Correct, the application is pending. However, the application was made years later than originally promised. Over the past six-and-a-half years, the endowment has accumulated over $100 million, with not a single audited financial statement ever published.
A very good choice, because the Internet Archive is financially far less secure than the Wikimedia Foundation and provides a vital service, by archiving Wikipedia sources before they go offline. This makes sure you can still see in five years' time what someone has cited in an article.
Archive.sth isn't an organization but a private site thus their finances aren't fully known. Based on that, think it like a GitHub project. If you like its work and can, donate.
I think the Internet Archive's insane legal strategy and wishful thinking with their Covid lending library is more than well known enough without me spelling it out explicitly.
The actual fundraiser will come at the end of the year, when the banners will follow everyone visiting Wikipedia around for over a month (29th of November – 31st of December).
It seems odd to me that an organization would try to fund raise around the same time that lots of people have increased fuel bills from heating, and expensive festivals like Thanks Giving and Christmas to pay for. No doubt there's some reasoning behind it but I'd definitely have thought that fund raising at almost any other time would be more successful.
Christmas, and by extension the holiday season, has a longstanding tradition of charitable giving (probably originating around Christianity?). People are just in a giving mood around the end of the year. It's not unusual for 30% of all donations to occur in the last month of the year. So it's by far the best months for fundraising.
I assume the small % of readers are also heavy users who don't make edits, like me. And honestly I would be thrilled to donate many many times if it wasn't for their ridiculous messaging. It's like Mozilla, stop spending my donation money on stupid doomed-to-fail projects and then I'll donate more.
Also, the donation ui-flow is full of dark patterns like "don't you want to make that a recurring donation?" and the reason why they didn't get my money.
However, I do feel that an internet where we pay for the things we use is to be preferred over an internet full of advertisements.
I felt the same way, which is why I started a recurring donation to WikiMedia. After about a year, they e-mailed me trying to convince me to write WikiMedia into my will. Check out this transparent attempt at manipulation:
> Many supporters like you who understand the usefulness of planning ahead have chosen to include a gift to Wikipedia in their will. They want to do more to protect free knowledge and are invested in building a legacy with Wikipedia to ensure their values live on for many years to come.
"If you understood the importance of planning ahead, you'd already have WikiMedia in your will, bozo"
I've never been offered a higher salary than I was offered by wikimedia. I turned it down because their corporate culture is helllla creepy. I'm a private guy, and they expect everybody in the company to be somewhat public figures, down to the recruiters and office managers.
Forgive me, I meant to say hella fucking creepy. Everything their employees do is public. It invites stalkers, harassment and phishing attempts. Terrible opsec.
I dunno bra, I write code because I like being the guy behind the guy, not the face on the window. You do you boo, whatever, but I've got my opinions and I'll express them whenever I want, however I want, and wherever I want.
I'll also add to this that they've got an incredibly incompetent recruitment department. The recruiter I dealt with really, really, really likes to use big words to show off her English lit degree.
I posted about it on twitter, 5 people responded with "Did she use the word perspicuous at least 3 times in every e-mail? Did she ghost you for 2 months, then send you angry messages that you haven't been more proactive in chasing her down? When you turned her down, did she say "I'm very disappointed, I saw something special in you?"
they should diversify their donation warchest by helping out archive.org and mozilla, in the interest of helping build and maintain a open and freer internet
its a fucked up situation but do you have any alternatives? wikipedia keeping amasing all that money while mozilla sinks deeper and deeper into being dependent on google ad money, reducing costs which means laying off developers?
Mozilla was a highly effective organization when Mozilla Corporation had in the range of 150–200 people (or even less) on payroll. The increase in (paid) headcount has been mainly correlated with:
- the removal of features in the name of smaller surface area (while at the same time adding telemetry and analytics[1])
- other lame fixtures of soulless corporations like cringy/dishonest PR babble
There's also stuff like breaking incoming links to content on mozilla.org; making it steadily harder to contribute; keeping things closed source (whereas before everything was licensed under MPL or some other FOSS license); being willing to cut deals with partners that come with strings attached and NDAs; wasting probably a billion dollars on obviously doomed things like Firefox OS and calling it a "moonshot"; etc.
> Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap.
To be fair to Wikipedia here, quoting a nearly ten year old figure and comparing it to current earnings in order to prove that their required expenses are low is not that honest.
… But have they had to scale to a degree commensurate with the amount of money they are spending? Absolutely not. The "Wikipedia has cancer" article makes that point handily.
The 21-22 annual plan [1] just shows "Technical Infrastructure" as 23.8% of "Programmatic", which is 76% of the budget, so 23.8% * 76% = 18%, or $27m.
"Technical Infrastructure" includes "all the engineering and technology" though. I'm not sure if a breakdown which includes server costs is available? I remember it being a pretty small piece of previous budgets.
It's not about usage going up. It's about the cost of usage going up v the cost of operations going down.
As an example, if we are to trust this site (https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm), a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars in 2012. You can purchase 8TB for 130 dollars now.
From this wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics) we can see the amount of English articles has about doubled since then. Chances are that storage costs have not only not gone up, they have gone down.
As far as I can see, the text of Wikipedia is about 10GB. I don't know how much space the images occupy, but if we assume they take up roughly the same space, then a single 2TB disk would accomodate 1,000 Wikipedias.
Totally agreed that the cost isn't really storage, but I wanted to point out that you're underestimating a fair bit on the size. Conveniently, there's a wikipedia article about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
"As of 21 September 2022, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 21.23 GB without media."
(Note that's gzipped, so the actual size is much higher in-use.)
Media is, of course, vastly larger. Sadly, the last number given was from 2014, so I'd expect it to have increased massively since then:
"The size of the media files in Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias was described as well over 23 TB near the end of 2014"
> (Note that's gzipped, so the actual size is much higher in-use.)
OK; I did a quick dig to see how big Wikipedia is, but you've dug deeper.
You can still stick the whole English Wikipedia on a single disk, probably with all linked media (I suspect that a lot of what's on Wikimedia isn't linked from Wikipedia articles). So the main cost issue is serving content to the network; and there are lots of server farms that would cheerfully do that for the love.
Internet hosting costs have long been stable at about $2.5 million. You'll find them on page 5 of the following pdf (the page is numbered 3 and headed "Consolidated Statements of Activities"):
Annual revenue was $163 million. Of course hosting costs alone don't cover the entire outlay, but Wikimedia's budget and money demands have absolutely exploded in recent years.
Your comment is quite dishonest and not considering the whole context.
> After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March
> “WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,”
> He put the running costs at $10 million a year. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years.
> So where does the money go? Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course.
> Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising
Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely useful.
Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas, but nobody cares.
I'd also add that while arguments that Wikipedia is bloated beyond their mission is worthy of discussion, saying that Wikipedia should only be funding their current site is too narrow. I think Wikipedia should be able to pursue projects such as their wiki textbooks idea (which was ultimately a failure, but still worth trying).
That's essentially pointless though. They may earmark your $10 for the core mission, but that just means another $10 that wasn't specified doesn't have to be used for the core, and gets used for their political initiatives. It's entirely semantics and doesn't change behavior at all unless an overwhelming majority earmark their donations the same way.
That "unless" clause at the end of your comment is precisely the point though. Just because you don't want to support most of the things that WMF are doing doesn't mean that others don't want to. If a majority of donors earmark their donations, then they will collectively have rebuked the foundation. If a majority of donors don't earmark their donations, then they will have collectively approved of the foundation's actions.
I'm entirely fine for funds to be spend on developing technology or even hosting of such resources.
On other hand, as any of it is spend on political propaganda while they have huge reserves... No money from me. If you want to do lies and propaganda start a new charity.
I think that's fair enough, but there's also a reasonable criticism that they are a) not being straight about that ambition in their fundraising efforts and b) some of their projects are significantly more political than textbooks.
And trust me, agreeing with Unherd about anything does not sit naturally to me.
I'm fine with pursuing other projects, it gets weird when they end up spending huge amounts of their money by giving grants to other organizations. I'd have no problem donating knowing they use it to fund projects, but knowing that they pretty much redonate much of it makes it feel pointless.
The issue is that they make it sound like they are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia running when they are actually wealthier than ever before.
The whole premise of Wikipedia (or aspiration, at least, and yes, not always fulfilled ...) is that people should have information so they can't be manipulated.
It kind of sucks to see the very organisation hosting the site do the opposite, don't you think?
Indeed, it's highly manipulative. Wikimedia does way more than "just" Wikipedia, and the majority of the money goes to these other activities. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, some of those activities might be well worth it.
But the banners I've seen have invariably been about the imminent demise of Wikipedia. Not that they got lots of other side projects they want funded.
Weird, I haven't seen any recent banners frame it in terms of demise of Wikipedia. The urgent banners I've seen are about the time to complete the fund drive. Along the lines of: If X% of users paid $Y then the goal would be reached in Z minutes.
If you assume the fund drive exists to help keep the lights on then I think it is natural to treat it as an existential issue for Wikipedia, but that doesn't seem to match the specific language used.
2021/2022 revenue target: $150M, already exceeded by end of quarter 3, weeks before the start of the fundraiser in India, South Africa and South America:
The banner shown in the article has a subtle tone of demise: if you don't donate, Wikipedia itself stops being independent, could not thrive, could not give reliable or independent info. And then the money is primarily spent in things other than Wikipedia. They never state or at least insinuate where the money go.
This sounds like the exact CTA of countless YouTubers asking for Patreon support. No level of coffers or ever increasing support changes their ask. (which to me is ok)
Patreon supporters generally know where their money is going: Straight into the YouTuber's (or whatever) pocket. That's the goal of the contributor and there's generally no particular deception on the YouTuber's part either. I want to give them $5 even if they already have a lot of other $5, because that's the value I'm getting or whatever.
I agree with others that Wikipedia very carefully makes it sound like they've got a sob story where if you don't donate they're going to shut down, so they probably get a lot of donations made with the belief that they're funding Wikipedia, but instead it gets shunted out to something else. Maybe something the donor is OK with, but maybe something not.
> Wikimedia does way more than "just" Wikipedia, and the majority of the money goes to these other activities.
[Citation needed]
And by citation needed, i mean i think this is a false statement. Unless you count things that help multiple wikimedia sites as not helping wikipedia because it is not just wikipedia. After all, all of these sites run the same software, a bug fix affects all of them pretty equally.
Charities seem to do do that sort of thing to raise money, probably because it works and also because the current activities are already funded.
When donations are sought after a disaster the implication is that the money is going to directly help the victims, but the reality is that it will fund other efforts, possibly including helping the victims of a future disaster.
This is loser logic. It's possible to play by self-imposed self-hindering rules, sure, but your competitors probably aren't. In business, you play the game that exists, not the game you want to exist. Politics is how you do the "game you want to exist" part.
Since we're on the ycombinator chat -- do you think ycombinator disagrees? Do you think businesses incubated here are taught about "ethical and moral advertising at all costs" or taught about "finding market fit and scaling fast at all costs", even using aggressively successful a/b tested etc marketing that many would find distasteful?
And yet, the western capitalistic system that is built on private businesses acting in their own self interest, regulated by governments of the people enforcing social good, have created the least violent, least disease-ridden, most luxurious and incredible experience for humanity in history (or at least since civilization).
Frankly, calling it dystopic that businesses play by the laws as written is ridiculous. Change the laws instead of expecting businesses to self-regulate out of the goodness of their hearts. Why is that dystopic?
Then they should tell donors and prospective donors what they do. As ever, all the content is written by unpaid volunteers (or people paid by others), but still the Wikimedia Foundation's spending doubles every few years.
And somehow the priorities are wrong. The Wikimedia Foundation has annual 8-figure surpluses, but volunteers are writing open letters to complain that the Foundation fails to update and maintain critical aspects of the software:
Notably none of the criteria measured in that rating consider their marketing. So yes their policies and filings exist, but those are not what they're presenting to potential donors, so do not prove the ads are not misleading
Yes, users can go elsewhere to find the information. The records are on file in the metaphorical filing cabinet downstairs. But if the messaging you're putting front and center contradicts said records, their existence doesn't counter criticism of the messaging
"Elsewhere" in this case is the FAQ link at the bottom of the donation page. If a person has questions, that's what an FAQ is for.
Calls to action are kept intentionally short because the research on human psychology is clear: every additional sentence beyond the first few decreases the odds of a conversion (that's adspeak for "closing the deal").
There are laws against fine print for a reason. The front page pop up ad tells a different story than a stack of text heavy articles that require no small amount of technical expertise to figure out.
"The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege..."
from the knowledge equity fund page. what the heck
A good encyclopedia would present information from myriad perspectives, not just whatever happened to be "dominant." I want my article about Christoper Colombus to talk about how 19th century immigrants to America, especially Italians, found him inspirational, but also about how he was brutal, greedy, and ineffectual.
(The current Wikipedia article is actually not bad on that front).
The funny thing is that the Wikimedia Foundation is trying to get volunteers in Africa and India to edit and contribute content for free – content which then feeds the search engines and voice assistants of trillion-dollar US companies who do their damnedest not to pay tax in the countries in which they operate.
Yeah, let's get away from imperialism and patriarchalism ...
Just because some wikimedia activities (primarily legal compliance, financial management, contractual work for hosting) are vital to wikipedia does not mean others are (arbiter of other charities, social causes, events, etc). And by budget spend and headcount allocation, there's far more of the latter yet they portray it as if it's the former that is at risk
Oh please, the mentions of having to seek alternative funding models like subscriptions and ads are clearly meant to raise the image of a site on the brink of unsustainability to potential donors
The implied subscription threat is a complete red herring. They should be ashamed for even mentioning it in their fundraising messages.
Wikipedians wouldn't work for free for a subscription service. The whole project would fork to a new host. The Wikimedia Foundation's own mission statement says, "The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity."
You can't contribute donations to Firefox; you can only contribute to the Mozilla Foundation, which spends most of the money it gets from donations on things that aren't Firefox.
Sure. And if you accept those images or not is your thing. Their banners are super annoying at only 2% conversion rate. What will it be without those banners?
Read the screenshot: "... humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence", "if you donate... Wikipedia could keep thriving for years".
The question as to whether this is manipulative isn't "is there are any clear statement of fact that is unambiguously a lie even in the most charitable possible interpretation?", it's "will this make ill-informed readers think their donations are necessary for Wikipedia's survival, and is this impression created deliberately?"
They have enough money to fund wikipedia in perpetuity several times over. Wikipedia's independence and thrivingness aren't at any risk whatsoever, even if donations were to completely stop immediately.
The donations are used for side projects almost all donors are completely unaware of, whose existence and nature are not hinted at in the ads soliciting donations.
Well the risk is they'd invest too much into saving the side projects in the event of a downturn that they would put wikipedia at risk, which is why even people like me who don't have ideological squabbles with the content of the side projects are concerned by the bundling.
Again, problems with basic communication, it seems. Perpetuity means "forever". Because they have a finite amount of money and they are not generating money, they can't "fund wikipedia in perpetuity several times over".
They way they DO stay online for a resilient amount of time is by generating money, i.e. through donations.
In fact, they used to say exactly how many months they have left. Now they don't say that, because they feel they can allow themselves that. Does that mean that it makes sense to stop fundraising? No. Because the minute the public doesn't feel that there's an urgency in donating to your cause, then it's someone else's problem, meaning it's nobody's problem and that's how you kill NPOs.
Money generates money. To fund something in perpetuity you need enough that the returns from investing it (taking into account tax, costs, inflation, etc) exceed the annual payment needed. This is not an infinite amount.
I haven't checked the figures but the article claims the foundation has $400 million cash and Wikipedia costs under $2 million per annum. There's no easy way of calculating the maximum annual sum that can be taken out in perpetuity from a well managed endowment but it's certainly a lot more than 0.5%.
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.
...
We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Yes, it's in a whiny tone. The fact that it will go down is your interpretation. An alternative interpretation could be "98% of people get asymmetric value out of Wikipedia, please make it less asymmetric".
In fact, if they stop begging, what percentage of their users will contribute? Will it remain at 2%?
What else would "We ask you, humbly, to help...We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online" mean if not to raise the possibility to go down is present?
You mean, what percentage of users will pay for using a website advertised as "The Free Encyclopedia", written by unpaid volunteers?
Just saying. If the WMF were working flat out on serving the volunteer community it would be a different matter. But it's taken on a life of its own, with Wikipedia as its cash cow.
Also, last year, the then-Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. (The wife of the WMF’s PR consultant, the Clinton Foundation’s Craig Minassian, works on the show as a producer.)
In the interview, Noah put it to Maher that the downside of being a non-profit is that “you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running. So, two parts. One, is that true and how does it affect you, and then, two, why would you make this thing if it’s not going to make you money?”
Maher’s cheerful answer made no reference to the WMF’s vast money reserves, but emphasised that Wikipedia’s lack of ads was responsible for the site being so trusted today.
The Wikimedia Foundation had an 8-figure surplus in 9 of the last 10 years. The only exception was 2013/2014, where the surplus was "only" $8.3M. That was their "worst year" in the last ten years. The Wikimedia Foundation has beaten its own annual revenue record every year of its existence.
My reluctance to donating again to wikipedia lies almost entirely on the subtext of their communication. There's a dissonance between the class of the project, the alleged finances, the in-your-face popups (some years it was half the page).
I have the same idea. A tiny pastel margin block would make me donate easily. A simple 1 or 2 clicks process and that's it.
I don't know how much experience they have, maybe stats say that subtle UX don't generate enough donations, while massive hated popups still bring massively more money. I hope so..
For me, at least, the fundraising banner is drawn on the page after the main content. Which means that the main content loads, displays, and then is pushed downwards by the banner.
I don't know whether this is intentional, but if it is, then I would classify it as a dirty, attention-grabbing, dark-pattern-esque, trick. It would be more honest if they just used the blink tag.
I don't get the outrage either. It's almost like people want Wikipedia to be barely scrapping by which isn't good. Having some money in your reserves is fine.
If lifespan was the goal they would keep the extent of their organisational structure to the minimum. But this is obviously not the case with now more than 500 employees and some with big paychecks.
An organization that has the goodwill of the hacker community has to perpetually walk the line on the edge of pauper to maintain its virtue, lest it be seen as selling out and no longer worthy of the goodwill of the hacker community.
It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.
If they were running ads that said, "Hey we sort of have the money we need to keep doing this for a while, but you can give us some more money if you want to help", then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Wikipedia's current ads are both misleading and more intrusive than ever.
550 employees is huge, especially for an organization that doesn't even pay those employees to create and edit the content on the site. It's so far away from "on the edge of pauper" that the point you're making—even if true for other, non-Wikimedia realms—is completely irrelevant here.
> If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money.
Bullshit.
To repeat: the ads today are more misleading and more intrusive than ever. In years past there were ads that were unlike the ones used today. (People complained about them, but I was not among them.) Those ads were successful. There's no evidence to argue that they wouldn't be successful today, too.
There is plenty of evidence, in the form of the hockey-sticking donation revenue for the organization, that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past.
As I said, hacker ethos of biasing in favor of the scrappy underdog. It was fine to fundraise when they were small and their strategy was unproven, but as they grow and their strategy is demonstrated as effective, they lose our favor.
ETA: speaking of human psychology... It's an election cycle in the US. It's interesting that this story, the facts of which have been known since last year (according to a cursory search of news story dates) is suddenly again making the rounds right now. May be simple coincidence.
In part this is a cumulative effect. People are invited to set up a recurring donation, or include the Wikimedia Foundation in their will, so naturally there is a growing base level of steady income each year, with first-time donors on top of that.
The reason the story is coming up now is that the Wikimedia Foundation is currently "testing" the fundraising banners, in time for the big annual fundraising campaign in December. So at present, a certain percentage of Wikipedia readers in major English-speaking countries are shown the fundraising banners.
> There is plenty of evidence[...] that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past.
You just moved the goalposts. (In this case, moved them such that your "argument" is just restating the substance of the complaint.) Wikimedia is bringing in a lot more money doing this sort of thing. That's well understood—by all, i.e., those on both sides of the issue.
Your job is not to defend the position that the aggressive ads bring in more donations, but that if they weren't using them then "they wouldn't make _any_ money". Please leave dishonest sleights of hand at the door.
I thought "any" would be understood to be rhetorical exaggeration; my apologies. My actual position I've posited is an org loses support of the hacker community when it becomes successful even if nothing about what it's doing fundamentally changes. If their ads are different now, it's because they refined their approach; the goal was always to get people to give them money to be used as they saw fit.
The banners have become more intrusive and obnoxious as the organisation has become richer. Ten years ago, they were quite mild by comparison. You wouldn't get ten reminders, the banners didn't cover your entire screen, and they didn't beseech you not to scroll away.
A couple of years ago a Wikimedia Foundation fundraising report explained why that "Don't scroll away" phrase was added:
------------
“Don’t Scroll Away”
A simple, yet effective phrase that we were surprised to see resonate with readers worldwide was simply asking readers not to “scroll away” from or “scroll past” the fundraising message in the banner. We believe that addressing the context in which people donate helps improve the donation rate.
Feel free to provide an actual argument against any one of the following:
- Wikipedia is not short on cash
- The current ads are misleading and intrusive
- The ads of years past were successful despite not being this misleading or intrusive
- The point you're trying to raise, when you're not being mercurial about it (the point about "support of the hacker community" for causes "on the edge of pauper") is, even if we assume it to be true, has no place in this discussion, in light of the circumstances (i.e. what's true about the subject we're discussing—and what isn't true, either)
Sure. If you don't want to discuss hacker bias against success via using the tools that are demonstrated successful because they're not "virtuous" tools, I can't force you. It's the only piece of this I'm interested in though.
In other words, what you're ostensibly here to discuss has nothing to do with WMF's campaign in light of the actual circumstances, and you've shown a willingness to make a bunch of indefensible claims along the way—only to say that you were never really serious about those things. There's no good reason for anyone to attempt to discuss anything with you when the only thing you seem to actually be committed to is the use of misdirection while hoping no one notices.
They can keep lying and misleading people if they want, and they will get money from people who are okay with being lied to and misled. If they want the money and respect of people who place an incredibly high value on truth (like myself), then they need to tell the truth.
I will sooner give $20 to someone begging who tells me that he intends on spending it on booze, than I would a well meaning non-profit who attempts to snow me with rhetoric honed on manipulating millions of other people before me.
I want Wikimedia, and Wikipedia to be a Neutral historian of world data and events, to preserve facts and promote the free access of those facts to everyone in the world.
They have strayed far far far far far from that goal
>3) In what way are they strayed far away from it?
By introducing political bias into the selection and presentation of information.
If I check pages on feminism or even radical feminism, I wouldn't see any information on how some prominent early feminist figures advocated mass genocide of men. Most of the pages are generally shown benign.
If I check a few pages on prominent manosphere subcultures, I don't have to scroll far before the word 'misogynist' pops up, despite the fact both cultures are fairly similar (both contain a small extremist population and a large population of idealists), and feminism having far, far more text written, both per page and across Wikipedia as a whole.
Personally, I'm fairly certain spreading a few more words on the bloodlust of early feminists would shine a fairly different light on the movement without changing the ideology of the majority. It's not just information hidden away from high traffic pages, it practically doesn't exist if you don't know exactly what to look for. Yet any kind of filth is practically at the front for anything related to the countercultures. That reeks of tone setting.
I'm sure we all agree that Wikipedia has a ton of biases in all sorts of directions, but I'm not following that Wikimedia has anything to do with. They rarely make any editorial choices, usually only following legal decisions.
Maybe it doesn't, but a commenter further up mentioned wanting both Wikipedia and Wikimedia. So in turn, I'm not following why Wikimedia alone is the focus here.
That said, it seems like a no-brainer that using a hands-off approach in a subculture known for being biased is an open invitation for articles to become biased. That doesn't mean Wikimedia is at fault, either.
"Human societies typically exhibit gender identities and gender roles that distinguish between masculine and feminine characteristics and prescribe the range of acceptable behaviours and attitudes for their members based on their sex.".. Typically? Nope.
"The most common categorisation is a gender binary of men and women.[422] Many societies recognise a third gender,[423] or less commonly a fourth or fifth.[424][425] In some other societies, non-binary is used as an umbrella term for a range of gender identities that are not solely male or female.".. Many societies recognise a third gender? Nope.
What? How is it not typical to have general men and women roles in different societies? Those roles aren't always the same but the existance of such roles is more than typical is almost ubiquitous.
> Many societies recognise a third gender? Nope.
Is the problem there the word "many"? There is a citation with the number of societies they found that have such a mention.
They do say the most common is just two and its primarily associated with the sex of the person, how is the acknowledgement of cultural genders beyond that binary "an agenda"?
> Just some hyperbolic mischosen words right?
So you think the problem is two quantitative words (many/typically) that make certain social constructs seem more common that what you believe is fair? Is that what it boils down to?
"Human societies typically exhibit gender identities".. Nope, as the linked page explains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity, it started in the 60s, but until 2015, nobody heard of that. "Non-binary" didn't exist until recently. I'm not judging it, but it's for sure not typical. But to write that it is typical, is a farce. It's atypical, but exists and should be respected.
> Is the problem there the word "many"?
Yup, the right is "few". Few countries recognize it. From 195, 16. But again, to create a new reality to support an agenda, is wrong.
You probably should read it a bit better then. The existance of the term gernder identity and the existance of gender identities are not the same thing. The word "sex" came slightly later than the first time humans reproduced.
> "Non-binary" didn't exist until recently.
no gender identity existed until recently, but thats because identity is a late 18th century concept. Historically people didn't think of themselves as individuals so they did not separate into identities.
The existance of people who did not "belong" to their prescribed sex, has a long history though. From the non binary page on wikipedia you can see someoone called "not a man or a woman" in the us in the 1700s.
> Yup, the right is "few". Few countries recognize it. From 195, 16.
Thats not what the quote said, the quote said many societes recognise a third gender. It doesn't say current existing nations. if you followed the citation you would have found the book the quote came from where it lists examples:
>> The existence of a third sex or gender enables us to understand how Byzantine palace eunuchs and Indian hijras met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated practices such as self-castration, and how intimate and forbidden desires were expressed among the Dutch Sodomites in the early modern period, the Sapphists of eighteenth-century England, or the so-called hermaphrodite-homosexuals of nineteenth-century Europe and America.
The book I am assuming cites even more historical examples in different ancient and modern societies of non conforming binary roles in society. Enough examples that the author feels warranted to claim there are "many" in the wikipedia summary of the book.
You are claiming wikipedia is biased because they used the word "many" in a concept you feel there isn't enough examples to warrant it. Is that what it boils down to? Your feelings about quantitative adjectives? Thats a loose definition of "agenda pushing" dont you think?
> If I check pages on feminism or even radical feminism, I wouldn't see any information on how some prominent early feminist figures advocated mass genocide of men.
So you think they missed critical information, which related to my second point, who gets to decide. Currently is unpaid moderators, so wikimedia can hardly be blamed for it. no?
> I'm fairly certain spreading a few more words on the bloodlust of early feminists would shine a fairly different light on the movement without changing the ideology of the majority.
But that seems to be intentionally deciding what people should believe. If you think that the ideology of early feminists is irrelevant to the larger movement but might help to turn people to your side, you're not keeping wikipedia unbiased, youre just biasing it more no?
> Yet any kind of filth is practically at the front for anything related to the countercultures.
Edit: consider spending on the above vs. hiring more people to translate some of the 6.5 million English articles to other languages that typically number only ~1.5 million or so.
> I'm sure this is not what people thought they were funding when they donated to Wikipedia
I do not think your argument follows. Wikipedia as a whole is untrustworthy because at one point they donated 1 million bucks divided between 5 NGOs through their fundation?
It would be like arguing that Exxon has strayed far far far away from their mission because they donated 20 million to the Amazon conservation. Exxon is still extracting oil and maximising profit for its shareholders, and wikipedia is still a free open encyclopedia. I don't think miniscule donations (related to revenue) mark a departure from the mission worthy of betraying their core intention.
Firstly, you asked how they strayed far from their goal of being a "neutral historian of world events", at least in idealistic terms. Those grants are specifically funding activism which many would argue is not neutral, so your question has been answered.
Secondly, Exxon is not a charitable organization so you're drawing a false equivalency. Wikimedia is asking for donations with ads that suggest donating is about keeping Wikipedia running. Most people donating then arguably think they're keeping Wikipedia running and/or expanding its usefulness, such as with translations. I think most people would be quite surprised to see some of that money going to activist DEI initiatives that many would consider to be far from the goal of increasing Wikipedia's utility.
> you asked how they strayed far from their goal of being a "neutral historian of world events",
I asked him how they strayed far far far away from being free, neutral and preserving facts.
> Those grants are specifically funding activism which many would argue is not neutral, so your question has been answered.
this does not follow again. I mean first of all, free and preserving facts would be fulfilled so the only part that could be compromised as you said is neutrality. But their grants affect future events not the ones recorded and wikimedia aren't even the people writting the text on wikipedia, they are unpaid moderators. So you would have to prove how the parent company donating to some company can affect volunteers in a way so blatant they would stray "far far far away" from those three missions.
> Exxon is not a charitable organization so you're drawing a false equivalency.
how so? The non voting shareholders of exxon and the donators in wikimedia have the same role, financing the operation.
> I think most people would be quite surprised to see some of that money going to activist DEI initiatives that many would consider to be far from the goal of increasing Wikipedia's utility.
Sure, but that is still not proof of them not being neutral though. You are implying things and letting people read between the lines but even if you try and prove ideological bias in the grants given, there is not logical throughline into the unpaid moderation of the content of the pages.
At most you could argue they betrayed the trust of donors by using those donations for paying for things beyond the server costs of wikipedia. Which is fair, but from that to calling their mission compromised seems a leap a tad far
> I mean first of all, free and preserving facts would be fulfilled so the only part that could be compromised as you said is neutrality.
Yes, which was a requirement the OP specified alongside the others. Abdicating neutrality was not acceptable.
> But their grants affect future events not the ones recorded and wikimedia aren't even the people writting the text on wikipedia, they are unpaid moderators.
Wikipedia only posts information with citations. The grant is funding organizations that will provide citations from a certain viewpoint ("shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege"), thus affecting the information that will show up on Wikipedia in the future. This follows trivially so I'm not sure exactly what doesn't follow.
> how so? The non voting shareholders of exxon and the donators in wikimedia have the same role, financing the operation.
The returns shareholders are expecting is money. The returns Wikipedia donors are expecting are improvements to Wikipedia in its role as neutral historian. Money and those expectations are not commensurate, so the comparison isn't really valid on its face.
Furthermore, if you accept that Wikimedia funded activism that's not strictly in line with being a neutral historian, then you must conclude that they abdicated that role contrary to donor expectations.
If you wanted a proper comparison to Exxon, then it would be comparable to Exxon making a series of choices that reduce shareholder value, which gives shareholders grounds to sue. There is no such recourse for Wikimedia donors as far as I understand so they still aren't directly comparable, but the "betrayal" of violated expectations as you termed it, is of a similar kind.
> Wikipedia only posts information with citations. The grant is funding organizations that will provide citations from a certain viewpoint ("shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege"), thus affecting the information that will show up on Wikipedia in the future. This follows trivially so I'm not sure exactly what doesn't follow.
Lets follow that example. You assume those grants can provide citations, and the mission of the grant is to shift away from eurocentricity. So theoretically there are enough eurocentric citacions already in Wikipedia, and they would provide a different analysis on the same topics.
This would improve wikipedia neutrality rather than diminish it. If OP wanted a neutral wikipedia then those grants would help that mission (if we believe that the grants actually generate content that promotes views not currently cited, and that people who update the affected pages will find, or cite those materials in the future. Two big ifs)
The only way this could affect neutrality is if you think a biased eurocentric telling is neutral but thats a circular argument where the status quo is always neutral and any new information is straying away from neutrality.
> Is there a neutral historian version of world events?
Just because there's no truly neutral version doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for neutrality. There are clearly anti-neutral approaches which we should always try to eliminate.
> Who chooses which facts show up, or how do we know if certain critical facts are missing?
I agree, but with a warchest of $400m, their budget can seemingly be funded at 2.5% withdrawal per year, so there may be no need to ask anymore. (Though personally I'd rather they spent even more and had more full time editors and researchers improving the site.)
Yeah, I didn't mean original or scientific research, more working on missing citations, integrating information from newly discovered original sources, or maybe even attempting to discover such original sources. I guess Wikipedians prefer to call this editing!
With the foundation's resources and clout, someone working on their behalf may be able to get better access to many source materials.
And if there were full-time paid editors, I'd stop editing immediately
So, I'm guessing you know a lot about Wikipedia.. but aren't there already full-time paid editors, just not from the foundation? I struggle to believe there are not well funded interests out there investing money into improving Wikipedia (whether such improvements are objective or subjective) in the same way that some tech companies fund, say, programming language core teams.
I guess what I was thinking more of was philanthropic organizations paying mathematicians, geologists, and various other types of academic to improve the quality of Wikipedia's entries on a full time basis. Maybe I am being hopefully naive about the allocation of capital though, and thinking merely the sort of things I'd like to fund if I were a billionaire.. ;-)
> may be able to get better access to many source materials.
As an established Wikipedia editor, you can sign-up for free access to a variety of source materials that "civilians" would have to pay for. You don't have to be employed by Wikimedia.
> but aren't there already full-time paid editors, just not from the foundation?
There are two kinds of paid editor: people who are employed by WMF, and also edit (but they're not actually paid to edit, at least in theory); and lobbyists, reputation-managers, marketing consultants and so on, who are allowed to edit within limits. Personally I would like those pluggers removed with extreme prejudice, but WP is very relaxed about these things.
You're labouring under a severe misconception. Wikipedia is written and curated by unpaid volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation itself "does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects":
I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues.
When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.
I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.
The thing with those sorts of requests is that a lot of the push for diversity is literally skin deep - they want people who look different, but think the same. They're not trying to say "hey, we'd like more electrical engineers, nurses, priests, political conservatives, etc." to contribute.
People with actually different experiences and backgrounds, somewhat the way how the ideal model of science is set up - individual humans are fallible and partisan, get your work checked by someone who disagrees because they're the ones who most want it to not be true.
They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do.
If you write about, say, the controversies around the Latin Mass in the Catholic Church, getting a liberal woman to check a liberal man's work is useless - they're both likely to either have a dim view of the conservative sects that prefer the Latin Mass, to be just utterly unable to understand the religious conservatives' POV and worldview, or both. I know I did until I actually befriended some, it was something you could liken to moral colorblindness - the modern secular liberal is aggressively morally colorblind and lacking in understanding of others - again, speaking from experience.
I really don't even care that much about skin colors.
White, black, purple Americans tend to have similar perspectives on things, so do white, black and purple Swedes.
The issue is that the articles on many international things are clearly written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, often citing purely English sources on events that happen in, say, France or Syria.
Mostly because I'm tired of these U.S.A. “diversity” efforts which come down to “more persons from the U.S.A.” overlooking most of the world.
That they apparently think gender defines perspectives more than ethnicity and cultural background is the problem. Apparently they can make an effort towards gender but not toward the issue that plagues English-Language Wikipedia that only English-language sources are used in the end, often even about subjects that are fundamentally not in English such as the critical response of non-English media, being phrased as though it's a global consensus.
Again, I've seen some places where his has recently improved, but it's annoying to, say, see on Wikipedia that for instance “criticism was mixed” on a French film that was overwhelmingly positively received in France because English-language criticism was more negative due to cultural differences.
It is my perspective that gender and race are completely insignificant compared to culture and it annoys me how often Anglo-Saxons think otherwise, probably because of never really having interacted with a foreign culture.
In the end, from my perspective, Anglo-Saxons from whatever gender or color tend to think very much alike and very different from persons from entirely different countries. The country one is born in influences one's perspectives far more than one's gender or skin color, how could it not really?
That they prioritize such minutiæ over bigger problems is something I found a slap in the face, or rather, a reminder of the issue that they're probably barely aware of it and don't realize how different the perspective of other culture can be.
Indeed, that's a common issue too with historical events.
But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally.
From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.
Yeah man, and how dare the Red Cross manipulate people with pictures of starving children in their famine relief ads? A graph showing the intersection between available calories trending down and required calories staying constant would land so much better on HN.
It's ironic that you use Red Cross as an example. An organization that has been proven again and again to be among the worst charity orgs you can donate to, repeatedly spends money on anything else but charity, and often does things that are both antithetical to their stated mission and unethical to boot.
In some ways Charity Navigator is like the BBB, and people need to take those ratings with a grain of salt.
What is not said here, but I think it was started this article there was a break-down on Twitter [2] recently where someone broke down the grants Wikimedia Foundation gives to other charities, A lot of Wikimedia has become advocacy for social issues not the spread of free information. Some of those Social issues many of the donors to Wikimedia may not agree with, and it being redistributed to some pretty controversial organizations. People donating to Wikimedia thinking they are advancing Wikipedia but in reality the bulk of the foundation spending is issuing grants to other charities.
>>Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget
I am reminded of this TED talk[1] from several years ago that talks about fundraising and charity
BBB == Better Business Bureau a private organization in the US that "rates" business based on certain factors and customer complaints. It is often confused with having some kind of governmental authority, approval, or validity when in reality they just a non-profit trade organization.
Very similar to charity navigator but rating for-profit businesses
After fighting with Ford over a recall issue for over a year, I opened a claim with the BBB. Two months later they closed it with a note that Ford explained that my car had been determined to be outside the claim (even though it experienced the recall related failure). Four months later, Ford issued be a check for the full cost of the repair, with an apology note. Even though at that point, I had given up.
I have to believe that the BBB claim had some effect on that. The BBB may have accepted Ford's word, and closed the claim, but it resulted in some messaging up the consumer complaint chain.
Ford and most corps have a deny-deny-deny culpability policy until the complaint hits someone who can make a decision on the matter (they actually have queues/emails). There is a hard money limit for the peons to be able to admit that it's the company's fault, above that amount it is a blanket deny and delay policy. We had a recent President who also lived by the same policies; lawyers have ingrained into the DNA of business.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you didn't verify, even slightly, anything that tweet-thread author said.
Either that, or like the author, you agree with their claim that grant money going to journalists who are people of color is 'furthering the inescapable American culture war.'
Jeez, how dare those black people engage in journalism that isn't about white culture. They're declaring war on American (white) culture!" /s
Only if you read it in the most uncharitable way, and ignore the very real aspects of the "Culture War" around things like CRT, Anti-Racism, DEI, ESG, etc that have very real political and partisan aspects to them. Often intersecting with the very concept of what role government should play in people's life, what authority government should have, and how government should regulate both behavior and economies
I am uncomfortable with the video stills at the end that do seem to be picking on black people. Maybe I am doing the Twitter user an injustice, but there were four other grant recipients they could have been picking on as well:
This said, I agree with the premise that the Wikimedia Foundation is partisan. Its General Counsel came from the Tides Foundation, which is as partisan as any of its equivalents on the right, and its Chief Advancement Officer, responsible for fundraising and strategic partnerships, had a long career in political philanthropy before joining Wikimedia:
The videos are what they are claimed to be. The last one features the black lady talking about how get experiments killed octopuses (weird!). You sound like you didn't watch them and are just reacting to the fact that black women are being criticized?
That twitter thread is garbage start to finish. It starts with 'wikipedia started out in a basement on a shoestring, so clearly all the millions spent two decades later is being pissed into the wind', which is absurd.
...then attacks SERCH claiming they've done nothing but release 'youtube videos with 50 views', attacks them for not having produced any within the last year (maybe their grant ended?) when if one google "SERCH foundation" they'd quickly see "Our signature program is Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, an online platform and monthly web series focused on women of color in STEM." and further:
> WHAT WE DO
> Produce a live web-series with timely and relevant content
> Celebrate women of color with weekly #WCWinSTEM features
> Publish original content written by and for women of color in STEM
> Foster support and networking via our online platform
> Convene as a community virtually and at in-person events
> Advocate for ourselves + our STEM interests
....and then the big bad boogeymonster really blows its dog whistle when the author associates a foundation distributing grants to journalists who are people of color with "bankrolling the inescapable American culture war." You hear that sound? That's the sound of my eyes rolling, hard. Grants to people of color who work in journalism is furthering a "American culture war." Gosh, those pesky people of color, spreading their "culture war."
The author of the thread then mentions Guy Macon, who, from a quick google, appears to be a transphobic bigot and a troll who made a point of purposefully misgendering a trans wikipedian just to get a rise out of them, and then made a huge scene when he wasn't allowed to erase history and pretend the whole thing didn't happen, and demanded that the person unblock him. Good lord, what a fucking child. https://www.reddit.com/r/RealWikiInAction/comments/rv9x94/gu...
....and then it ends somehow vaguely tying wikipedia to an experiment involving octopii hatchlings getting killed, or something.
It's a gish-gallop mess, and what a giant surprise it was to find that the author has a long, rambling thread about police killings in the UK that seems to say "that, really, if those black people just stopped committing crimes, they wouldn't get arrested and shot and stuff": https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1574101120347168770.html
if you want to know where you lost me, this is where....
Anyone talking about "dog whistle" gets an instant ignore from me.
At the end of the day, my problem with wikimedia is the same problem I have with United Way, and other such "charities". I do not support charities of charities. I want to give directly to a cause I support, The fact that wikimedia is soliciting donations for one thing, then using that money for another is very misleading and IMO unethical, People do not donate to Wikipedia to support SERCH or any of the other organizations, they do so to support wikipedia, that is where the money should be spent.
> Anyone talking about "dog whistle" gets an instant ignore from me.
I take it you think a "dog-whistle" is something the left criticizes the right for doing; and I suppose you are of the right. In fact a dog-whistle could be uttered by a politician of any colour; it's simply a message that is more likely to be heard by one particular political group than others.
There are evidently what you might call "anti-dog-whistles": messages that are not likely to be heard by some group. Apparently you belong to the group that can't hear messages containing the term "dog-whistle".
No, "dog-whistle" has become the same thing as "conspiracy theorist" but for the charge of racism. It is fraught with overuse to the point of dilution and misuse.
In the same way that anyone that dared suggest that COVID could have been a lab leak before "authority" validated the possibility was marked as being a "conspiracy theorist", anyone that dare challenge the current trends in the arena of ESG, DEI, CRT, and anti-racism must clearly be a racist, and "dog-whistle" to their racist friends because no one could possibly object to these things for any other reason.
In this usage of the term dog-whistle it is likely a Left political cause, however that this not my opposition to the use. dog-whistle is often used in an effort to side-step having to confront the actual issue, and instead lay a charge upon the individual instead of the idea being presented. It is almost like saying "when did you stop beating your wife", any response to the charge will be seen as an admission of guilt.
Yet the point overall of that twitter thread seems valid to me.
If widipedia is asking me to donate to support it, but most of the money isn't going to support wikipedia, then that is a bit deceptive. It's especially deceptive when that money isn't just going to the wikimedia foundation's other projects, but as grants to a variety of other organizations that have very different missions.
I think much of the criticism of SeRCH is valid. Their "signature program" hasn't released a video in over 5 years and none ever got over a thousand views. The unclearly related "Vanguard Stem" (I think it is a parent or partner organization) hasn't put out video in over a year. To be clear, a quick google isn't enough to write this organization off, but it did fail to find any information that made SeRCH seem like a legit organization to fund.
The problem with the highlighted organizations is not (only) that they are irrelevant to Wikipedia's mission and the intent of the funders, it's that they don't seem to be doing anything which raises the question of why this specific group is being given free money. The answer can well be corruption or nepotism. Whatever it is, it doesn't look good.
> What is not said here, but I think it was started this article there was a break-down on Twitter [2] recently where someone broke down the grants Wikimedia Foundation gives to other charities, A lot of Wikimedia has become advocacy for social issues not the spread of free information
I dont like the knowledge equity grants either, but it was still a tiny portion of Wikimedia foundation's budget. Describing it as "a lot" is outright misleading.
Unfortunately, I think this is the most practical take to take here. WMF is "only" doing what pretty much all other large NGOs do, only they are in a highly visible position where: a) they operate on the Internet and b) their volunteer userbase is extremely obsessed about cataloguing and editing data, so it naturally follows they'd also be interested in the financial data around the organisation itself.
This is not to say they shouldn't be held accountable, but I do wonder what's the percentages of large charities that are "much worse" in terms of "we exist mostly to pay pretty good salaries to people whose purpose is to fundraise so we can repeat the loop".
Apparently medical conferences are the biggest days of the year for the sex industry, although IIRC it was actually cardiologists who held the top spot.
Charity Navigator is very narrow. They check that paperwork is up to date and that fundraising expenses are low. They don't check for effectiveness or if "program spending" is doing anything.
A low CN rating is bad, but a high CN rating isn't good.
Be wary of the cogs grinding in the background that can lead to an article like this hitting popularity.
There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia - disagreements with the way certain topics are represented, and the way wikipedia has become a huge resource for information and news is not good news for everyone.
I spend way more money on entertainment being piped into my TV, or deliveries happening a day quicker than I do on a website I use several times a day.
> There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia
Check the wikipedia page for the author of the article, he has been against wikipedia for 20 years now. Got his job in the Daily Telegraph by insulting Google and wikipedia repeatedly about how woke they are.
That makes a lot of sense. I don't like to characterise 'left' and 'right' as being more or less factual, but we've experience a distorted massaging of facts in my country from papers like the Daily Telegraph. There are a bunch of people who like to say things to persuade people of their point of view, and are upset when the evidence doesn't agree with them. I can see something like wikipedia making these people upset.
They will do this to all (relatively) open systems because its easier to criticise when things are open. Wait till they get ad enabled version of Gikipedia (by Google) shoved down their throats in the future.
More useful questions to ask are how much good they do and how much harm they cause. I use wiki daily. I gain so much from it that the 10 quids a month seems like a bargain.
The wiki outrage looks like a variation of bike shedding, the more people know, they more opinion they have
Having worked at non-profits a lot, more money doesn't make them better. It brings in exactly the wrong sort of people.
I would never donate to the university I went to, because the endowment is too !@#$$ big. It's more than enough to sustain itself, and the remainder goes into wacky financial schemes which hurt the whole organization.
The author of this has a decades long history of really disliking Wikipedia, so it seems unlikely that he's genuinely concerned about their funding levels. It's just another thing to attack them with.
Why he's so consistently angry with Wikipedia is still a bit of a mystery to me.
Orlowski was acting very polite in this article (and presented some compelling points) compared to most of his work at The Register, but he’s always been a beacon of “yellow journalism” [0]. I’ve always thought it was less a crusade than a favourite target.
[0] “journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.”
This is kind of a cheap ad hominem attack. There is a lot of legitimate criticism of the WMF, and it has been a problem for a long time so I don’t see why the criticism should stop.
The most vituperative critics of WMF are typically active Wikipedians. When a nonprofit is consistently acting against the desires of the community they are set up to support and when you as an unpaid volunteer feel like they are putting your work in jeopardy for their own benefit then you might be upset.
The question is not whether WMF is good, the questions is whether more money will make them better or worse. I think it's clear that the wealthier WMF gets the worse it will be.
"Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead?"
Truly an unnecessary dig at oncologists. If that happens it is not frequent. The more relevant association for clinical oncologists would be ASCO, which has its annual conference in Chicago this year.
When I donate to Wikipedia I expect that money goes to keeping Wikipedia alive not for the Wikimedia organization to redistribute the funds as they fit.
Why do I need a proxy for charity? If I want to give to some cause I will do so directly.
> The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go
That’s just a damning argument against most charities. Like, you can say “the US is still a good place as far as human rights go”, yeah, ok, is it a good reason to stop talking about rights?
It’s a free service with no advertising and people don’t like that it asked them for money a few weeks out of the year.
If they listen to the radio NPR pledge drives must irritate them to the point of flames coming out their ears.
Or if they read free newspapers like the guardian online they must loath it as much as Wikipedia, or more because it doesn’t just do ask a few weeks out of the year.
No one is forced to use Wikipedia. If Being occasionally asked to chip in is too much to bear then don’t use it.
I’ll confess I’m not totally enthused by the way they frame it, but I’ve used it for decades so I have donated one time. I mean it’s free and useful and I’d feel cheap if I use something for decades and never chip in
Just to add one more point of context, nearly every commercial service does a ton of advocating and donating to causes that is not related to their core business.
I have no choice but to provide some Cell phone and internet providers money to do those things because paying them is necessarily to function in society.
I think the point is that they're misleading about where the money is going. Most people assume it's to keep the website going, not for sponsoring political interests of the people running wikimedia. It's the same reason people get mad at Mozilla.
Wikipedia is far too important as a dataset and knowledge base for companies such as Google. They will never let it fail, and are already funding it. Your donations can make a bigger difference elsewhere.
A paltry few hundred million $ in the war chest is nothing to keep open a site mainly devoted to coordinating established facts in an information landscape otherwise controlled by state actors.
And I would, and I did, contribute to Wikipedia.
Until it became clear to me that they'd allowed antisemitic, anti-Israeli politics to warp their articles about things like the Holocaust, the 6-day war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the point that no neophyte could get a neutral recitation of facts, but would be confronted with an enormously racist and biased perspective at every step.
Essentially, they became like the UN general assembly. A body pretending to represent free speech and human rights that's stuffed with illiberal violators of human rights. And I don't need to contribute to that, or even care if it exists.
This makes no sense especially if you know how Wikipedia works. But antisemtic propaganda accounts spread the same thing about Wikipedia, so no one will ever be satisfied.
No, minorities will never be satisfied. Not when the platform's structure is geared toward allowing swarms acting on behalf of authoritarians to revise history.
>>. A body pretending to represent free speech and human rights that's stuffed with illiberal violators of human rights.
UN literally never pretended to do such a thing - it's just a forum for countries to meet and discuss issues, with no power to really do anything other than agree or disagree with each other on whatever is being discussed. Kicking out say Russia or China or North Korea from the UN makes no sense in that context, because you can't have an international forum for discussion if you are not letting countries in to actually you know, discuss.
I think it stems from the idea of UN that people have in their head, maybe it's embedded by the popular media or otherwise, but I see people complaining that UN doesn't force countries to do X or Y. That's literally not how it works - it's just a forum to talk, nothing less nothing more.
Discussion is only useful when the parties are acting in good faith. It's better to limit discussion to good-faith actors than to allow their transparency to provide camouflage and give the appearance of normality to bad-faith actors who only seek to use the openness of the discussion to execute policies that directly undermine discussion writ large. This has always been the weakness of democracies, and it's always been apparent to and exploited by authoritarian states, and there's no reason whatsoever to allow them to continue to have the pretextual cover of international approval from a body that, in principle, has accepted a declaration of human rights.
TL;DR, the UN's discussions serve now only to grant the veneer of liberal discourse to illiberal states by implying that their collective authoritarian voices should be taken seriously by the democracies, when in fact they should be given no platform whatsoever. Let alone one upon which to expound on human rights!
>>when in fact they should be given no platform whatsoever.
See, this is where we disagree.
Let's say that Russia was kicked out of the UN for their recent actions - what's the point of UN then? Just everyone else discussing Russia but without Russia being present? That's a joke then, not a discussion forum.
>> by implying that their collective authoritarian voices should be taken seriously by the democracies
I don't see how you can even come to that conclusion. Look at what's happening recently - yes Russia is being given a voice, Lavrow comes out and says whatever drivel Kremlin told him to say, then literally every other country stood up and said how much they disagree with that statement. The last thing that would come to my mind upon seeing this is that they are "being taken seriously by democracies" - they are a country, so they have a place at the table. Doesn't mean that anyone else automatically agrees or respects what they say.
>> there's no reason whatsoever to allow them to continue to have the pretextual cover of international approval from a body that
I literally don't see where you think that having a seat in the UN gives anyone an "approval" for anything. It's literally just a seat at a discussion table, nothing else nothing more.
>> has accepted a declaration of human rights.
Which is great and all, but again, it's not UN's mission statement to enforce that - it's a forum where countries can agree or disagree on things, it has no executive power. If you would like it to have some, then that's a different discussion altogether.
And when a member state does break the declaration of human rights(or any of the other things that UN has agreed on) - it is discussed, it is brought up, and countries to voice their disapproval or agree on collective action. "UN" as an organisation does not, because that's not why it exists.
> Until it became clear to me that they'd allowed antisemitic, anti-Israeli politics to warp their articles about things like the Holocaust, the 6-day war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
This claim would really benefit from some examples.
We would really need examples of what you are referring to. The reason for that being that intuitively, when someone talks about a platform no longer being neutral in such extreme language, it usually means the platform does not support their specific interpretation.
It’s not just they are flush with cash. It’s they are funding and fanning the culture war despite claiming to be a neutral party. Some of their funds are being routed to political entities that are not neutral.
Edit: here’s a link to a thread about what I mean:
They clearly support a left ideology by the editors, but I’m not even talking about that. I mean they send money to support far left anti-science groups.
You have a strange definition of far-left, didn't see a single Maoist insurrection in that Twitter link.
Curse of American politics, I guess, when one considers the Democrats to be "left leaning", then your whole political perception is skewed.
(The Democrats are significantly to the right of our centre-right party. People who call them lefties or socialists or commies amuse, confuse, and bemuse me.)
In this case far-left mean groups that are opposed to objectivity and support adding bias to science. This is the 2+2=5 crowd. They can believe whatever they want, but this is not science and is born out of neo-Marxist ideology.
Wait you think Marx was pro science? He denied the supernatural, but like all ideologies reality is secondary to dogmatism. Don't forget he was routed in Hegel.
Marx's ideas were refined by Antonio Gramsci who offered social Hegemony as a means to achieve the utopia. To the extent that science is a sense-making part of society it must be taken over by pro-marxist/communist forces. It's the only way to assure the success of marxism.
Using Lysenko as evidence that Marx was anti-science is kinda weird.
Stalin had thousands of Lysenko's critics imprisoned, I dunno how Marx would feel about that, but I have a feeling it wouldn't be particularly positive.
What does Hegel have to do with anything here? Adam Smith was also "routed in Hegel"...
They are leftists. The woke ideology has a clear geneaology to Marx. Of course, they are not economic class focused leftists by any stretch of the imagination - bourgeoisie champagne socialists who've re-engineered the Marxian thinking style to focus on social identities, which makes it really easy to purport to care for the oppressed. It's very high quality champagne socialism.
But it's still leftist in origin and in ideology. Saying the modern wokified U.S. Left isn't leftist is just a No True Scotsman argument. Leftism and rightism are not narrow, specific things, they're more like inchoate moral intuitions that are given more concrete form by ideology and realpolitik. Individual leftist or rightist ideologies are often contradictory with each other. But the underlying sentiment is usually still recognizable as one or the other.
Even the formally communist country of china semes to be capitalist in truth. To the point where they will likely overtake the US as the richest country in the world.
I stopped donating when I saw how politicised they were.
People are people, and will have opinions about things. People of a kind will naturally group together. This is all fine, but it becomes a problem when one of the things that make what you produce worthwhile is neutrality, and you can't keep your politics in your pants.
I don't really believe these claims of "Wokepedia", because no-one making these claims has presented actual evidence.
I'm sure you have some though, otherwise commenting as you did would mean you'd be as guilty of "not keeping your politics in your pants" as you accuse Wikipedia of being.
> The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege
Well then. That makes it perfectly clear that Wikimedia is under the sway of partisan activists.
True neutrality is something like centrism; it's a weird unopinionated or compromising middle ground that only works in theory.
There's a comic out there, one side advocates for genocide, the other opposes it; the centrists are like "let's have a little genocide, as a compromise".
The advantage of a community supported encyclopedia should be a reasonable degree of impartiality, openness and academic freedom. Wikipedia has departed a good distance from this ideal and should support itself as other media does... through advertising or subscriptions. The case is best found in the OP link comments, but here's one I found that well summarizes:
"You do have to filter out some stuff unfortunately – but even academia, scientists and historians are now confessing that they are tailoring their output to ‘fit in’ with wokeness and sensitivities."
I mean everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but if the implication of those opinions is that we should take one of the last truly great sites on the Internet and ruin it with ads, then I think its fair for others to treat those opinions as ideas worth avoiding.
I have to say I can't think of a worse outcome than Wikipedia becoming advertising- or subscription-funded.
At best, it will be less useable and more liable to influence once its source of funding is at the behest of advertisers. And with a subscription model, presumably it would then be pay-to-play which is antithetical to the idea of Wikipedia in the first place.
I also don't agree that Wikipedia has to a significant degree departed from "impartiality, openness and academic freedom", or at least I'd need some sources/examples.
A random comment with no sources about unnamed scientists who tailor their work to be featured in Wikipedia of all places?
I think the comment that best describes it is further down, on the guy who cannot fathom why New York Post (a tabloid) is not allowed as a source but NPR (the most trusted news source in america according to several surveys) is.
When you start off from not separating tabloids from journalism well then yeah you can call out Wikipedia for being "woke".
Is this the same person who every now and then appears on HN utterly outraged by Wikipedia's fundraising?
I donate to Wikipedia.
And I am glad they have lots of money. I do not feel outraged about it, I feel happy about it.
I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Wikipedia is a great service, it should be valued. They should not always be living close to the edge of going out of business. How they spend their funds raised is their business.
This anti Wikipedia person is really annoying and I wish they would stop their crusade.
EDIT: it seems the outraged guy is a right wing Murdoch journalist. Enough said, it all adds up. I still remember how Murdoch ran a successful campaign here in Australia to sink the planned national fibre to the home broadband network - 10 years down the track we never got our national fibre network. These guys hate tech, especially free information services like Wikipedia and national broadcasters like the ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Murdoch wants to own it all and hates free.
"Wokepedia". This guy certainly has an axe to grind. Looks like urging people not to donate is in fact a right wing attack on Wikpedia - "The Daily Telegraph" of course being a Murdoch newspaper.
"Writing for The Daily Telegraph in May 2021, Orlowski said that the Wikimedia Foundation was "flush with cash" and passing money to the Tides Network, which he described as "a left-leaning dark money group"; he referred to Wikipedia as "Wokepedia" in an allusion to the term "woke".[24] In another article for The Daily Telegraph, in December 2021, Orlowski said the Wikimedia Foundation's urgent fundraising banners on Wikipedia were "preposterous" given that it held assets of $240 million and had a $100 million endowment, and the Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director had said in 2013 that the Foundation could be sustainable on "$10M+ a year".[25] In August 2022, Orlowski claimed that Wikipedia had "become a tool of the Left in the battle to control the truth", referencing the recent controversy over Wikipedia's definition of a recession.[26]"
I'd wondered whether it was a clever ploy to GET me to donate to Wikipedia/media/whatever, what with all the comments ranting in right-wing style. Kind of like Nike or whoever, gesturing to causes they don't really do anything to support, in order to goad political rants against then and elicit a larger backlash and more money they'd have had if they kept quiet.
HBomberguy has a good video on the subject. You can use people ranting about 'wokeness' to make money, and while it's amusing and gratifying to indulge that 'ha, I showed you, I don't agree with your ranting against this thing!' it's engaging in pseudo-political behavior that's in a sense wasted. Throwing more money at Wikipedia isn't really helping them be more woke, it's helping them be better at using that to ask for money.
I'm not actually going to give them money today but that's because I gotta tend to my own affairs: if I had a bunch extra I'd send some Wikipedia's way on the grounds that at least they're annoying the right people?
Just checked here: The BLM org I donated was not this one you linked, but i'm seeking this one specifically to make a new donation, just because your bad faith argument.
It's relevant because he's not really disclosing his motivations. He clearly has other reasons for disliking wikipedia but he fails to disclose them in this article.
His "track record" has nothing to do with whether his claims are true, either.
Either his claims are factual, or they aren't.
If they are not factual, they should be refuted, but appealing to his "motivations" or "track record" is not a refutation. It is an ad hominem attack, i.e., a logical fallacy.
No one has said it's a refutation but it's entirely relevant and not an ad hominem at all - unless you think that his record is something to be ashamed of?
As I said above:
> So when an oil company writes a report on the viability of solar power then that doesn't affect how we should view the report?
> His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
The point in contention appears to be whether or not Wikipedia funnels donations to left-wing causes.
The truth of that claim has no causal relationship with his opinions. I mean, obviously someone who disagrees with funneling donations to left-wing causes would be more likely to complain about it, or even possibly make something up. But that in itself has no bearing on whether the claim is actually true.
Does Wikipedia funnel donations to left-wing causes or not?
You have presented no evidence one way or the other. Instead, you have attacked his "motivations" and "track record". That is a textbook ad hominem.
"The Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund is a new US$4.5 million fund created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, to provide grants to external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge."
You can claim completely true things, while also omitting other completely true things that radically change the situation. Examining whether or not someone is presenting facts in order to argue a political stance vs neutrally reporting is an important and basic media literacy skill.
An editor or author can, in a biased way, choose to disclose things that are all true, but incomplete, thereby giving a false impression of a larger picture. I think it is absolutely in the consumer's (of any given text) interest to understand the potential biases of the content producer, even if all of the content itself is "facts".
Are there any examples of such facts being incompletely disclosed, or are we just assuming their existence without further analysis based on the writer's political affiliation?
So when an oil company writes a report on the viability of solar power then that doesn't affect how we should view the report?
His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
> So when an oil company writes a report on the viability of solar power then that doesn't affect how we should view the report?
But why do you think it does affect how you view the report? Because the company is likely to lie, right? So you should perhaps examine the report more carefully. But that has nothing to do with the report's factuality. It may affect how likely it is to be true, but once you've determined it to be one or the other, who reported it is completely irrelevant.
Likewise, if Wikipedia is in fact dishonest when it asks for donations, and you first heard that completely true fact from a Nazi, are you going to conclude that actually it was false all along? In other words, is your reality determined by the opposite of what your political adversaries say?
Are you saying 1.9M is only the cost of the hardware, excluding the cost of bandwidth, power, etc.? Then what's the actual number? The misreporting is only relevant if the actual number is meaningfully different.
EDIT: And I insist, all that's relevant is the error itself. The political affiliation of the person who made the error shouldn't matter.
How are his motivations relevant to how wikimedia spends donations (and thus whether you should donate)?
If wikimedia was actually spending all donations on blackjack and hookers for execs, would it matter that the person reporting it was reporting it because he really hates wikis as a concept?
Slight correction - Telegraph isn't Murdoch. It's owned by the surviving billionaire Barclay brother [1]. If anything though it's even more biased than any Murdoch paper (eg in the UK The Times).
You can view the history of of submissions and comments on the wikipedia has cancer article to see how many of the posters have a long history of submissions that clearly indicates they're different people, and not just one single person with a grudge.
Not everyone shares your opinion on high pressure misleading sales as a persuasion method being acceptable.
I agree with everything. To be fair though, the banners are pretty manipulative. They also make you think that Wikipedia is broke and they need urgent funding, which they don't. They almost lie to you so you donate. Explain that you need donations to do more cool stuff with wikipedia and everything's fine. Just be honest.
Could you elaborate on that? I really don't want to believe this is true, WMF is clearly being manipulative and a world where being manipulative is necessary sounds...extremely dystopian.
Exactly. If you value something, pay for it. It’s a way of sending resources to an organization so that it can continue to do more of what you value. I remember When my parents bought World Book so we could have it on our shelf at home. It had absurdity less information and was vastly more expensive.
I use Wikipedia a few times a week, my kids use it, I am happy to pay for it, and to give them some room to fund new related efforts.
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
> I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Necessary how? For what?
I donate to Wikipedia—as a Wikipedian. I've contributed a bunch of time editing content and doing lots of gnomish things to create value so that Wikipedia is a "great service". Millions of others have, too. But neither I nor any of the other people have anything to do with your donations.
Don't misunderstand: this is not a call-to-action for revenue sharing in the vein of the articles constantly appearing about the sustainability of FOSS; I'm not saying "give us a cut". What I am saying is that the Wikimedia fundraising tactics are thoroughly unnecessary to the actual production costs of Wikipedia that Wikimedia is responsible for.
Am I outraged? No. Do I recognize what WMF is doing as borderline slimy? Yes.
Your (bad) attempt to be clever notwithstanding, my comment makes it clear that I'm not referring to donating money. That's not true of the person I responded to. Try again.
Ah, you're right. I thought it was ironic that you made the same mistake the previous comment did, but that isn't the case. It wasn't clear to me the first time I read your comment.
The issue isn't "Wikipedia" having lots of money and using it to run their site. It's Wikimedia having the money and using it for stuff that has no direct connection to Wikipedia.
From a Twitter thread on a scientific research project funded through Wikimedia:
> In deciding who to fund, the key criteria was use of the Intersectional Scientific method. Everything else - a scientific background, data - was optional. What could possibly go wrong?
> One of the projects was into spatial learning in the California Two-Spot Octopus, for which the researcher got 12 hatchling octopuses.
> Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded.
You may be glad wikipedia has a lot of money, but are you glad wikimedia does? Are you happy with the proportion of your wikimedia donation that goes to wikipedia?
About your edit: "we never got our national fibre network". I'm confused. No trolling. What about NBN (National Broadband Network)? That has spawned 100s of new ISPs that rent bandwidth on your amazing new national backbone and resell to retail customers. From afar, it sounds like a great national investment. Do I misunderstand?
For the record, you aren't donating to Wikpedia, you're donating to the foundation. And the cost of running Wikipedia is generously less than 10% of donations per year.
Why do they need 550 employees? I think it's fair to question what the foundation has decided to do with your donation, because basically all of your donation goes to the "not-Wikipedia" parts.
But yeah the fact that this was written by some radical right-winger makes sense. The weird red-scare stuff at the end was so out of place, I should have realized it was by a right-wing propagandist, they have to shove that tripe into everything.
Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation are not the same thing. The author’s sentiment is pretty common among the large number of volunteer editors who make the bulk of what makes Wikipedia valuable. You can find people of all sorts of political affiliations who edit Wikipedia and feel like the WMF fundraising schemes are insulting to their contributions to the project and put the whole project at risk. If Wikipedia were a business then fine, they could do as they like but it is also a community and the public facing behavior of
WMF has serious consequences to that community.
Perhaps it's because it's deceptive, dishonest & undermines trust.
Unless of-course you don't care about such things, then what's the problem? You don't have to read my comment, 'just' switch off the website.
The problem is that Wikipedia goes to great effort to shill for the CIA-NATO propaganda machine - whilst deceptively claiming they're an independent factual source. The problem is that the youth of Western Europe & The USA are growing up where truth is forbidden by power; buried by Google then muddied by Wikipedia & co.
The problem is when trust is eroded we cannot have meaningful interactions, we cannot even communicate, to the point that:
it doesn't matter if one says 'eric4smith is a rapist'; because (as you have conjectured): 'you don't have to read the comment'.
> The problem is that Wikipedia goes to great effort to shill for the CIA-NATO propaganda machine
What exactly are you saying? Are you suggesting that thousands of Wikipedia editors have all been subborned by Western military agencies? Or are you just referring to the overpaid Wikimedia C-suite?
Of course some Wikipedia editors are shills. Most MSM journalists are shilling for someone; if you pay attention to current affairs, you'll bump into a shill within seconds. But Wikipedia is largely self-correcting; even if the mainspace articles are biased, (a) there's page history; (b) there's per-editor contribution history; and (c) there's talk pages. I don't know of any other information source that provides so many tools that a critical reader can use to judge the content of an article.
The Wikimedia Foundation control Wikipedia, the subbordination is done by them. Editors are only as free as they permit - the two are inseparable, to suppose otherwise is as supposing chromium is independent from Google.
Of-course Wikipedia is a useful tool, so what? Are they exempt from criticism?
What is it you are saying? You abuse the English language; by definition a journalist is not a shill. Many mainstream shills may claim to be journalists, but that does not make them so.
Well, your definitions are eccentric. For example, Luke Harding is accredited as a senior journalist at The Guardian; he shills for the UK security services. I'm not sure whether we disagree as to what a shill is, or what a journalist is. The only journalists that I know of that are not shills are independent writers, like Jonathan Cook and Peter Hitchens.
I thought they were struggling and donated even though I was struggling at the time.
It feels a bit sordid and dishonest how they go about getting money.
> While I am a very low income Senior [ live in Gov't. H.U.D. Apt.], I do still try to contribute to certain causes. Wikipedia is 1 such Group. I believe that I have given Wikipedia small donations for about 3 years now. While I do not have much to give, It is important that You know we appreciate the great work you undertake.
> I do, respectfully, need to point out 1 "process" that Wikipedia implements that "disturbs/upsets" me. I just, accidentally, got rolled over to Wikipedia on a matter I am researcing. The Wikipedia "overlay" writing asking for Donations said this was 4th time You have asked me.
> THAT "NOTICE" MADE ME FEEL VERY "GUILTY/BAD"....... Right now, I have $18.00 in my bank account ! That's It !
> Soon, I will get my only source of Income [ a monthly Social Security Check] & will try to make a donation at that time.
Man, Wikipedia is like the best website I can think of. No joke.
No silly 25MB framework, no hype, no popup banners (except the donation), no ads, no tracking, doesn't ask to sign up when I scroll down, no paywall...
Just doing it's thing providing all the world with all knowledge for free, in a lot of languages.
These managers can earn $4 million for all I care.
Hell, I work for a mid-sized company that doesn't even come close to being as useful as Wikipedia and our C-suite earns a million a year.
Agreed. So let's take a look at why the columnist, Andrew Orlowski, has such a problem with Wikipedia. It's not hard to find out why - it's on Wikipedia [1]. With direct links to Orlowski's own work, of course, should anyone make unfounded accusations of bias.
> "It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers," observes one regular Register reader, which seems as good a description as any to us.
In a rhetorical line consistent with the "Khmer Rouge in diapers" and "Wokepedia" snipes, the writing in this second piece is strikingly petty and polemical:
> If Karl Marx was alive today, perhaps he wouldn’t be touring Manchester slums with Engels, but peering in astonishment at the upstairs-downstairs world of Wikipedia. Instead of Das Kapital, he’d be writing Das Wiki.
It's revealing that Orlowski chooses to single out Wikipedia as a remarkable examplar of extreme wealth inequality, when many of the outlets he mentions in his very first sentence are headed by far wealthier individuals than Jimmy Wales:
> Who would you name as the most influential media company in the world? Some might offer Fox, Disney or the BBC. Or AT&T and Comcast, the largest media giants by revenue. In fact, the real answer may be hidden in plain view: Wikipedia.
Evidently, Orlowski is simply a right-wing journalist who dislikes the public having access to information with an ideological bent which is even sometimes different than he would like to see online, and therefore takes potshots at Wikipedia using standards he doesn't apply to other outlets.
Personally, when I want information on a topic that's received widespread attention, I almost always find Wikipedia an extraordinarily informative source, usually much more neutral in tone and much more fact-loaded than anything else found online. Even when the writing suggests a viewpoint I don't agree with. And yes, sometimes the viewpoint is to the political left of my personal viewpoint.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not a little "Khmer Rouge diaper baby" who is helplessly swayed to the evil communists by the slightest bias in Wikipedia's tone. I'm an adult who finds it to be one helpful source as I draw my own conclusions.
If such a viewpoint is unpalatable to Andrew Orlowski, perhaps he belongs on Conservapedia, the onetime self-styled "trustworthy" encyclopedia.
> With all claims backed by citations of course, should anyone make unfounded accusations of bias.
Note that citations don't make bias impossible or claims true, they just make it easier to decide whether to trust information. E.g. If I cite the BBC in my statement and you trust the BBC you're more likely to trust my statement.
A lot of right wingers believe that most news sources (and particularly a lot of the ones the wikipedian collective thinks of as reliable) are grossly misleading or lying, so they won't be very convinced by, say, a Vogue citation.
We aren't talking about a situation where we disagree about which third parties are trustworthy, e.g. I am citing the BBC which you distrust. My claim is that Orlowski attacks Wikipedia because its content is sometimes disagreeable to him politically, and I have supported that claim with citations from Wikipedia which are direct links to Orlowski's own opinion columns.
Your point, while valid enough in general, is a red herring in this case.
> A lot of right wingers believe that most news sources are grossly misleading or lying
Not just right-wingers. With few exceptions, Wikipedia "reliable sources" are mostly mainstream media, which most lefties regard as locked-down, neo-liberal propaganda cannons.
I agree 200% with your words about Wikipedia. I am sure that I have spent 1000s (literally) of hours reading Wikipedia, opening my mind to new and interesting ideas. And, learning that I was wrong about long held beliefs. Plus, it is like a huge, free encyclopedia for lower income people in developing countries. The digital footprints are astonishingly large.
In closing, one small joke: About dark / annoying patterns: You forgot my least favourite: When you move the mouse out of tab, lightbox pops up: "Don't leave yet... blah blah blah... sign up for our newsletter!" As if that is going to keep me on the page!
499 comments
[ 10.6 ms ] story [ 5038 ms ] threadSpecial report: "Wikipedia's independence" or "Wikimedia's pile of dosh"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Opinion: The Wikimedia Endowment – a lack of transparency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment/Updates/...
(Note, I don't have any stakes in that debate, besides occasionally uploading drone photography to Commons)
This also got rid of the annoying "preview" feature.
While we're on the subject, I'm a fan of Nitter[0] as a JS-free Twitter UI. Can anyone recommend any other JS-free frontends to popular apps?
[0] nitter.net, and it's mirrored on many other URLS: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
Here is a more exhaustive list: https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect
They also pay their executives far less.
That's at least in part because the IA board are idiots however.
* some bundles/deals are locked to specific charities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
The actual fundraiser will come at the end of the year, when the banners will follow everyone visiting Wikipedia around for over a month (29th of November – 31st of December).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising#Current_fundrais...
Your donors often feel generous as the giving or holiday season approaches. Many will also be looking to make year-end donations for tax relief." [0]
[0] https://donorbox.org/nonprofit-blog/fundraising-season
If you donate in March, when no ads are running, that will lead to the ads being seen as less effective.
However, I do feel that an internet where we pay for the things we use is to be preferred over an internet full of advertisements.
> Many supporters like you who understand the usefulness of planning ahead have chosen to include a gift to Wikipedia in their will. They want to do more to protect free knowledge and are invested in building a legacy with Wikipedia to ensure their values live on for many years to come.
"If you understood the importance of planning ahead, you'd already have WikiMedia in your will, bozo"
But "hel×4a creepy"? That feels like it's, just, you know, your opinion man.
I dunno bra, I write code because I like being the guy behind the guy, not the face on the window. You do you boo, whatever, but I've got my opinions and I'll express them whenever I want, however I want, and wherever I want.
I'll also add to this that they've got an incredibly incompetent recruitment department. The recruiter I dealt with really, really, really likes to use big words to show off her English lit degree.
I posted about it on twitter, 5 people responded with "Did she use the word perspicuous at least 3 times in every e-mail? Did she ghost you for 2 months, then send you angry messages that you haven't been more proactive in chasing her down? When you turned her down, did she say "I'm very disappointed, I saw something special in you?"
- the removal of features in the name of smaller surface area (while at the same time adding telemetry and analytics[1])
- other lame fixtures of soulless corporations like cringy/dishonest PR babble
There's also stuff like breaking incoming links to content on mozilla.org; making it steadily harder to contribute; keeping things closed source (whereas before everything was licensed under MPL or some other FOSS license); being willing to cut deals with partners that come with strings attached and NDAs; wasting probably a billion dollars on obviously doomed things like Firefox OS and calling it a "moonshot"; etc.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178875>
To be fair to Wikipedia here, quoting a nearly ten year old figure and comparing it to current earnings in order to prove that their required expenses are low is not that honest.
Note I made the same argument in Wikipedia's community newspaper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Read the comments from Wikipedians underneath. No one claimed it was a dishonest argument to make.
I'm pretty happy to wager real money that Wikipedia has had to scale significantly in the last ten years.
But, hey, if you've got evidence to the contrary, I'll happily read it.
… But have they had to scale to a degree commensurate with the amount of money they are spending? Absolutely not. The "Wikipedia has cancer" article makes that point handily.
"Technical Infrastructure" includes "all the engineering and technology" though. I'm not sure if a breakdown which includes server costs is available? I remember it being a pretty small piece of previous budgets.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Wikimedi...
As an example, if we are to trust this site (https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm), a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars in 2012. You can purchase 8TB for 130 dollars now.
From this wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics) we can see the amount of English articles has about doubled since then. Chances are that storage costs have not only not gone up, they have gone down.
As far as I can see, the text of Wikipedia is about 10GB. I don't know how much space the images occupy, but if we assume they take up roughly the same space, then a single 2TB disk would accomodate 1,000 Wikipedias.
This isn't about the cost of disk storage.
"As of 21 September 2022, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 21.23 GB without media."
(Note that's gzipped, so the actual size is much higher in-use.)
Media is, of course, vastly larger. Sadly, the last number given was from 2014, so I'd expect it to have increased massively since then:
"The size of the media files in Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias was described as well over 23 TB near the end of 2014"
OK; I did a quick dig to see how big Wikipedia is, but you've dug deeper.
You can still stick the whole English Wikipedia on a single disk, probably with all linked media (I suspect that a lot of what's on Wikimedia isn't linked from Wikipedia articles). So the main cost issue is serving content to the network; and there are lots of server farms that would cheerfully do that for the love.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
Annual revenue was $163 million. Of course hosting costs alone don't cover the entire outlay, but Wikimedia's budget and money demands have absolutely exploded in recent years.
> After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March
> “WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,”
> He put the running costs at $10 million a year. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years.
> So where does the money go? Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course.
> Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising
etc.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/defund-wikipe...
I wonder if Firefox sync copies these settings across machines as well?
You'll then just need the URL to your filter and paste that it into your different instances of Firefox.
For what it's worth, Charity Navigator gives them 4 out of 4 stars with a 98.33/100 rating: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas, but nobody cares.
On other hand, as any of it is spend on political propaganda while they have huge reserves... No money from me. If you want to do lies and propaganda start a new charity.
And trust me, agreeing with Unherd about anything does not sit naturally to me.
The whole premise of Wikipedia (or aspiration, at least, and yes, not always fulfilled ...) is that people should have information so they can't be manipulated.
It kind of sucks to see the very organisation hosting the site do the opposite, don't you think?
But the banners I've seen have invariably been about the imminent demise of Wikipedia. Not that they got lots of other side projects they want funded.
If you assume the fund drive exists to help keep the lights on then I think it is natural to treat it as an existential issue for Wikipedia, but that doesn't seem to match the specific language used.
2020/2021 revenue goal: $108M, increased to $125M, total at end of year: $154M
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikim...
2021/2022 revenue target: $150M, already exceeded by end of quarter 3, weeks before the start of the fundraiser in India, South Africa and South America:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AF%26A...
I agree with others that Wikipedia very carefully makes it sound like they've got a sob story where if you don't donate they're going to shut down, so they probably get a lot of donations made with the belief that they're funding Wikipedia, but instead it gets shunted out to something else. Maybe something the donor is OK with, but maybe something not.
[Citation needed]
And by citation needed, i mean i think this is a false statement. Unless you count things that help multiple wikimedia sites as not helping wikipedia because it is not just wikipedia. After all, all of these sites run the same software, a bug fix affects all of them pretty equally.
Charities seem to do do that sort of thing to raise money, probably because it works and also because the current activities are already funded.
When donations are sought after a disaster the implication is that the money is going to directly help the victims, but the reality is that it will fund other efforts, possibly including helping the victims of a future disaster.
Frankly, calling it dystopic that businesses play by the laws as written is ridiculous. Change the laws instead of expecting businesses to self-regulate out of the goodness of their hearts. Why is that dystopic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
What's it for? Tell donors what they are funding.
And somehow the priorities are wrong. The Wikimedia Foundation has annual 8-figure surpluses, but volunteers are writing open letters to complain that the Foundation fails to update and maintain critical aspects of the software:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Think_big_-_open_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol/Coo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
What the WMF does produce, however, is reams and reams of words about "strategy", "leadership", "codes of conduct" etc.
And millions of dollars are given away to progressive organisations that have nothing to do with Wikipedia:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
Wikimedia has a 100/100 transparency rating.
https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
How is this misleading? They provide an incredibly large amount of information.
And more information can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Disputes
Yes, users can go elsewhere to find the information. The records are on file in the metaphorical filing cabinet downstairs. But if the messaging you're putting front and center contradicts said records, their existence doesn't counter criticism of the messaging
Calls to action are kept intentionally short because the research on human psychology is clear: every additional sentence beyond the first few decreases the odds of a conversion (that's adspeak for "closing the deal").
But effectiveness doesn't imply ethicality, so "but it's effective" is not a defense against criticism of ethics.
Be careful, if you argue that your opinions are not wrong, you'll be admitting your comment here is wrong.
Has Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation broken any?
Prove to me they are lying. Nothing on their donation page seems to be a lie.
Your comment on the other hand is very misleading.
from the knowledge equity fund page. what the heck
A good encyclopedia would present information from myriad perspectives, not just whatever happened to be "dominant." I want my article about Christoper Colombus to talk about how 19th century immigrants to America, especially Italians, found him inspirational, but also about how he was brutal, greedy, and ineffectual.
(The current Wikipedia article is actually not bad on that front).
Yeah, let's get away from imperialism and patriarchalism ...
Wikipedians wouldn't work for free for a subscription service. The whole project would fork to a new host. The Wikimedia Foundation's own mission statement says, "The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity."
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/
You can't contribute donations to Firefox; you can only contribute to the Mozilla Foundation, which spends most of the money it gets from donations on things that aren't Firefox.
The question as to whether this is manipulative isn't "is there are any clear statement of fact that is unambiguously a lie even in the most charitable possible interpretation?", it's "will this make ill-informed readers think their donations are necessary for Wikipedia's survival, and is this impression created deliberately?"
I think that's a very obvious "yes and yes".
The donations are used for side projects almost all donors are completely unaware of, whose existence and nature are not hinted at in the ads soliciting donations.
They way they DO stay online for a resilient amount of time is by generating money, i.e. through donations.
In fact, they used to say exactly how many months they have left. Now they don't say that, because they feel they can allow themselves that. Does that mean that it makes sense to stop fundraising? No. Because the minute the public doesn't feel that there's an urgency in donating to your cause, then it's someone else's problem, meaning it's nobody's problem and that's how you kill NPOs.
Money generates money. To fund something in perpetuity you need enough that the returns from investing it (taking into account tax, costs, inflation, etc) exceed the annual payment needed. This is not an infinite amount.
I haven't checked the figures but the article claims the foundation has $400 million cash and Wikipedia costs under $2 million per annum. There's no easy way of calculating the maximum annual sum that can be taken out in perpetuity from a well managed endowment but it's certainly a lot more than 0.5%.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...
We ask you, humbly, to help.
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.
...
We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
In fact, if they stop begging, what percentage of their users will contribute? Will it remain at 2%?
Just saying. If the WMF were working flat out on serving the volunteer community it would be a different matter. But it's taken on a life of its own, with Wikipedia as its cash cow.
Also, last year, the then-Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. (The wife of the WMF’s PR consultant, the Clinton Foundation’s Craig Minassian, works on the show as a producer.)
In the interview, Noah put it to Maher that the downside of being a non-profit is that “you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running. So, two parts. One, is that true and how does it affect you, and then, two, why would you make this thing if it’s not going to make you money?”
Maher’s cheerful answer made no reference to the WMF’s vast money reserves, but emphasised that Wikipedia’s lack of ads was responsible for the site being so trusted today.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
If you are in the US, you can view the interview clip here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdn1s9Sjfo&t=270s
If you're in the UK or Europe, use a VPN (Opera e.g. has got one built in).
That episode of the Daily Show was around April 2021. So, their funds were much smaller then.
From the article: “In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
At the time they had reported net assets in excess of $77 million. Even by mid-2020, that had increased to $180 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
The Wikimedia Foundation had an 8-figure surplus in 9 of the last 10 years. The only exception was 2013/2014, where the surplus was "only" $8.3M. That was their "worst year" in the last ten years. The Wikimedia Foundation has beaten its own annual revenue record every year of its existence.
I don't know how much experience they have, maybe stats say that subtle UX don't generate enough donations, while massive hated popups still bring massively more money. I hope so..
I don't know whether this is intentional, but if it is, then I would classify it as a dirty, attention-grabbing, dark-pattern-esque, trick. It would be more honest if they just used the blink tag.
It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.
Wikipedia's current ads are both misleading and more intrusive than ever.
550 employees is huge, especially for an organization that doesn't even pay those employees to create and edit the content on the site. It's so far away from "on the edge of pauper" that the point you're making—even if true for other, non-Wikimedia realms—is completely irrelevant here.
Bullshit.
To repeat: the ads today are more misleading and more intrusive than ever. In years past there were ads that were unlike the ones used today. (People complained about them, but I was not among them.) Those ads were successful. There's no evidence to argue that they wouldn't be successful today, too.
As I said, hacker ethos of biasing in favor of the scrappy underdog. It was fine to fundraise when they were small and their strategy was unproven, but as they grow and their strategy is demonstrated as effective, they lose our favor.
ETA: speaking of human psychology... It's an election cycle in the US. It's interesting that this story, the facts of which have been known since last year (according to a cursory search of news story dates) is suddenly again making the rounds right now. May be simple coincidence.
The reason the story is coming up now is that the Wikimedia Foundation is currently "testing" the fundraising banners, in time for the big annual fundraising campaign in December. So at present, a certain percentage of Wikipedia readers in major English-speaking countries are shown the fundraising banners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
You just moved the goalposts. (In this case, moved them such that your "argument" is just restating the substance of the complaint.) Wikimedia is bringing in a lot more money doing this sort of thing. That's well understood—by all, i.e., those on both sides of the issue.
Your job is not to defend the position that the aggressive ads bring in more donations, but that if they weren't using them then "they wouldn't make _any_ money". Please leave dishonest sleights of hand at the door.
A couple of years ago a Wikimedia Foundation fundraising report explained why that "Don't scroll away" phrase was added:
------------
“Don’t Scroll Away”
A simple, yet effective phrase that we were surprised to see resonate with readers worldwide was simply asking readers not to “scroll away” from or “scroll past” the fundraising message in the banner. We believe that addressing the context in which people donate helps improve the donation rate.
------------
Quoted from this report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2019-20_Report
Feel free to provide an actual argument against any one of the following:
- Wikipedia is not short on cash
- The current ads are misleading and intrusive
- The ads of years past were successful despite not being this misleading or intrusive
- The point you're trying to raise, when you're not being mercurial about it (the point about "support of the hacker community" for causes "on the edge of pauper") is, even if we assume it to be true, has no place in this discussion, in light of the circumstances (i.e. what's true about the subject we're discussing—and what isn't true, either)
I will sooner give $20 to someone begging who tells me that he intends on spending it on booze, than I would a well meaning non-profit who attempts to snow me with rhetoric honed on manipulating millions of other people before me.
They have strayed far far far far far from that goal
2) Who chooses which facts show up, or how do we know if certain critical facts are missing?
3) In what way are they strayed far away from it?
By introducing political bias into the selection and presentation of information.
If I check pages on feminism or even radical feminism, I wouldn't see any information on how some prominent early feminist figures advocated mass genocide of men. Most of the pages are generally shown benign.
If I check a few pages on prominent manosphere subcultures, I don't have to scroll far before the word 'misogynist' pops up, despite the fact both cultures are fairly similar (both contain a small extremist population and a large population of idealists), and feminism having far, far more text written, both per page and across Wikipedia as a whole.
Personally, I'm fairly certain spreading a few more words on the bloodlust of early feminists would shine a fairly different light on the movement without changing the ideology of the majority. It's not just information hidden away from high traffic pages, it practically doesn't exist if you don't know exactly what to look for. Yet any kind of filth is practically at the front for anything related to the countercultures. That reeks of tone setting.
That said, it seems like a no-brainer that using a hands-off approach in a subculture known for being biased is an open invitation for articles to become biased. That doesn't mean Wikimedia is at fault, either.
well, the agenda trying to be pushed.
"Human societies typically exhibit gender identities and gender roles that distinguish between masculine and feminine characteristics and prescribe the range of acceptable behaviours and attitudes for their members based on their sex.".. Typically? Nope.
"The most common categorisation is a gender binary of men and women.[422] Many societies recognise a third gender,[423] or less commonly a fourth or fifth.[424][425] In some other societies, non-binary is used as an umbrella term for a range of gender identities that are not solely male or female.".. Many societies recognise a third gender? Nope.
Just some hyperbolic mischosen words right?
What? How is it not typical to have general men and women roles in different societies? Those roles aren't always the same but the existance of such roles is more than typical is almost ubiquitous.
> Many societies recognise a third gender? Nope.
Is the problem there the word "many"? There is a citation with the number of societies they found that have such a mention.
They do say the most common is just two and its primarily associated with the sex of the person, how is the acknowledgement of cultural genders beyond that binary "an agenda"?
> Just some hyperbolic mischosen words right?
So you think the problem is two quantitative words (many/typically) that make certain social constructs seem more common that what you believe is fair? Is that what it boils down to?
> Is the problem there the word "many"?
Yup, the right is "few". Few countries recognize it. From 195, 16. But again, to create a new reality to support an agenda, is wrong.
You probably should read it a bit better then. The existance of the term gernder identity and the existance of gender identities are not the same thing. The word "sex" came slightly later than the first time humans reproduced.
> "Non-binary" didn't exist until recently.
no gender identity existed until recently, but thats because identity is a late 18th century concept. Historically people didn't think of themselves as individuals so they did not separate into identities.
The existance of people who did not "belong" to their prescribed sex, has a long history though. From the non binary page on wikipedia you can see someoone called "not a man or a woman" in the us in the 1700s.
> Yup, the right is "few". Few countries recognize it. From 195, 16.
Thats not what the quote said, the quote said many societes recognise a third gender. It doesn't say current existing nations. if you followed the citation you would have found the book the quote came from where it lists examples:
>> The existence of a third sex or gender enables us to understand how Byzantine palace eunuchs and Indian hijras met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated practices such as self-castration, and how intimate and forbidden desires were expressed among the Dutch Sodomites in the early modern period, the Sapphists of eighteenth-century England, or the so-called hermaphrodite-homosexuals of nineteenth-century Europe and America.
The book I am assuming cites even more historical examples in different ancient and modern societies of non conforming binary roles in society. Enough examples that the author feels warranted to claim there are "many" in the wikipedia summary of the book.
You are claiming wikipedia is biased because they used the word "many" in a concept you feel there isn't enough examples to warrant it. Is that what it boils down to? Your feelings about quantitative adjectives? Thats a loose definition of "agenda pushing" dont you think?
So you think they missed critical information, which related to my second point, who gets to decide. Currently is unpaid moderators, so wikimedia can hardly be blamed for it. no?
> I'm fairly certain spreading a few more words on the bloodlust of early feminists would shine a fairly different light on the movement without changing the ideology of the majority.
But that seems to be intentionally deciding what people should believe. If you think that the ideology of early feminists is irrelevant to the larger movement but might help to turn people to your side, you're not keeping wikipedia unbiased, youre just biasing it more no?
> Yet any kind of filth is practically at the front for anything related to the countercultures.
What countercultures?
Even if you agree with the spirit of these grants, I'm sure this is not what people thought they were funding when they donated to Wikipedia:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Grant_...
Edit: consider spending on the above vs. hiring more people to translate some of the 6.5 million English articles to other languages that typically number only ~1.5 million or so.
I do not think your argument follows. Wikipedia as a whole is untrustworthy because at one point they donated 1 million bucks divided between 5 NGOs through their fundation?
It would be like arguing that Exxon has strayed far far far away from their mission because they donated 20 million to the Amazon conservation. Exxon is still extracting oil and maximising profit for its shareholders, and wikipedia is still a free open encyclopedia. I don't think miniscule donations (related to revenue) mark a departure from the mission worthy of betraying their core intention.
Secondly, Exxon is not a charitable organization so you're drawing a false equivalency. Wikimedia is asking for donations with ads that suggest donating is about keeping Wikipedia running. Most people donating then arguably think they're keeping Wikipedia running and/or expanding its usefulness, such as with translations. I think most people would be quite surprised to see some of that money going to activist DEI initiatives that many would consider to be far from the goal of increasing Wikipedia's utility.
I asked him how they strayed far far far away from being free, neutral and preserving facts.
> Those grants are specifically funding activism which many would argue is not neutral, so your question has been answered.
this does not follow again. I mean first of all, free and preserving facts would be fulfilled so the only part that could be compromised as you said is neutrality. But their grants affect future events not the ones recorded and wikimedia aren't even the people writting the text on wikipedia, they are unpaid moderators. So you would have to prove how the parent company donating to some company can affect volunteers in a way so blatant they would stray "far far far away" from those three missions.
> Exxon is not a charitable organization so you're drawing a false equivalency.
how so? The non voting shareholders of exxon and the donators in wikimedia have the same role, financing the operation.
> I think most people would be quite surprised to see some of that money going to activist DEI initiatives that many would consider to be far from the goal of increasing Wikipedia's utility.
Sure, but that is still not proof of them not being neutral though. You are implying things and letting people read between the lines but even if you try and prove ideological bias in the grants given, there is not logical throughline into the unpaid moderation of the content of the pages.
At most you could argue they betrayed the trust of donors by using those donations for paying for things beyond the server costs of wikipedia. Which is fair, but from that to calling their mission compromised seems a leap a tad far
Yes, which was a requirement the OP specified alongside the others. Abdicating neutrality was not acceptable.
> But their grants affect future events not the ones recorded and wikimedia aren't even the people writting the text on wikipedia, they are unpaid moderators.
Wikipedia only posts information with citations. The grant is funding organizations that will provide citations from a certain viewpoint ("shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege"), thus affecting the information that will show up on Wikipedia in the future. This follows trivially so I'm not sure exactly what doesn't follow.
> how so? The non voting shareholders of exxon and the donators in wikimedia have the same role, financing the operation.
The returns shareholders are expecting is money. The returns Wikipedia donors are expecting are improvements to Wikipedia in its role as neutral historian. Money and those expectations are not commensurate, so the comparison isn't really valid on its face.
Furthermore, if you accept that Wikimedia funded activism that's not strictly in line with being a neutral historian, then you must conclude that they abdicated that role contrary to donor expectations.
If you wanted a proper comparison to Exxon, then it would be comparable to Exxon making a series of choices that reduce shareholder value, which gives shareholders grounds to sue. There is no such recourse for Wikimedia donors as far as I understand so they still aren't directly comparable, but the "betrayal" of violated expectations as you termed it, is of a similar kind.
Lets follow that example. You assume those grants can provide citations, and the mission of the grant is to shift away from eurocentricity. So theoretically there are enough eurocentric citacions already in Wikipedia, and they would provide a different analysis on the same topics.
This would improve wikipedia neutrality rather than diminish it. If OP wanted a neutral wikipedia then those grants would help that mission (if we believe that the grants actually generate content that promotes views not currently cited, and that people who update the affected pages will find, or cite those materials in the future. Two big ifs)
The only way this could affect neutrality is if you think a biased eurocentric telling is neutral but thats a circular argument where the status quo is always neutral and any new information is straying away from neutrality.
Just because there's no truly neutral version doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for neutrality. There are clearly anti-neutral approaches which we should always try to eliminate.
> Who chooses which facts show up, or how do we know if certain critical facts are missing?
Wikipedia already has a pretty good policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...
Wherein a lack of nuance allows a person to be obsessed with “phoniness”—any perceived moral breakdown in an idealized person or organization—
To want a neutral historical is one incredible demand. And then to really suggest that Wikipedia has strayed 5xfar from that!
By "full-time" you mean paid?
Researchers can't contribute to Wikipedia at all, unless the "research" consists of a literature review.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
And if there were full-time paid editors, I'd stop editing immediately, and instead contribute my efforts to the fork that would inevitably result.
With the foundation's resources and clout, someone working on their behalf may be able to get better access to many source materials.
And if there were full-time paid editors, I'd stop editing immediately
So, I'm guessing you know a lot about Wikipedia.. but aren't there already full-time paid editors, just not from the foundation? I struggle to believe there are not well funded interests out there investing money into improving Wikipedia (whether such improvements are objective or subjective) in the same way that some tech companies fund, say, programming language core teams.
What the WMF does do at times is fund community "organizers" trying to get unpaid volunteer editors to work on its content. See e.g.:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/09/22/join-the-organizer-lab...
Direct editing paid for by the Foundation was tried once, with bad results:
https://thewikipedian.net/2014/04/02/bats-in-the-belfer-a-be...
I guess what I was thinking more of was philanthropic organizations paying mathematicians, geologists, and various other types of academic to improve the quality of Wikipedia's entries on a full time basis. Maybe I am being hopefully naive about the allocation of capital though, and thinking merely the sort of things I'd like to fund if I were a billionaire.. ;-)
As an established Wikipedia editor, you can sign-up for free access to a variety of source materials that "civilians" would have to pay for. You don't have to be employed by Wikimedia.
> but aren't there already full-time paid editors, just not from the foundation?
There are two kinds of paid editor: people who are employed by WMF, and also edit (but they're not actually paid to edit, at least in theory); and lobbyists, reputation-managers, marketing consultants and so on, who are allowed to edit within limits. Personally I would like those pluggers removed with extreme prejudice, but WP is very relaxed about these things.
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno...
Not having a ton of extra money is a good way to prevent that kind of bloat.
Who will decide how we interface to encyclopedic facts in the absence of Wikipedia?
These campaigns are great to diversify and prevent Wikipedia from being beholden to them.
When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.
I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.
What was this ad that was so objectionable?
People with actually different experiences and backgrounds, somewhat the way how the ideal model of science is set up - individual humans are fallible and partisan, get your work checked by someone who disagrees because they're the ones who most want it to not be true.
They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do.
If you write about, say, the controversies around the Latin Mass in the Catholic Church, getting a liberal woman to check a liberal man's work is useless - they're both likely to either have a dim view of the conservative sects that prefer the Latin Mass, to be just utterly unable to understand the religious conservatives' POV and worldview, or both. I know I did until I actually befriended some, it was something you could liken to moral colorblindness - the modern secular liberal is aggressively morally colorblind and lacking in understanding of others - again, speaking from experience.
You do know that any traction you are getting with these arguments goes out the window when you start using terms like "woke".
White, black, purple Americans tend to have similar perspectives on things, so do white, black and purple Swedes.
The issue is that the articles on many international things are clearly written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, often citing purely English sources on events that happen in, say, France or Syria.
That they apparently think gender defines perspectives more than ethnicity and cultural background is the problem. Apparently they can make an effort towards gender but not toward the issue that plagues English-Language Wikipedia that only English-language sources are used in the end, often even about subjects that are fundamentally not in English such as the critical response of non-English media, being phrased as though it's a global consensus.
Again, I've seen some places where his has recently improved, but it's annoying to, say, see on Wikipedia that for instance “criticism was mixed” on a French film that was overwhelmingly positively received in France because English-language criticism was more negative due to cultural differences.
That they decided to highlight the gender problem first doesn't mean that Wikipedia thinks the other problems are ok as is.
Someone having different priorities for fixing problems is not necessarily your enemy.
In the end, from my perspective, Anglo-Saxons from whatever gender or color tend to think very much alike and very different from persons from entirely different countries. The country one is born in influences one's perspectives far more than one's gender or skin color, how could it not really?
That they prioritize such minutiæ over bigger problems is something I found a slap in the face, or rather, a reminder of the issue that they're probably barely aware of it and don't realize how different the perspective of other culture can be.
1. Wikipedia is biased toward Anglo perspectives.
2. Wikipedia is trying to recruit contributors with a broader range of perspectives.
This doesn't seem like a problem with WMF.
But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally.
From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.
Wikipedia doesn't help starving children in any way.
And related to that, some of the practices raise eyebrows.
(For example, letting children play in your freezers and around your blood and plasma donations.)
What is not said here, but I think it was started this article there was a break-down on Twitter [2] recently where someone broke down the grants Wikimedia Foundation gives to other charities, A lot of Wikimedia has become advocacy for social issues not the spread of free information. Some of those Social issues many of the donors to Wikimedia may not agree with, and it being redistributed to some pretty controversial organizations. People donating to Wikimedia thinking they are advancing Wikipedia but in reality the bulk of the foundation spending is issuing grants to other charities.
>>Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget
I am reminded of this TED talk[1] from several years ago that talks about fundraising and charity
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579778161889652736.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau
Very similar to charity navigator but rating for-profit businesses
I have to believe that the BBB claim had some effect on that. The BBB may have accepted Ford's word, and closed the claim, but it resulted in some messaging up the consumer complaint chain.
Twitter "Customer Service" is marketing budget
Its a shame so much money is being funneled to these groups since that's exactly the opposite goal of most donators to Wikipedia.
Either that, or like the author, you agree with their claim that grant money going to journalists who are people of color is 'furthering the inescapable American culture war.'
Jeez, how dare those black people engage in journalism that isn't about white culture. They're declaring war on American (white) culture!" /s
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Grant_...
This said, I agree with the premise that the Wikimedia Foundation is partisan. Its General Counsel came from the Tides Foundation, which is as partisan as any of its equivalents on the right, and its Chief Advancement Officer, responsible for fundraising and strategic partnerships, had a long career in political philanthropy before joining Wikimedia:
https://sfgov.org/civilservice/sites/default/files/Documents...
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/greening-the-left/
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/COMMUNITY-Growing-ch...
Ugh, what?
...then attacks SERCH claiming they've done nothing but release 'youtube videos with 50 views', attacks them for not having produced any within the last year (maybe their grant ended?) when if one google "SERCH foundation" they'd quickly see "Our signature program is Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, an online platform and monthly web series focused on women of color in STEM." and further:
> WHAT WE DO
> Produce a live web-series with timely and relevant content
> Celebrate women of color with weekly #WCWinSTEM features
> Publish original content written by and for women of color in STEM
> Foster support and networking via our online platform
> Convene as a community virtually and at in-person events
> Advocate for ourselves + our STEM interests
....and then the big bad boogeymonster really blows its dog whistle when the author associates a foundation distributing grants to journalists who are people of color with "bankrolling the inescapable American culture war." You hear that sound? That's the sound of my eyes rolling, hard. Grants to people of color who work in journalism is furthering a "American culture war." Gosh, those pesky people of color, spreading their "culture war."
The author of the thread then mentions Guy Macon, who, from a quick google, appears to be a transphobic bigot and a troll who made a point of purposefully misgendering a trans wikipedian just to get a rise out of them, and then made a huge scene when he wasn't allowed to erase history and pretend the whole thing didn't happen, and demanded that the person unblock him. Good lord, what a fucking child. https://www.reddit.com/r/RealWikiInAction/comments/rv9x94/gu...
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=292896
....and then it ends somehow vaguely tying wikipedia to an experiment involving octopii hatchlings getting killed, or something.
It's a gish-gallop mess, and what a giant surprise it was to find that the author has a long, rambling thread about police killings in the UK that seems to say "that, really, if those black people just stopped committing crimes, they wouldn't get arrested and shot and stuff": https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1574101120347168770.html
...and their response to "uh, who exactly is this person" is to troll people by giving them the name of an anime: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeKtlilX0AAqnKA?format=png&name=...
if you want to know where you lost me, this is where....
Anyone talking about "dog whistle" gets an instant ignore from me.
At the end of the day, my problem with wikimedia is the same problem I have with United Way, and other such "charities". I do not support charities of charities. I want to give directly to a cause I support, The fact that wikimedia is soliciting donations for one thing, then using that money for another is very misleading and IMO unethical, People do not donate to Wikipedia to support SERCH or any of the other organizations, they do so to support wikipedia, that is where the money should be spent.
I take it you think a "dog-whistle" is something the left criticizes the right for doing; and I suppose you are of the right. In fact a dog-whistle could be uttered by a politician of any colour; it's simply a message that is more likely to be heard by one particular political group than others.
There are evidently what you might call "anti-dog-whistles": messages that are not likely to be heard by some group. Apparently you belong to the group that can't hear messages containing the term "dog-whistle".
In the same way that anyone that dared suggest that COVID could have been a lab leak before "authority" validated the possibility was marked as being a "conspiracy theorist", anyone that dare challenge the current trends in the arena of ESG, DEI, CRT, and anti-racism must clearly be a racist, and "dog-whistle" to their racist friends because no one could possibly object to these things for any other reason.
In this usage of the term dog-whistle it is likely a Left political cause, however that this not my opposition to the use. dog-whistle is often used in an effort to side-step having to confront the actual issue, and instead lay a charge upon the individual instead of the idea being presented. It is almost like saying "when did you stop beating your wife", any response to the charge will be seen as an admission of guilt.
Yet you continue to engage
If widipedia is asking me to donate to support it, but most of the money isn't going to support wikipedia, then that is a bit deceptive. It's especially deceptive when that money isn't just going to the wikimedia foundation's other projects, but as grants to a variety of other organizations that have very different missions.
I think much of the criticism of SeRCH is valid. Their "signature program" hasn't released a video in over 5 years and none ever got over a thousand views. The unclearly related "Vanguard Stem" (I think it is a parent or partner organization) hasn't put out video in over a year. To be clear, a quick google isn't enough to write this organization off, but it did fail to find any information that made SeRCH seem like a legit organization to fund.
I have no idea about the other stuff, but I knew the name from The Insult File: https://micans.org/stijn/haphazard/flame.txt
I think he's since removed it from his personal site, but there's plenty of copies, floating around.
In most cases, openly opposed to the spread of free information.
I dont like the knowledge equity grants either, but it was still a tiny portion of Wikimedia foundation's budget. Describing it as "a lot" is outright misleading.
This is not to say they shouldn't be held accountable, but I do wonder what's the percentages of large charities that are "much worse" in terms of "we exist mostly to pay pretty good salaries to people whose purpose is to fundraise so we can repeat the loop".
Is there a reference here that I'm missing?
A low CN rating is bad, but a high CN rating isn't good.
There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia - disagreements with the way certain topics are represented, and the way wikipedia has become a huge resource for information and news is not good news for everyone.
I spend way more money on entertainment being piped into my TV, or deliveries happening a day quicker than I do on a website I use several times a day.
Check the wikipedia page for the author of the article, he has been against wikipedia for 20 years now. Got his job in the Daily Telegraph by insulting Google and wikipedia repeatedly about how woke they are.
Additionally, only a small fraction of the money goes to wikipedia (including software dev for it).
The wiki outrage looks like a variation of bike shedding, the more people know, they more opinion they have
And here's an alternative way to browse Wikipedia and WikiData: https://conze.pt/
These sites are possible because the Wikimedia Foundation puts a lot of effort into making it easy for others to retrieve the data and reuse them.
I would never donate to the university I went to, because the endowment is too !@#$$ big. It's more than enough to sustain itself, and the remainder goes into wacky financial schemes which hurt the whole organization.
Why he's so consistently angry with Wikipedia is still a bit of a mystery to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski#Criticism_of...
[0] “journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.”
The most vituperative critics of WMF are typically active Wikipedians. When a nonprofit is consistently acting against the desires of the community they are set up to support and when you as an unpaid volunteer feel like they are putting your work in jeopardy for their own benefit then you might be upset.
Hyperbole / slander?
"Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead?"
Why do I need a proxy for charity? If I want to give to some cause I will do so directly.
That’s just a damning argument against most charities. Like, you can say “the US is still a good place as far as human rights go”, yeah, ok, is it a good reason to stop talking about rights?
If they listen to the radio NPR pledge drives must irritate them to the point of flames coming out their ears.
Or if they read free newspapers like the guardian online they must loath it as much as Wikipedia, or more because it doesn’t just do ask a few weeks out of the year.
No one is forced to use Wikipedia. If Being occasionally asked to chip in is too much to bear then don’t use it.
I’ll confess I’m not totally enthused by the way they frame it, but I’ve used it for decades so I have donated one time. I mean it’s free and useful and I’d feel cheap if I use something for decades and never chip in
I have no choice but to provide some Cell phone and internet providers money to do those things because paying them is necessarily to function in society.
And I would, and I did, contribute to Wikipedia.
Until it became clear to me that they'd allowed antisemitic, anti-Israeli politics to warp their articles about things like the Holocaust, the 6-day war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the point that no neophyte could get a neutral recitation of facts, but would be confronted with an enormously racist and biased perspective at every step.
Essentially, they became like the UN general assembly. A body pretending to represent free speech and human rights that's stuffed with illiberal violators of human rights. And I don't need to contribute to that, or even care if it exists.
UN literally never pretended to do such a thing - it's just a forum for countries to meet and discuss issues, with no power to really do anything other than agree or disagree with each other on whatever is being discussed. Kicking out say Russia or China or North Korea from the UN makes no sense in that context, because you can't have an international forum for discussion if you are not letting countries in to actually you know, discuss.
I think it stems from the idea of UN that people have in their head, maybe it's embedded by the popular media or otherwise, but I see people complaining that UN doesn't force countries to do X or Y. That's literally not how it works - it's just a forum to talk, nothing less nothing more.
TL;DR, the UN's discussions serve now only to grant the veneer of liberal discourse to illiberal states by implying that their collective authoritarian voices should be taken seriously by the democracies, when in fact they should be given no platform whatsoever. Let alone one upon which to expound on human rights!
See, this is where we disagree.
Let's say that Russia was kicked out of the UN for their recent actions - what's the point of UN then? Just everyone else discussing Russia but without Russia being present? That's a joke then, not a discussion forum.
>> by implying that their collective authoritarian voices should be taken seriously by the democracies
I don't see how you can even come to that conclusion. Look at what's happening recently - yes Russia is being given a voice, Lavrow comes out and says whatever drivel Kremlin told him to say, then literally every other country stood up and said how much they disagree with that statement. The last thing that would come to my mind upon seeing this is that they are "being taken seriously by democracies" - they are a country, so they have a place at the table. Doesn't mean that anyone else automatically agrees or respects what they say.
>> there's no reason whatsoever to allow them to continue to have the pretextual cover of international approval from a body that
I literally don't see where you think that having a seat in the UN gives anyone an "approval" for anything. It's literally just a seat at a discussion table, nothing else nothing more.
>> has accepted a declaration of human rights.
Which is great and all, but again, it's not UN's mission statement to enforce that - it's a forum where countries can agree or disagree on things, it has no executive power. If you would like it to have some, then that's a different discussion altogether.
And when a member state does break the declaration of human rights(or any of the other things that UN has agreed on) - it is discussed, it is brought up, and countries to voice their disapproval or agree on collective action. "UN" as an organisation does not, because that's not why it exists.
This claim would really benefit from some examples.
Edit: here’s a link to a thread about what I mean:
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633?s=46&...
But I gather you think wmf is doing something beyond this? Which side, of which culture war do they support, in your view?
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579779097278181378?s=46&...
Curse of American politics, I guess, when one considers the Democrats to be "left leaning", then your whole political perception is skewed.
(The Democrats are significantly to the right of our centre-right party. People who call them lefties or socialists or commies amuse, confuse, and bemuse me.)
See Lysenkoism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Marx's ideas were refined by Antonio Gramsci who offered social Hegemony as a means to achieve the utopia. To the extent that science is a sense-making part of society it must be taken over by pro-marxist/communist forces. It's the only way to assure the success of marxism.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.93001...
Stalin had thousands of Lysenko's critics imprisoned, I dunno how Marx would feel about that, but I have a feeling it wouldn't be particularly positive.
What does Hegel have to do with anything here? Adam Smith was also "routed in Hegel"...
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations when Hegel was 5 years old, and died when Hegel was 19, and hadn't published anything yet.
Lysenkoism still isn't evidence that Marx was anti-science.
But it's still leftist in origin and in ideology. Saying the modern wokified U.S. Left isn't leftist is just a No True Scotsman argument. Leftism and rightism are not narrow, specific things, they're more like inchoate moral intuitions that are given more concrete form by ideology and realpolitik. Individual leftist or rightist ideologies are often contradictory with each other. But the underlying sentiment is usually still recognizable as one or the other.
As someone who is a communist, the Dems have nothing to do with Marx, and they are about as capitalist as they come.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579778161889652736.html
I stopped donating when I saw how politicised they were.
People are people, and will have opinions about things. People of a kind will naturally group together. This is all fine, but it becomes a problem when one of the things that make what you produce worthwhile is neutrality, and you can't keep your politics in your pants.
I'm sure you have some though, otherwise commenting as you did would mean you'd be as guilty of "not keeping your politics in your pants" as you accuse Wikipedia of being.
I expect this would qualify.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
which also links to:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/06/03/we-stand-for...
Most people would probably place a lot of this firmly in the "woke" category.
Well then. That makes it perfectly clear that Wikimedia is under the sway of partisan activists.
True neturality is basically an impossible target.
There's a comic out there, one side advocates for genocide, the other opposes it; the centrists are like "let's have a little genocide, as a compromise".
That's probably true, but Wikipedia isn't even pretending to try.
"You do have to filter out some stuff unfortunately – but even academia, scientists and historians are now confessing that they are tailoring their output to ‘fit in’ with wokeness and sensitivities."
At best, it will be less useable and more liable to influence once its source of funding is at the behest of advertisers. And with a subscription model, presumably it would then be pay-to-play which is antithetical to the idea of Wikipedia in the first place.
I also don't agree that Wikipedia has to a significant degree departed from "impartiality, openness and academic freedom", or at least I'd need some sources/examples.
I think the comment that best describes it is further down, on the guy who cannot fathom why New York Post (a tabloid) is not allowed as a source but NPR (the most trusted news source in america according to several surveys) is.
When you start off from not separating tabloids from journalism well then yeah you can call out Wikipedia for being "woke".
I donate to Wikipedia.
And I am glad they have lots of money. I do not feel outraged about it, I feel happy about it.
I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Wikipedia is a great service, it should be valued. They should not always be living close to the edge of going out of business. How they spend their funds raised is their business.
This anti Wikipedia person is really annoying and I wish they would stop their crusade.
EDIT: it seems the outraged guy is a right wing Murdoch journalist. Enough said, it all adds up. I still remember how Murdoch ran a successful campaign here in Australia to sink the planned national fibre to the home broadband network - 10 years down the track we never got our national fibre network. These guys hate tech, especially free information services like Wikipedia and national broadcasters like the ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Murdoch wants to own it all and hates free.
From the authors Wikpedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski
"Writing for The Daily Telegraph in May 2021, Orlowski said that the Wikimedia Foundation was "flush with cash" and passing money to the Tides Network, which he described as "a left-leaning dark money group"; he referred to Wikipedia as "Wokepedia" in an allusion to the term "woke".[24] In another article for The Daily Telegraph, in December 2021, Orlowski said the Wikimedia Foundation's urgent fundraising banners on Wikipedia were "preposterous" given that it held assets of $240 million and had a $100 million endowment, and the Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director had said in 2013 that the Foundation could be sustainable on "$10M+ a year".[25] In August 2022, Orlowski claimed that Wikipedia had "become a tool of the Left in the battle to control the truth", referencing the recent controversy over Wikipedia's definition of a recession.[26]"
HBomberguy has a good video on the subject. You can use people ranting about 'wokeness' to make money, and while it's amusing and gratifying to indulge that 'ha, I showed you, I don't agree with your ranting against this thing!' it's engaging in pseudo-political behavior that's in a sense wasted. Throwing more money at Wikipedia isn't really helping them be more woke, it's helping them be better at using that to ask for money.
I'm not actually going to give them money today but that's because I gotta tend to my own affairs: if I had a bunch extra I'd send some Wikipedia's way on the grounds that at least they're annoying the right people?
That's muddying the waters. If Wikipedia has deceptive donation drives, then who reports it should be completely irrelevant.
If he's not presenting a factual summary of what's going on, his "motivations" are likewise irrelevant.
If you can refute his claims, by all means do so, but vague ad hominems don't impress me.
Either his claims are factual, or they aren't.
If they are not factual, they should be refuted, but appealing to his "motivations" or "track record" is not a refutation. It is an ad hominem attack, i.e., a logical fallacy.
As I said above:
> So when an oil company writes a report on the viability of solar power then that doesn't affect how we should view the report?
> His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
The truth of that claim has no causal relationship with his opinions. I mean, obviously someone who disagrees with funneling donations to left-wing causes would be more likely to complain about it, or even possibly make something up. But that in itself has no bearing on whether the claim is actually true.
Does Wikipedia funnel donations to left-wing causes or not?
You have presented no evidence one way or the other. Instead, you have attacked his "motivations" and "track record". That is a textbook ad hominem.
Did you actually read the article? This point is not made anywhere in the article.
No point in discussing this further.
"The Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund is a new US$4.5 million fund created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, to provide grants to external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge."
His motivation absolutely affects how he reports on this issue. He's not a neutral observer and so he picks and chooses which facts he includes and puts his own spin around the issues.
But why do you think it does affect how you view the report? Because the company is likely to lie, right? So you should perhaps examine the report more carefully. But that has nothing to do with the report's factuality. It may affect how likely it is to be true, but once you've determined it to be one or the other, who reported it is completely irrelevant.
Likewise, if Wikipedia is in fact dishonest when it asks for donations, and you first heard that completely true fact from a Nazi, are you going to conclude that actually it was false all along? In other words, is your reality determined by the opposite of what your political adversaries say?
> Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap.
$1.9m is was the capital expenditure budget for 2012/3 (ie cost of servers etc).
But I'm sure that his motivations had nothing to do with the fact that he found a conveniently small expense figure to mislead with.
EDIT: And I insist, all that's relevant is the error itself. The political affiliation of the person who made the error shouldn't matter.
If wikimedia was actually spending all donations on blackjack and hookers for execs, would it matter that the person reporting it was reporting it because he really hates wikis as a concept?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_and_Frederick_Barclay
Not everyone shares your opinion on high pressure misleading sales as a persuasion method being acceptable.
Could you elaborate on that? I really don't want to believe this is true, WMF is clearly being manipulative and a world where being manipulative is necessary sounds...extremely dystopian.
I use Wikipedia a few times a week, my kids use it, I am happy to pay for it, and to give them some room to fund new related efforts.
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
> I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Necessary how? For what?
I donate to Wikipedia—as a Wikipedian. I've contributed a bunch of time editing content and doing lots of gnomish things to create value so that Wikipedia is a "great service". Millions of others have, too. But neither I nor any of the other people have anything to do with your donations.
Don't misunderstand: this is not a call-to-action for revenue sharing in the vein of the articles constantly appearing about the sustainability of FOSS; I'm not saying "give us a cut". What I am saying is that the Wikimedia fundraising tactics are thoroughly unnecessary to the actual production costs of Wikipedia that Wikimedia is responsible for.
Am I outraged? No. Do I recognize what WMF is doing as borderline slimy? Yes.
f8376c7f9d4e7f2c03d4dc6e7ced48bdc5f9b4019d94e7dc77c048226dbce9aa
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
Your (bad) attempt to be clever notwithstanding, my comment makes it clear that I'm not referring to donating money. That's not true of the person I responded to. Try again.
From a Twitter thread on a scientific research project funded through Wikimedia:
> In deciding who to fund, the key criteria was use of the Intersectional Scientific method. Everything else - a scientific background, data - was optional. What could possibly go wrong?
> One of the projects was into spatial learning in the California Two-Spot Octopus, for which the researcher got 12 hatchling octopuses.
> Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded.
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579888630868611073
Don't conflate wikipedia and wikimedia.
You may be glad wikipedia has a lot of money, but are you glad wikimedia does? Are you happy with the proportion of your wikimedia donation that goes to wikipedia?
Why do they need 550 employees? I think it's fair to question what the foundation has decided to do with your donation, because basically all of your donation goes to the "not-Wikipedia" parts.
But yeah the fact that this was written by some radical right-winger makes sense. The weird red-scare stuff at the end was so out of place, I should have realized it was by a right-wing propagandist, they have to shove that tripe into everything.
What’s the problem? Wikipedia will always be free to use.
Some people will always support it, others won’t. Life will go on.
This is exactly like trying to cancel someone on YouTube. Just don’t watch the channel.
Perhaps it's because it's deceptive, dishonest & undermines trust.
Unless of-course you don't care about such things, then what's the problem? You don't have to read my comment, 'just' switch off the website.
The problem is that Wikipedia goes to great effort to shill for the CIA-NATO propaganda machine - whilst deceptively claiming they're an independent factual source. The problem is that the youth of Western Europe & The USA are growing up where truth is forbidden by power; buried by Google then muddied by Wikipedia & co.
The problem is when trust is eroded we cannot have meaningful interactions, we cannot even communicate, to the point that: it doesn't matter if one says 'eric4smith is a rapist'; because (as you have conjectured): 'you don't have to read the comment'.
What exactly are you saying? Are you suggesting that thousands of Wikipedia editors have all been subborned by Western military agencies? Or are you just referring to the overpaid Wikimedia C-suite?
Of course some Wikipedia editors are shills. Most MSM journalists are shilling for someone; if you pay attention to current affairs, you'll bump into a shill within seconds. But Wikipedia is largely self-correcting; even if the mainspace articles are biased, (a) there's page history; (b) there's per-editor contribution history; and (c) there's talk pages. I don't know of any other information source that provides so many tools that a critical reader can use to judge the content of an article.
The Wikimedia Foundation control Wikipedia, the subbordination is done by them. Editors are only as free as they permit - the two are inseparable, to suppose otherwise is as supposing chromium is independent from Google.
Of-course Wikipedia is a useful tool, so what? Are they exempt from criticism?
What is it you are saying? You abuse the English language; by definition a journalist is not a shill. Many mainstream shills may claim to be journalists, but that does not make them so.
Well, your definitions are eccentric. For example, Luke Harding is accredited as a senior journalist at The Guardian; he shills for the UK security services. I'm not sure whether we disagree as to what a shill is, or what a journalist is. The only journalists that I know of that are not shills are independent writers, like Jonathan Cook and Peter Hitchens.
Vote with your dollars and attention.
I’m sick of people trying to cancel the things that they do not like and does not affect their lives.
> While I am a very low income Senior [ live in Gov't. H.U.D. Apt.], I do still try to contribute to certain causes. Wikipedia is 1 such Group. I believe that I have given Wikipedia small donations for about 3 years now. While I do not have much to give, It is important that You know we appreciate the great work you undertake.
> I do, respectfully, need to point out 1 "process" that Wikipedia implements that "disturbs/upsets" me. I just, accidentally, got rolled over to Wikipedia on a matter I am researcing. The Wikipedia "overlay" writing asking for Donations said this was 4th time You have asked me.
> THAT "NOTICE" MADE ME FEEL VERY "GUILTY/BAD"....... Right now, I have $18.00 in my bank account ! That's It !
> Soon, I will get my only source of Income [ a monthly Social Security Check] & will try to make a donation at that time.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk/Archives/2...>
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978>
No silly 25MB framework, no hype, no popup banners (except the donation), no ads, no tracking, doesn't ask to sign up when I scroll down, no paywall...
Just doing it's thing providing all the world with all knowledge for free, in a lot of languages.
These managers can earn $4 million for all I care.
Hell, I work for a mid-sized company that doesn't even come close to being as useful as Wikipedia and our C-suite earns a million a year.
> "It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers," observes one regular Register reader, which seems as good a description as any to us.
https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/07/khmer_rouge_in_daiper...
> "You think the BBC is biased? Check out Wokepedia"
https://archive.ph/20210527073503/https://www.telegraph.co.u...
In a rhetorical line consistent with the "Khmer Rouge in diapers" and "Wokepedia" snipes, the writing in this second piece is strikingly petty and polemical:
> If Karl Marx was alive today, perhaps he wouldn’t be touring Manchester slums with Engels, but peering in astonishment at the upstairs-downstairs world of Wikipedia. Instead of Das Kapital, he’d be writing Das Wiki.
It's revealing that Orlowski chooses to single out Wikipedia as a remarkable examplar of extreme wealth inequality, when many of the outlets he mentions in his very first sentence are headed by far wealthier individuals than Jimmy Wales:
> Who would you name as the most influential media company in the world? Some might offer Fox, Disney or the BBC. Or AT&T and Comcast, the largest media giants by revenue. In fact, the real answer may be hidden in plain view: Wikipedia.
Evidently, Orlowski is simply a right-wing journalist who dislikes the public having access to information with an ideological bent which is even sometimes different than he would like to see online, and therefore takes potshots at Wikipedia using standards he doesn't apply to other outlets.
Personally, when I want information on a topic that's received widespread attention, I almost always find Wikipedia an extraordinarily informative source, usually much more neutral in tone and much more fact-loaded than anything else found online. Even when the writing suggests a viewpoint I don't agree with. And yes, sometimes the viewpoint is to the political left of my personal viewpoint.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not a little "Khmer Rouge diaper baby" who is helplessly swayed to the evil communists by the slightest bias in Wikipedia's tone. I'm an adult who finds it to be one helpful source as I draw my own conclusions.
If such a viewpoint is unpalatable to Andrew Orlowski, perhaps he belongs on Conservapedia, the onetime self-styled "trustworthy" encyclopedia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski
[note: minor edits for clarity + expanded analysis]
Note that citations don't make bias impossible or claims true, they just make it easier to decide whether to trust information. E.g. If I cite the BBC in my statement and you trust the BBC you're more likely to trust my statement.
A lot of right wingers believe that most news sources (and particularly a lot of the ones the wikipedian collective thinks of as reliable) are grossly misleading or lying, so they won't be very convinced by, say, a Vogue citation.
Your point, while valid enough in general, is a red herring in this case.
Not just right-wingers. With few exceptions, Wikipedia "reliable sources" are mostly mainstream media, which most lefties regard as locked-down, neo-liberal propaganda cannons.
In closing, one small joke: About dark / annoying patterns: You forgot my least favourite: When you move the mouse out of tab, lightbox pops up: "Don't leave yet... blah blah blah... sign up for our newsletter!" As if that is going to keep me on the page!