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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

#21

Post by hondo77 »

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…

> 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.

You're kidding, right? You won't donate to a hospital because "pronouns and stuff" isn't part of "their mandates"? How about sexual harassment? Should they turn a blind eye to that in the workplace because it's not part of their mandates. Lunch breaks? Birthday parties? Seriously, if pronouns is the reason you stopped donating to an otherwise worthy cause, I don't see the hospital as the problem.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#22

Post by StevePerkins »

KerrAvon wrote: post #16

OK, look, the Twitter thread is gobbledygook. If people really care about non-profit governance, there's a website for that called Charity Navigator which actually rates the charity according to essentially how much donations actually serve the mission. Wikimedia gets the top rating. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

Pretty much all Charity Navigator is good for is determining how much of a charity's funds get spend on fundraising. Everything that's not a fundraising expense is therefore a "program expense".

You don't really HAVE to go to 3rd parties for this. To their credit, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes their own financials, as audited by KPMG:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

You can browse the breakdown of their expenses on page 5. It does seem like hosting their websites is only a tiny portion of their total expenditures. This is their own published financial statement, hosted on their own website.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#23

Post by _--__--__ »

KerrAvon wrote: post #14
mike_d wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In what sense? Since this is a culture war adherent spouting this stuff, how can you take any of it at face value?

There's nothing biased about the foundation's own financial reports, review them for yourself: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

They place banner ads implying that donations are needed 'to keep Wikipedia thriving for years' which is a weird way to express that they annually collect over 50x their cost of maintenance in donations. And most of what they do collect gets distributed to 1) their employees (employees of the foundation are mostly not directly involved with running Wikipedia, which is edited and maintained by volunteers) and 2) other organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with the operation of the site.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#24

Post by jwmcq »

mortenjorck wrote: post #13
jwmcq wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

”Woke” is a flawed term for a sprawling movement, but the best I’ve read on it is Wesley Yang's framework of successor ideology. As it would happen, Wikipedia actually has a pretty good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology

Wow, what a theory. Please, tell me more about the authoritarianism of the least powerful people in society.

To be fair, I was being glib there. This probably is the best attempt I've seen to define it - certainly better than when I usually ask the question that I did. In truth, though, I believe there is no 'woke' movement. I'm old enough to remember when people moaning about this stuff called it "political correctness gone mad" and, just like then, I have seen very little to convince me that 'wokism' and 'wokeness' are not just terms used by reactionaries who enter the 'free marketplace of ideas' and lose.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#25

Post by version_five »

mortenjorck wrote: post #13
jwmcq wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

”Woke” is a flawed term for a sprawling movement, but the best I’ve read on it is Wesley Yang's framework of successor ideology. As it would happen, Wikipedia actually has a pretty good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology

See what happens when you reply to "could you define it" comments? It's just a rhetorical device to set you up to then start debating your definition. Better to just ignore

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#26

Post by abstrakraft »

KerrAvon wrote: post #16

OK, look, the Twitter thread is gobbledygook. If people really care about non-profit governance, there's a website for that called Charity Navigator which actually rates the charity according to essentially how much donations actually serve the mission. Wikimedia gets the top rating. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

The issue is that many don't know they're donating to a charity, regardless of alignment. The popups make it sound like donations go to the running of Wikipedia as a web service, not to political activism.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#27

Post by onos »

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…

Agree. There are many causes that people across the political spectrum would support a la carte, but for some reason many institutions have recently collapsed into a “must support all of the above” posture. Bring back the single issue institution!

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#28

Post by zozbot234 »

smt88 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

> support diversity in science

They donated a quarter mil to an organization whose support for "diversity in science" seemingly involves posting obscure YouTube videos featuring bizarre rants about "hyperspace" and their "intersectional scientific method", whatever that is. Does this stuff help minorities succeed in science? How does this help Wikipedia's mission, exactly? I even tried searching for "intersectional scientific method" on Wiki, hoping to learn some cool science about hyperspace - but I'm not sure that they'd accept that encyclopedia article in the first place.

Re: The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

#29

Post by [deleted] »

greyface- wrote: post #6
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.

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