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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Transparency is being reduced more and more; stopping publication of the quarterly reviews is just another symptom.

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.

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.

Then convince people to donate. Re-appropriating their donations seems like a good way to throw out the baby with the bath water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/GD...

It's always been a curious contrast and a sad one.

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.

For example?

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.

I'm not so sure that's always the case.

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.

Your argument holds no water because the fact that an antiracist calls out a racist is a given, if painting with a broad brush. Doesn't mean it's a joyride to do so. To the opposite, the constant fight is a reason to try to tone it done. People who resent this, without further ado, are asking for a step back.

Given Jimbo Wales heritage in South Africa it's kind of understandable though, isn't it? They also did one laptop per child.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

https://www.tides.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2020_Tides-...

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?

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.

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.

What does "pushing woke politics" mean?

Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any comparable organisations spend a more appropriate proportion of their revenue on web hosting?

Which political extremists have taken over?

What is ruined?

Pushing for global use of the US's anachronistic racial science over more nuanced alternatives such as ethnicity/nationality

OP knows they are pushing woke policies, so that information is out there.

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2019-annu...

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-2021...

[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fex9854WIAIHSun?format=jpg

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.

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?

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund

Using the term “white supremacy” is equivalent to using the term “jewish media”.

Both are racist dog whistles aimed at painting a large group of people with the same broad brush and increase hate towards them.

Not all jewish people are involved with the media, not all white people are supremacist.

If you consider one of those two phrases harmful you must consider the other one as well.

Furthermore, “create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide” - Are “people of color” the only voice whose experience must be reflected? What happened to the other people? Are they not welcome? Perhaps are they no longer around? I would argue this statement is a call to genocide.

And while we are on the topic of “people of color”. What are they exactly? Can you define a people of colour for me please? Also, isn’t this term, you know, Eurocentric? The very thing they aim to “shift away” from?

Does any of this make sense to you?

Would you donate money to an organisation with a blatantly racist statement such as this?

This is the insane things people tend to file under “extreme left wing”. And I suspect you know this, but just want to pretend it ain’t so.

Err ... Wikipedia is a website, come on.

"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.

As noted in their own 2020 report:

https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...

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.

https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579779097278181378

> What is ruined?

For one: Wikipedia's neutral reputation.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.

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.

This is answered by

> Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running"

I don't understand how a disruptive banner that makes no claims can be considered nefarious.

> banner that makes no claims

Look at this example [0]. If you read that, what would you say the money is going to?

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Founda...

> 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.

It’s like Mozilla and all of their non-Firefox/Thunderbird bullshit. Bloat for the sake of bloat.

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.

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).

What exactly do you mean by "woke politics"?

> 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.

[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579776106034757633.html

No way! How dare they! (/s)

> 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.

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.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

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.

Yes, you're right. I wouldn't react the same way. One of those is clearly better than the other.

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?

Pretty much anybody outside California rejects it.

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 as 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.

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".

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!

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".

Well, yeah. That's what "neutral" means

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.

That is the twitter thread that started the uproar, all the info you'll need is in there.

if you were being sarcastic, the answer is: anything vaguely antiracist ist woke

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.

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 ...

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.

And it goes on forever.

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.

That's exactly why they are the most subjective. Arguing semantics ad nauseam to come to a conclusion that fits their hypothesis, rather than establishing semantics and syntax to help uncover the workings of the world. If one's going to make a point that "gee look we're pointing out academia is based on humans and that might hurt le white male", certainly, they are lacking the basic introspection of which fields are suffering most from volatility and the reproduction crisis (hint: it isn't STEM).

>the humanities are fond of condemning a system that perpetuates systemic violence

Friendly reminder this is the field that came out with the Duluth model, which has done a lot of work in perpetuating systemic violence itself. And it has yet to owe up to its own mistake.

>It's only human nature to be uncomfortable with criticism of a system that's done you no harm or done you well

Cop-out answer. Argue facts, not feelings.

>That rich white men

You're making the same mistake as the original comment, attributing far more lenience to the system than is actually happening. Read the original comment, and it had 3 attributes beyond "white male". Yours has one, and it is a big one. The system is barely looking beyond "white male", having no qualm to mash together Jimmy the local backstreet rat with John the rich kid.

It's academia. Academia can do better than focus almost solely on race and gender. That's why they get funded. Your average 70s movie had more focus on the effects of affluence than most research coming out from humanities.

>But the political humanities are concerned with you to the degree that you refuse to acknowledge or take action against this system.

You mean, the political humanities who leave their current old guard of tenured, white men in charge while shoving the burden onto the next generation and don't look past gender or race? That political humanities hardly ever mentioning the kinds of sexism men face, the racism inherent to feminism, had to make an exclusion specifically for Asian men when they found out Asians were doing pretty okay bar romance, and aggressively try to censor any kind of dissent or paper that might imply the opposite of the current narrative?

That political humanities, concerned?

You used a lot of big words for an unfounded reduction of entire disciplines. I think you meant to say, "I don't think the humanities are a respectable field of study" - which fair, opinion, but perhaps you could word it more clearly?

And to counter that sentiment - you would say history is in the humanities, yes? Consider the statement "America had a civil war" - it's a pretty solid (objective) fact. You seem to be purposefully ignoring that a not negligible amount of the humanities is composed of similar statements.

> reproduction crisis (hint: it isn't STEM).

STEM are the only fields that can have a reproduction crisis. Biology specifically - is that not science to you? The humanities doesn't reproduce experiments, it advances discourse. It can't have a reproduction crisis because reproducing an argument makes no sense.

> Friendly reminder this is the field that came out with the Duluth model, which has done a lot of work in perpetuating systemic violence itself.

Yes. The Duluth model, that pioneered the idea that America hasn't yet rid itself of the systems that profited from and enforced slavery. The idea of a monopoly on violence had only been developed in 1981, TIL.

> Cop-out answer. Argue facts, not feelings.

OK? It's a fact that some people get uncomfortable when faced with criticism of a system that did them well? Are you saying this isn't a fact?

Whatever you're trying to say, you're not doing it very coherently, or faithfully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Citation needed]

Here you go, from Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger:

>Wikipedia Is Badly Biased

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

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 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.

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.)

> # '''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)

As such, seeing that a trans person is not a (biological) female, I can understand that poster's logic, he/she most probably had expected a female to become an admin in order to moderate (or whatever it is the wikipedia admins do) wikipedia pages.

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.

She was excommunicated for heresy.

Look who's actually dominating the reddit sub "actuallesbians": https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/actualles...

Trans people are not masquerading as another 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female

>In humans, the word male can also be used to refer to gender.

>In humans, the word female can also be used to refer to gender.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female

>In humans, the word female can also be used to refer to gender

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female

>In humans, the word male can also be used to refer to gender.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male

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.

I'm pretty sure you'd get banned here on HN for saying that as well.

For this to make sense, the trans person would need to occupy a "space" of some kind that was formerly reserved for a born woman. So it could be not an attack on the trans person at all, but general criticism of the fact trans persons are now allowed in positions formerly reserved for women.

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.

That's a lie. Her opposition to another admin candidate is because they're yet a man who wants to control women's spaces.

(I'm referring to the manual reduction of the rank of an article mocking go)

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Master/slave_(technology)#Ter...

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.

IMHO, some prime Wikipedia skills are finding bureaucratic cover and being deliberately mute about your motives.

[1] though not only, another big one is obsession

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...

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.

--------------------

Problems with poorly supervised grants

See discussion last month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signp...

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)

--------------------

The words "gravy train", "cash cow" come to mind.

[0] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/05/john-osullivans-first-l...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy#:~:text=....

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.)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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").

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

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.

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.

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 think this is the best criticism as it avoids going into politics and addresses the practical issue.

From https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund:

> Many of the barriers that prevent people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge are rooted in systems of racial oppression.

I don't think there would be a scandal if the money would have been used for the fund stated purpose: to help access and contribution to Wikipedia.

The money instead has gone to a political lobby group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund

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.)

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.

(Doesn't SSL or something have a bug?)

- Greg

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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...

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.

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.

They're not funneling money to themselves, they're funneling it to other charities that they work with.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, you are correct that running this endowment in a way that doesn't expose you fully to stock market movement is part of the job description.

> "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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

Hitler is the only person on all of wikipedia not allowed to self identify his religion.

Mohammed's proclivity for prepubescent children, despite being one of his primary associations, remains nowhere to be found on his main page.

Historical Jesus is asserted as fact.

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.

4/5 million is still huge amount.

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".

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.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

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.

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"

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?

> 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

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978

That the banners where misleading is IMHO they main issue with the secondary issue being the not so grate transparency for this external usages.

I saw the Wikimedia example, and it didn't appear to me that they were hiding anything. So I'd be curious to see an example of this being done well.

Edit: To be clear, I'm looking for examples like Wikimedia, where the donations are being used for multiple things.

Not if it was clear the money was going to other avenues of increased knowledge.

Then the donator knows what they’re getting into and can choose accordingly. Nothing wrong with that.

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).

https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...

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:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endow...

to over $100 million:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endow...

in the same year.

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:

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

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.

Yes, because destroying your credibility risks destroying future fund raising potential.

Certainly I don't donate money to organizations I don't "really expect" to act ethically and responsibly. Do you?

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).

Why defend this blatantly unethical behavior?

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).

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.

So I disagree with both of y'all!

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.

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/

The big deal is people being duped.

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.

The 30% surplus is just salt in that wound

And there you have it.

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.

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 ...

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_Wikimedia_Founda...

... the South Asian "Regional Partnerships" Manager moved to Wikimedia from Google:

https://archive.ph/jf3FT

... 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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

etc.

"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?

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.

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].

[1]https://www.inputmag.com/culture/internet-archive-copyright-...

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.

Wikipedia could forward a little sum if need be, technically?

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.

It isn’t when their messaging acts like they’re gonna go under without your donation when in reality they have millions to burn on frivolities.

“Non-profit” tale as old as time, impossible to run an honest business when the grift depends on guilt.

I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund

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.

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.

Essentially you need to toe the party line if you want to edit Wikipedia.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Child_protection

[2] TODO

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_Nazis

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?

Expressing the view off site that sexual relationships between adults and children are not harmful results in being prevented from editing wikipedia.

This is an ideological test on who can edit.

I edit Wikipedia regularly, and have done for 20 years. I don't believe transwomen are women. I am not banned.

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.

Neo liberal society in a nutshell. And people wonder why authoritarian regimes and attitudes are getting more and more traction in the so called free west.

You can say whatever you want as long as you do as you are told.

Actually not even this is true for quite a while.

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.

The following is a direct quote from one of the “foundations” they sponsor.

> The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund

I want to contrast this to what happened recently to Kanye West when he mentioned jewish media.

The immediate response to “jewish media” was “there is no such thing”, problems in the industry are due to individuals and saying “jewish media” is dangerous because it pains an entire group with a broad brush.

Why is no one’s response to this blatantly racist diatribe the exact same?

Why is it wrong to say “jewish media” but ok and acceptable to say “white supremacy”?

Not all jews are involved with the media and not all media-involved jews are malevolent. Likewise, not all white people are supremacist.

Why is one ok but not the other?

I have even seen, in mainstream outlets, “jewish media” being called a “call to genocide”. Why is that a call to genocide but not “reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide” - What happen to the white peoples? Is the sentence implying they are no longer welcome, perhaps no longer around ?

Why isn’t their statement:

The Wikimedia Foundation defines equity as shifting away from region centric attitudes, attitudes of supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of a multitude of people.

I refuse to give money to racists, especially ones attempting to opress a global minority.

We need as a society to make a choice. Either all racism is unacceptable or none is. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t in the same breath say “jewish media is an anti semitic term” and follow that up with “dismantle white supremacy”. You can’t proclaim “black lives matter” and harp on someone saying “white lives matter”. You can’t claim to strive towards equity and say “reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide”. It needs to reflect everyone’s experience.

Nothing good will come of racist policies like the ones supported by this “foundation”.

One of my old TTRPG players adamantly defended an anti-white tirade they'd made, justifying it with horse-blinder arguments of inherited sin ("our ancestors did X, therefore we we are guilty of X") and of the belief that non-whites need to be handed a crutch in order to survive modern society. It was enlightening to hear a true believer honestly state and defend a double-standard as they did, even if the dissonance was as maddening then as it is now.

Who controls the tone of these discussions? Those who control mass media.

We are in the midst of a large scale disagreement over whether White Supremacy is STILL in effect.

Most non-Whites say that the USA still is, and that they are disadvantaged both by the disparate accumulation of capital during overt white supremacy (which tends to reinforce itself in a capitalist economy), and how non-whites are still treated by people with power (e.g. cops, doctors, hiring managers).

Most Whites say that it is not, that accumulated capital in general is meaningless because they specifically don't have any of it, and that any claims of disparate treatment in the present day are over-sensitive attention seeking from people who have been raised to think of themselves as victims.

"Jewish Media," on the other hand, is and always has been a false anti-semitic trope since Media first began. It stems from general anti-semitic conspiritorial beliefs that all abstract, ineffable systems are controlled by a monolithic and shadowy organization of "The Jews" in order to subjugate other peoples. It's a subset of anti-semitic tropes that have been applied to the media, banks, unions, and communism - basically any non-tangible system that affects peoples lives, confuses them, and scares them. The mere existence of any Jewish bankers, lawyers, union organizers, media personalities, movie producers, or communist agitators is seen as proof that "The Jews" entirely run whatever that thing is.

While there are some surface-level linguistic similarities between "White Supremacy" and "Jewish Media," one is a historical fact that may or may not be present-day fact and the other is a historical lie that has been used to murder millions.

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.

or

Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (US$250,000): The Arab Reporters in Journalism (ARIJ) is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Jordan?

Books, Internet-in-a-Box, etc. for poor children in underdeveloped countries, now that kind of projects would be knowledge equity.

Are they spending that much money in Norway?

They're in a cult and they don't realize it. Woke politics has every negative hallmark of a cult. Original sin, excommunication, heresy...

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.

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 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)

Wikipedia's banner ads make it sound like it desperately needs support even to keep running as it is.

That cause is a lot more noble than the causes that wikimedia supports.

The "somewhat-viral" complaint (and its echo) fails to point out any concrete wrongdoing. The example grant recipients are presented as failures without any evidence. Figures are cherry-picked and abused.

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.

Wikipedia hasn't been around for that long, was the first of its kind, and it doesn't exist by default. Please criticise it well -- make it stronger.

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.

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.

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.

Oh no, no, no. This is a lie and a mischaracterisation. No one, and I mean no one, has a problem with “young non-white non-male” people being encouraged to participate.

As for “allowed”, you know all too well this is plain bs. There is nothing disallowing “non-white non-male” people from participating.

Here, let me lay out for you just one of the insane diatribes this foundation puts forth:

> The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund

Questions for you:

1. Do you agree this is a racist diatribe?

2. Why is the above not worded like this, and instead makes racial references?

> The Wikimedia Foundation defines equity as shifting away from region centric attitudes, attitudes of supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of a multitude of people.

3. Do you agree saying something like “jewish media” is equivalent to saying “white supremacy”? Not all jewish people are involved in the media. Not all white peoples are supremacist. Using phrases such as “jewish media” increases hate towards jewish people. Using phrases such as “white supremacy” increases hate towards white peoples. Do you agree both outcomes are equally bad?

4. Do you agree “create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide” is an exclusionary and racist statement? Furthermore it can be construed to be a call to genocide as it implies people that are “not of color” are either not welcome or perhaps not around anymore.

5. Do you agree “people of color” is it’s self an eurocentric term, the very thing the foundation claims to want to shift away from?

Unlike what you are implying, people broadly speaking have no issues with “non white non male” people participating in society or anything else. What they have a problem is double standards, blatant racism, hypocrisy and nonsensical self-contradictory ideas. Or, you know, woke insanity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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?

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.

No more. I trust Wikipedia as much as I trust Fox news or CNN or MSNBC now.

For eg. The math explanations are amazing

The nice thing about bias is it's a form of laziness, and as such can often be easily noticed, and subsequently dismissed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-qVpm_CHU

"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."

A couple months ago I visited the site on an incognito session and got presented with this: https://i.imgur.com/HsjfAsn.jpg

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.

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 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.

In all seriousness, I wonder if there’s an unbiased timeline of the organization and when and how things started to get hairy.

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.

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.

Wikipedia is not short on cash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 - Oct 2022 (482 comments)

The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710 - Oct 2022 (43 comments)

Related and less recent:

Poll of Wikipedians concludes: Wikimedia fundraising emails are misleading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978 - Sept 2022 (113 comments)

Wikipedia fundraising banners paused over weekend in response to complaints - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603858 - Dec 2021 (22 comments)

Ask HN: Is Wikipedia running out of money? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29523033 - Dec 2021 (28 comments)

Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402703 - Dec 2021 (251 comments)

Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 - May 2021 (595 comments)

Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569239 - Sept 2020 (74 comments)

Ask HN: Do you donate to Wikipedia? Is their donation request motivating? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135871 - Aug 2020 (17 comments)

Wikipedia fundraising strikes again – an open letter to Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509582 - Oct 2017 (23 comments)

Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429067 - Oct 2017 (121 comments)

Wikimedia Foundation spending - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 - May 2017 (409 comments)

Wikimedia Foundation Raises $20 Million From 1 Million+ Donors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416127 - Jan 2012 (22 comments)

Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908546 - Nov 2010 (37 comments)

Optimizing Wikipedia's Fundraising Banner Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006438 - Dec 2009 (14 comments)

Others?

Their side projects are money sinkholes. Would never give money to Mozilla.