[HN Gopher] Jimmy Wales' Final Email
___________________________________________________________________
Jimmy Wales' Final Email
Author : cyounkins
Score : 268 points
Date : 2021-11-09 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cyounkins.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cyounkins.medium.com)
| caymanjim wrote:
| None of these things are egregious violations of any ethical
| standard. Wikipedia is not a source of excessive spam, and their
| beg banners on the website, while mildly annoying (especially if
| you already donated), aren't so frequent that they bother me. The
| site has no ads and provides tremendous value to the world.
| Nitpicking some minor marketing annoyances (which are probably
| handled by hired guns) comes off as petty.
|
| One could make an argument that Wikipedia already has enough
| money that they could beg less and possibly survive indefinitely
| by just managing their current endowment well. One could make an
| argument that Google and others benefit so much from Wikipedia's
| high-quality search results that Google should help support them
| (although I wouldn't want Wikipedia to rely on corporate money).
| There are plenty of reasons why Wikipedia might not need to beg
| as often or at all.
|
| None of that makes these minor issues a problem.
| avalys wrote:
| A nonprofit using tricks to get your attention as they ask for
| donations? Say it isn't so!
|
| In other news, NPR pledge drives are _so annoying_.
| randycupertino wrote:
| > In other news, NPR pledge drives are so annoying.
|
| I'll take an NPR pledge drive over the 1-800-KARS-for-KIDS
| commercial any day.
| cyounkins wrote:
| With NPR, does the aggressiveness match the need?
| voz_ wrote:
| NPR has become a race baiting mouthpiece, sadly. The quality
| of the overall programming has sharply declined over the last
| 10 years. No more driveway moments for me.
| djbusby wrote:
| Car Talk tho.
| handrous wrote:
| The loss of Car Talk and the changes to A Prairie Home
| Companion all but eliminated my weekend listening. Wait,
| Wait... is OK but I usually don't tune in without the
| other stuff to draw me. The other new comedy show (with
| Coulton and Eisenberg[?], I forget the name of it) isn't
| very good. Maybe they'll find their footing, but it's
| been years at this point, and it's still not good. On the
| Media is really good, but plays at a time when I'm almost
| never driving, so I rarely catch it.
|
| Their weekday news shows are too corporate-friendly and
| consist mostly of the same horse-race and monday-morning-
| quarterbacking campaign strategy garbage that everything
| else does, when the US is in national political campaign
| mode, which is like 60+% of the time now. The best US and
| international coverage on the whole damn station is when
| they just re-broadcast the BBC.
|
| [EDIT] Oh and there's the huge amount of time they spend
| either advertising or promoting other NPR shows or
| podcasts. God damn, it's so much. It's at least as much
| time as "commercial" radio devotes to that kind of thing.
| Donate? You fucking play corporate ads! All the time!
| jedimastert wrote:
| Hasn't had a new episode in almost ten years, sadly, and
| likely will not have a revival as Tom passed away.
| Apparently radio distribution was slated to stop at the
| beginning of last month
| cphoover wrote:
| Agreed they've been infected by the PC police/woke mob...
| Quite a shame because they used to do real hard-hitting
| reporting.
| eric_b wrote:
| Agreed, I used to love some of their programming, but the
| NPR of today is completely unlistenable to me.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree with this. I'm on "the left", but I don't need a
| media outlet confirming my biases or stroking my ego. I was
| originally drawn to NPR precisely because it seemed like a
| _relatively_ neutral news source (still discernibly left-
| of-center, but not aggressively so) and because it
| frequently exposed me to other perspectives; however, it
| seems to have been dragged into the swamp of "activist
| journalism" just like everyone else.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| NPR and PBS both are among the most accurate/neutral
| according to a media study. [1] I honestly worry that
| we're having a political disparity in truth that's
| pushing a choice between politically neutral and
| factually accurate.
|
| [1]: https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/
| metabagel wrote:
| Since some are complaining about the Ad Fontes
| methodology, here it is:
|
| "Ad Fontes administers an internal political bias test to
| analysts, asking them to rank their left-to-right
| position on about 20 policy positions. That information
| allows the company to attempt to create ideological
| balance by including one centrist, one left-leaning and
| one right-leaning analyst on each review panel. The
| panels review at least three articles for each source,
| but they may review as many as 30 for particularly
| prominent outlets, like The Washington Post, Otero said.
| More on their methodology, including how they choose
| which articles to review to create a bias rating, can be
| found here on the Ad Fontes website."
|
| From Poynter:
|
| https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-
| literacy/2021/sh...
|
| And here are a couple of links to their methodology:
|
| https://adfontesmedia.com/white-paper-multi-analyst-
| ratings-...
|
| https://adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-
| sources/
| eric_b wrote:
| I mean... you can put anything you want on the internet.
| I looked up their "methodology" and it's sort of just
| whatever they think a source/article is. Not really
| rigorous.
|
| And anyways, they put the WashPo right of NYT? That
| hasn't been true since ol Jeff B took over.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Maybe WashPo's fondness for "austere religious scholars"
| was counted as 'conservative points'?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| There are surely more venter right opinion columnists in
| the Post than the Times.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's not hard to be "most accurate/neutral" when
| comparing against every batshit blog and podcast, which
| is what your source does. In fact, NPR and PBS are
| clustered among the mainstream news sources, which only
| supports my "NPR is in the swamp with everyone else"
| claim. That said, I don't put much stock in JPGs that
| look like something a high schooler put together with
| PowerPoint 20 years ago.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| There's an interactive version on that same website if
| the image isn't engaging enough for you.
| 3maj wrote:
| To be fair, this is one of the few non-profits that benefits
| most people and that is actually used day-to-day by the
| majority of people with an internet connection.
| nameless912 wrote:
| But at least they're (mostly) honest? They take up some time,
| but they're clear about what's happening. The only "deceptive"
| practice they have is the two-for-one matching grants, which
| I'm dubious about whether they exist or not.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| That sort of matching is real, but usually just a
| psychological trick to encourage people to donate more.
|
| A foundation or rich person says "hey NPR we wanna give you
| $10 million" and NPR says "what if instead you match every
| donation we get dollar for dollar up to $10 million?". That
| way, they can encourage smaller donors while still getting
| the original $10 million.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The important difference is what happens if they receive
| less than $10m from other donors.
| mbauman wrote:
| The donation matches are typically not grants, but rather
| _other donors_ playing those games (surely in collaboration
| with NPR's development dept). They definitely exist.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100
| million.
|
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/22/wikimedia-fo...
|
| (sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yale University has an endowment of $30 billion. That's an
| endowment 300 times bigger than Wikipedia.
| https://investments.yale.edu/
|
| Apple, in comparison, has $200 billion in cash reserves.
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-companies-most-cash-reserv...
| [deleted]
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| What's a hardware manufacturing private company have to do
| with the Wikipedia foundation?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| If Wikipedia is the most successful _non-profit_ tech
| organization, Apple is the most successful _for-profit_
| tech organization.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| Okay. Then why do you compare cash to endowments?
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| It reminds me of the Mozilla Foundation.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each
| year and have ~500 staff.
|
| I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and
| that much money to run it?
|
| Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-
| stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as
| much as 50 people, more like 2x if that.
|
| That much spend seems unsustainable long term.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people
| are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of
| facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise.
|
| And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on
| them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!
| Thaxll wrote:
| Same scale? We're talking about almost static pages, with
| some videos / audio. At heart wikipedia is very simple and
| did not changed much from 15 years ago.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| For comparison, OpenStreetMap has roughly $800k in reserves
| and their expenses are a couple hundred thousands dollars
| per year.
|
| I agree there are probably more justifiable expenses at
| Wikimedia than that, but that there is a middle ground
| between the high water mark they're targeting and what
| other non-profits are operating with. The Internet
| Archive's annual budget is ~$10 million.
|
| EDIT: @dylan604 (replying here due to HN throttling):
| Section 230 shields Wikipedia from most liability/exposure:
| https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/successes/wikipedia
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Alexa rank for wikipedia is 13, OSM is 4550. It's not on
| the same planet. No, not on the same galaxy.
|
| Wikipedia is not only read and written by the entire
| planet of humans, including the smallest 3rd world
| countries, it's also a bot feast, and busy powering APIs
| all over the world.
|
| It got hundreds of links in some articles, which are
| automatically connected to all other articles in a
| gigantic graph of data. Oh, each article may also exist
| in a hundred languages, times each version, thanks to the
| history of all edits ever performed or suggested.
|
| It's not just links though, now articles have plenty of
| metadata that generate connections, tables, ranks, toc,
| indexes, hierarchies, and listings as well.
|
| All that is edited, rollbacked, debated, diffed and
| rendered almost on the fly for millions of articles,
| while respecting the permission system, and of course,
| the fun part, detecting the thousands of attempt at
| abuses by second.
|
| In the blink of an eye. Because wikipedia is _fast_. It's
| one of the fastest site around.
|
| Of course now it is also serving billions of images,
| sounds and videos. And the foundation is also maintaing:
| MediaWiki Meta-Wiki Wikibooks
| Wikidata Wikinews Wikiquote
| Wikisource Wikispecies
| Wikiversity Wikivoyage
| Wiktionary
|
| Not to mention animating workshops all around the globes,
| helping NGO to provide offline wikipedias for poor
| countries and providing and maintaining the wiki as FOSS.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Thanks, it's always so easy to forget how much work has
| to be done so that things seem easy and effortless.
| emerged wrote:
| you turned me from Wikipedia cynical to wanting a job
| there
| dylan604 wrote:
| What's the legal expenses associated with Wiki? I could
| see some people wanting to sue for information linked
| to/about them. OSM probably doesn't have that same type
| of exposure.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >>> As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at
| >$100 million.
|
| >> It seems that this is approximately how much they spend
| each year and have ~500 staff.
|
| > It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and
| people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same
| scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise.
|
| How much of that money and staff goes to actually running
| the site and maintaining the software? IIRC (and correct me
| if I'm wrong), a large fraction actually goes to other
| efforts.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| With an Alexa rank of 13 and very real competitors that are
| large tech companies (every search engine now tries to answer
| your question instead of presenting Wikipedia anymore) seems
| to be quite appropriate to me.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| > I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people
| and that much money to run it?
|
| It takes a lot of people and money to raise $150m/year ;->
| belval wrote:
| According to their 2019/2020 statement they spend 5M$ in
| "donation processing" and an additional 5M$ in wages for
| the donation campaigns.
|
| 10M$ in expenses to get 120M$ really isn't so bad.
|
| [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/
| Wikim...
| charles_f wrote:
| Between content moderation, dev, security, infrastructure and
| such, then the support needed, I can easily see how Wikipedia
| can grow to 500 people. They're offering a stable product
| that has a presence in almost _every country in the world_,
| serving an insane volume of data. This is not a random
| startup, I'm actually amazed they pull it out with just 500
| people
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Between content moderation....I can easily see how
| Wikipedia can grow to 500 people.
|
| IIRC, nearly 100% of all content moderation is done by
| Wikipedia volunteer editors, so that's not actually an
| operational expense of theirs.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people
| and that much money to run it?
|
| Maybe we could ask Mozilla. /s
|
| At least Wikipedia is not actively working on sabotaging
| their flagship product.
| bmhin wrote:
| There has been some concern about their inflating spending
| for a while. I'm honestly not well versed in if this is some
| potential disaster or problem like it can be made out to be,
| but it does seem like Wikimedia will generally find ways to
| spend money they get, whether it's a good use of the funds or
| not.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C.
| ..
| btilly wrote:
| It is worth noting that the endowment is about half of
| Wikimedia's assets, and is not included in that tally. See
| https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
| for more.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| That's not a lot of money in context.
| loeg wrote:
| It's quite a lot of money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User
| :Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I read the page. It's very angry about Wikipedia's
| finances.
|
| I still don't resent their asking and I still donate.
|
| Wikipedia is a truly worthwhile service and I'm happy they
| have much more money than they need to scrape by.
|
| You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have
| is just above what they need to get by. I think that is a
| bad way to run any operation.
| joshmanders wrote:
| My thoughts too, "living paycheck to paycheck" doesn't
| sound like it ensures Wikimedia's survival. We'd all be
| shouting "Save Wikipedia!" if they have a bad year were
| expenses are up and donations are drastically down and
| they end up going offline due to not having enough
| reserve to help it.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| But Wikipedia _is_ living paycheck to paycheck despite
| getting a lot of donations. That is what Guy Macon 's
| article is complaining about.
| coldpie wrote:
| Yeah. I always wonder if the complainers do the same deep
| analysis and whining about how for-profit companies spend
| their income, or if they just plunk down $120 for Xbox
| Game Pass and leave happy. Is Wikipedia worth $20 a year
| to me? Yeah. So they can have it and spend it how they
| like. Just like Microsoft can with my Game Pass
| subscription.
| Aachen wrote:
| It's about as much money as Signal has. One of those two
| serves a lot more people though!
| simonswords82 wrote:
| What to do with a problem like Wikipedia. It's ultimately a
| fantastic source of information like nothing else on the
| internet. That has to be worth something right?
|
| Problem is that people probably don't bother to donate as much as
| they could or should. I know I haven't donated.
|
| Is there another way it could be monetised without ads?
| skulk wrote:
| IMO using your resources to store a copy of all the articles
| (and even serve them if you can) is a pretty solid donation to
| the cause.
| david_allison wrote:
| They're moving into selling access to structured data APIs.
|
| $50k/year for their mid-tier offering. "Contact us" after that.
|
| https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/
|
| https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/
| dmurray wrote:
| The problem, as other posts allude to, is it has _too much_
| money and not enough interesting, useful projects to do with
| it. It 's a great example of how a fantastic resource very much
| can be - and is - funded purely through donations of time and
| money. They just try to tell you it isn't doing well.
| wyager wrote:
| Wikipedia is not expensive to run. Wikimedia is a classic
| bloated nonprofit that keeps "needing" more money to grow the
| number of useless administrative sinecures they can support.
| https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_c...
| ezoe wrote:
| It's common to all donation based non-profits groups and whether
| you like it or not, it works. Spamming donation request letters
| to the previous donors yields better outcome than not to do it.
| cynoclast wrote:
| Wikipedia Founder Larry Sanger: "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased"
| (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/)
|
| Such a shame.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| it is well-known in USA non-profits that some fundraising in some
| orgs takes over, and that those who can "make rain" get long-term
| status. Counter-point? lots of countries do not have "non-profit"
| at all.
|
| Wikipedia is a precious, troubled project IMHO
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has
| ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Indeed, Wikipedia is so important that they absolutely should
| not be using scammy and spammy techniques to solicit donations.
| oscribinn wrote:
| Compare the opening paragraphs of this article in 2015 vs now:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
|
| Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan
| platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the
| angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either
| dishonest or naive.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It's strange to see someone use "bipartisan" as a stand un
| for "fair" or "factual".
| oscribinn wrote:
| Edited, "nonpartisan" is apparently the word I was looking
| for.
| bad_username wrote:
| This is cotrect. Wikipedia informs poorly on subjects that
| have political or cultural significance, favoring heavily
| certain ideologies over neutral presentation of facts. It has
| been hijacked by activists that make it impossible to
| introduce any data that is outside of what is fashionable
| today. Wikipedia still rides its old reputation, but does not
| deserve it any more.
| adzm wrote:
| What are you trying to point out in the latest version? They
| are still pretty similar for several years apart.
| cyounkins wrote:
| Yes. As I wrote, I have donated to Wikipedia and love the
| project. I think the methods they use to solicit donations
| undermines their trustworthiness.
| acover wrote:
| Wikipedia is great but I similarly don't trust their cries
| for help anymore.
|
| I won't donate till they communicate more honestly or
| Wikipedia - not wikimedia - needs help. It feels a lot like
| my local food bank begging for food but it turns out it's
| only their side venture composting food that's in need.
| lancesells wrote:
| I'll donate to the annual email every year to keep them from
| adding ads or other forms of monetization.
| blowski wrote:
| It's incredible how many people say they'd love to support
| an ad-free social network, frequently use Wikipedia, and
| don't donate to Wikipedia.
|
| This is a problem for so many charities. People
| passionately agree with the mission, want to donate, can
| afford to donate... and yet don't donate. And then complain
| when the charity is too aggressive in requesting donations.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Donations are the worst idea ever. They are hard to
| solicit and then when you do get one people have
| incredibly unreasonable expectations.
|
| How many people complain about non-profit execs making
| $200k but will happily buy nike's made by Chinese slave
| prison labor with out a thought as to how much the exec
| makes, or what the labor conditions are.
|
| Wikimedia is guilty of allowing people to volunteer their
| time. If you don't volunteer, nothing bad happens.
| Compare with try not volunteering your time to make
| Nike's in the Chinese prison system.
| berkut wrote:
| I share similar sentiments as the article's author: I donated
| once ~4 years ago, and have been *completely* turned off
| donating again (despite wanting to, and knowing I should for
| such a fantastic resource) by such agressive emails, because I
| feel it's rewarding such behaviour.
| mattlondon wrote:
| It is the same with most charities.
|
| Donate once as a one-off and they will Never. Leave. You.
| Alone. You'll continue getting letters and emails and
| sometimes even calls for years and years after your last
| donation.
|
| It puts me off donating.
| randycupertino wrote:
| I've had the same thing with race fundraising charities. I
| donated to someone else's Best Buddies bike ride
| fundraising trip and I haven't been able to get off "Maria
| Shriver's Best Buddies" email spam list for years. They
| create new email addresses to spam me constantly. It's
| turned me off of ever donating anything to them again!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. As a longtime donor, I feel
| uncomfortable not donating, but even more uncomfortable at
| closing a positive feedback loop on bad behavior.
|
| New management is probably the only answer, as Wales clearly
| feels this is the best way to run this particular railroad.
| But what will we give up when _that_ finally happens?
|
| The whole situation sucks. It would be so much better if they
| just knocked off the shady shit.
|
| Lately I've been redirecting donations that would have gone
| to Wikipedia to the Internet Archive, as I feel their work is
| at least equally important. But IA's reckless legal behavior
| is likely to result in my donations going straight to their
| defense counsel and/or plaintiffs, which is also not
| something I want to be part of.
| hammock wrote:
| The high value of Wikipedia is the (only?) reason why so many
| people tolerate really annoying donation solicitation
| practices.
|
| If it were any other way, it wouldn't be this way.
| myself248 wrote:
| I either found a way to unsubscribe from these, or I found a
| way to filter them. I now make a monthly donation, and I see
| the receipts from those transactions, and that's it. Just the
| way I like it.
|
| Contrast with the Red Cross, whose annoyance-to-value ratio
| is far worse, IMHO, to the point that I refuse to donate. Yes
| they're providing literal life blood to people who may die
| without it, but have you SEEN their firehose of email?
|
| I don't understand why this continues. It must work better
| than the alternatives, which is awful.
| petters wrote:
| Wikipedia is incredibly valuable, but the Wikimedia foundation
| is not known to spend money wisely.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
|
| A very small fraction of the money is going to keep the servers
| running. The editors of Wikipedia are unpaid.
|
| The software projects ran by Wikimedia have not been very
| impressive. What happened to proper discussion pages, for
| example? That has been going on for more than a decade.
| junon wrote:
| The "make a book" function has been literally _broken_ (see:
| non-functional, with a "sorry about that" message) for years
| now. It used to be my favorite part of Wikipedia and now you
| can't do shit with it.
| easton wrote:
| Looks like it was uninstalled from the English Wikipedia a
| couple months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books
| junon wrote:
| Sad. It was insanely useful.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world
| has ever seen
|
| [citation needed]
| andrewguenther wrote:
| I get a ton of value out of Wikipedia and I donate annually.
|
| Fun fact: If you unsubscribe from the donation email list, you
| are re-subscribed the next time you donate. It's scummy and
| infuriating and I hate to think that this kind of crap is what my
| money is actually going towards.
| roelmore wrote:
| They just do what works. Is this what 'ends justify the
| means'....means?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
| matt_morgan wrote:
| The most successful nonprofit project in the history of the world
| and 90% of the comments here are about what they're doing wrong.
| Get a grip. Your idea about what they could be doing better is
| ... useless.
|
| That said, some of those email tactics are a little unsavory. But
| you can bet they test the hell out of them and they do what makes
| the most money.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Wikipedia is a wonderful project built on the back of highly
| qualified unpaid staff.
|
| Management is milking the cow and has been for years.
|
| This is tricky because they rightfully have a stellar brand
| value, I am not sure that will last forever.
|
| As you know, the fish always rot from the head, this is a good
| example.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| That's my biggest problem with it. They raise all this money,
| and yes, a bunch of it goes to infrastructure. But the thing
| is, they always seem to find ways to spend whatever money they
| have, and none of it ever seems to make its way to their most
| critical and valuable staff: editors, admins, etc.
| nobody_nothing wrote:
| > People will tell me to click that "unsubscribe" button. I will
| and swear I have before.
|
| Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many
| subscriptions - to the point where I was questioning my own
| memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my
| Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I
| unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks
| anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label.
| This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if
| I'm actually being spammed.
|
| Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of
| doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever
| continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my
| memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.
|
| (And no, the company is not Wikimedia) :P
| cyounkins wrote:
| It's definitely possible I'm misremembering. I've donated
| multiple times and it'd be reasonable for them to re-add me
| upon donation. But I'm _pretty sure_ I 've unsubscribed since
| my last donation in 2019.
| legitster wrote:
| A large part of my job managing email systems is dealing with
| unsubscribe issues. If the unsubscribe button doesn't work,
| it's probably one of these issues:
|
| - "Unsubscribed" is not persistent. If they have a logic that
| subscribes you to their emails (filling out a form), you will
| get resubscribed.
|
| - You are unsubscribing a different email than you subscribed
| with (This is like, 75% of cases we deal with. It could be a
| forwarder, or a POP download, or a DL, etc). - You are
| unsubscribing via the Google link and not the one in the email
| (not all systems are smart enough to recognize that).
|
| - Something is broken or someone screwed up the logic. If you
| reach out and inform them, they may have someone seriously look
| into it (for our company, this would be me).
|
| Or they are truly are scummy company and ignore unsubscribes or
| pull your address off of the same purchased list again. If they
| don't respond to you, pull the email headers and figure out who
| their host is and report them for abuse.
| busterarm wrote:
| I swear I googled to see if Jimmy Wales died first before reading
| this post.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| RIP
|
| edit: fine, downvote me, I am just memorializing a fallen hero.
| guess I will do it alone
| m8s wrote:
| That's what I thought too. The title of this article is as much
| clickbait as Wales' emails.
| cyounkins wrote:
| That's the idea.
| jbuhbjlnjbn wrote:
| Wikipedia on non-controversal scientific topics is great.
|
| The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and
| "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution
| was ever proposed, instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and
| banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to
| rectify information. It continues with the political topics and
| oh boy, just get to investigating and reading if you care for a
| look into the deep, dark depths.
|
| The short heads up is, wikipedia is absolutely riddled with one-
| sided, manipulative information on political topics. Often
| written by ghost writers, posting stuff 14 hours a day for years
| without a single day off.
|
| The finances and agressive begging for donations are also highly
| controversial. I have read multiple investigations accusing them
| of absolutely not needing any money, and staging a charade while
| getting huge sums by big interest groups, though I cannot
| estimate if this is true, or to which degree.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics
| and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible
| solution was ever proposed...
|
| Yeah, table stakes for editing Wikipedia on anything even
| remotely controversial is an obsessive personality, limitless
| time, and patience for an huge amount of toxicity.
|
| > ...instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning
| editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify
| information.
|
| IMHO, it's quite sensible to not allow people to edit pages
| about themselves, because people tend to have a strong-well
| understood biases on that topic.
| 8260337551 wrote:
| Infrastructure isn't free. Happy to donate to Wikipedia on a
| yearly basis. And the emails are only once a year.
| andrewguenther wrote:
| If only it were once a year. Every quarter I get a whole thread
| spread out over a couple weeks. "Did you see our last email?"
| "There's still time to save Wikipedia!"
| wyager wrote:
| Wikimedia spends like 95% of their money on stuff that isn't
| Wikipedia. They're a classic bloated NGO, where they have some
| initial mission they can do efficiently but they keep asking
| for money way down the diminishing returns curve.
| loeg wrote:
| To substantiate these (accurate) claims: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| hguant wrote:
| >they have some initial mission they can do efficiently
|
| Because the initial mission is still, by and large, done by
| volunteers and unpaid editors.
|
| Wikimedia is a bloated leech
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| Food isn't free either, but I haven't been sending Bill Gates
| money every year to help him buy his own food.
| Aachen wrote:
| I didn't know Gates ran a non profit that provided you with
| food/content/whatever on a daily basis. Not sure in what
| other scenario this comparison makes sense.
| tpmx wrote:
| Congrats on your first post. Welcome to HN.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| They don't need the money tho. They have enough money, I
| believe, to run without raising anymore money for 1.0-years.
| berkut wrote:
| Are other people only having a single email per year?
|
| This year I've had three (two in September, both from
| donate@wikimedia.org, and one from jimmy@wikipedia.org in
| October saying 'We've had enough').
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| That's part of the problem - they have way more money than
| needed to run the infrastructure, but when they beg for more,
| they make it sound like they might not have enough to keep the
| lights on.
|
| They're very firmly on my "do not give money to" list, together
| with Mozilla (donations go to everything EXCEPT Firefox
| development, which isn't made particularly clear when you
| donate, and much of their other stuff isn't worth supporting
| IMO).
| nsonha wrote:
| phew, the title made me think something happened to Jimmy
| rich_sasha wrote:
| What are their expenses btw? Are their hosting costs so high? Do
| they have paid staff beyond some fairly trivial admin? Do they
| curate articles for cash?
| ff317 wrote:
| Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to:
|
| Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering
| capacity.
|
| The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is
| perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good
| use.
|
| Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot
| of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The
| tech stack runs on its own bare metal (on the scale of a couple
| thousand servers) and its own CDN (to better protect against
| censorship and surveillance for the global audience, among many
| reasons), the total network currently has some physical
| presence in 7 different datacenter locations around the world,
| and there's all the redundant transport, transit, and peering
| network requirements that come with that. The live codebase
| gets new releases to production multiple times a week. There
| are many other side-services that run alongside the core
| MediaWiki codebase. There's constant network attacks on our
| infrastructure. There's all the infrastructure layer metrics
| and monitoring stuff. I could go on and on...
|
| On top of all that (which implies reasonably robust techie
| staffing): there's a Legal department that has to defend
| against threats to the org from businesses and governments
| around the world and in general does a ton of amazing work in
| many different directions (my favorite example was our past
| lawsuit against the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v._NSA).
| There's all the usual corporate supporting functions, including
| finance, travel, talent and culture, etc. Can't fail to mention
| the Fundraising team itself, of course! :)
|
| The foundation has a big job keeping the soft and hard
| infrastructure of the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia going.
| The budget really isn't that unreasonable, and the endowment
| also isn't anywhere near big enough to replace our annual
| donation budget and ensure the org remains financially stable
| in the long run, yet. Usually when one of us goes to a
| conference and talks about our infrastructure, others are
| shocked to learn just how _small_ our tech teams are for the
| jobs they 're doing.
| cyounkins wrote:
| OP here. Thank you for work on Wikipedia (seriously!). I can
| really appreciate that the Foundation has expenses and I
| think donations is really the best way to get the funds. My
| only qualm is with the aggressiveness and deception with
| which those donations are solicited.
| bryans wrote:
| Except the organization already has liquid assets nearing
| twice its annual expenses, on top of the endowment, and >20%
| of the revenue is simply redirected to other organizations.
| It's also a little ridiculous to suggest that the
| infrastructure is substantial, given that the costs are only
| <2% @ $2.5 million.
|
| I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure
| operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which
| the rest of us could learn from, but it's almost irrelevant
| in regards to the bottom line of the organization.
| mcguire wrote:
| Wikimedia Foundation's financials are online:
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#a1-...
|
| Top expenses are: Salaries and wages ($56M), awards and
| grants[1] ($23M), professional services ($12M), other operating
| expenses ($10M), donation processing expenses ($5M), and
| internet hosting ($2M)[2].
|
| [1] Still trying to figure out what goes into that.
|
| [2] From my own experience and their size and availability, I
| would expect that to be at least an order of magnitude larger.
| I'm impressed.
| loeg wrote:
| The expenses of wiki _pedia_ itself are miniscule compared with
| wiki _media_ 's total revenue and expenses:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| dmurray wrote:
| Hosting is a trivial cost for them. Bandwidth costs to serve
| text are super cheap these days, and they can do quite a bit of
| caching. You might be surprised what the money is actually
| spent on, but they're reasonably transparent about it
|
| Their complete audited accounts for 2019-20, page 3 [0]
|
| Total expenses: $129 million, of which
|
| - Salaries (~500 staff): $55 million
|
| - Awards and Grants (I suppose this is them donating to other
| causes?): $23 million
|
| - Hosting: $2.5 million
|
| - Professional Services (mostly lawyers?): $11 million
|
| - Donation processing: $4 million (3% seems reasonable here)
|
| - Other operating expenses: $10 million
|
| [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-
| reports/#a1-...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| inferyes wrote:
| I have always found Wikipedias begging for money weird.
|
| Even if they chose to be driven by donations, I'd have imagined
| one the biggest website on the internet has better, more
| effective ways of raising money.
|
| Is it really that bad for non-profits on the internet?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| When did you last donate?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has
| better, more effective ways of raising money.
|
| How many of them are good for _users_ , though? Sure, you can
| slap some Google AdWords on there, but there's a reputational
| and privacy cost. NPR-style sponsorships? Maybe, but I cringe
| when NPR does a story on Facebook that's bookended by "Facebook
| is a sponsor of NPR" a little.
|
| I'm a fan of the current model, in that it makes a conflict of
| interest quite unlikely.
| kettleballroll wrote:
| I can't really any good ways for them to raise money, outside
| of becoming a subscription service or selling user data. What
| ways did you imagine? Because the more I think about it, the
| harder this problem appears to be...
| wpietri wrote:
| What did you have in mind as those better and more effective
| ways?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I would guess that's the crux of their efforts now. That is,
| like it or not, it works. As long as it's effective there's
| no incentive for them to change.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You end up building your product for who gives you your money.
|
| With advertisers you build your product to sap as much
| attention as possible.
|
| With corporate sponsors you start to let them moderate your
| product.
|
| With annoying users for money you at least want your users to
| like you instead of making them a product of some kind or
| another.
| legitster wrote:
| > But open the email and you don't see that text anywhere!
|
| In the email industry, we call this a "pre-header". The bit about
| "multi-part email" is pure nonsense. If you put any text above
| the body, it won't render in the email but will still be parsed
| by the inbox preview function (since it ignores any html it
| sees). This was mostly an exploit back in the day, but clearly
| email clients love it because they doubled down on supporting it.
|
| Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way
| email was designed. Both of these features are built into every
| email client and service.
|
| I thought this was going to be a complaint about their clearly
| hyperbolic messaging, but OP is really frustrated about some of
| the most basic features of email. I wonder if he has yet learned
| that the letters he gets from the White House are not actually
| sent _from_ the White House.
| etskinner wrote:
| The email doesn't have a different From and Reply To, it has an
| email address where the sender's name should be. The author's
| complaint is that the sender claims to be one email, when it's
| actually from another.
| legitster wrote:
| Fair point! Although the name field isn't particularly sacred
| in its own way (your inbox may already be littered with
| things like "No Reply" or "Taco @ Trello").
|
| I suspect this really comes down to spam filters. Most emails
| would generally avoid a shell game like this for fear of spam
| filters - but I imagine emails from Wikimedia have enough
| authority that they can get away with it more.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| I just looked through my email, and you're right that many
| companies use preheaders (though usually with display: none).
| But I would classify most of them as summaries of the email
| content. The email from Jimmy Wales, in contrast, uses it for
| deceptive purposes: it shows a completely different text
| fragment that sounds like a brief personal email.
|
| Also, just because the "email industry" routinely uses bad
| practices, that doesn't make it okay for wikimedia to do so.
| _3u10 wrote:
| It's not a bad practice, it's the preferred method by their
| customers.
|
| You can tell people's real preferences by the actions they
| take based on messaging. In aggregate a hard sell like this
| is people's preferred way of buying. The people who aren't
| going to buy unsubscribe increasing deliverability, the
| people who are going to buy are pushed off the fence into
| buying.
|
| On every email a sale is made, either you close them on a
| reason they can donate, or they close you on a reason they
| can't. Make no mistake, a sale is made.
|
| Guy says he'd donate if he didn't get emails like this, 5
| years of not donating, and not donating before their email
| campaign, proved that was a lie.
| password4321 wrote:
| So the ends justify the means
| legitster wrote:
| The ideal use of preheader is to cut away some of the chaff
| in the head of the email - text about logging in, account
| info, etc. They are tough to consistently plan for as each
| email client chooses a different length of text to preview.
|
| We've tested some pretty funky attention-grabbing ones, but
| nothing as blatantly exploitative as these. I really only see
| this kind of stuff coming in donation emails - I suspect
| recipients are more forgiving of it when it comes from a non-
| profit.
| op00to wrote:
| It's not a different "from" and "reply to". Read the article.
| They're putting an email address in the HUMAN NAME part of the
| "From".
| pfortuny wrote:
| The from: address trick is nasty, though, deceitful according
| to the _expected_ usage.
| mattl wrote:
| It's also just not well done. It would be trivial for them to
| send the email from jimmy@wikipedia.org. I'm actually glad
| they use a consistent email address for this stuff though as
| it makes it easier to file.
| lmc wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
| 5- wrote:
| agreed with you on pre-header, but
|
| > having a different from and reply-to
|
| is not about what the op is complaining.
|
| the offending header is
|
| > From: "jimmy@wikipedia.org" <donate@wikimedia.org>
|
| i.e. the address uses a display-name (in rfc2822 nomenclature)
| made to look like an unrelated, personal email address.
|
| (and the _reply-to_ actually matches _from_ )
|
| i wouldn't quite call it abuse but it is certainly deceptive.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| > The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense.
|
| No it's not. Emails can have both text and HTML versions, and
| the email client will decide which one to show in different
| contexts (e.g. if someone is on a device that can't show
| formatting and/or image content). Using the text part to
| include content that is never intended to be rendered as the
| full email is abuse of this feature.
|
| > Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the
| way email was designed.
|
| What you're describing is from being jimmy@ and having reply-to
| as donate@
|
| But this is _not_ what the article describes. The emails do
| _not_ have a separate reply-to address. They have a from line
| which is something like:
|
| From: "legitster@legitster.com" <rahim@encona.com>
|
| i.e. using the 'name' part of the from header to make it seem
| like the email is from a different email address.
| bob229 wrote:
| Why would you love Wikipedia? It is absolute and total garbahe
| richardatlarge wrote:
| At least fundraising seems to be one of the few areas where
| standards have fallen:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29054729
| okprod wrote:
| Unfortunately not all donors donate without being
| asked/motivated.
| david_allison wrote:
| The majority of people don't donate without being asked. I'd
| estimate a ~70x increase of donations during a donation
| campaign.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I've donated thousands to Wikipedia over the years, but I've
| noticed an increasing amount of bias in the website that made me
| hit the pause button. At first I saw it in a couple random
| examples, where I just thought "that's weird" and dismissed it as
| a random issue. But then I started to look for bias and noticed
| it much more frequently. And I don't mean just on the left-right
| American political spectrum, but also in other more complex ways,
| for example favoring Western scholarship over other scholarship.
| When I look at the Talk pages, I see regular bad faith
| application of policies that were written with better intentions.
|
| I'm not the only one to note this issue in recent years. Larry
| Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote a blog post titled
| "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" last year
| (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/).
| Although Wikipedia is decentralized, it is an institution. And I
| feel like we need more than one.
| ajay-b wrote:
| I've never trusted Jimmy Wales with money and so I have never
| donated to Wikipedia.
| golemotron wrote:
| Wikipedia is 21st century PBS.
| btilly wrote:
| For another good article on Wikipedia's aggressive soliciting,
| see https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-
| fundrais... which was previously discussed at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887.
|
| In 2016 a prominent Wikipedian saw the exponential trend and
| wrote
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...,
| aka "Wikipedia has Cancer".
| [deleted]
| birdyrooster wrote:
| RIP Jimmy Wales
| paulintrognon wrote:
| I kind of agree with the article, but on the other hand, I don't
| think I would I have ever donated without their aggressive
| campaign... Or I maybe would have once and then forgot about it.
| When I receive their email I'm like, "oh yeah! I should donate,
| totally forgot in a long time."
| [deleted]
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I don't resent them doing what they need to do.
|
| Wikipedia is one of the few things on the Internet that feels
| right.
|
| If they need to play the same shit game as everyone else, so be
| it.
|
| The tone of resentment here from the commenters is disappointing
| - it's like Wikipedia needing money is somehow not OK.
| loeg wrote:
| Wiki _pedia_ doesn 't need money. Wiki _media_ wants an even
| bigger pile of money to light on fire, and trades on wiki
| _pedia_ 's good name to solicit that money:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| myself248 wrote:
| You've now posted this link in four threads, I think the
| point is made.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I've said many times if they had just bought Bitcoin with their
| pledges long ago they would never have had to annoy us with this.
| I remember saying this when Bitcoin was $1800 in 2017. Even a
| less risky investment like the SP500 should surely have been
| enough. It has 4x'd in ten years. It doesn't take $100 million
| and 500 employees to run some light Wikipedia pages. All the
| content is provided by users!
| tw600040 wrote:
| And if bitcoin had crashed to 0 their answer to the donors will
| be what?
| jbschirtzs wrote:
| The reality is this person was never going to donate anyway and
| so they found their excuse to not do so. Do you suppose they use
| wikipedia any less as a result?
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(page generated 2021-11-09 23:02 UTC)