The original thread emphasized too much on a few grants, which I feel is a minor issue considering how small part of the annual revenue they were. Not surprised Wikipedia is able to defend it easily.
> "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5 million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for actual grants made to the community – a figure dwarfed by the Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020–2021. There was no lack of money for grants.
The actual problem is that the Foundation reached its endowment goal, five years before the the deadline it set [1], and yet, they keep guilt-tripping and pretending as if they are running out of money. How's it not profiteering? They could be honest and add, "We have already reached our goal. But raising more could help us find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge," and they would be completely in the right. I bet fewer people would donate if they realized that they are not funding running expenses, at all.
Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive. The complexity of their project and running expenses is way more than Wikipedia, and yet, they just received 12% of the amount that Wikipedia got in 2020 [2]. They just have $4M in net assets, and yet, I have never seen them guilt-tripping regular users.
> find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge
No. People who visit and donate, only wants it to go to the site they are using and for its development. Not to some other things that they don't know.
If Wikimedia wants money for all these things, they should mention what are these exactly without hiding.
You're right, but that is what the post you are replying to was proposing: they should say what they are raising the money for.
Then people can decide, instead of being panicked into donating because they are made to think there is an urgent need for money "to defend Wikipedia's independence" or "to keep Wikipedia online".
But the post also said misappropriating the funds “is a minor issue”.
It’s not a minor issue to say you’re raising funds for X and to then give those funds to Y just because it only amount to Z% of your budget. And in this case Z% is actually pretty high.
Most of these grants are not even that bad - they're explicitly trying to foster the creation and sharing of knowledge about highly under-represented populations, which is clearly within the remit of Wikipedia as a broad community. But then you do get truly weird stuff like the $250k grant to SeRCH, an organization that purportedly aims to support minority folks in STEM pursuits. Unfortunately, that "support" seemingly involves posting obscure YouTube videos featuring bizarre rants about "hyperspace" and their "intersectional scientific method", whatever that is. It's highly dubious that this stuff can actually help minorities succeed in science, to say the least.
The point is not that they're bad/good - the point is that Wikipedia is presenting us with heartfelt pleas to keep the servers running, while also running a massive budget surplus and donating our money to other people who we've never heard of.
And the lack of transparency makes corruption incredibly likely. How much of the donated money has been siphoned off to the bank accounts of Wikimedia executives? How many grants have been awarded because of kickbacks, bribes, etc? I have no evidence that any of this has happened, but there is no evidence it didn't, either.
There are basic, simple, good governance practices that are being ignored here. Which is very suggestive that the people involved are actually corrupt and resisting the implementation of good governance practices.
Also, the ongoing pleas for donations when those donations are clearly not required is very suggestive. Why are Wikimedia executives asking for this money when they don't need it, if they're not siphoning off into their own accounts?
The Wikimedia Endowment has amassed $100 million in five years, half the time anticipated, and there has never been a single audited financial statement or Form 990 disclosure, because the money is stashed away with the completely opaque Tides Foundation:
The public has no way of knowing how much Tides is paid to host the fund (and the Wikimedia Foundation refuses to say when asked), nor is there any way of knowing whether and to whom any money from this fund has been paid out. Even if there is no abuse, this sort of set-up is so clearly vulnerable to abuse that one wonders why anyone would choose it.
Not only vulnerable - if you were going to siphon away money into your bank account, this is exactly how you'd set that up. This looks like it was designed to be abused.
Yeah the fact that the large transfer to Tides happened at the same time that the Tides CEO became General Counsel for Wikimedia seems pretty gross (and I say this as someone that in general would agree with Tides' mission otherwise)
To quote the page this HN submission links to:
"Concerns expressed then focused on the secrecy of the grant, the break with the participatory grantmaking principles the Foundation had until then embraced, and the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation"
"Keeping the servers running" is useless if the project itself is not flourishing. Nobody wants a dead, out of date Wikipedia. So broad support for the project and community is what really matters.
Which is fine, but tell us that. The impression I get from the donations plea is that the money goes directly to support Wikipedia because it needs it to keep the servers running.
And they need to be clear about the grants made, how much was given to whom, for what purpose, what was the rationale for this grant to support Wikipedia? and did the grant achieve its objective?
But it doesn't really help Wikipedia, at least not in a measurable way. From the original article opinion of long time wikipedian Steven Walling
> Given that this is a pilot and there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects, I would encourage you to stop
Moreover, most of the money to date has gone to U.S. organisations.
This is truly bizarre if you consider that the Wikimedia Foundation raises funds in places like India, South Africa and South America – with heart-wrenching messages about donations being needed to keep Wikipedia online, independent, subscription-free and so on:
Okay, I get your point. Speaks to the organisation's basic lack of honesty, which is arguably the real problem here. That's come up before – a recent poll among Wikipedians judged the WMF's fundraising emails "unethical and misleading":
That's exactly why I am not going to donate this year, and I donated annually for almost a decade now. I love Wikipedia, will support it if it gets in trouble. But I am not rich enough to donate to some random causes, especially if I find them wasteful and even ethically questionable.
No at least I find out quite appropriate of they spend less then 5% to support projects with similar goals as long as they have a surplus. I mean you are donating to the organization not the website and at least for me that had always been clear.
That the banners where misleading is IMHO they main issue with the secondary issue being the not so grate transparency for this external usages.
That was my thought too on reading; those grants are a pretty small portion of budget (not even a big portion of surplus) so don't seem like a big deal.
But if I understand it right, they have a $50 million surplus on a ~$150 million budget? Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a situation? (Under some circumstances, such a huge surplus leftover can even make the IRS suspicious of a charitable organization's tax status, although this may not apply legally to the particular kind of organization Wikimedia is).
Though in fact, the real surplus was nearly $90 million, because in addition, their Endowment, held at the Tides Foundation (and therefore not included in Wikimedia Foundation assets) increased from $62.9 million:
Note also that each year the Wikimedia Foundation pays at least $5 million into its Endowment. These payments are included in the Foundation's expenses:
I'm definitely going to stop giving any money to wikimedia as a result of their on-screen fund drives. And I actually support that expenditure to fund that "Knolwedge Equity Fund", and don't find anything unethical about wikimedia supporting such a fund with a small portion of their budget, especially when they have extra. (I think it would be appropriate to send some to the Internet Archive too). But they clearly don't need my money.
9.8M divided by $25 (my best guess on what an average person might donate) is 392,000 people being duped into giving $25 to something they did not intend to give money to.
> Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a situation?
They've got many millions of users and billions of page views, so if all it takes is a little banner to bring in millions of dollars, and a little, slightly deceptive tweak to the language to bring in millions more...do you really expect them to decline that opportunity? What real, measurable incentives do they have to not fundraise? You can hardly blame those grant applicants when they ask their really, really rich friend for some support or a day or two of fundraising to achieve that support.
There aren't financial or legal consequences, especially for the smaller group doing the asking.
It's really hard, especially in 2022, at the level of a global multi-million dollar, multi-billion page view organization to make decisions on vague, difficult to measure concepts like ethics and reputation.
> They've got many millions of users and billions of page views, so if all it takes is a little banner to bring in millions of dollars, and a little, slightly deceptive tweak to the language to bring in millions more...do you really expect them to decline that opportunity?
Yes, because destroying your credibility risks destroying future fund raising potential.
I think most people "really expect" Wikipedia/Wikimedia to act ethically and responsibly, yeah -- which is why their fund-raising is so successful. If they lose that reputation, it will be less so.
Certainly I don't donate money to organizations I don't "really expect" to act ethically and responsibly. Do you?
"When being unethical brings in so much money, how can you expect them to act ethically?"
How is this materially different than if I started a GoFundMe saying I needed money for my mortgage and other bills, but actually using it to take a huge vacation? You see, if I didn't take that vacation, I would have burned out from my job, lost it, and then been unable to pay my bills (after my savings ran out).
Do I expect a non-profit organization with a charitable mission to decline opportunities to aggressively browbeat the public for money it doesn't need? Yes, yes I absolutely do.
> But if I understand it right, they have a $50 million surplus on a ~$150 million budget? Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a situation?
If there is one thing that the COVID pandemic has shown us, it is that resilience is a very good idea - and that grave crises can easily last years at a time or yet another grave crisis comes up like the Ukraine invasion, followed by energy price explosions and insane inflation.
It is a decent idea to have at least five years worth of financial runway these days... you never know what is coming up (or well, we do, climate change, but that still leaves a host of other issues that can go badly wrong).
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was a Wikimedia employee. They told us at the time that in a worst-case scenario of zero fundraising and zero layoffs that the org had a runway of 18 months before they had to start making staffing cutbacks. The worst-case scenario didn't pan out but it was nice to know that my continued employment was fairly secure during that time.
Wikimedia does a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with but I think they do a fairly good job of ensuring the continued existence of Wikipedia.
That said, the Wikimedia foundation has much loftier ideas and sets goals far beyond just keeping the website running. I think almost everyone at the foundation genuinely cares about the org's mission, but that mission probably has different meaning and scope for different people.
Internally, there was a huge push to focus on strategy and expanding beyond just maintaining MediaWiki and some servers. For a taste of what they are aspiring to, at least what is being publicized externally and was getting a lot of focus internally over the last couple of years, see https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/tag/strategy-2/
I mean, they aren't. The amount they are giving to this Information Equity Fund is a small portion of the endownment they are building up; plus it's not "random", it's something they decided was mission-aligned. You disagree with that assessment, but it's not "random"; they've always given other grants too, and continue to, I'm not sure if you and others are opposed to _all_ granting from wikimedia or just disagree with this particular choice. You are allowed to disagree with this particular choice without being required to object to all granting of course -- I feel like people are feeling compelled to argue that wikimedia ought to never give any grants to any third parties, when they really just don't like this particualr choice. There is no reason for such a compulsion. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
But meanwhile... fund-raising to build up a "rainy day" fund of 5x your annual operating budget is... just not something non-profits generally do. It's certainly not standard practice. Of course most organizations wouldn't be able to pull that off even if they decided it's a goal, most orgs don't have the capacity to fund-raise an extra 50%+ beyond their operating budget "just in case". I think it's debatable whether it's a wise or responsible use of funds or a good goal.
There are already many comments saying this but the main objection is asking for money to do one thing and then doing something else with it. A secondary objection, for many, is the nature of the other thing they are doing with the money.
In the context of this particular thread, GP advocated for funding of organizational resilience. While this also isn't what Wikimedia was asking for money for, it would probably be less objectionable to those who disagree with the ultimate destination of their donation.
And yet nobody seems fired up about the other grants wikimedia gives, and has for years, while some are insisting it's just the prinicple of wikimedia giving any grants that they object to, what they are actually focusing on, and their lack of concern with even mentioning those other grants while getting really fired up about this "equity" fund (a topic very likely to fire people up), makes me think that's what's going on must be primarily not secondarily about this particular thing.
It seems silly to argue about whether the people who are making an argument are misrepresenting what their concerns are instead of just believing what they say. But it sounds like you are ready to make some sort of conspiratorial assertion for why that could be.
If Wikimedia has too many donations for their own costs, maybe they should give some to the Internet Archive. It's certainly related to their goal of preserving information.
But more importantly: Wikimedia needs to be honest and transparent, including about what they're raising funds for. If their own costs are thoroughly covered and they're raising funds for others, they need to be honest about that, and not pretend that they still need the money. That's deceptive and completely contrary to their mission.
That's the big problem I have with these fundraisings.
They are using the exact thing that make most of us hate advertising: deceiving claims, annoying banners, and revenue-driven A/B testing. The only thing they don't seem to do (yet) is personal data collection / targeting. When I see them I can't help but think "how did these got through my ad blocker?" [*]
They don't have to do that, they can afford not to use typical advertising tactics and still get enough money for continued operation.
*: The reason I think Wikimedia fundraisers don't appears in most block lists is that as a rule, self-promotion is not considered advertising. Same reason why you can see ads for the latest Microsoft products when you go to microsoft.com.
<<If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive.
I kinda wanted to focus on this portion, because Wikipedia does not seem to face fresh round of lawsuits, while Internet Archive appears to be very much a target in sights of various copyright holders, who are unhappy over its activities[1].
Wikipedia for almost the past decade has reminded me of those televangelists that would beg for donations to keep the lights on and that Uncle Sam was kicking the door down to seize their assets. Then they'd drive home in a brand new Cadillac.
I don't disagree with anything you said. I also think that wikipedia should adopt a much less cringey fundraising style.
However...
I feel like wikipedia tends to attract a highly disproportionate amount of criticism, especially about fundraising, budget inflation and editing/deletionism. In one sense, this is a good thing. Criticism and scrutiny keep organisations honest.
In another sense, there's a nihilism to it. Wikipedia is perhaps 100X more resource efficient than a Facebook. It's far more respectful of its users than any bigtech. It embodies otherwise naive ideals of the early web. It has performed way better than commercial peers in the face of the decade's misinformation and political fact wars... including journalistic ones. It keeps its nose much cleaner than big nonprofits like the Red Cross. All freely available to everyone, highly accessible, supported by optional donations. Wikimedia is a beacon.
FOSS has been tamed. The rivers of the WWW have been dammed. "Don't be evil" got fired. It feels like Wikipedia is subjected to a bigotry of higher expectations specifically because it doesn't suck. There's a crabs-in-a-bucket feel to it that disturbs me.
It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour. The people earning the most money from that volunteer labour aren't even the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Big Tech companies who use Wikipedia and Wikidata content to populate Knowledge Graph panels (Google, Microsoft Bing), have their voice assistants read Wikipedia articles in response to questions (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant), etc.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a partner of all these organisations. Amazon regularly donates a million to the Wikimedia Endowment, there is a little-publicised Google partnership ...
... as did the originator of the Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia projects, and the seed money for Wikidata came from Microsoft founder Paul Allen and Google:
OK... this is the kind of thing I am talking about.
"It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour."
That's one of the reasons, and it's not a bad reason at all. In fact, I would say that wikipedia couldn't buy what it gets for free at any price. It's also for other reasons. Wikipedia serves lightweight websites. It has a lightweight management structure. It has a lightweight content moderation function.
None of these are incidental. They are what efficiency is made of.
In any case, what is your comment demonstrating other that everything can be criticised. By what standard, is wikimedia worthy of your scorn?
Ensuring your charitable donations are actually doing the good you think it is, is difficult enough that there are organizations specifically created to rate them and verify what they say. When a charitable organization does a poor job of it, they rightly earn the scorn they receive, because they are betraying a trust. I donate to a number of charities (including Wikipedia) and if any one of them were found to be operating as it appears Wikipedia is, I would move my money elsewhere, which is what I intend to do in this case.
I hold Wikipedia to the moral standards of the old idealistic internet precisely because it's one of the last bastions of the tech world that I still thought of as 'pure'. I'm not going to judge them by the standards of the rest of the scumbag internet. I'm going to judge them by the standards of an organization i respect. If they want to degrade themselves back into the class of 'organization I wouldn't trust to have my email address' so that I judge them by those standards instead they're well on their way to doing so.
I know the AMerican library system isn't exactly awash in money, but why is Wikimedia not getting a huge amount of donations from the library budgets? It is practically the definition of the base intent of the library system brought into the internet age, and arguably is the internet's greatest achievement.
Sure you could start quoting things about undue influence, but I go into a library and don't exactly see lots of influence from the government on collection content, or censorship of encyclopedias. About the only political hotpotato I've seen about libraries is an occcaisional funding complaint by the ultra-small government wing.
> The money was transferred to an outside organisation, Tides Advocacy, sometime in the 2019–2020 financial year when the Foundation found it had a large amount of money left over because of an underspend
This is the root of the problem. Wikimedia rises too much money, and instead of putting it in a fund they "need" to find projects, programmes and - now apparently - outside organization that are in no way accountable to Wikimedia.
Instead of burning all the money they are donated, Wikimedia should first and foremost strive to secure the technical and financial continuity of the project by e.g. investing a lion's share of the donations to a distributing fund that provides perpetual passive income from e.g. stock market dividends. Only once that passive income surpasses the current and foreseeable technical running costs (hosting, bandwidth, project and engineering staff) should they start giving money to external organizations.
This is the root of the problem. Wikimedia rises too much money
100% agree and it’s endemic to the people running any organization not held accountable. There’s a port authority near me that was formed to maintain key bridges. The tolls on these bridges is exorbitant.
The people who run the authority use it as their own personal slush fund, donating money to things like ballet schools and other pet projects.
Maybe these projects are the most worthy thing in the world but forcing people to donate to them under threat of arrest (for not paying bridge tolls) is immoral.
“Non-profits” in general are very poorly understood and seem to slip under the radar of accountability at the governmental and board levels.
501c3 has the household name, “non-profit.” It is a case study of an extraordinarily well-branded idea and how that shapes perception.
My experience with these types of organizations and their governance puts me in a default defensive default posture. Too many have found out ways to exploit the capabilities.
At least with a regular corporate entity, there is no mistake the company is out to reward its ownership.
People were able to re-brand "charity" to "non-profit" in the US as well -- in part because if you have a $500k salary as CEO of a charity that looks like you're taking money, but if you have a $500k salary as the CEO of a non-profit...
I don't know whether they needed to "find projects":
> the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Sounds like someone got into power at Wikimedia and went ahead and moved a few millions to their project.
This is how most large non-profits work. They start out from building something genuinely successful, like Wikipedia, and from that visibility they raise more donations than they know how to spend. So naturally they want to expand their work. But it's very rare that the founders also happen to have the skills to run a large organization, so they need to bring in "professional management."
And who could be better than someone who has previously run a large non-profit? They are now run by some career non-profit manager, and the first thing they will do is focus on fundraising. They will pay large salaries to professional fundraisers who are, you guessed it, their friends from previous organizations they have worked at. Their jobs will be easy and their salaries fat. Then they will build an expensive administration structure whose salaries will eat up an ever increasing share of donation income.
The non-profit becomes essentially a feudal structure, with idealistic volunteers doing all of the productive work while highly paid managers consume all of the donation income. As long as fundraising investment has a positive ROI in terms of donations, management will find new ways to spend it. They will hire more and more parasitic administrators, and if things are particularly lucrative, they will donate to other organizations run by people they know in the industry. Always good to have someone else owe you a favor when times get tough.
This will continue until the organization grows so big that it collapses under the weight of its own structure. In the case of Wikipedia, some of the serf volunteers have figured this out and described it as "Wikipedia has Cancer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
this is a very interesting take. Is it a sample of personal research or is it based on some external source?
I have this exact view that "everything is politics". For profit businesses are just a particular case of a top down authoritarian political structure, but they work politically too in the broad sense, people fighting for power, influence and resources. it's the only constant i can think of regarding human behavior across cultures and types of organizations.
No, the difference is meaningful because as soon as you swap out owners for "board of directors" it changes the scenario from "outrageously normal" to "outrageous fraud".
A director is not an owner who has any legitimate claim to funds they manage on behalf of the owner or the charity, quite the opposite, they have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the interests of the owner or the charitable purpose, not their own. If they funnel the company's money to themselves, that's outright fraud (or embezzlement, depending on details) and they deserve to be in jail and a civil claim to compensate for breach of fiduciary duty, there's nothing normal or tolerable about that.
I'm not discussing the way things should be, but the way they are. There are numerous public charities who get a significant amount of funding because of who's on their board.
They're not funneling money to themselves, they're funneling it to other charities that they work with.
> Wikimedia should first and foremost strive to secure the technical and financial continuity of the project by e.g. investing a lion's share of the donations to a distributing fund that provides perpetual passive income from e.g. stock market dividends.
Stock investment funds are a favorite American pastime, but when shit hits the fan you get wiped out pretty easily. No matter if you're looking at heavyweights like Facebook (-68% YTD) or even the S&P 500 (-19% YTD). With interest rates going up across the board, IMHO I think we're in even worse times for shareholder investors, simply because the free money well that drove the last ten years worth of "gains" has been turned off and won't be re-activated any time soon.
The poster mentioned long-term passive income, which to me is spot on. The strategy used to generate it can be debated, but the goal is very common and many methods, while not guaranteed stood the test of time pretty well. For example, look at university endowments and various privately-funded research fellowships that run for many decades, through booms and busts of the stock markets.
IIRC these are usually required to only invest into super secure stock classes like government bonds - which actually was a problem on its own during the last years as most of the government bonds considered secure enough were ultra low or even negative (Germany!) yield, so the funds and endowments actually lost money due to inflation.
Not really, at least not for all of them. US college endowments, for example, invest into all sorts of things, from highly illiquid developing market investments to options, ventures and hedge funds.
A couple of times at MIT I saw an overview with a general allocation. I do not remember the details and was not particularly curious, but it certainly had "we can invest in whatever we need and want" flair. It got a >14% average annual investment return for the last 10 years, not something one could get with government bonds. You can look at the endowment reports of the Ivies; many publish some outlines every year.
Malinvestment is a problem at any large organization. I don't see any reason to believe this is nefarious or unethical. Nor do I grudge Wikipedia for being to incredibly efficient at running their core business that they so easily outraise their needs. Raising money to grant to other organizations is a very common model in the charity world so it's hardly unprecedented either.
I think a distinction should be made between a foundation and a charity. A foundation uses an endowment to fulfill the agenda defined by its charter on the society. Only a small portion of the foundation's capital is used each year, as the foundation aims to be a more or less a perpetual organization.
A charity generally uses all of its annual income on its "cause", and needs to constantly raise more capital. Wikimedia sure seems to behave more like a charity than a foundation despite its name. I find this regrettable because it is probably the only non-profit internet organizations whose fundraising volume would allow it to behave more like a true foundation if it chose so.
Basically the reason why I will not donate to any large organization. Imagine donating to an organization because you think it helps them pay for their servers or devs and then it enters an intangible web of different obscure organizations, all donating to one another in some obscure way. The cause it goes to is "external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge", which is about the most nebulous, meaningless "cause" imaginable.
Where does the money go? Unkown.
Who benefits? The charities.
They throw in the term "racial inequities" specifically so they can call anyone who questions the funds "racist." It's a tried and true tactic used for fraud.
Just personal cynical opinion here but as soon as large amounts of money are in complex circulation like that, vultures appear. I don't trust for one second that some of that money isn't being siphoned off in various creative ways that most civilians couldn't imagine understanding.
Like most things in the current year, most of it amounts to jobs programs for university graduates of dubious usefulness, and patronage systems for political machines.
Every American nonprofit publishes all their financial data by law. They're called 990 forms. Typically a year or two lag from filing until public but you can always see executive comp, major outlays and income sources, trustees, etc. It's incredibly cynical to just assume they're up to no good. Large orgs do work at scale that smaller ones never can. Certainly some of them are bad, but they're behavior is almost never secret.
Well the entire issue is that it's a tenant of the Tides Foundation which does file a 990 which is where all this info comes from about how the money is spent. It's not clear if tenant money is earmarked or otherwise set aside.
It is searchable. I cannot find a single mention of "Wikimedia" or "Wikipedia" or "Wiki" in it. So what does it tell us about what happened with people's Wikipedia donations?
That is not the case here because the Tides Foundation is a Donor Advised Fund, which is a dark money vehicle used to fund causes indirectly, hiding the source.
Let's say (hypothetically) that Wikimedia wanted to use our donations to fund the eradication of Palestinians from Israel. If they fund it directly, people would know and might stop giving money to Wikimedia. However, Wikimedia can give your money to the Tides Foundation with instructions on how to disburse it. Tides doesn't have to disclose who's money is used for what. Ta-da! Dark money charities.
Stripped of jargon, that sentence is saying "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is basically true if you account for second-order effects. For example, a major reason why Haiti is poor and has few Wikipedia users is centuries of European and American prejudice and straight-up racism against former slaves.
Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.
That is missing the point.
The point is that Wikipedia baits people by begging for help to keep the site up.
Then, the raised money is funneled through different layers of charities (each obviously taking a cut) to then end up in a vague, totally unclear cause.
"many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism" is not a thing you can pay money to fix. These are not server costs, where you can present the donor a bill for where his money went.
Who received the money ultimately? What happened because of that money? What could have been avoided because of that money?
Can you answer these questions? Would you donate to any organization which did not tell you these answers? Certainly I will not.
First up, I actually agree that the specific fund donation here is highly sketchy, especially the way it bypassed the usual processes and in particular the conflict of interest involved with the counsel hopping jobs between the WMF and the recipient. So I'm not even going to try to justify it.
However, the WMF also does have a history of concrete actions to improve access to Wikipedia: it funds chapters around the world, seeds obscure language versions that would otherwise not be sustainable, and does stuff like sponsoring flights for students and Wikimedians living in poor countries to various Wiki conferences. I'm totally on board with this and I think it's a fine use of a reasonable portion of the Foundations' money, as long as it doesn't imperil the main mission, which it clearly doesn't.
It's the culture at the very top of the WMF that has allowed this "sketchy" fund to come about. It's even worse with the Wikimedia Endowment at the Tides Foundation. That's over $100 million in donations collected over a period of 6.5 years without a single Form 990 disclosure, without a single audited financial statement ever published:
People who donate, do it only for the website, not for any other cause. The donate banner is a lie. Now when they are spending elsewhere, they are deceiving the donors. Period.
If they want money for all these things, they should clearly mention this while asking money in Wikipedia. People will donate for that. This is the reason of the issue. Not because people hate any community.
> "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is basically true if you account for second-order effects
This kind of very shaky use of second-order effects is dangerous and is responsible for some of the most well-intentioned but also destructive policy changes in the last 20 years.
Too many examples to list and I encourage you to do your own reading, but a low-hanging fruit is the ongoing legal battle of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Policy which was intended to make admission standards more equitable have succeeded in making them shockingly discriminative.
As I said, everyone involved I assume was acting out of good faith, but it's incredibly easy to see in retrospect how misguided their decision making was.
Why not create, or donate to, a separate non-profit that focuses on improving access for poor people? Asking established entities to shift their focus to your favorite topic (or just making them, if you succeed to subvert them) feels like a sneaky way to bypass convincing people of your goals, and just redirecting funds that were meant to go elsewhere.
Because people wouldn't donate. They want to donate to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a highly successful product. So much so that people will voluntarily pay 100x what it takes to run it. In a normal business this would be profit, and the owners would be able to pocket it.
But, Wikipedia is a non-profit, so they have to be a bit more clever in how they pocket the money. First you create a parasitic management structure. But if your administrative expenses are 80% of donations, that looks bad. So you donate to another non-profit, and that counts in financial statements as money put to work as charity. Then that non-profit can siphon off its share of administrative expenses, and repeat the cycle.
Haiti finished making interest payments in 1947 (75 years ago). Apparently the Dominican Republic had the same GDP per capita as Haiti in 1950, so post-WW2 they roughly started off in the same boat. One of their economy's has skyrocketed (relatively) and the other has stayed completely stagnant, despite being on the same island and having access to much of the same natural resources:
> Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.
I'm pretty sure the foundation could fund such work with the full support of the community, if they went about it in a different way.
For example, if they transparently said they were going to try paying professional researchers/editors/translators to beef up articles on subjects that were under-represented; they took a systematic look at subjects and determined Haiti was under-represented; and they spent $x00k towards some concrete goal, like getting Haiti more articles/words/featured articles than Star Wars.
Or if paying editors is unpopular or ineffective, they could fund efforts to recruit more volunteer contributors to the Hatian-language wikipedia, spending $x00k and measuring success by the increase in article count, how long the newly recruited volunteers stay around for, and suchlike.
You know - transparent priorities, with goals expressed in terms of wikipedia contributions.
AFAIK they do provide grants to a bunch of independent chapters around the world which do things like organize events and outreach to encourage more people to participate in editing.
Even though I'm not German, I (still) donate to Wikimedia Deutschland (which is legally separate to Wikimedia Foundation) since that I see them as the "janitors" which actually experiments with new software that could be useful to Wikipedia et al., like for example Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org).
I just wish I could donate directly to the devs working on Wikipedia and to the hosting costs. Same goes for Mozilla, actually. I want to support Firefox developers, but not Mozilla. I won't donate to either anymore even though I am a Firefox user and rely on Wikipedia a lot in my daily life as well. Maybe the devs should all set up Patreon or GitHub Sponsors accounts. I'd be happy to support them that way.
I have donated to Wikimedia in the past. I had been a bit annoyed for the last few years at how the money was being used and the declining state of the (volunteer) editor community.
Found it really scummy. A family member told me a few days later he donated because he thought the site was in risk, after being presented with the same text. This is someone who makes 600$ a month... Knowing this charity is getting hundreds of millions of USD *in excess* and is convincing people on the other side of the world who don't have much cash hanging around based on shaming and misleading statements, and that it's the charity that's supposed to be representing and taking care of what I consider one of the most important things on the internet... feels wrong.
In many ways it's like a government job. If you're a good bureaucrat then it's a a really easy job with really great benefits and job security (as long as you play the politics well).
Hello from another ex-Wikimedia developer, by the way. We never worked together, I think you left right around the time that I started. Anyway you earned the respect of a lot of folks I worked with so cheers! Hope you're doing well.
I use Wikipedia a lot and will never, ever donate a single dollar unless there's radical changes (that we know we'll never happen). If there was a better alternative to Wikipedia without all it's beaurocratic and managerial BS I would donate to it. Wikipedia is a lost cause now in that regard I think.
I long stopped using wikipedia for anything that involves the media, is contemporary, is political or otherwise controversial, due to the sheer amount of bias because of the "reliable" sources rules, which simply don't reliably work for any of those.
For the "hard" sciences they generally are pretty reliable.
I find that articles about political theories and movements are usually fairly good. Articles about history, especially the history of regions where nationalist movements are active, are another matter entirely. Those are political battlegrounds. They tend to have 10 or more archives of the talk page, indicating that the article is widely disputed or even "owned".
Any article about the Middle East, for example, is heavily gatekept; I won't even try to fix punctuation on such articles, I treat them only as a source of links to more-reliable material.
Political theories, yeah I can see them having some rigor.
For movements? Very much depends on what media sources think of them, because they are the "reliable sources". This gets even more pronounced when they have a conflict of interest, for example "This subset of media sources is engaging in behaviour that indicates a conflict of interest" easily gets you labelled as everything bad in the world by those very same outlets. Which then get cited as reliable sources, and through those citations other outlets start mirroring that and so on.
Until the reliable sources are mostly in agreement and you can't do shit about it.
Seriously, why should I donate when they're moving the "excess" money outside the organization? _They don't need it._ Perhaps if there's some low water mark that they can set for funds under which they can start asking for donations again.
I won't be donating to Wikipedia again until I hear they're on the ropes, laid off a third of the staff, and may have to shut down. _Then_ I'll donate.
Honestly, why would you donate even then? It would be better to fork it; copy off all of the wiki into a new one and start fixing all the bias (similar to what InfoGalactic does) than try to fix that crumbling mess of a site. If we stop keeping garbage alive, new stuff will emerge. We need the innovation of the 90s back on the web.
> Wiki Education Foundation Executive Director Frank Schulenburg: "there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects"
I think this is the best criticism as it avoids going into politics and addresses the practical issue.
Gotta say, when I read about how Bram Moolenaar, the author and maintainer of Vim, works sometimes to build schools in remote areas of Uganda and encourages users to donate to that cause—not once did I question how that is helpful or what he's doing with people's money.
I am not sure if you're supporting, or opposing what Moolenaar does here. But a large difference is, that, although i am not sure if there's any sort of transparent reports available on the project, they don't ask "donate so I can keep working on vim", they specify "Donate to help poor Ugandan children"
That's what I'm saying, in part. Mr. Moolenaar's reports on his own on-the-grounds activities are quite clear (from what I remember now, a bunch of years later), and the goal of ‘build some schools’ doesn't make me wonder ‘what exactly does that mean’.
Moreover, the encouragement to donate to that charity is written into the license of Vim, and still I never went ‘ugh, why does he pollute the software with politics’ or anything like that.
They absolutely do say "To motivate Bram and others to continue working on Vim please send a donation." It's the second sentence on https://www.vim.org/sponsor/
They GO ON to say that they'll use the money to help kids in Uganda, which is great (both for transparency and the thing itself).
>Hey guys when I’m not working on this thing I’m building homes for some of the poorest and neediest people on earth. If you want to help me here is a link.
And
>HEY YOU USE WIKIPEDIA RIGHT? GIVE US MONEY TO KEEP IT GOING YA JERK (we will donate the money to orgs completely unrelated to Wikipedia and which exist to try and make people hate each other)
Just wow. I’ve been hearing about Wikipedia having a surplus of money for a while, it didn’t bother me. But after seeing what sort of nonsense they’re funding I’m cancelling my donations.
I am aware that quite a few years ago the Australian chapter of the WMF had systemic rorting. People were paid to travel overseas and report on conferences. Instead, they disappeared, did not write any reports and used it as an overseas holiday.
This has been a problem for a very, very long time.
Stop giving money to Wikipedia. They don’t need it, and they don’t publicise what they spend it on.
It's amazing to me that people presented with a very simple "travel for free and report on a conference" can't even be bothered to at least provide some simplistic report to maintain the charade.
"People won't donate to unpopular Cause X, so we'll pretend Wikipedia is running out of money which is a more popular cause and pass on the donations."
Why would you give to them?! They actively censor entire websites from their archives under political pressure. They have openly gone against their core values.
Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics?
2021 the hosting costs were $2.4 million and they spend well over $100 million each year.
If they were to use their funds to actually drive the site they have enough to fund it for years to come. Most of their funding goes to stuff that has nothing to do with Wikipedia. This is yet another example of an org that has been taken over by political extremists that don't care about the core product and ruins everything.
I am a bit upset about it because I used to donate monthly until I learned about how they actually used the donations. I think this is a very important topic and urge that everyone that donates to Wikimedia stop immedietly.
After reading some of the comments in the arbitration process discussed on this page (see: “Administrator desysopped after RfA comment, arb case in progress”) I would find it hard for anyone to argue, with a straight face, that the most active members of the community do not lean towards a common political ideology.
Whether that influences the quality of the articles, particularly new ones, I cannot say; I was banned as an admin and editor years ago and have zero desire to return. (Although I am wondering if I might enjoy working on some of the non-English wikis, having seen that their communities seem far less internally combatative.)
> FWIW, here's the comment that led to Athaenara getting desysopped, and it amounts to a direct personal attack on an admin candidate for the sole reason that they're trans:
If females are underrepresented among admins, and the comment is factually correct in saying that the representation of women consists mostly of trans women, isn't the trans status of the candidate directly relevant to whether you actually are improving representation? I'm not sure how pointing this out qualifies as a personal attack (which isn't to say the comment isn't problematic in other ways).
Suppose black people are underrepresented among admins, and in trying to increase that representation, they nominate a transracial person who was born white but identifies as black, wouldn't their transracial status be a relevant consideration?
Transracialism isn't as widely accepted, despite the fact that both gender and race are "social constructs", and I think this makes it clear that "trans" status can sometimes be relevant in such questions. If they can be considered for a role because of their trans status, then they can also be rejected from a role because of their trans status.
> It's almost impossible that that could be true based on demographics (50% vs around ~0.5% for women vs trans women)
It would be almost impossible if admin membership were drawn completely randomly from the population. It would also be impossible for over 80% of computer science graduates to be male given the same assumption. Computer science is observably dominated by males though, therefore perhaps membership isn't drawn completely randomly from the population in either case.
I'm not privy to the demographics of Wikipedia's admin membership so I don't know if the comment in question is factually accurate, my point is only that it doesn't follow from the comment alone that it's prejudicial against trans people or that it constituted a direct personal attack.
At least, it's not more prejudicial than accounting for race or gender in a positive context, since some people think any consideration of these factors, positive or negative, is unjustly prejudicial.
I can simultaneously think that’s an abhorrent comment while also pointing out that the vast majority of the arguments (on both sides) regarding her ban were based on her beliefs, not her actions, which is counter to how these processes are supposed to unfold.
I think her action here is to represent her beliefs by submitting an oppositional vote based purely on her ideology and not the actions of the candidate. It makes sense that the ideology is also debated?
This comment section has proven you right. HN: We don't tolerate mindless repetitive criticism of programming languages, we do tolerate mindless repetitive criticism of people.
(I'm referring to the manual reduction of the rank of an article mocking go)
I believe the complaint was that the female representative team had a majority of trans people, so less of a personal attack and more of a general comment about the team.
There's no such "space" at all. This whole idea that trans women are somehow monopolizing spaces that "rightfully belong" to cis women is just a transphobic, hateful slur; especially so when the attack is so clearly targeted at a single, vulnerable trans person. The block was absolutely warranted; it was an egregious violation of a "no personal attacks" rule that's been there since the beginning.
Not going to entertain the plenty of your tangents, just going to say this:
you are wrong, obviously these spaces exist and I'm confident this comment refers to such one, because the context makes sense this way (Occam's Razor), so the block was not warranted at all, not even in the slightest.
> I would find it hard for anyone to argue, with a straight face, that the most active members of the community do not lean towards a common political ideology.
I believe it, but then let's not pretend it is otherwise. Let's not have people fund projects under the false pretence of keep servers online.
> Whether that influences the quality of the articles, particularly new ones, I cannot say
With zero intention of doing so, over time, people's political ideologies will bleed into the content. The organization itself will become more and more hostile towards opposing views.
The neutral topics themselves still have merit, but I suspect not for much longer. We no longer can have an article about master-slave buses without bringing up slavery [1], for example.
I mean, in an article about terminology I would expect to see how is that terminology evolving, and it is undeniable that a lot of entities are moving away from it. Doesn't matter whether you and I agree on the move or not, but it's a reality and it's appropriate to discuss it in that article.
Also, Wikipedia has a lot of pride in being factual, avoiding judgements of value, and backing with already established sources. I think that makes it really hard for ideologies to bleed into content.
Honestly, it seems like one of the main [1] motivations for anyone participate on Wikipedia is to push some ideology or another. I know they theoretically have rules against it, but those are invariably enforced inconsistently and/or only against the most blatant cases.
IMHO, some prime Wikipedia skills are finding bureaucratic cover and being deliberately mute about your motives.
For reference, here's the comment that was deemed sufficient grounds to be desysopped.
> # '''Oppose.''' I think the domination of Wikipedia's woman niche, for lack of a better term, by males masquerading as females as opposed to welcoming actual, genuine, real women who were born and have always been female, is highly toxic. Go ahead, "cancel" me, I don't care. – [[User:Athaenara|Athaenara]] [[User talk:Athaenara| ]] 00:44, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
The important context here is that this is a direct reply to a trans person's application to become an admin on Wikipedia. In other words, they're not objecting to trans ideology or something, they're specifically telling a Wikipedian that they can't be an admin because they're trans.
Except the debate on the ban (which is what I was referring to - the reply itself is pretty much indefensible) became a referendum on ideology rather than a legitimate discussion on a ban due to a harmful action.
Indeed, she is one of many women who are completely fed up of being talked over on women's issues by men who identify as women.
It wasn't really the appropriate forum for her outburst, but I think many of us can empathise with the sentiment she was expressing. The subsequent overreaction to her comment kind of proved her point too.
this is pretty fascinating to me, i thought the whole point of wikipedia was if you see something wrong you hit edit, fix it, and then click save. If you want to add something new the process is the same. Do you now have to pass like a virtual interview to qualify to make a change?
There are power users with more privileges like being able to lock controversial articles, revert defaced articles, and stuff. Those people apply for the position.
I think she using "male" and "female" to refer to sex. In which case, this would be a true statement, regardless of one's opinion on the validity of 'gender identity' as a concept.
Kinda. It's different for different people. Many trans women take hormones hoping they'll help them look like a typical gender-conforming cisgender woman.
One other really common reason is that they are deeply upset by and experience dysphoria due to the effects of masculine puberty, and use hormones and surgery to match their body to how they feel it should be. It helps them feel comfortable in their own skin.
I saw a comic from a trans woman once who had recently started hormones, who noticed she had a miserable mood for a few days every couple of weeks for no apparent reason. She marked them on her calendar and found that it was always the couple of days before her HRT shots. She switched from shots every 14 days to every 10 days, and that fixed it up. So it seems that for trans people, HRT isn't just cosmetic, but has a direct effect on mental well-being that's independent of any noticed physical changes.
Unless they're used in a discussion specifically about human biology, "male" and "female" can be assumed to refer to gender. The terminology isn't neatly separated, unfortunately.
It depends on context. A discussion about "female singers" would probably be referring to gender.
It's useful to have an adjective equivalent of "man" and "woman", so people use "male" and "female" to mean that. My main point isn't to establish one meaning as more common, but to point out that there's not one "correct" meaning. Terminology around sex and gender are not neatly divided and it's not always easily determined what meaning people are using.
> Male is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization.
> Female is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.
The person I was replying to made a bunch of allegations which had to be based on something, right? If you’re going to attack them for something they did there has to be some kind of specific event you could point to.
This is the key - and it's the failure mode of all political/charity begging across decades and decades.
"We want money to do the things we want to do" doesn't get as much reaction as "holy shit the servers will die tomorrow because you fucks don't ever donate and just suck the sweet sweet wikitit of knowledge".
It's obviously manipulative and at some point it crosses a boundary into immoral. You could add a "My donation is necessary to keep the Wikipedia servers online next year" yes/no question to the donation page and I bet you'd get something high like 80%+ picking yes, because of how the appeals are written.
Only 2.4 of the 112.4 million spent was actually on maintaining the servers themselves. The rest were spent on salaries (55.6 million (!!)), grants (22.8 million (!, why?)), & "Professional services" (11.67 million (again, why?)).
> What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
From what I can gather, it's the promotion of leftist talking points that relegates objectivism & personal liberty in favor of any form of rebalancing, be it racial, political, economical, social, gender-based, or sexual.
My problem with this is that its mainly a phenomenon that's isolated to western countries, with Asian & Middle-eastern countries seemingly skirting by with LGBT+ arrests & atrocities without any major recompense.
> Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any comparable organisations spend a more appropriate proportion of their revenue on web hosting?
This is mainly because Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running", when their own reports make it clear that a lot of the donated funds have been sucked up by the foundation's own internal mechanisms.
> Which political extremists have taken over?
Mainly left-oriented extremists, with the organizations listed from here onwards being examples that were funded by the foundation.
Wikipedia was supposed to be a place where consensus could be reached without falling into the trappings of personal or political bias. Instead, the foundation is now seeking to reduce its own transparency by ceasing the publications of its quarterly reviews:
> Only 2.4 of the 112.4 million spent was actually on maintaining the servers themselves. ... why?
You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary. I'm not sure why that would be the case.
I think people may be focusing on these high-level figures a bit too much. The Wikimedia website has other information about what it is they are actually doing.
> Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running"
Fair enough, I can imagine how that could be an issue. As one opposed to such manipulations in general, a critique of the sort of messaging being used is something that I would welcome.
> Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.
Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string of blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear as possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's comment.
> You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary. I'm not sure why that would be the case.
This is answered by
> Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running"
Meanwhile I've only ever considered the banners to be annoying and beg-y, but not any sort of claim that they are running out of money. Do the people "scammed" by "help us reach our fundraising goal" also get scammed by those emails about "donald trump's defense fund" and similar? Why didn't they just look up whether wikipedia is running out of money?
I don't understand how a disruptive banner that makes no claims can be considered nefarious.
Anything other than server maintenance or tangibly improving Wikipedia and directly supporting technical projects is unnecessary. Frankly nobody cares about the rest aside from the people getting money as a result and maybe their family and friends.
It’s like Mozilla and all of their non-Firefox/Thunderbird bullshit. Bloat for the sake of bloat.
> > Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.
> Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string of blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear as possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's comment.
It's also a mis-use of the term. It's for live debates when you just dump a series of questions on the opponent without giving them time to respond, trying to make them look stupid to observers. Doesn't really apply to text like here, when you can take as long as you need to type of the reply.
> You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary.
I suspect the OP would be perfectly fine with Wikimedia hiring translators to translate more of the 6.5 million English articles into other languages which are often considerably less developed. Or funding more development of their textbooks, dictionaries and other content. They clearly have ample funds that seem to be going to more dubious ends.
> I suspect the OP would be perfectly fine with Wikimedia hiring translators to translate more of the 6.5 million English articles into other languages which are often considerably less developed. Or funding more development of their textbooks, dictionaries and other content. They clearly have ample funds that seem to be going to more dubious ends.
...I would rather that the translation efforts be done by the community & translation services than by the foundation itself. Pushing the effort of translation onto the foundation gives them authority over the translated material, & consequently authority on the original material itself.
In principle, I would like the scope of work for any foundation to be as minimal as possible, & to be directly related to the direct operations & maintenance of the service being provided. Any additional efforts beyond that invites scope creep & will inevitably bloat any organization with non-related work.
> From what I can gather, it's the promotion of leftist talking points that relegates objectivism & personal liberty in favor of any form of rebalancing, be it racial, political, economical, social, gender-based, or sexual.
This does not read like a good-faith interpretation to me. Small-o objectivism and personal liberty are not at all incompatible with a "woke" perspective on race; I daresay relativism -- particularly moral relativism -- is a minority opinion even among leftists. Nor is it necessarily the case that being woke means you're in favor of enforced rebalancing on the basis of race, ethnicity, etc. Wokeness, in my experience, is far more concerned with issues of justice than with rebalancing (which I take to mean something akin to affirmative action or reparations).
> How do you arrive at the claim that "probably most" donations go to "pushing woke politics"?
In their donations campaigns, they make it sound like most of the donations go to fund the site while it's almost less than 2%. If they were to employ cheaper developers not working in the city centre of SF and stuck with the pure operational costs (Wikipedia is driven by people working for free for the most part anyway) it would be significally less than it is today.
Even if they change nothing how the site is developed and the actual engineering costs, the funding pages are still dishonest since most of the funding does not go to Wikipedia itself.
> What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
They give money, a lot of it, more than double than the operational costs to highly controversial funds that are politically driven and does not lean on anything else. Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political agendas and therefore are pushing politics.
> Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any comparable organisations spend a more appropriate proportion of their revenue on web hosting?
Because they make it sound like this is the main reason that they need additional funding when they ask for it on their webpage. It is what they claim (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fex9854WIAIHSun?format=jpg&name=...) they need in order to operate the site. If they strictly just used the funding to operate the site they could do so for many years to come.
> What is ruined?
The sense of having an actual free community that governs factual information for free for everyone. A site where everyone can rejoice over and take pride in the common knowledge of humanity and the accessability that it provides for people in countries that can't easily get this information otherwise.
This is slowly being ruined by people, like I assume yourself, that are so blinded by the current political agendas that they cannot see the damage they're inflicting on the community. I understand that people always have had different political agendas but you used to be able to talk to people on the other side of the spectrum and accept basic physical facts about the world.
Now it seems like we've thrown everything out of the window. People can't even get along over well established scientific facts and this is true for extremists on all sides.
It is hard to trust a source of information if you know the people that controls the information are political extremists. I would want to live in a world where I can trust that the articles on Wikipedia is as objective as can be.
The most recent Annual Reports [0][1] list 43% and 42% "Direct support to websites" and has a brief explanation of how "Keeping the Wikimedia websites online is about more than just servers." But I do note that plural 'Wikimedia websites' and not just 'Wikipedia'. But even if your 2% figure is accurate for wikipedia.org, that's 40% on other websites, some of which is used directly by Wikipedia.
They same reports list ~32% of their expenses as "support to communities" which they say includes "grants, programs, events, trainings, partnerships, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors."
The screenshot you linked [2] doesn't show anything about hosting costs. I think most people would expect keeping any organisation/website running to involve costs other than the cost of the internet connection/servers. But I do realise that I'm talking from a privileged position here.
> This is slowly being ruined by people, like I assume yourself, that are so blinded by the current political agendas that they cannot see the damage they're inflicting on the community. I understand that people always have had different political agendas but you used to be able to talk to people on the other side of the spectrum and accept basic physical facts about the world.
I'm not sure where that's coming from. All I am doing is talking, and calmly asking you to explain some of the points you volunteered in this forum.
> I'm not sure where that's coming from. All I am doing is talking, and calmly asking you to explain some of the points you volunteered in this forum.
First off, I am sorry if I came onto you but the questions you were asking while fair and square was incredible naive and a bit wishy washy so I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that you were a firm supporter of the traditional extremist left wing camp.
Everything about the wikimedia scandal can be viewed either by their own documents or most of the important parts is in the twitter thread posted by me and others in comments.
Most of the costs regarding the websites is probably due to the high salary costs of having developers maintain stuff. This is fine IMO but when you run a not for profit org maybe you should respect peoples money and open an office somewhere else than one of the most expensive cities in the world or simply hire remote developers and other employees.
> Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political agendas and therefore are pushing politics.
Please provide some evidence that they fund specifically "extreme left wing" political agendas. By which you mean, what, soviet-style communism? Gulags for cops? Violent revolution?
> Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political agendas
They fund specific agendas. I suspect you are from the USA, have never come across groups with extreme leftwing views, and have confused touchy-feely leftish liberalism with "extreme left wing".
Certainly they are using the funds to discreetly push a political agenda; I think they shouldn't do that. I think they should invest the capital, and run Wikipedia on the investment income. That's what you do with an endowment; you don't launch a search for ways to give all the money away.
Well, not true. They have employed hundreds of people and pays them ridicolous salaries. Less than half is actually used on actually operating/developing the site. Yes that fund is the most controversial part but it's not the only thing about the topic that is controversial.
2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million - which is less than it did in 2012. Most of the money they recieve by donations goes to something else. As you may see, the site hosting costs are less than what the spend on that controversial fund.
The budget and headcount simply keep growing and growing. At the same time, the Foundation has had eight-figure surpluses for nine of the last ten years:
In the July 2020 – June 2021 financial year, the surplus was close to $90 million (over $50 million increase in Foundation assets, almost $40 million increase in Endowment).
Yet when volunteers complain that software tools need updating and bug-fixing, the Foundation claims there is a lack of resources:
One thing they do spend money on is consultants and "community organizers" trying to figure out how to get people in the developing world to write Wikipedia articles in their languages for free – in part so that Big Tech's voice assistants and Knowledge Graph panels can provide answers in Indian and African languages and extend their monopolies to new markets.
Money actually flowing to people in the developing world however has been a really small amount – less than $4 million in 2020:
Nice ninja edit there, your post previously claimed "about 90% goes to pushing woke politics". As you can see below, enumerated in excruciating detail in the annual reports if you'd like to dig in, the biggest component of Wikimedia's expenditure is simply paying the engineers that keep the site running and roll out improvements like the new UI, visual editing, etc. The actual hosting bill (servers, bandwidth, etc) is only a tiny fraction of that cost.
Yeah I get that I exaggerated my first sentence and thus edited it but it's not that far from the truth.
According to their own site, https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe... about 43% goes to the websites. This is less than half. I imagine that most of these salaries are ridicolously high where they could employ cheaper devs and get an actual good representation they chose a SF office with SF employees and give them huge salaries. And since I have learned about this fund and other controversial topics about their employee count etc I question this figure as well. I am not convinced that they have devs for about $50 million per year.
It's fine if you operate a for-profit company but when it's a not for profit organisation the ridicolous spending seems a bit disrespectful to the people that help shape wikipedia to what it is today.
I've reviewed several grants and I remain deeply worried we are spending money on stuff that is a poorly disguised attempt to raid WMF coffers. A lot of grants are 1) being used for stuff that has ZERO connection with Wikimedia movement, 2) have little to no accountaiblity (people promise to do stuff, if they fail, I see no mechanism for money to be returned to WMF) and 3) seem to have very inflated costs (ex. one project I remember well asked for ~6k$ for open access publishing, whereas I know that the average costs of OA in this very field is usually under $2k, and a lot of similar research is published at no cost yet still using OA model). While I am sure some grants are being spent on worthy causes, the amount of problems I see here is very worrying. I am glad this issue is making more waves. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:44, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
So supporting radical left wing people with millions of dollars for output of political propaganda does not? Would you be as apologetic if Wikimedia would donate money to people who spread nazi propaganda as well? If nothing makes them extremists, then no one is extremist.
Of course it's all subjective but this is kind of what I mean that people like this destroys. If we, the other people standing by, cannot even get along to call shit out when it appears then we are royalty effed.
The original claim for which I asked a citation was "This is yet another example of an org that has been taken over by political extremists"
The link you provided makes the claim "Wikipedia pages are biased in their descriptions".
Those claims are not the same, thus your reference does not support the claim. I don't really care either way, but it is dishonest to refer to sources which don't even support the claim.
We can't agree because you appear unable to support the original claim, use dishonest and emotionally manipulative discussion techniques ("Of course it's all subjective but this is kind of what I mean that people like this destroys. If we, the other people standing by, cannot even get along to call shit out when it appears then we are royalty effed.") and Whataboutism ("Would you be as apologetic if Wikimedia would donate money to people who spread nazi propaganda as well?") to attempt to spread your worldview.
May be referring to this part of the thread[1] linked in the article
> Wikimedia gave $250,000 to Borealis's Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. That money was then cascaded down to a dozens of ideologically aligned news outlets across the US.
> Thus, the money you give to keep Wikipedia online is diverted to bankroll the inescapable American culture war.
Here is the message wikipedia has on its donation page:
> We'll get straight to the point: Today we ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence.
> We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online and thriving, but 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way. If everyone who reads Wikipedia gave just a little, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of a cup of coffee is all we ask.
> When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people told us we’d regret it. But if Wikipedia were to become commercial, it would be a great loss to the world.
> Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a community of people working to bring you unlimited access to reliable, neutral information.
> We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of €5, €20, €50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Whether or not one likes the causes they give the money to, if they spend $100 million and they only use $2.4 million for hosting, and they also give money for political activism, then this is a misleading message, making it sound like they are on the cusp of not being able to cover the costs that keep the site online unless they start having ads on wikipedia.
Oh I completely agree, misleading is the best way I'd describe this message as well.
But the idea that they're "going woke" or "going political" with their money because they support BIPOC journalists and presenting that as a waste of money ($250k, about a month of hosting), that's where you completely lose me.
Also I'm pretty sure Wikimedia does way more than just hosting.
Well, they apparently did donate to some woke-adjacent pseudoscience, which seems like a waste of money to me. Regardless, I agree with you that the question isn't where some $0.25 million went, but why they are spending $100 million and still asking for donations with that misleading message, while a few years ago they were spending a small fraction of that even though their hosting costs were actually higher back then. It increasingly looks like Wikimedia as an organisation has a parasitical relationship with Wikipedia, doing enough to keep its host alive with a small fraction of its budget, while benefiting from the work of volunteers and not even fixing longstanding issues with the software that the volunteers ask to be fixed. Even beyond fixing bugs, I'd be happy to add to their $100 million budget if they actually did useful things with it. I can easily think of 10 features that would improve Wikipedia. For instance, Wikipedia pages such as "list of countries by GDP per capita" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...) are useful, but the table UI is not that great and the map is a non-interactive PNG image. For $100 million, why can't we hover over the country and see its name and the exact GDP per capita number?
Most of the money from the Knowledge Equity Fund so far has gone to organisations in the U.S. I think that indicates how much genuine thinking about diversity is taking place in the Wikimedia Foundation.
I apologise, I'm sure there's a better, more cool-headed way to discuss giving money to a marginalized population to make a foothold in a marginalized field with someone that views that action as "woke politics".
I'm sure we've could've met in the middle (like only supporting some BIPOC journalists) if only I wasn't so gosh-darn divisive. My bad.
When people accuse someone of being "woke", I believe they do not mean literally that they consider those people to be more awake to social justice issues, that they disagree with fixing injustice, and they want it to continue. Rather, it can be an accusation of performative social virtue, a distaste for sanctimonious platitudes, or a disagreement regarding the source of a particular systemic issue and how to fix it.
Now, you can disagree with this, it is obviously impossible to tell for sure without reading people's minds, and many people will throw out accusations of "wokism" with little to no merit to the point where you lose the will to engage with any of them, but if you do argue against these accusations of "wokism" as endorsements of bigotry, you aren't actually engaging with what people are telling you.
In that sense, the "middle" between "woke" and "bigoted" isn't "slightly bigoted", it's "not woke and not bigoted".
Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of boosting marginalised groups, otherwise you're "too woke" because those marginalised groups tend to lean left? No, I don't think I can agree on that. Because, as I stated multiple times so far, marginalised people's existence != political.
Being a bigot is a choice (and using the term woke unironically is a pretty good, albeit not perfect tell), being black is not. I couldn't care less about finding a common ground with bigotry. I have zero interest in debating them, and I have zero interest in debating your "centrist position" to do nothing to elevate BIPOC people's position in marginalised fields. Hope that clears up my comment for you!
The is the most bad faith arguing I've seen here in a while. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The people that want to support those valuable causes should find their own supporters instead of hijacking the supporters of an encyclopedia without telling them. It's as simple as that and has nothing to do with being bigoted, it's about feeling cheated when you were asked for money for one thing and then they used it for another. You're intentionally being difficult because you believe you're right and that trumps everything else, but it doesn't.
> Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of boosting marginalised groups ... I have zero interest in debating your "centrist position" to do nothing to elevate BIPOC people's position in marginalised fields
Doing nothing might be a lot more conducive to minority achievement than some of the stuff that was ultimately funded by these grants. Such as SeRCH's YouTube videos about "intersectional scientific method" and "hyperspace".
A BIPOC receiving a grant is not the issue, the issue, and what might be considered "woke" is to give the grant because they are BIPOC. That's "equity".
Equity means awarding people based on immutable characteristics and makes every interaction in society a racist/sexist struggle.
Anyway, you may be in favor of it, which is fine. Just know that it's an incredibly unpopular movement that is widely rejected internationally, and also in most developed nations across the political spectrum, minus the far-left.
Even the idea to call said people "marginalized" is insulting.
What is this BIPOC voting population (I just learned this term today)? Are we talking of the united states of america or does this somehow apply to other countries? Don't these journalists push american viewpoints anyway, and aren't they much better funded than almost any newspaper outside the USA? Why should most of this money going to one of the richest countries in the world?
I wonder whether you would post a comment similar to this if it turned out that the donation money had been funnelled to right-wing think tanks and had then subsequently been distributed to right-leaning commentators?
So because they're donating to your political leaning, it's fine. Do realise that half the population leans the opposite way to you, and you'll see why encouraging more organisations to get political is a disastrous thing for society.
It's far more than 50%. When specifically considering "woke" politics, centrists and moderate progressives reject it too. I'd say it's in the range of 70-90% rejecting.
Pretty much anybody outside California rejects it.
Cause being BIPOC while in journalism isn't a political ideology and their existence is not "woke" nor "political". On top of that I happen to believe a wider range of voices within journalism is incredibly important and see nothing controversial there.
That seems way better to me than giving money to those hostile towards damn near every marginalized and underrepresented minority. Does it not seem that way to you?
It's not my fault (nor is it Wikimedia's) that this specific historically marginalized and oppressed group of people as a collective leans a certain... less confederate-flag-waving way.
Were they supposed to find a hypothetical centrist group of BIPOC journalists that will therefore then over-represent right-wing BIPOC population?
If you see one side involving millions of people is portrayed as monsters, you should doubt such portrayal (people overall are good, sadists who enjoy human suffering are tiny minority, most evil is from systems/institutions not individuals).
Here's personal account (one data point) of what I mean then I use the word "wokeism:" good intentions are subverted to censor people, to distract from what is important, kindness/openness is weaponized e.g., cancel culture is applied to university professors for voicing scientific truth.
The mere fact that the word has been appropriated to mean something negative to some should be a big ol' red flag for those who are skeptical about its necessity.
It isn't and wasn't ever about divisiveness or negativity, the whole point is to include as many people of diverse backgrounds as possible in as many things as possible, and "woke" politics could be described as ideas and policies that support this concept of inclusivity.
Nothing about "woke" ideology portrays anyone as a "monster", full stop.
Millions of people are monsters. Millions of people are sociopaths.
People who use the term "woke" as a pejorative universally are stupid, terrible people, or they're manipulating stupid, terrible people. This is an absolute truth.
> If you see one side involving millions of people is portrayed as monsters, you should doubt such portrayal
Except that history is chock full of cases where millions of people collectively acted as monsters. People may overall want to be good, but seem to be very easily persuaded that "good" involves genociding all those "others".
> most evil is from systems/institutions not individuals
If those institutions perpetuating evil are made of up millions of people, then who cares? Your claim is that "Wokeism" is obviously wrong because it says 40 to 60 million Americans are acting like assholes, when in fact they're simply all individual die-hard followers of the asshole party? You're just shuffling definitions around to get around the obvious point that the term "woke" is now a get-out-of-racism-free card. (Or sexism, classism, homophobia, you name it)
> cancel culture
Yes, all those woke people, banning and burning books ...
To the first part, knowledge as a collection of facts is subjective, so the statement "the most subjective academic fields" is already false. The humanities long ago realized that the meaning of statements like "line A intersects line B" depend heavily on implicit assumptions about what you mean by 'lines' and 'intersect'. And even when the math used is unambiguous, the communication and interpretation of it is always done by a human with cultural biases that are liable to make "straight Euclidean line" the unspoken default. The only time it's objective is when the expert is communicating to other experts with the same contextual biases.
To the second part, the humanities are fond of condemning a system that perpetuates systemic violence. That rich white men benefit from
and created it is a historical - and in the most abstract discussions, coincidental - fact. It's only human nature to be uncomfortable with criticism of a system that's done you no harm or done you well. But the political humanities are concerned with you to the degree that you refuse to acknowledge or take action against this system. The white male is the byproduct of a historical examination, not the starting point.
Is a Thatcherite political columnist exactly an unbiased source? That self-promotional “law” is conspicuously unsupported by evidence and seems hard to reconcile with the hard right resurgence in various around the world.
Interesting - I'd never heard of that quote, but I've definitely observed the same about online forums. But it's more like - the more moderated online forums become, the more left-wing they become.
"O'Sullivan's First Law" seems like nonsense to me. Here are some counterexamples:
Centrist political parties.
Every small company I have worked for. (Large companies tend to be performatively social-justice-y and economically right-wing.)
My local public library.
Every choir, orchestra, etc., with which anyone in my family has been involved.
The Church of England. (I mention this just because of the presence of the Episcopal Church in the quote. The CoE contains very left-wing bits and very right-wing bits and plenty in between, but as a whole I don't think it can reasonably be described either as left-wing or as right-wing.)
I think the only way you can make the "Law" true is to define either "left-wing" or "right-wing" or both broadly enough that everything is either "left-wing" or "right-wing".
(I wondered who O'Sullivan was, and noted that a web search brought up a Conservapedia page. In case anyone has forgotten how ... distinctive ... the ideas there are, I remark that their examples of O'Sullivan's First Law include Fox News, CPAC, and Pat Robertson. Anyway, it turns out that O'Sullivan is a former editor of the National Review, another thing that's on Conservapedia's list of Things That Are Now Left-Wing, and he named the "law" after himself.)
Even if that were true (it doesn't seem like you're able to substantiate this)...
Good.
"Woke" politics (better known as "anything conservatives don't like") are the only sane politics taking place right now. Perfect? No. Actually trying to help the people who need it most? Yes.
Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics?
Hold up a second. The last time I saw an article whining about political bias on Wikipedia the complaint was that Wikipedia were a bunch of incel neckbeards and/or Nazis. Has something changed?
Wikipedia is basically the Wikipedia volunteers. Anyone can volunteer, so unsurprisingly some of the volunteers are "odd".
This article is about WMF, which is run by paid employees, not volunteers. They reflect the political posture of their employer, not the consensus of the Wikipedia volunteers.
Things have changed a LOT in the last 15 years. There are no neckbeards left on Wikipedia. It's all purple-haired, blue check marked ideologues now. Everyone else gets banned.
As far as I can tell from the OP and it's cited links[1], in 2021 they had around $160 in total revenue. $5 million of that went to the Tides foundation, the thing I think you are describing as "pushing woke politics". Another $50 million of that revenue was simply left over as unspent surplus.
Are you talking about other expenditures as "pushing woke politics"? On what basis are you claiming that a "lot, probably most" of donations to go "pushing woke politics"?
(Around 1/3rd of donations (still not "probably most") remain simply unspent, which is kind of weird, but not about "pushing woke politics").
> Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that about 90%+ goes to pushing woke politics?
Lots of people! The advancing of fashionable progressive causes is a far more popular thing to do today than hosting free online encyclopaedias. Wikipedia would arguably get more donations if they stuck a Black Lives Matter logo on their banner ads.
> Lots of people! The advancing of fashionable progressive causes is a far more popular thing to do today than hosting free online encyclopaedias. Wikipedia would arguably get more donations if they stuck a Black Lives Matter logo on their banner ads.
I don't think so. Just because the social activists are vocal does not mean that they are numerous.
In fact, looking at raw numbers, they're obviously in the minority: wikipedia donators outnumber actual BLM donators, so there are obviously more people interested in donating to wikipedia than to BLM.
If the wikimedia foundation were honest in their request for donations ("We plan to spend this on political activism"), they'd get fewer donators.
Wikimedia gets a TON of money each year, way way way more than it needs to support "The Projects" (including salaries of developers). Yet the fundraisers still cry out like if you don't give them money, the site might go offline. Also most everyone at the WMF is not getting paid amazingly (seeing is how they are San Francisco based).
And I don't know how it is now, but back in the day (about 10 years ago or so) their spending internally was hilariously wasteful. It's been a while, but based on what news keeps coming out about them... I don't think it's gotten any better.
I stopped donating to Wikipedia after I learned that they were the organization behind the "Chimp selfie" lawsuit. I understood that my money was not going towards keeping the servers on, but instead in defending frivolous lawsuits like these.
In all frankness, I have no interest in letting Wikipedia die either. I just feel there are enough people who donate today that makes it easy for the foundation to do stuff beyond just keeping a Wikipedia on. Will probably donate again if their contributor pool ever shrinks.
I think Wikipedia funding lawyers to defend fair use interpretations of copyright is actually a very useful function to support the encyclopedia. I know it sounds stupid, but there are a lot of lawyers out there looking to make a buck off a stupid lawsuit, and copyrights on the internet are a pretty wide open field for this kind of nonsense. In order to defend things like fair use that should be obvious someone needs to pay the legal bills.
This is a lot of what the EFF does and it generally strikes me as a rather important force in the context of American Civil Rights law.
Got a source on that just because I’m interested in reading more about that “shitshow”.
My understanding of it was the images were put on Wikipedia/Wikimedia because they held the belief that the images were not copyrightable (as the photo was taken by a non legal person), the photographer threatened to sue Wiki over it but I don’t recall that going anywhere. But it was actually PETA who sued the photographer after he published the photos in a book claiming the monkey should have copyright on the images.
What im interested in is was Wikimedia actually behind the lawsuit (or was it a different case, as I said that whole incident was a bit of a shitshow)
Last I heard it never got a final judgement in court so it was never settled if the monkey should have copyright, my understanding is that the case was settled out of court were the photographer agreed to hand over a share of future earnings from the photos (copyright cases get expensive very quickly, they might have seen it as the cheaper option to exit the case)
But that’s just my understanding of what went down, would love to know more. I find it an interesting case esp as we move into the realm of AI creating art.
I would donate to wikipedia if they would commit to becoming a smaller organisation, with a smaller staff.
10 fulltime staff should be plenty. ~5 developers/devops people to run the site and slowly make changes, and 5 marketing/branding/business/finance people for everything else that needs to be done.
Pay those 10 staff well, but cap it at that and don't aim to grow headcount or scope beyond being a great online encyclopaedia.
Ironically, they probably wouldn't need my donation if they only had 10 staff.
And perhaps a team to make innovations in the knowledge domain. Another comment mentioned wikidata, which is an interesting project to organize knowledge in a relational database. I would love to see the federated version where you can reference concepts in remote graphs, but the development is very slow. I wish they would prioritize such kind of projects
> the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation.
I wonder what "coincide" means here. I think the most generous inference I can make is that they had a bunch of extra money lying around from all the excess fundraising they do, and Amanda Keton said "I know a worthwhile organization you could give some to." But, you'd assume that as general counsel she would be aware that that looks a little shady.
Of course, the even shadier conclusion you could jump to would be that she benefits from that grant, via her connection to the non-profit.
The fact that actions like this leave questions in people's minds is why non-profits should strive for transparency, and diligently avoid any possible conflicts of interest, which at the very least didn't happen here.
Let's consider the good news here: we can have NGOs provide effective, foundational services for reasonable costs.
Some issues belong in the 'commons' due to elements of 'public good'.
I'm not making a political statement, this is just pragmatic reality.
If something like Wikipedia can exist without having to die due to lack of funding, well, maybe we can also do such things for 'search' and 'public messaging' (aka Twitter).
In this manner, we can forgo issues of 'total marketing surveillance' and having an excess of irrelevant ads for so many things which might be oriented towards public good and should not have artifacts of commercialization. (And I'm not even against Ads, just their ubiquity and irrelevance).
Let's not fret too much about $5M in 'goodwill' money sent out to Tides but contemplate the sliver lining here.
Of course, we should keep our eye on these things, Tides is maybe a benevolent actor, but they are also a political actor that sent money to Canada to support issues which were ultimately related to electoral outcomes.
The way they put up this banner on the website is so beyond me, I was never going to donate anyway. The banner on wikimedia is just disgusting. This big screaming banner is so out of place, It raised all my red flags. If they were true to them selfs, a small (permanent) link saying 'donate' would've been fair and more than enough.
I donate every year as I get tremendous value from Wikipedia.
I am still inclined to continue, but will allocate more to other not for profits this year, as the foundation is just wasting money that can be better spent elsewhere.
I have no comment about the main article, but I agree about the other unrelated point below - that Commons is really start to show its age.
It’s kind of comical how YouTube and flickr is listed there as the “new boys on the block”, but I agree that there should be more development on making Commons easier to use.
Try to upload photos to Commons… they don’t even have phone apps and using the web uploader is really cumbersome.
(I also hate wikidata with a passion, but it seems like there is a push for this Semantic Web nonsense from the very top of wikimedia so what am I gonna do)
maybe if wikimedia gave more money to development and less to random grants, it would be better. but I don’t know. This community stuff is always hard to pull off.
It is. Soliciting donations under false premises is an extremely common form of fraud. But it almost assuredly won't be treated that way, given Wikipedia's general good citizenship plus a lack of political will to oppose anything in the name of "equity."
i never realized how much money they have. I suggest everyone not donate until the page load time increases because they're having to scale back their infrastructure. I've always assumed donations went directly to bandwidth and servers.
Isn't this the exact thing they went after Jim Bakker for? Raising too much money for a specific purpose and then taking the excess money and using it for other projects?
I think there's a neutral technical aspect and a political aspect.
The neutral aspect is that if you have so much money (a surplus) that you start giving it away to secondary causes, you're being misleading. The begging messages clearly imply they're about to run out of money to run things, which seems opposite to reality.
So they should change the tone of the message, and provide more transparency about where the money goes to. It should be a basic donator's right to understand if the money is needed at all, and where it is used for. No matter from which political angle you're coming from.
As for the political angle, to each their own. I'd say most knowledge institutes are progressive and always have been. Importantly, moderately progressive or "classic liberal". Which is quite different from post-modernist, equity, "woke" type of politics. This last category far less embraced, and not just by conservatives.
The situation seems comparable to Mozilla. Many people would gladly donate to support the development of the Firefox browser but not neccessarily want to reward incompetent leaders or fund the running of a "indigenous intersectional BLM feminist blog" that does absolutely fuck-all for anybody.
So that Twitter user started talking about Wikipedia funding the "culture war", and I stopped reading. I guess it's my own fault for reading what an anime avatar has to say.
I had a recurring donation set up for wikipedia. I really like it. It’s useful. But I hate woke politics. So, yeah, I no longer have that recurring donation.
I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
That was painful to read. If I wanted to promote “knowledge equity” I would focus on education in low and middle income countries, rather than pouring money on affirmative action in the richest country in the world and throwing fuel on culture war in said country and elsewhere.
I used to donate a small amount annually. No more from now on.
So you'd suggest they gave money to, for example, Media Foundation for West Africa: The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) is a non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting and defending the right to freedom of expression, particularly for media and human rights defenders, throughout the 16 countries in West Africa
or
Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (US$250,000): The Arab Reporters in Journalism (ARIJ) is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Jordan?
>I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
My perception is that every major ideological group is doing this and has been since civilization started. Most people don't mind as long as the ideology aligns with their own ideology.
Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human rights.
While those policy areas are not in themselves necessarily negative, they have a clear political slant which is the ground associated with woke activism.
It's not obvious what it has to do with Wikimedia.
Also they sound extremely localised. As someone outside extremely wealthy and rich USA why should my money go to that sort of political organizations there. Why don't they use their own money for it?
None of those sound bad, but one organisation that tries to focus on all of them?
You'll end up trying lots of things but poorly, or find that they cross influence to make things efficient. Why work on labour issues when you can deal with women's labour issues?
And especially if they are being funded via manipulation, such as paying for Wikipedia's servers, means they would lack the oversight from donors which is not an effective way.
> They prohibit people from editing who believe child sexual activity isn't harmful[1],
From the linked page:
> Wikipedia does not tolerate inappropriate adult–child relationships. Editors who attempt to use Wikipedia to pursue or facilitate inappropriate adult–child relationships, who advocate inappropriate adult–child relationships on- or off-wiki (e.g. by expressing the view that inappropriate relationships are not harmful to children), or who identify themselves as pedophiles, will be blocked and banned indefinitely.
Looks pretty sane to me? If it's only one "party" that draws this line, what are those that don't?
I haven't filled-in a profile page, and I haven't had occasion to make any edit concerning transness, sex and gender. My Wikipedia handle is a name I've used in other places, so a determined stalker could draw inferences about my views; but I haven't used the handle outside of Wikipedia for a decade.
I have opinions about the Middle East that, if expressed in my editing, would get me into trouble - but probably not banned; my edits would simply be reverted in a microsecond.
Editing with an opinion is fine; you just get reverted. Nobody bans you. You get into trouble if you try to take a stand: e.g. revert the revert, or if you take it to the talk page, or ask for admin review.
Neoliberalism is an economic viewpoint, not a sociological one.
I don't know a good word for the "safe", modern, liberal point-of-view. Perhaps that's why everyone calls it "woke", a word that I don't use, because it's usually meant as an insult. In the USA, "liberal" seems to be an insult too.
The viewpoint I'm referring to is that of educated, urban, mainly white people, who sympathize with oppressed minorities, but are scared of any kind of revolution, because they depend on capitalism.
Cherry-picked is right! The original thread picks on the SeRCH foundation, which got a little over 1% of the grant money based on their own figures. The grant was to "support and expand their signature program ... which amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, women of color and non-binary people of color in STEM fields". That's what the money is going toward. There are a lot of people who become enraged at the idea of their money going toward causes like that, and those people are called "bigoted asshole racist pieces of shit." Indeed those people should not donate to Wikipedia.
I don't pretend to know what the hell the sentence about counterspaces and hyperspace and fluid "place-times" means, but it sounds like someone reading the words "hyperlink" or "daemon" and concluding the Internet is woo-woo mysticism. They're shaking their fist at these words without even attempting to understand what they mean. They say in that very sentence that they're borrowing terms from fiction because they find them useful. It's the height of cherry-picking and straw-manning to criticize all of Wikipedia's grant-giving because 1% of it went to a recipient with otherwise noble goals that uses weird words sometimes.
"Where the complaint does succeed is in showing an intense disgust for the social justice movement. So, don't donate to Wikimedia if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people being encouraged to (& see themselves as allowed to) participate in science and journalism. Go buy a copy of Encarta."
Thanks for making the debate worse. It's basically "do what I say or you're a racist".
One argument is "Wikipedia is guilt-tripping users into donating without making it clear they don't need the money for hosting, and it's more likely to go to Wikimedia-given grants."
That argument is completely fair. Lots of evidence has been given about their finances and it's pretty obvious that this is a completely legitimate criticism of Wikimedia and its fundraising style.
The second argument is "YOUR money is going to support GAY and BLACK people!!!!!!! WOKE POLITICS! CULTURE WARS!!!!!!!"
That second argument is absolute utter bullshit nonsense supported by some of the worst cherry-picked examples I've ever seen and backed by the same trite get-out-of-racism-free dog-whistle jargon that we've seen over and over again from overtly racist groups. That is the argument GP is criticizing. Yes, the people who get infuriated at the idea of nonprofits supporting black women in STEM are indeed racists. That's what the word means.
You're doing the exact same thing: reverting to instinctive binary positions and name-calling. Throwing away the baby with the bath water. The thing you accuse the original source of, you're mirroring.
Sure enough, there really are people whom dislike minorities altogether for whatever twisted reasons. Awful people, no argument here.
Yet you're looking over a sizable group who have no issue with minorities, they have an issue with equity politics, which flies in the face of equality and is racist and sexist by design. People whom find it incredibly patronizing and insulting to call an entire demographic "marginalized".
Those people are not conservative nor are they racist. We use to call these people progressive. Center to center-left, classic liberalism. Many aren't on board at all with the postmodernist version of progressive politics. Yet they are lumped in with "racists", this is how you keep a culture war going. Just keep doubling down, and keep losing ever more support.
> if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people
I'm disgusted by discrimination in any form. Why not have money go to the poor, no matter what their race or gender? I don't understand why people are apologizing for and defending obviously racist and communist organizations that Wikimedia is donating to.
And let's be frank, how many of these organizations have leadership that's buying multi-million dollar homes with those "donations" under the guise of creating "creative spaces" .. another very famous garbage-charity was just outed by an incredible documentary (made by a black woman, not that it should matter) for pumping millions into personal real estate purchases that were disguised as business buildings. Where is the IRS to go after these people?
We've banned this account for posting ideological flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Many even biased sources can be amazing sources, you just have to remember to recall the bias. Is Wikipedia likely to bias a math article? Probably not. Would Fox News incorrectly report a giant spool rolling down the road? Probably not.
The nice thing about bias is it's a form of laziness, and as such can often be easily noticed, and subsequently dismissed.
Every time something like this makes the hn frontpage, I increase my monthly recurring donation by 1$. Wikipedia is literally the best thing to come from the modern Internet and I'm not willing to let it die, no matter how "problematic" the Wikimedia foundation becomes.
Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all?
Do you really mean to say that the content of Wikipedia is so valuable that no matter what else Wikimedia does, it still deserves as much funding as possible? Even though the Wikimedia Foundation did not create that content, and doesn't own it in either a moral or legal sense? Do you not see how that creates some really bad incentives for the health of Wikipedia?
(Personally, I don't have huge disagreements with the actual worthiness of most of the causes that Wikimedia chooses to support, but I think the way it fundraises for them is wildly deceptive.)
> Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all?
Thanks for highlighting this. I am concerned about architectural decisions like the refusal to add a dot onion service, paired with never navigating the original sin of people who created their own name pages and edited them abusing that social position to deny that others are notable.
The fun comes when someone flips that logic around: "I was born in the 80s, who are these pedophiles who met me as a child who keep thinking they can... coerce me? Haven't they read the constitution? I thought they put a crazy catch all in the 9th amendement to avoid some of these retarded takes".
For context, I'm on the autistic spectrum, so I can use the word, and I attended an approved private school before eventually graduating from one of the most allegedly prestigous high schools in the... let's say county?... in the mythical "suburbs of Pittsburgh".
And to be fair, many of the people I'm angry at are not pedophiles -- they're just totally normal people who keep voting for literal fasciss over and over and then expecting me to smile and wave like it's 1996 still.
(It's not gonna happen.)
I think we, as a society, need to think about how to handle edge cases where folks purposefully make bad decisions under uncertainty for purely sadistic reasons, and yeah, that's kind of shitty they don't invest that money such so that it's perpetually self sustaining or donate it over to more infrastructure related projects like Mozilla, Tor, or the various projects associated with HTTPS.
But what is the most likely cause of death for Wikimedia? It's not running out of money to operate servers or maintain the knowledge of keeping them ruining: it's collapsing under it's own wealth, rising costs and inefficiency to a point where one day they actually will be unable to maintain servers and knowledge. Money attracts people eager to get it under their control, and determined wealth-seekers will always outdo their more idealist peers in ascending to that control. And chances are they'll fool everyone including themselves, believing that they are believers when in fact they wouldn't have come close to thinking about joining up without that glimmer of gold leading their attention.
Note that I'm not suggesting that idealists must remain poor, I'm suggesting that there needs to be balance and I don't see Wikimedia anywhere close. I'd rather donate to a frugal Wikimedia for getting them from reserveres equivalent to six generations of operation without new donations to seven generations of reserves than for yet another expensive side project that roughly correlates with some interpretations of Wikipedia ideals.
If those side projects have adequate merit they'll find donations on their own, but if they can only fund themselves hiding behind the wikipedia front, they don't deserve your dollars.
> "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5 million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for actual grants made to the community – a figure dwarfed by the Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020–2021. There was no lack of money for grants.
The actual problem is that the Foundation reached its endowment goal, five years before the the deadline it set [1], and yet, they keep guilt-tripping and pretending as if they are running out of money. How's it not profiteering? They could be honest and add, "We have already reached our goal. But raising more could help us find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge," and they would be completely in the right. I bet fewer people would donate if they realized that they are not funding running expenses, at all.
Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive. The complexity of their project and running expenses is way more than Wikipedia, and yet, they just received 12% of the amount that Wikipedia got in 2020 [2]. They just have $4M in net assets, and yet, I have never seen them guilt-tripping regular users.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
[2]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...