>pays for real expenses
Only a small percentage of donations do.
>instead of whatever vanity project
Anytime the topic of Wikimedia donations come up you will see people complaining about their vanity projects too, wishing they could donate towards wikipedia itself.
Not the person you are replying to, and it is a bit tangential, but you just basically described a solid chunk of open-source software work.
I am not mocking open-source software work, I am mocking how reductionist the parent comment was, because their logic often applies to volunteer open-source software work as well. And, I suspect, on HN we can agree that volunteer open-source software work can often be worth doing, regardless of how "irrational" it is or how much for-profit corporations could benefit from it.
Not true, nearly 30% of their budget goes to partisan activism with DEI related initiatives.
"Supporting equity represents the second largest part of our programmatic work"
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
And an encyclopedia can absolutely do that and still present factual information based on actual research and facts.
You know that just because a lady has blue hair or a person has colored skin does NOT mean that they can't be right about something or do good research. Right? You do know it, right?
Because in the end, when you cry about DEI (whatever you believe it to mean), this is the implication that comes with it: that you can't imagine for a second that anyone who doesn't look exactly like you could ever do anything competently. I genuinely wonder if you've ever thought about that for more than half a second after you closed that Charlie Kirk video.
If you do believe it, fair enough. I guess you're allowed to believe it. But at least be honest about it.
"They genuinely believe I can’t get a job without a DEI quota, that I can’t work out how to get ID to vote, that I have to commit crime to survive and so shouldn’t be held accountable for my actions.
In their eyes I’m a helpless victim who needs saving by my benevolent white middle class liberal saviour. Without them I’m apparently destined for crime and poverty.
They convince themselves that this makes them good people. But the moment you challenge that thinking, you become a “bad” ethnic minority that’s ungrateful and deserving of abuse and punishment.
Their racism is 20-30% of the country and hides behind virtue which is what makes it so dangerous."
A comment like this is completely unacceptable on HN. The guidelines make it clear that we expect better than this here:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Any correction or improvement only serves to legitimize the lies the site is meant to spread. The less obviously wrong stuff there is, the more likely people are to believe the harmful lies.
If you're correcting a lie that they actively want to spread (e.g. the "White Genocide" lie) they obviously won't accept your correction.
If you're correcting a lie that they don't care about (hypothetical example: "ripe strawberries are blue") they might accept your correction, but that makes it less likely that an uninformed visitor will see through their lies.
So the best case scenario is that literally nothing happens, and the worst case one is that you're indirectly helping their cause. What am I missing?
They know that this is being built with an explicitly partisan bias, but also know liberal folk are super weak to certain types of attacks. Attacks like "be fair" and "you can submit feedback". They are explicitly playing on liberal weaknesses all while leaning into the blatantly false representation of history. They will say "you can't judge it since you haven't provided feedback to help correct it" but that was never their intention and they just say those things because it confuses liberals. And I know I've overused "liberals" here. That's absolutely my bias slipping in. But they are the most credulous folks who will constantly try to reach across the aisle to blatant bad faith actors. If there's a better term for this, I haven't learned it in my 20+ years of being politically active in the US.
Not that I think it does any good on a site like this, but I vouched for your original comment. I completely agree with you. I was also raised in the cult and have first hand experience with many people still in it. I know why they would support and lend effort to things like these. They support all sorts of awful shit.