PR benefits).

Maybe the only other function apart from hosting/sysop that is essential to WMF's operation are the lawyers that prevent it from being shutdown in entire countries by lawsuit-happy individuals.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#190

Post by jart »

tablespoon wrote: post #186
jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO, it's quite sensible to not allow people to edit pages about themselves, because people tend to have a strong-well understood biases on that topic. Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia? There is no way to rectify that information as far as I heard, probably only the legal way, suing for libel, with uncertain outcome facing a multimillion dollar company…

> Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia? I think Wikipedia's standards are fairly reasonable there: their main criteria is actually traceability to a source , not actual truth. If "truth" was the main criteria, they'd actually destroy themselves because there'd be no practical way to resolve disputes about what that is. That's a limitation of their institutiona…

The problem is their sources on living persons is usually clickbait and tabloids. If you feel like you've been treated unfairly, then there's no authority you can appeal to at Wikipedia. Even if you know an admin, they use a consensus process where if one of these anonymous accounts doesn't like you then they do nothing, and doing nothing for them means all the cruel, biased, misleading, false, and harassing content written by guys with names like Dingolover6969 remains as your #1 google search result. So what can you do other than sue for libel? Problem is you might as well be suing Santa Claus, since not many people understand what Wikipedia does, and these constant donation drives buy them an army of lawyers who'll just point the finger at the tabloids. There's no accountability for them either. The only chance you have of making a successful case is if you can argue you're not a public figure, but it's hard to make that argument if you're an open source developer. Even if you're a billionaire, it might take you ten years and millions of dollars to hold just one online tabloid accountable, only to see it sold off at bankruptcy to another head of the hydra that keeps its old harassing content on the web as read-only static content so that Wikipedia can continue to cite it.
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