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.
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.
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).
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
> 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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]"
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is worth hundreds of dollars per year to me. I occasionally throw $20 at them. It is a steal. I never asked myself if they have too much money or if they are using it "correctly".
The main donation page doesn't seem bad to me. Nowhere do they claim they are struggling or may go under. In fact, they say "thriving" and that a small donation will keep it thriving for years to come.
To those upset with them, what would you do? All of their other projects are about free information. Are people upset about wikidata or wikiversity exist? Should they have only done Wikipedia and stopped? Should they not ask for money until they are desperate and in a dire situation? Should they not use any marketing speak and say, "we have hundreds of millions of dollars but would like more please."
Comparing them to FAANG/MAMAA, it is no comparison at all. The value is great and pure: nice, fast, simple, useful interface. They don't have malware, ads, tracking scripts, popups, spam, or dark patterns. Unlike social media there is no envy/depression side effects. They don't try to get you addicted and gamify it. They don't push controversial news just to boost engagement. They respect your privacy, ublock origin has nothing to block on their site.
It seems like Wikimedia is getting hell on here for having very high standards and maybe not quite living up to people's expectations. Whereas the FAANGs have zero standards, don't respect users at all, are 100% profit driven (and already have vastly more money), but they are ok because... some reason.
Maybe in the pure STEM subsections but anything to do with humanities is highly subjective and biased.
Even in the hard sciences I find that Wikipedia is a just good starting point: scan the references for the real material. It helps if you have access to real libraries, both physical and digital.
Personally I stopped donating to them when I discovered how difficult it was to correct errors in literally my own family's history; there's always some "editor" sitting there to roll it back in seconds.
> Personally I stopped donating to them when I discovered how difficult it was to correct errors in literally my own family's history;
As it should be. Wikipedia is not your personal blog. If you cannot prove what you say is true to an acceptable standard it should be reverted. That is how it wikipedia stays reliable.
Wikipedia being a starting point is one of my favorite things about it. I really like that all their sources are cited and linked to. It always amazes me that news organizations don't cite their sources or have links to the original source.
On that same note, could that be why your family history gets rolled back? No doubt it would be frustrating to have a change you know is real get rolled back but it would make sense from an objective editorial standpoint. That said, I get why you wouldn't want to donate. I personally come from a long line of nobodies (and am proudly carrying on that tradition) so I will never have this problem!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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"
Readit News
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.
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.
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
Its a shame so much money is being funneled to these groups since that's exactly the opposite goal of most donators to Wikipedia.
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.
In most cases, openly opposed to the spread of free information.
...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=...
And trust me, agreeing with Unherd about anything does not sit naturally to me.
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 do I need a proxy for charity? If I want to give to some cause I will do so directly.
A low CN rating is bad, but a high CN rating isn't good.
Additionally, only a small fraction of the money goes to wikipedia (including software dev for it).
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".
They have strayed far far far far far from that goal
Not having a ton of extra money is a good way to prevent that kind of bloat.
It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.
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...
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.
[0] “journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.”
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.
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.
"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?"
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.
The wiki outrage looks like a variation of bike shedding, the more people know, they more opinion they have
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?
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.
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.
What was this ad that was so objectionable?
Is there a reference here that I'm missing?
Hyperbole / slander?
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]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_and_Frederick_Barclay
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.
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
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.
Not everyone shares your opinion on high pressure misleading sales as a persuasion method being acceptable.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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!
> "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.
The main donation page doesn't seem bad to me. Nowhere do they claim they are struggling or may go under. In fact, they say "thriving" and that a small donation will keep it thriving for years to come.
To those upset with them, what would you do? All of their other projects are about free information. Are people upset about wikidata or wikiversity exist? Should they have only done Wikipedia and stopped? Should they not ask for money until they are desperate and in a dire situation? Should they not use any marketing speak and say, "we have hundreds of millions of dollars but would like more please."
Comparing them to FAANG/MAMAA, it is no comparison at all. The value is great and pure: nice, fast, simple, useful interface. They don't have malware, ads, tracking scripts, popups, spam, or dark patterns. Unlike social media there is no envy/depression side effects. They don't try to get you addicted and gamify it. They don't push controversial news just to boost engagement. They respect your privacy, ublock origin has nothing to block on their site.
It seems like Wikimedia is getting hell on here for having very high standards and maybe not quite living up to people's expectations. Whereas the FAANGs have zero standards, don't respect users at all, are 100% profit driven (and already have vastly more money), but they are ok because... some reason.
Maybe in the pure STEM subsections but anything to do with humanities is highly subjective and biased.
Even in the hard sciences I find that Wikipedia is a just good starting point: scan the references for the real material. It helps if you have access to real libraries, both physical and digital.
Personally I stopped donating to them when I discovered how difficult it was to correct errors in literally my own family's history; there's always some "editor" sitting there to roll it back in seconds.
As it should be. Wikipedia is not your personal blog. If you cannot prove what you say is true to an acceptable standard it should be reverted. That is how it wikipedia stays reliable.
On that same note, could that be why your family history gets rolled back? No doubt it would be frustrating to have a change you know is real get rolled back but it would make sense from an objective editorial standpoint. That said, I get why you wouldn't want to donate. I personally come from a long line of nobodies (and am proudly carrying on that tradition) so I will never have this problem!
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&...
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.
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.
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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
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"
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