331–340 of 379 posts
I have never understood why it's okay and not wildly illegal for anyone to interfere with unions at any level in the USA Then again we still don't have universal healthcare and now even more million have lost health insurance due to cost so I guess it's stupid all the way down People just keep voting against themselves. might be billionaires someday so gotta protect dubious "rights" of the ultra-wealthy just in case
Some people here think Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to keep Wikipedia up. That's a subset of their mission. I attribute nearly all of the blame to WMF, because their donation ads are quite deceptive. The actual, public mission of Wikimedia Foundation: > The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in th…
That is why I always say: Don't donate to wikipedia, donate to archive.org
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could tell us which programs.
They could, but if their donation ads said for example 'please help us to take more photos of live events' instead of 'we need your help to keep wikipedia alive' then they would not get half the donations they do currently, which is the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO.
Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it. Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
Licenses do matter, just like open source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have donated to them for many years and will stop now. I will not support any kind of union busting.
Never too late to read WP:CANCER also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
I understand why factory workers or store clerks might want a union but I'd never understand why tech workers should. I guess except the game developers but the most realistic threat vector for them is the studio shutting down, so a union wouldn't really help.
Tech workers historically have had it made in terms of compensation and work environment. Additionally good tech workers have historically had more leverage over their employer than an average worker. So it makes sense that many would be reticent to mess with a good thing. But here we are at the dawn of a new era. Nobody has any idea what tech employment will look like in ten or twenty years.
I would happily be in a union in tech. Maybe I wouldn’t if i was making 300k in the Bay Area but I am not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it. Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
The for-profit media don’t release photos under freely available licenses. So we’re looking at those images being under copyright for ~100 years. Licenses do matter, just like open source.
Raising funding for Wikipedia, then diverting 90% of the funds for pet projects is dishonest at best, and most likely fraudulent.
The other problem, is that the projects wikimedia foundation has historically funded have a notable political bias, to the point where it has been accused of being a pseudo-PAC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects According to [0], they intend to spend $18m on community projects total, out of their total $240m FY26-27 budget[1]. $330k of that go to the WikiPortraits project[2]. Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects). I would hardly call that deceptive. [0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Regions#Wikimed…
> Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects) That's a bit of a stretch. I couldn't find any up to date information, but for 2024-2025 WMF wrote: "Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Servi…
At this point, 100% of all new funds raised in the name of Wikipedia are actually being diverted to other projects. It’s incredibly deceptive, borderline fraudulent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO.
Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it. Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
That being said, we're not just covering the big fancy events. We've done hundreds of events from indigenous festivals to minor league sports to science conferences. We've also donated equipment to wiki communities in Kenya, Ghana, and Benin to photograph their local events and culture, which are very undercovered on-wiki. The big events are what gets a lot of visibility and make the headlines but we do a lot more than that.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiPortraits_by...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could not find any indication that the purpose of this ever-increasing spending (while alarming) is money laundering in the essay you linked. Can you provide any other source to back up this claim? Money laundering is illegal, while spending money in of itself is definitely not.
I'm generally critical of WMF and think (1) they waste significant amount of resources on mis-managed projects, and (2) are not very honest or transparent in donation communications. But to play devils advocate, a lot of this depends on your views of what WMF should be. Some see WMF as "keep wikimedia sites up and healthy". But the foundation is much broader: > The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower an…
Also want to highlight that WikiPortraits is not just covering the fancy events like FIFA and Cannes, but many more smaller and undercovered events as well (indigenous festivals, science conferences, literature festivals, and so on). World Cup coverage in particular was relatively very cheap for how high-visibility the photos are on Wikipedia (majority of matches were covered locally); we've put more towards getting wiki photographers in Benin, Ghana, and Kenya support to cover their local culture and events.
For the amount of direct impact we have on Wikipedia and Commons, I'll go to bat to say that it's a good use of money compared to a good number of other projects that have received more funding over the years (ofc I have a conflict of interest here, but still). But I do get the larger point, that this sort of project is not necessarily what people expect when they donate to Wikimedia (and Cannes and FIFA of course stand out in the list of events being covered and are what people will focus on). And I've also been critical of the WMF's approach to donation comms for this reason.