[HN Gopher] Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics af...
___________________________________________________________________
Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after "somewhat-
viral" tweet
Author : akolbe
Score : 440 points
Date : 2022-10-31 08:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| hunter-2 wrote:
| I stopped donating to Wikipedia after I learned that they were
| the organization behind the "Chimp selfie" lawsuit. I understood
| that my money was not going towards keeping the servers on, but
| instead in defending frivolous lawsuits like these.
|
| In all frankness, I have no interest in letting Wikipedia die
| either. I just feel there are enough people who donate today that
| makes it easy for the foundation to do stuff beyond just keeping
| a Wikipedia on. Will probably donate again if their contributor
| pool ever shrinks.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Got a source on that just because I'm interested in reading
| more about that "shitshow".
|
| My understanding of it was the images were put on
| Wikipedia/Wikimedia because they held the belief that the
| images were not copyrightable (as the photo was taken by a non
| legal person), the photographer threatened to sue Wiki over it
| but I don't recall that going anywhere. But it was actually
| PETA who sued the photographer after he published the photos in
| a book claiming the monkey should have copyright on the images.
|
| What im interested in is was Wikimedia actually behind the
| lawsuit (or was it a different case, as I said that whole
| incident was a bit of a shitshow)
|
| Last I heard it never got a final judgement in court so it was
| never settled if the monkey should have copyright, my
| understanding is that the case was settled out of court were
| the photographer agreed to hand over a share of future earnings
| from the photos (copyright cases get expensive very quickly,
| they might have seen it as the cheaper option to exit the case)
|
| But that's just my understanding of what went down, would love
| to know more. I find it an interesting case esp as we move into
| the realm of AI creating art.
| blululu wrote:
| I think Wikipedia funding lawyers to defend fair use
| interpretations of copyright is actually a very useful function
| to support the encyclopedia. I know it sounds stupid, but there
| are a lot of lawyers out there looking to make a buck off a
| stupid lawsuit, and copyrights on the internet are a pretty
| wide open field for this kind of nonsense. In order to defend
| things like fair use that should be obvious someone needs to
| pay the legal bills. This is a lot of what the EFF does and it
| generally strikes me as a rather important force in the context
| of American Civil Rights law.
| morbidious wrote:
| Wikipedia is known to have funded anti-India riots, and it has
| connections with an infamous anti-Hindu and anti-India
| propagandist, George Soros.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-qVpm_CHU
| gadders wrote:
| It sounds like donation-laundering to me.
|
| "People won't donate to unpopular Cause X, so we'll pretend
| Wikipedia is running out of money which is a more popular cause
| and pass on the donations."
| commitpizza wrote:
| Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot,
| probably most, goes to pushing woke politics?
|
| 2021 the hosting costs were $2.4 million and they spend well over
| $100 million each year.
|
| If they were to use their funds to actually drive the site they
| have enough to fund it for years to come. Most of their funding
| goes to stuff that has nothing to do with Wikipedia. This is yet
| another example of an org that has been taken over by political
| extremists that don't care about the core product and ruins
| everything.
|
| I am a bit upset about it because I used to donate monthly until
| I learned about how they actually used the donations. I think
| this is a _very_ important topic and urge that everyone that
| donates to Wikimedia stop immedietly.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Where are you getting "about 90%" from? The controversy here is
| about a US$4.5 million fund, which is about 2.7% of Wikimedia's
| 2021 income.
| commitpizza wrote:
| Well, not true. They have employed hundreds of people and
| pays them ridicolous salaries. Less than half is actually
| used on actually operating/developing the site. Yes that fund
| is the most controversial part but it's not the only thing
| about the topic that is controversial.
|
| 2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million - which is less than
| it did in 2012. Most of the money they recieve by donations
| goes to something else. As you may see, the site hosting
| costs are less than what the spend on that controversial
| fund.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Nice ninja edit there, your post previously claimed "about
| 90% goes to pushing woke politics". As you can see below,
| enumerated in excruciating detail in the annual reports if
| you'd like to dig in, the biggest component of Wikimedia's
| expenditure is simply paying the engineers that keep the
| site running and roll out improvements like the new UI,
| visual editing, etc. The actual hosting bill (servers,
| bandwidth, etc) is only a tiny fraction of that cost.
|
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-
| goe...
| akolbe wrote:
| See interesting comment underneath the linked article by
| a very longstanding Wikipedia volunteer:
|
| --------------------
|
| Problems with poorly supervised grants
|
| See discussion last month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signp...
|
| I've reviewed several grants and I remain deeply worried
| we are spending money on stuff that is a poorly disguised
| attempt to raid WMF coffers. A lot of grants are 1) being
| used for stuff that has ZERO connection with Wikimedia
| movement, 2) have little to no accountaiblity (people
| promise to do stuff, if they fail, I see no mechanism for
| money to be returned to WMF) and 3) seem to have very
| inflated costs (ex. one project I remember well asked for
| ~6k$ for open access publishing, whereas I know that the
| average costs of OA in this very field is usually under
| $2k, and a lot of similar research is published at no
| cost yet still using OA model). While I am sure some
| grants are being spent on worthy causes, the amount of
| problems I see here is very worrying. I am glad this
| issue is making more waves. --Piotr Konieczny aka
| Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:44, 31 October 2022
| (UTC)
|
| --------------------
|
| The words "gravy train", "cash cow" come to mind.
| commitpizza wrote:
| Yeah I get that I exaggerated my first sentence and thus
| edited it but it's not that far from the truth.
|
| According to their own site,
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-
| goe... about 43% goes to the websites. This is less than
| half. I imagine that most of these salaries are
| ridicolously high where they could employ cheaper devs
| and get an actual good representation they chose a SF
| office with SF employees and give them huge salaries. And
| since I have learned about this fund and other
| controversial topics about their employee count etc I
| question this figure as well. I am not convinced that
| they have devs for about $50 million per year.
|
| It's fine if you operate a for-profit company but when
| it's a not for profit organisation the ridicolous
| spending seems a bit disrespectful to the people that
| help shape wikipedia to what it is today.
| akolbe wrote:
| See e.g. an earlier report in the same community newspaper:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
| 2...
|
| The budget and headcount simply keep growing and growing.
| At the same time, the Foundation has had eight-figure
| surpluses for nine of the last ten years:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financia
| l...
|
| In the July 2020 - June 2021 financial year, the surplus
| was close to $90 million (over $50 million increase in
| Foundation assets, almost $40 million increase in
| Endowment).
|
| Yet when volunteers complain that software tools need
| updating and bug-fixing, the Foundation claims there is a
| lack of resources:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
| 2...
|
| One thing they do spend money on is consultants and
| "community organizers" trying to figure out how to get
| people in the developing world to write Wikipedia articles
| in their languages for free - in part so that Big Tech's
| voice assistants and Knowledge Graph panels can provide
| answers in Indian and African languages and extend their
| monopolies to new markets.
|
| Money actually flowing to people in the developing world
| however has been a really small amount - less than $4
| million in 2020:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
| 2...
| dmurray wrote:
| > Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that
| about 90%+ goes to pushing woke politics?
|
| Lots of people! The advancing of fashionable progressive causes
| is a far more popular thing to do today than hosting free
| online encyclopaedias. Wikipedia would arguably get _more_
| donations if they stuck a Black Lives Matter logo on their
| banner ads.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Lots of people! The advancing of fashionable progressive
| causes is a far more popular thing to do today than hosting
| free online encyclopaedias. Wikipedia would arguably get more
| donations if they stuck a Black Lives Matter logo on their
| banner ads.
|
| I don't think so. Just because the social activists are vocal
| does not mean that they are numerous.
|
| In fact, looking at raw numbers, they're obviously in the
| minority: wikipedia donators outnumber actual BLM donators,
| so there are obviously more people interested in donating to
| wikipedia than to BLM.
|
| If the wikimedia foundation were honest in their request for
| donations ("We plan to spend this on political activism"),
| they'd get fewer donators.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >This is yet another example of an org that has been taken over
| by political extremists
|
| [Citation needed]
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >[Citation needed]
|
| Here you go, from Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger:
|
| >Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
|
| https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Appreciate the link and it was an interesting read, but
| being biased does not make them _extremists_.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > probably most
|
| As far as I can tell from the OP and it's cited links[1], in
| 2021 they had around $160 in total revenue. $5 million of that
| went to the Tides foundation, the thing I think you are
| describing as "pushing woke politics". Another $50 million of
| that revenue was simply left over as unspent surplus.
|
| Are you talking about other expenditures as "pushing woke
| politics"? On what basis are you claiming that a "lot, probably
| most" of donations to go "pushing woke politics"?
|
| (Around 1/3rd of donations (still not "probably most") remain
| _simply unspent_ , which is kind of weird, but not about
| "pushing woke politics").
|
| [1]
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| "That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations
| that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-
| wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford
| Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course,
| that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't
| like private profit, business, making money, the current
| organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world.
| At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy [1] takes over
| -- and the rest follows." [0]
|
| [0] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/05/john-osullivans-
| first-l...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy#:~:text
| =....
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > O'Sullivan's First Law
|
| Interesting - I'd never heard of that quote, but I've
| definitely observed the same about online forums. But it's
| more like - the more moderated online forums become, the more
| left-wing they become.
| acdha wrote:
| Is a Thatcherite political columnist exactly an unbiased
| source? That self-promotional "law" is conspicuously
| unsupported by evidence and seems hard to reconcile with the
| hard right resurgence in various around the world.
| gjm11 wrote:
| "O'Sullivan's First Law" seems like nonsense to me. Here are
| some counterexamples:
|
| Centrist political parties.
|
| Every small company I have worked for. ( _Large_ companies
| tend to be performatively social-justice-y and economically
| right-wing.)
|
| My local public library.
|
| Every choir, orchestra, etc., with which anyone in my family
| has been involved.
|
| The Church of England. (I mention this just because of the
| presence of the Episcopal Church in the quote. The CoE
| contains very left-wing bits and very right-wing bits and
| plenty in between, but as a whole I don't think it can
| reasonably be described either as left-wing or as right-
| wing.)
|
| I think the only way you can make the "Law" true is to define
| either "left-wing" or "right-wing" or both broadly enough
| that _everything_ is either "left-wing" or "right-wing".
|
| (I wondered who O'Sullivan was, and noted that a web search
| brought up a Conservapedia page. In case anyone has forgotten
| how ... distinctive ... the ideas there are, I remark that
| their examples of O'Sullivan's First Law include Fox News,
| CPAC, and Pat Robertson. Anyway, it turns out that O'Sullivan
| is a former editor of the _National Review_ , another thing
| that's on Conservapedia's list of Things That Are Now Left-
| Wing, and he named the "law" after himself.)
| pxmpxm wrote:
| I have not heard of this before - thanks for the evening
| reading.
| qwery wrote:
| How do you arrive at the claim that "probably most" donations
| go to "pushing woke politics"?
|
| What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
|
| Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any comparable
| organisations spend a more appropriate proportion of their
| revenue on web hosting?
|
| Which political extremists have taken over?
|
| What is ruined?
| nnopepe wrote:
| >What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
|
| Pushing for global use of the US's anachronistic racial
| science over more nuanced alternatives such as
| ethnicity/nationality
| acdha wrote:
| Could you provide some examples? Be specific about the
| parts which you think are scientifically relevant.
| [deleted]
| boppo1 wrote:
| Well, if I'm reading this all correctly, there's no
| audit-trail for those funds. So, no we can't provide
| examples.
| Goronmon wrote:
| That can't be true though.
|
| OP knows they are pushing woke policies, so that
| information is out there.
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| The person I was replying to made a bunch of allegations
| which had to be based on something, right? If you're
| going to attack them for something they did there has to
| be some kind of specific event you could point to.
| commitpizza wrote:
| > How do you arrive at the claim that "probably most"
| donations go to "pushing woke politics"?
|
| In their donations campaigns, they make it sound like most of
| the donations go to fund the site while it's almost less than
| 2%. If they were to employ cheaper developers not working in
| the city centre of SF and stuck with the pure operational
| costs (Wikipedia is driven by people working for free for the
| most part anyway) it would be significally less than it is
| today.
|
| Even if they change nothing how the site is developed and the
| actual engineering costs, the funding pages are still
| dishonest since most of the funding does not go to Wikipedia
| itself.
|
| > What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
|
| They give money, a lot of it, more than double than the
| operational costs to highly controversial funds that are
| politically driven and does not lean on anything else. Thus,
| they fund specific (extreme left wing) political agendas and
| therefore are pushing politics.
|
| > Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any
| comparable organisations spend a more appropriate proportion
| of their revenue on web hosting?
|
| Because they make it sound like this is the main reason that
| they need additional funding when they ask for it on their
| webpage. It is what they claim (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F
| ex9854WIAIHSun?format=jpg&name=...) they need in order to
| operate the site. If they strictly just used the funding to
| operate the site they could do so for many years to come.
|
| > What is ruined?
|
| The sense of having an actual free community that governs
| factual information for free for everyone. A site where
| everyone can rejoice over and take pride in the common
| knowledge of humanity and the accessability that it provides
| for people in countries that can't easily get this
| information otherwise.
|
| This is slowly being ruined by people, like I assume
| yourself, that are so blinded by the current political
| agendas that they cannot see the damage they're inflicting on
| the community. I understand that people always have had
| different political agendas but you used to be able to talk
| to people on the other side of the spectrum and accept basic
| physical facts about the world.
|
| Now it seems like we've thrown everything out of the window.
| People can't even get along over well established scientific
| facts and this is true for extremists on all sides.
|
| It is hard to trust a source of information if you know the
| people that controls the information are political
| extremists. I would want to live in a world where I can trust
| that the articles on Wikipedia is as objective as can be.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political
| agendas and therefore are pushing politics.
|
| Please provide some evidence that they fund specifically
| "extreme left wing" political agendas. By which you mean,
| what, soviet-style communism? Gulags for cops? Violent
| revolution?
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| > The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as
| shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-
| imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and
| privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and
| reflects the experiences of communities of color
| worldwide.
|
| https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
|
| Using the term "white supremacy" is equivalent to using
| the term "jewish media".
|
| Both are racist dog whistles aimed at painting a large
| group of people with the same broad brush and increase
| hate towards them.
|
| Not all jewish people are involved with the media, not
| all white people are supremacist.
|
| If you consider one of those two phrases harmful you must
| consider the other one as well.
|
| Furthermore, "create an environment that is inclusive and
| reflects the experiences of communities of color
| worldwide" - Are "people of color" the only voice whose
| experience must be reflected? What happened to the other
| people? Are they not welcome? Perhaps are they no longer
| around? I would argue this statement is a call to
| genocide.
|
| And while we are on the topic of "people of color". What
| are they exactly? Can you define a people of colour for
| me please? Also, isn't this term, you know, Eurocentric?
| The very thing they aim to "shift away" from?
|
| Does any of this make sense to you?
|
| Would you donate money to an organisation with a
| blatantly racist statement such as this?
|
| This is the insane things people tend to file under
| "extreme left wing". And I suspect you know this, but
| just want to pretend it ain't so.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political
| agendas
|
| They fund specific agendas. I suspect you are from the USA,
| have never come across groups with extreme leftwing views,
| and have confused touchy-feely leftish liberalism with
| "extreme left wing".
|
| Certainly they are using the funds to discreetly push a
| political agenda; I think they shouldn't do that. I think
| they should invest the capital, and run Wikipedia on the
| investment income. That's what you do with an endowment;
| you don't launch a search for ways to give all the money
| away.
| qwery wrote:
| The most recent Annual Reports [0][1] list 43% and 42%
| "Direct support to websites" and has a brief explanation of
| how "Keeping the Wikimedia websites online is about more
| than just servers." But I do note that plural 'Wikimedia
| websites' and not just 'Wikipedia'. But even if your 2%
| figure is accurate for wikipedia.org, that's 40% on other
| websites, some of which is used directly by Wikipedia.
|
| They same reports list ~32% of their expenses as "support
| to communities" which they say includes "grants, programs,
| events, trainings, partnerships, tools to augment
| contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of
| editors."
|
| The screenshot you linked [2] doesn't show anything about
| hosting costs. I think most people would expect keeping any
| organisation/website running to involve costs other than
| the cost of the internet connection/servers. But I do
| realise that I'm talking from a privileged position here.
|
| > This is slowly being ruined by people, like I assume
| yourself, that are so blinded by the current political
| agendas that they cannot see the damage they're inflicting
| on the community. I understand that people always have had
| different political agendas but you used to be able to talk
| to people on the other side of the spectrum and accept
| basic physical facts about the world.
|
| I'm not sure where that's coming from. All I am doing is
| talking, and calmly asking you to explain some of the
| points you volunteered in this forum.
|
| [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2019
| -annu...
|
| [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020
| -2021...
|
| [2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fex9854WIAIHSun?format=jpg
| commitpizza wrote:
| > I'm not sure where that's coming from. All I am doing
| is talking, and calmly asking you to explain some of the
| points you volunteered in this forum.
|
| First off, I am sorry if I came onto you but the
| questions you were asking while fair and square was
| incredible naive and a bit wishy washy so I assume,
| perhaps incorrectly, that you were a firm supporter of
| the traditional extremist left wing camp.
|
| Everything about the wikimedia scandal can be viewed
| either by their own documents or most of the important
| parts is in the twitter thread posted by me and others in
| comments.
|
| Most of the costs regarding the websites is probably due
| to the high salary costs of having developers maintain
| stuff. This is fine IMO but when you run a not for profit
| org maybe you should respect peoples money and open an
| office somewhere else than one of the most expensive
| cities in the world or simply hire remote developers and
| other employees.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Why is the cost of web hosting so important?
|
| Err ... Wikipedia is a website, come on.
| qwery wrote:
| Yes, and seeing the total cost of running a website being
| significantly greater than the cost of the web hosting
| seems perfectly reasonable.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Sure, but they're spending money on things that have
| nothing to do with running the website.
| OJFord wrote:
| And the banner ads always make it sound like the server
| might grind to a halt any minute.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the key - and it's the failure mode of _all_
| political /charity begging across decades and decades.
|
| "We want money to do the things we want to do" doesn't
| get as much reaction as "holy shit the servers will die
| tomorrow because you fucks don't ever donate and just
| suck the sweet sweet wikitit of knowledge".
|
| It's obviously manipulative and at some point it crosses
| a boundary into immoral. You could add a "My donation is
| necessary to keep the Wikipedia servers online next year"
| yes/no question to the donation page and I bet you'd get
| something high like 80%+ picking yes, because of how the
| appeals are written.
| x-complexity wrote:
| > How do you arrive at the claim that "probably most"
| donations go to "pushing woke politics"?
|
| As noted in their own 2020 report:
|
| https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi.
| ..
|
| Only 2.4 of the 112.4 million spent was actually on
| maintaining the servers themselves. The rest were spent on
| salaries (55.6 million (!!)), grants (22.8 million (!,
| why?)), & "Professional services" (11.67 million (again,
| why?)).
|
| > What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
|
| From what I can gather, it's the promotion of leftist talking
| points that relegates objectivism & personal liberty in favor
| of any form of rebalancing, be it racial, political,
| economical, social, gender-based, or sexual.
|
| My problem with this is that its mainly a phenomenon that's
| isolated to western countries, with Asian & Middle-eastern
| countries seemingly skirting by with LGBT+ arrests &
| atrocities without any major recompense.
|
| > Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any
| comparable organisations spend a more appropriate proportion
| of their revenue on web hosting?
|
| This is mainly because Wikipedia's donation drives make it
| look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running", when
| their own reports make it clear that a lot of the donated
| funds have been sucked up by the foundation's own internal
| mechanisms.
|
| > Which political extremists have taken over?
|
| Mainly left-oriented extremists, with the organizations
| listed from here onwards being examples that were funded by
| the foundation.
|
| https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579779097278181378
|
| > What is ruined?
|
| For one: Wikipedia's neutral reputation.
|
| Wikipedia was supposed to be a place where consensus could be
| reached without falling into the trappings of personal or
| political bias. Instead, the foundation is now seeking to
| reduce its own transparency by ceasing the publications of
| its quarterly reviews:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2.
| ..
|
| Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a conducive
| way of inviting conversations around a topic.
| qwery wrote:
| > Only 2.4 of the 112.4 million spent was actually on
| maintaining the servers themselves. ... why?
|
| You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly
| server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary. I'm
| not sure why that would be the case.
|
| I think people may be focusing on these high-level figures
| a bit too much. The Wikimedia website has other information
| about what it is they are actually doing.
|
| > Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to
| us to keep the servers running"
|
| Fair enough, I can imagine how that could be an issue. As
| one opposed to such manipulations in general, a critique of
| the sort of messaging being used is something that I would
| welcome.
|
| > Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a
| conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.
|
| Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string of
| blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear as
| possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's
| comment.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > You seem to be arguing that anything other than
| strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or
| unnecessary. I'm not sure why that would be the case.
|
| This is answered by
|
| > Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate
| to us to keep the servers running"
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Meanwhile I've only ever considered the banners to be
| annoying and beg-y, but not any sort of claim that they
| are running out of money. Do the people "scammed" by
| "help us reach our fundraising goal" also get scammed by
| those emails about "donald trump's defense fund" and
| similar? Why didn't they just look up whether wikipedia
| is running out of money?
|
| I don't understand how a disruptive banner that makes no
| claims can be considered nefarious.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I didn't mention claims of running out of money. I don't
| know what your first paragraph is based on.
|
| > banner that makes no claims
|
| Look at this example [0]. If you read that, what would
| you say the money is going to?
|
| [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia
| _Founda...
| naasking wrote:
| > You seem to be arguing that anything other than
| strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or
| unnecessary.
|
| I suspect the OP would be perfectly fine with Wikimedia
| hiring translators to translate more of the 6.5 million
| English articles into other languages which are often
| considerably less developed. Or funding more development
| of their textbooks, dictionaries and other content. They
| clearly have ample funds that seem to be going to more
| dubious ends.
| Izkata wrote:
| > > Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a
| conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.
|
| > Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string
| of blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear
| as possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's
| comment.
|
| It's also a mis-use of the term. It's for live debates
| when you just dump a series of questions on the opponent
| without giving them time to respond, trying to make them
| look stupid to observers. Doesn't really apply to text
| like here, when you can take as long as you need to type
| of the reply.
| nostrebored wrote:
| It totally does apply here and has the same effect. The
| dwell time between responses makes the questioner look
| correct to casual readers.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Anything other than server maintenance or tangibly
| improving Wikipedia and directly supporting _technical_
| projects is unnecessary. Frankly nobody cares about the
| rest aside from the people getting money as a result and
| maybe their family and friends.
|
| It's like Mozilla and all of their non-
| Firefox/Thunderbird bullshit. Bloat for the sake of
| bloat.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > From what I can gather, it's the promotion of leftist
| talking points that relegates objectivism & personal
| liberty in favor of any form of rebalancing, be it racial,
| political, economical, social, gender-based, or sexual.
|
| This does not read like a good-faith interpretation to me.
| Small-o objectivism and personal liberty are not at all
| incompatible with a "woke" perspective on race; I daresay
| relativism -- particularly moral relativism -- is a
| minority opinion even among leftists. Nor is it necessarily
| the case that being woke means you're in favor of enforced
| rebalancing on the basis of race, ethnicity, etc. Wokeness,
| in my experience, is far more concerned with issues of
| justice than with rebalancing (which I take to mean
| something akin to affirmative action or reparations).
| seti0Cha wrote:
| What do you think justice means in a "woke" context? My
| understanding that justice is equity, not equality, in
| the current jargon.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I'll certainly never donate again.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a
| lot goes to pushing woke politics?
|
| What exactly do you mean by "woke politics"?
| croisillon wrote:
| if you seriously ask:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke#Woke_as_a_pejorative_term
|
| if you were being sarcastic, the answer is: anything vaguely
| antiracist ist woke
| theclansman wrote:
| You: for you everything anti racist is woke. Them: for you
| everything is racist.
|
| And it goes on forever.
| d0mine wrote:
| If you see one side involving millions of people is
| portrayed as monsters, you should doubt such portrayal
| (people overall are good, sadists who enjoy human suffering
| are tiny minority, most evil is from systems/institutions
| not individuals).
|
| Here's personal account (one data point) of what I mean
| then I use the word "wokeism:" good intentions are
| subverted to censor people, to distract from what is
| important, kindness/openness is weaponized e.g., cancel
| culture is applied to university professors for voicing
| scientific truth.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| The mere fact that the word has been appropriated to mean
| something negative to some should be a big ol' red flag
| for those who are skeptical about its necessity.
|
| It isn't and wasn't ever about divisiveness or
| negativity, the whole point is to include as many people
| of diverse backgrounds as possible in as many things as
| possible, and "woke" politics could be described as ideas
| and policies that support this concept of inclusivity.
|
| Nothing about "woke" ideology portrays anyone as a
| "monster", full stop.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| Millions of people are monsters. Millions of people are
| sociopaths.
|
| People who use the term "woke" as a pejorative
| universally are stupid, terrible people, or they're
| manipulating stupid, terrible people. This is an absolute
| truth.
| feoren wrote:
| > If you see one side involving millions of people is
| portrayed as monsters, you should doubt such portrayal
|
| Except that history is chock full of cases where millions
| of people collectively acted as monsters. People may
| overall _want_ to be good, but seem to be very easily
| persuaded that "good" involves genociding all those
| "others".
|
| > most evil is from systems/institutions not individuals
|
| If those institutions perpetuating evil are made of up
| millions of people, then who cares? Your claim is that
| "Wokeism" is obviously wrong because it says 40 to 60
| million Americans are acting like assholes, when in fact
| they're simply all individual die-hard followers of the
| _asshole party_? You 're just shuffling definitions
| around to get around the obvious point that the term
| "woke" is now a get-out-of-racism-free card. (Or sexism,
| classism, homophobia, you name it)
|
| > cancel culture
|
| Yes, all those woke people, banning and burning books ...
| croisillon wrote:
| If by "cancel culture" you mean books banned in schools,
| that happens indeed, but maybe not the way you believe
| https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-
| censor...
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Probably means something closer to Kathleen Stock: https:
| //www.theguardian.com/education/2021/may/22/kathleen-s...
| mxkopy wrote:
| Politics like racial equity, removing police from schools,
| admitting that science is as objective as the humans who
| engage in it. You know, the type of politics that makes a
| middle aged affluent white male from the U.S. uncomfortable.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Aren't the most subjective academic fields the ones which
| condemn "white male", without any of the other attributes
| you name?
| mxkopy wrote:
| To the first part, knowledge as a collection of facts is
| subjective, so the statement "the most subjective
| academic fields" is already false. The humanities long
| ago realized that the meaning of statements like "line A
| intersects line B" depend heavily on implicit assumptions
| about what you mean by 'lines' and 'intersect'. And even
| when the math used is unambiguous, the communication and
| interpretation of it is always done by a human with
| cultural biases that are liable to make "straight
| Euclidean line" the unspoken default. The only time it's
| objective is when the expert is communicating to other
| experts with the same contextual biases.
|
| To the second part, the humanities are fond of condemning
| a system that perpetuates systemic violence. That rich
| white men benefit from and created it is a historical -
| and in the most abstract discussions, coincidental -
| fact. It's only human nature to be uncomfortable with
| criticism of a system that's done you no harm or done you
| well. But the political humanities are concerned with you
| to the degree that you refuse to acknowledge or take
| action against this system. The white male is the
| byproduct of a historical examination, not the starting
| point.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >The humanities long ago realized that the meaning of
| statements like "line A intersects line B" depend heavily
| on implicit assumptions about what you mean by 'lines'
| and 'intersect'.
|
| That's exactly why they are the most subjective. Arguing
| semantics ad nauseam to come to a conclusion that fits
| their hypothesis, rather than establishing semantics and
| syntax to help uncover the workings of the world. If
| one's going to make a point that "gee look we're pointing
| out academia is based on humans and that might hurt le
| white male", certainly, they are lacking the basic
| introspection of which fields are suffering most from
| volatility and the reproduction crisis (hint: it isn't
| STEM).
|
| >the humanities are fond of condemning a system that
| perpetuates systemic violence
|
| Friendly reminder this is the field that came out with
| the Duluth model, which has done a lot of work in
| _perpetuating_ systemic violence itself. And it has yet
| to owe up to its own mistake.
|
| >It's only human nature to be uncomfortable with
| criticism of a system that's done you no harm or done you
| well
|
| Cop-out answer. Argue facts, not feelings.
|
| >That rich white men
|
| You're making the same mistake as the original comment,
| attributing far more lenience to the system than is
| actually happening. Read the original comment, and it had
| 3 attributes beyond "white male". Yours has one, and it
| is a _big_ one. The system is barely looking beyond
| "white male", having no qualm to mash together Jimmy the
| local backstreet rat with John the rich kid.
|
| It's academia. Academia can do better than focus almost
| solely on race and gender. That's why they get funded.
| Your average 70s movie had more focus on the effects of
| affluence than most research coming out from humanities.
|
| >But the political humanities are concerned with you to
| the degree that you refuse to acknowledge or take action
| against this system.
|
| You mean, the political humanities who leave their
| current old guard of tenured, white men in charge while
| shoving the burden onto the next generation and don't
| look past gender or race? That political humanities
| hardly ever mentioning the kinds of sexism men face, the
| racism inherent to feminism, had to make an exclusion
| specifically for Asian men when they found out Asians
| were doing pretty okay bar romance, and aggressively try
| to censor any kind of dissent or paper that might imply
| the opposite of the current narrative?
|
| That political humanities, _concerned_?
| mxkopy wrote:
| > That's exactly why they are the most subjective.
| Arguing semantics ad nauseam to come to a conclusion that
| fits their hypothesis, rather than establishing semantics
| and syntax to help uncover the workings of the world.
|
| You used a lot of big words for an unfounded reduction of
| entire disciplines. I think you meant to say, "I don't
| think the humanities are a respectable field of study" -
| which fair, opinion, but perhaps you could word it more
| clearly?
|
| And to counter that sentiment - you would say history is
| in the humanities, yes? Consider the statement "America
| had a civil war" - it's a pretty solid (objective) fact.
| You seem to be purposefully ignoring that a not
| negligible amount of the humanities is composed of
| similar statements.
|
| > reproduction crisis (hint: it isn't STEM).
|
| STEM are the _only_ fields that _can_ have a reproduction
| crisis. Biology specifically - is that not science to
| you? The humanities doesn 't reproduce experiments, it
| advances discourse. It can't have a reproduction crisis
| because reproducing an argument makes no sense.
|
| > Friendly reminder this is the field that came out with
| the Duluth model, which has done a lot of work in
| perpetuating systemic violence itself.
|
| Yes. The Duluth model, that pioneered the idea that
| America hasn't yet rid itself of the systems that
| profited from and enforced slavery. The idea of a
| monopoly on violence had only been developed in 1981,
| TIL.
|
| > Cop-out answer. Argue facts, not feelings.
|
| OK? It's a fact that some people get uncomfortable when
| faced with criticism of a system that did them well? Are
| you saying this isn't a fact?
|
| Whatever you're trying to say, you're not doing it very
| coherently, or faithfully.
| commitpizza wrote:
| https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
|
| That is the twitter thread that started the uproar, all the
| info you'll need is in there.
| ajdude wrote:
| May be referring to this part of the thread[1] linked in the
| article
|
| > Wikimedia gave $250,000 to Borealis's Racial Equity in
| Journalism Fund. That money was then cascaded down to a
| dozens of ideologically aligned news outlets across the US.
|
| > Thus, the money you give to keep Wikipedia online is
| diverted to bankroll the inescapable American culture war.
|
| [1]
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579776106034757633.html
| input_sh wrote:
| They threw some money at BIPOC journalists!? And BIPOC
| journalists might for some reason lean a certain way
| politically, same as like 80% of all BIPOC voting
| population!?
|
| No way! How dare they! (/s)
| tiagod wrote:
| What is this BIPOC voting population (I just learned this
| term today)? Are we talking of the united states of
| america or does this somehow apply to other countries?
| Don't these journalists push american viewpoints anyway,
| and aren't they much better funded than almost any
| newspaper outside the USA? Why should most of this money
| going to one of the richest countries in the world?
| Gareth321 wrote:
| You asked, they answered, and then you dodged with a
| flippant reply. Even if I agreed with you, this is a
| terrible way to discuss things.
| input_sh wrote:
| Oh shit, you're right!
|
| I apologise, I'm sure there's a better, more cool-headed
| way to discuss giving money to a marginalized population
| to make a foothold in a marginalized field with someone
| that views that action as "woke politics".
|
| I'm sure we've could've met in the middle (like only
| supporting _some_ BIPOC journalists) if only I wasn 't so
| gosh-darn divisive. My bad.
| skrbjc wrote:
| This type of insufferable attitude isn't in the spirit of
| HN civility and would make someone who might be
| sympathetic to your views much less so.
| zB2sj38WHAjYnvm wrote:
| When people accuse someone of being "woke", I believe
| they do not mean literally that they consider those
| people to be more awake to social justice issues, that
| they disagree with fixing injustice, and they want it to
| continue. Rather, it can be an accusation of performative
| social virtue, a distaste for sanctimonious platitudes,
| or a disagreement regarding the source of a particular
| systemic issue and how to fix it.
|
| Now, you can disagree with this, it is obviously
| impossible to tell for sure without reading people's
| minds, and many people will throw out accusations of
| "wokism" with little to no merit to the point where you
| lose the will to engage with any of them, but if you do
| argue against these accusations of "wokism" as
| endorsements of bigotry, you aren't actually engaging
| with what people are telling you.
|
| In that sense, the "middle" between "woke" and "bigoted"
| isn't "slightly bigoted", it's "not woke and not
| bigoted".
| input_sh wrote:
| Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of
| boosting marginalised groups, otherwise you're "too woke"
| because those marginalised groups tend to lean left? No,
| I don't think I can agree on that. Because, as I stated
| multiple times so far, _marginalised people 's existence
| != political_.
|
| Being a bigot is a choice (and using the term woke
| unironically is a pretty good, albeit not perfect tell),
| being black is not. I couldn't care less about finding a
| common ground with bigotry. I have zero interest in
| debating them, and I have zero interest in debating your
| "centrist position" to do nothing to elevate BIPOC
| people's position in marginalised fields. Hope that
| clears up my comment for you!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of
| boosting marginalised groups ... I have zero interest in
| debating your "centrist position" to do nothing to
| elevate BIPOC people's position in marginalised fields
|
| Doing nothing might be a lot more conducive to minority
| achievement than some of the stuff that was ultimately
| funded by these grants. Such as SeRCH's YouTube videos
| about "intersectional scientific method" and
| "hyperspace".
| vasco wrote:
| The is the most bad faith arguing I've seen here in a
| while. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The people that want
| to support those valuable causes should find their own
| supporters instead of hijacking the supporters of an
| encyclopedia without telling them. It's as simple as that
| and has nothing to do with being bigoted, it's about
| feeling cheated when you were asked for money for one
| thing and then they used it for another. You're
| intentionally being difficult because you believe you're
| right and that trumps everything else, but it doesn't.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of
| boosting marginalised groups,
|
| Well, yeah. That's what "neutral" means
| fleddr wrote:
| You're purposefully misreading the situation.
|
| A BIPOC receiving a grant is not the issue, the issue,
| and what might be considered "woke" is to give the grant
| because they are BIPOC. That's "equity".
|
| Equity means awarding people based on immutable
| characteristics and makes every interaction in society a
| racist/sexist struggle.
|
| Anyway, you may be in favor of it, which is fine. Just
| know that it's an incredibly unpopular movement that is
| widely rejected internationally, and also in most
| developed nations across the political spectrum, minus
| the far-left.
|
| Even the idea to call said people "marginalized" is
| insulting.
| jules wrote:
| Here is the message wikipedia has on its donation page:
|
| > We'll get straight to the point: Today we ask you to
| defend Wikipedia's independence.
|
| > We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay
| online and thriving, but 98% of our readers don't give;
| they simply look the other way. If everyone who reads
| Wikipedia gave just a little, we could keep Wikipedia
| thriving for years to come. The price of a cup of coffee
| is all we ask.
|
| > When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people told us
| we'd regret it. But if Wikipedia were to become
| commercial, it would be a great loss to the world.
|
| > Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for
| advertising. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a
| community of people working to bring you unlimited access
| to reliable, neutral information.
|
| > We know that most people will ignore this message. But
| if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a
| donation of EUR5, EUR20, EUR50 or whatever you can to
| protect and sustain Wikipedia.
|
| Whether or not one likes the causes they give the money
| to, if they spend $100 million and they only use $2.4
| million for hosting, and they also give money for
| political activism, then this is a misleading message,
| making it sound like they are on the cusp of not being
| able to cover the costs that keep the site online unless
| they start having ads on wikipedia.
| input_sh wrote:
| Oh I completely agree, misleading is the best way I'd
| describe this message as well.
|
| But the idea that they're "going woke" or "going
| political" with their money because they support BIPOC
| journalists and presenting _that_ as a waste of money
| ($250k, about a month of hosting), that 's where you
| completely lose me.
|
| Also I'm pretty sure Wikimedia does way more than just
| hosting.
| jules wrote:
| Well, they apparently did donate to some woke-adjacent
| pseudoscience, which seems like a waste of money to me.
| Regardless, I agree with you that the question isn't
| where some $0.25 million went, but why they are spending
| $100 million and still asking for donations with that
| misleading message, while a few years ago they were
| spending a small fraction of that even though their
| hosting costs were actually higher back then. It
| increasingly looks like Wikimedia as an organisation has
| a parasitical relationship with Wikipedia, doing enough
| to keep its host alive with a small fraction of its
| budget, while benefiting from the work of volunteers and
| not even fixing longstanding issues with the software
| that the volunteers ask to be fixed. Even beyond fixing
| bugs, I'd be happy to add to their $100 million budget if
| they actually did useful things with it. I can easily
| think of 10 features that would improve Wikipedia. For
| instance, Wikipedia pages such as "list of countries by
| GDP per capita" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co
| untries_by_GDP_(PPP)...) are useful, but the table UI is
| not that great and the map is a non-interactive PNG
| image. For $100 million, why can't we hover over the
| country and see its name and the exact GDP per capita
| number?
| akolbe wrote:
| The Wikimedia Foundation collects money in places like
| India, South Africa and South America with those
| misleading messages:
|
| https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-
| fundrais...
|
| Most of the money from the Knowledge Equity Fund so far
| has gone to organisations in the U.S. I think that
| indicates how much _genuine thinking_ about diversity is
| taking place in the Wikimedia Foundation.
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| I wonder whether you would post a comment similar to this
| if it turned out that the donation money had been
| funnelled to right-wing think tanks and had then
| subsequently been distributed to right-leaning
| commentators?
| input_sh wrote:
| You are equating supporting minorities in journalism to
| right-wing think tanks? In your view that's a completely
| cool and normal comparison to make?
|
| Yes, you're right. I wouldn't react the same way. One of
| those is clearly better than the other.
| ajvs wrote:
| So because they're donating to your political leaning,
| it's fine. Do realise that half the population leans the
| opposite way to you, and you'll see why encouraging more
| organisations to get political is a disastrous thing for
| society.
| fleddr wrote:
| It's far more than 50%. When specifically considering
| "woke" politics, centrists and moderate progressives
| reject it too. I'd say it's in the range of 70-90%
| rejecting.
|
| Pretty much anybody outside California rejects it.
| f1shy wrote:
| Can you please elaborate on why one is better than the
| other?
| input_sh wrote:
| Cause being BIPOC while in journalism isn't a political
| ideology and their existence is not "woke" nor
| "political". On top of that I happen to believe a wider
| range of voices within journalism is incredibly important
| and see nothing controversial there.
|
| That seems way better to me than giving money to those
| hostile towards damn near every marginalized and
| underrepresented minority. Does it not seem that way to
| you?
|
| It's not my fault (nor is it Wikimedia's) that this
| specific historically marginalized and oppressed group of
| people as a collective leans a certain... less
| confederate-flag-waving way.
|
| Were they supposed to find a hypothetical centrist group
| of BIPOC journalists that will therefore then over-
| represent right-wing BIPOC population?
| atdrummond wrote:
| After reading some of the comments in the arbitration process
| discussed on this page (see: "Administrator desysopped after
| RfA comment, arb case in progress") I would find it hard for
| anyone to argue, with a straight face, that the most active
| members of the community do not lean towards a common political
| ideology.
|
| Whether that influences the quality of the articles,
| particularly new ones, I cannot say; I was banned as an admin
| and editor years ago and have zero desire to return. (Although
| I am wondering if I might enjoy working on some of the non-
| English wikis, having seen that their communities seem far less
| internally combatative.)
| bArray wrote:
| > I would find it hard for anyone to argue, with a straight
| face, that the most active members of the community do not
| lean towards a common political ideology.
|
| I believe it, but then let's not pretend it is otherwise.
| Let's not have people fund projects under the false pretence
| of keep servers online.
|
| > Whether that influences the quality of the articles,
| particularly new ones, I cannot say
|
| With zero intention of doing so, over time, people's
| political ideologies will bleed into the content. The
| organization itself will become more and more hostile towards
| opposing views.
|
| The neutral topics themselves still have merit, but I suspect
| not for much longer. We no longer can have an article about
| master-slave buses without bringing up slavery [1], for
| example.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Master/slave_(technology)#
| Ter...
| gjulianm wrote:
| I mean, in an article about terminology I would expect to
| see how is that terminology evolving, and it is undeniable
| that a lot of entities are moving away from it. Doesn't
| matter whether you and I agree on the move or not, but it's
| a reality and it's appropriate to discuss it in that
| article.
|
| Also, Wikipedia has a lot of pride in being factual,
| avoiding judgements of value, and backing with already
| established sources. I think that makes it really hard for
| ideologies to bleed into content.
| tablespoon wrote:
| Honestly, it seems like one of the main [1] motivations for
| anyone participate on Wikipedia is to push some ideology or
| another. I know they theoretically have rules against it, but
| those are invariably enforced inconsistently and/or only
| against the most blatant cases.
|
| IMHO, some prime Wikipedia skills are finding bureaucratic
| cover and being deliberately mute about your motives.
|
| [1] though not only, another big one is obsession
| rippercushions wrote:
| FWIW, here's the comment that led to Athaenara getting
| desysopped, and it amounts to a _direct personal attack_ on
| an admin candidate for the _sole reason_ that they 're trans:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=.
| ..
|
| I'm pretty sure you'd get banned here on HN for saying that
| as well.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I can simultaneously think that's an abhorrent comment
| while also pointing out that the vast majority of the
| arguments (on both sides) regarding her ban were based on
| her beliefs, not her actions, which is counter to how these
| processes are supposed to unfold.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think her action here is to represent her beliefs by
| submitting an oppositional vote based purely on her
| ideology and not the actions of the candidate. It makes
| sense that the ideology is also debated?
| GaylordTuring wrote:
| Why is it an abhorrent comment?
| naasking wrote:
| > FWIW, here's the comment that led to Athaenara getting
| desysopped, and it amounts to a direct personal attack on
| an admin candidate for the sole reason that they're trans:
|
| If females are underrepresented among admins, and the
| comment is factually correct in saying that the
| representation of women consists mostly of trans women,
| isn't the trans status of the candidate directly relevant
| to whether you actually are improving representation? I'm
| not sure how pointing this out qualifies as a personal
| attack (which isn't to say the comment isn't problematic in
| other ways).
|
| Suppose black people are underrepresented among admins, and
| in trying to increase that representation, they nominate a
| transracial person who was born white but identifies as
| black, wouldn't their transracial status be a relevant
| consideration?
|
| Transracialism isn't as widely accepted, despite the fact
| that both gender and race are "social constructs", and I
| think this makes it clear that "trans" status can sometimes
| be relevant in such questions. If they can be considered
| for a role because of their trans status, then they can
| also be rejected from a role because of their trans status.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > and the comment is factually correct in saying that the
| representation of women consists mostly of trans women
|
| It's almost impossible that that could be true based on
| demographics (50% vs around ~0.5% for women vs trans
| women)
| naasking wrote:
| > It's almost impossible that that could be true based on
| demographics (50% vs around ~0.5% for women vs trans
| women)
|
| It would be almost impossible if admin membership were
| drawn completely randomly from the population. It would
| also be impossible for over 80% of computer science
| graduates to be male given the same assumption. Computer
| science is observably dominated by males though,
| therefore perhaps membership isn't drawn completely
| randomly from the population in either case.
|
| I'm not privy to the demographics of Wikipedia's admin
| membership so I don't know if the comment in question is
| factually accurate, my point is only that it doesn't
| follow from the comment alone that it's prejudicial
| against trans people or that it constituted a direct
| personal attack.
|
| At least, it's not more prejudicial than accounting for
| race or gender in a positive context, since some people
| think any consideration of these factors, positive or
| negative, is unjustly prejudicial.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not impossible if you're actively selecting for that and
| discriminating against those born as women.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I believe the complaint was that the female representative
| team had a majority of trans people, so less of a personal
| attack and more of a general comment about the team.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >FWIW, here's the comment that led to Athaenara getting
| desysopped, and it amounts to a direct personal attack on
| an admin candidate for the sole reason that they're trans:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid
| =...
|
| That's a lie. Her opposition to another admin candidate is
| because they're yet a man who wants to control women's
| spaces.
| drc500free wrote:
| I strongly doubt that HN is a place that would ban you for
| being transphobic.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| This comment section has proven you right. HN: We don't
| tolerate mindless repetitive criticism of programming
| languages, we do tolerate mindless repetitive criticism
| of people.
|
| (I'm referring to the manual reduction of the rank of an
| article mocking go)
| jbuhbjlnjbn wrote:
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's no such "space" at all. This whole idea that
| trans women are somehow monopolizing spaces that
| "rightfully belong" to cis women is just a transphobic,
| hateful slur; especially so when the attack is so clearly
| targeted at a single, vulnerable trans person. The block
| was absolutely warranted; it was an egregious violation
| of a "no personal attacks" rule that's been there since
| the beginning.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| For reference, here's the comment that was deemed sufficient
| grounds to be desysopped.
|
| > # '''Oppose.''' I think the domination of Wikipedia's woman
| niche, for lack of a better term, by males masquerading as
| females as opposed to welcoming actual, genuine, real women
| who were born and have always been female, is highly toxic.
| Go ahead, "cancel" me, I don't care. -
| [[User:Athaenara|Athaenara]] [[User talk:Athaenara| ]] 00:44,
| 11 October 2022 (UTC)
| rippercushions wrote:
| The important context here is that this is a direct reply
| to a trans person's application to become an admin on
| Wikipedia. In other words, they're not objecting to trans
| ideology or something, they're specifically telling a
| Wikipedian that they can't be an admin because they're
| trans.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Except the debate on the ban (which is what I was
| referring to - the reply itself is pretty much
| indefensible) became a referendum on ideology rather than
| a legitimate discussion on a ban due to a harmful action.
| paganel wrote:
| Not sure how wikipedia admins works but looking at that
| comment seems like the person that wrote it was unhappy
| with the fact that non-female people were getting more
| and more in charge of pages focused on females.
|
| As such, seeing that a trans person is not a (biological)
| female, I can understand that poster's logic, he/she most
| probably had expected a female to become an admin in
| order to moderate (or whatever it is the wikipedia admins
| do) wikipedia pages.
| chasd00 wrote:
| this is pretty fascinating to me, i thought the whole
| point of wikipedia was if you see something wrong you hit
| edit, fix it, and then click save. If you want to add
| something new the process is the same. Do you now have to
| pass like a virtual interview to qualify to make a
| change?
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| There are power users with more privileges like being
| able to lock controversial articles, revert defaced
| articles, and stuff. Those people apply for the position.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| This is really common all over the internet, not just
| wikipedia.
|
| Look who's _actually_ dominating the reddit sub
| "actuallesbians": https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-
| user-overlaps/actualles...
| ghostgost wrote:
| Indeed, she is one of many women who are completely fed
| up of being talked over on women's issues by men who
| identify as women.
|
| It wasn't really the appropriate forum for her outburst,
| but I think many of us can empathise with the sentiment
| she was expressing. The subsequent overreaction to her
| comment kind of proved her point too.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| croes wrote:
| >males masquerading as females
|
| Trans people are not masquerading as another gender.
| jacooper wrote:
| A male with some pills and makeup doesn't become a
| female.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is knowledge.
| jackling wrote:
| Isn't being female due to your sex at birth and not your
| identifying gender?
| croes wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gender_identities
| jacooper wrote:
| This is BS.
| robocat wrote:
| It's the same as saying a tomato is a fruit. Words have
| contextual meanings. Not that I'm a fan, I like things
| more defined.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| The emperor's new dress doesn't make him a woman.
| jwond wrote:
| "male" and "female" refer to sex, not gender
| croes wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gender_identities
| jwond wrote:
| > Male is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete
| (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger
| female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male
|
| > Female is the sex of an organism that produces the
| large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex
| cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual
| reproduction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female
| a_shovel wrote:
| Unless they're used in a discussion specifically about
| human biology, "male" and "female" can be assumed to
| refer to gender. The terminology isn't neatly separated,
| unfortunately.
| kbelder wrote:
| Are you sure? My impression from common usage is the
| opposite. It's normally referring to biology, except
| under certain circumstances.
| a_shovel wrote:
| It depends on context. A discussion about "female
| singers" would probably be referring to gender.
|
| It's useful to have an adjective equivalent of "man" and
| "woman", so people use "male" and "female" to mean that.
| My main point isn't to establish one meaning as more
| common, but to point out that there's not one "correct"
| meaning. Terminology around sex and gender are not neatly
| divided and it's not always easily determined what
| meaning people are using.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| > In humans, the word female can also be used to refer to
| gender.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female
| ghostgost wrote:
| I think she using "male" and "female" to refer to sex. In
| which case, this would be a true statement, regardless of
| one's opinion on the validity of 'gender identity' as a
| concept.
| croes wrote:
| You are still missing the point. Trans people living
| their real gender don't masquerade, it's the opposite.
| ghostgost wrote:
| Isn't the purpose of the hormone treatments, surgeries,
| etc. so that someone of the male sex can appear as if the
| female sex, or vice versa?
| a_shovel wrote:
| Kinda. It's different for different people. Many trans
| women take hormones hoping they'll help them look like a
| typical gender-conforming cisgender woman.
|
| One other really common reason is that they are deeply
| upset by and experience dysphoria due to the effects of
| masculine puberty, and use hormones and surgery to match
| their body to how they feel it should be. It helps them
| feel comfortable in their own skin.
|
| I saw a comic from a trans woman once who had recently
| started hormones, who noticed she had a miserable mood
| for a few days every couple of weeks for no apparent
| reason. She marked them on her calendar and found that it
| was always the couple of days before her HRT shots. She
| switched from shots every 14 days to every 10 days, and
| that fixed it up. So it seems that for trans people, HRT
| isn't just cosmetic, but has a direct effect on mental
| well-being that's independent of any noticed physical
| changes.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yeah I used to donate semi regularly but not anymore. The EFF
| is just about the only org I still trust.
| causi wrote:
| _Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a
| lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics?_
|
| Hold up a second. The last time I saw an article whining about
| political bias on Wikipedia the complaint was that Wikipedia
| were a bunch of incel neckbeards and/or Nazis. Has something
| changed?
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Things have changed a LOT in the last 15 years. There are no
| neckbeards left on Wikipedia. It's all purple-haired, blue
| check marked ideologues now. Everyone else gets banned.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Wikipedia is basically the Wikipedia volunteers. Anyone can
| volunteer, so unsurprisingly some of the volunteers are
| "odd".
|
| This article is about WMF, which is run by paid employees,
| not volunteers. They reflect the political posture of their
| employer, not the consensus of the Wikipedia volunteers.
| [deleted]
| matai_kolila wrote:
| Even if that were true (it doesn't seem like you're able to
| substantiate this)...
|
| Good.
|
| "Woke" politics (better known as "anything conservatives don't
| like") are the only sane politics taking place right now.
| Perfect? No. Actually trying to help the people who need it
| most? Yes.
| SilasX wrote:
| Pretty much word for word what I say about Mozilla and their
| constant "need" for more money.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the
| 2019-2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides
| Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the
| Wikimedia Foundation.
|
| I wonder what "coincide" means here. I think the most generous
| inference I can make is that they had a bunch of extra money
| lying around from all the excess fundraising they do, and Amanda
| Keton said "I know a worthwhile organization you could give some
| to." But, you'd assume that as general counsel she would be aware
| that that looks a little shady.
|
| Of course, the even shadier conclusion you could jump to would be
| that she benefits from that grant, via her connection to the non-
| profit.
|
| The fact that actions like this leave questions in people's minds
| is why non-profits should strive for transparency, and diligently
| avoid any possible conflicts of interest, which at the _very_
| least didn 't happen here.
| dncornholio wrote:
| The way they put up this banner on the website is so beyond me, I
| was never going to donate anyway. The banner on wikimedia is just
| disgusting. This big screaming banner is so out of place, It
| raised all my red flags. If they were true to them selfs, a small
| (permanent) link saying 'donate' would've been fair and more than
| enough.
| scioto wrote:
| Seriously, why should I donate when they're moving the "excess"
| money outside the organization? _They don't need it._ Perhaps if
| there's some low water mark that they can set for funds under
| which they can start asking for donations again.
|
| I won't be donating to Wikipedia again until I hear they're on
| the ropes, laid off a third of the staff, and may have to shut
| down. _Then_ I'll donate.
| airhangerf15 wrote:
| Honestly, why would you donate even then? It would be better to
| fork it; copy off all of the wiki into a new one and start
| fixing all the bias (similar to what InfoGalactic does) than
| try to fix that crumbling mess of a site. If we stop keeping
| garbage alive, new stuff will emerge. We need the innovation of
| the 90s back on the web.
| fleddr wrote:
| I think there's a neutral technical aspect and a political
| aspect.
|
| The neutral aspect is that if you have so much money (a surplus)
| that you start giving it away to secondary causes, you're being
| misleading. The begging messages clearly imply they're about to
| run out of money to run things, which seems opposite to reality.
|
| So they should change the tone of the message, and provide more
| transparency about where the money goes to. It should be a basic
| donator's right to understand if the money is needed at all, and
| where it is used for. No matter from which political angle you're
| coming from.
|
| As for the political angle, to each their own. I'd say most
| knowledge institutes are progressive and always have been.
| Importantly, moderately progressive or "classic liberal". Which
| is quite different from post-modernist, equity, "woke" type of
| politics. This last category far less embraced, and not just by
| conservatives.
|
| The situation seems comparable to Mozilla. Many people would
| gladly donate to support the development of the Firefox browser
| but not neccessarily want to reward incompetent leaders or fund
| the running of a "indigenous intersectional BLM feminist blog"
| that does absolutely fuck-all for anybody.
| vesinisa wrote:
| > The money was transferred to an outside organisation, Tides
| Advocacy, sometime in the 2019-2020 financial year when the
| Foundation found it had a large amount of money left over because
| of an underspend
|
| This is the root of the problem. Wikimedia rises too much money,
| and instead of putting it in a fund they "need" to find projects,
| programmes and - now apparently - outside organization that are
| in no way accountable to Wikimedia.
|
| Instead of burning all the money they are donated, Wikimedia
| should first and foremost strive to secure the technical and
| financial continuity of the project by e.g. investing a lion's
| share of the donations to a distributing fund that provides
| perpetual passive income from e.g. stock market dividends. Only
| once that passive income surpasses the current and foreseeable
| technical running costs (hosting, bandwidth, project and
| engineering staff) should they start giving money to external
| organizations.
| luckylion wrote:
| I don't know whether they needed to "find projects":
|
| > the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move
| in the 2019-2020 financial year from General Counsel of the
| Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of
| the Wikimedia Foundation.
|
| Sounds like someone got into power at Wikimedia and went ahead
| and moved a few millions to their project.
| throwA29B wrote:
| Looks like saying "where is the fraud there is bound to be
| embezzling" is on the money again.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I don't think this would count as fraud or embezzling?
| businesses donating to charities run by the owners is
| outrageously normal.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Wikipedia is supposed to be a non-profit. Non-profits
| don't have owners.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| sure, swap out owners for "board of directors" and
| business for "charity" -- it's still true
| PeterisP wrote:
| No, the difference is meaningful because as soon as you
| swap out owners for "board of directors" it changes the
| scenario from "outrageously normal" to "outrageous
| fraud".
|
| A director is not an owner who has any legitimate claim
| to funds they manage on behalf of the owner or the
| charity, quite the opposite, they have a legal fiduciary
| duty to act in the interests of the owner or the
| charitable purpose, not their own. If they funnel the
| company's money to themselves, that's outright fraud (or
| embezzlement, depending on details) and they deserve to
| be in jail and a civil claim to compensate for breach of
| fiduciary duty, there's nothing normal or tolerable about
| that.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm not discussing the way things should be, but the way
| they are. There are numerous public charities who get a
| significant amount of funding because of who's on their
| board.
|
| They're not funneling money to themselves, they're
| funneling it to other charities that they work with.
| fallingknife wrote:
| This is how most large non-profits work. They start out from
| building something genuinely successful, like Wikipedia, and
| from that visibility they raise more donations than they know
| how to spend. So naturally they want to expand their work.
| But it's very rare that the founders also happen to have the
| skills to run a large organization, so they need to bring in
| "professional management."
|
| And who could be better than someone who has previously run a
| large non-profit? They are now run by some career non-profit
| manager, and the first thing they will do is focus on
| fundraising. They will pay large salaries to professional
| fundraisers who are, you guessed it, their friends from
| previous organizations they have worked at. Their jobs will
| be easy and their salaries fat. Then they will build an
| expensive administration structure whose salaries will eat up
| an ever increasing share of donation income.
|
| The non-profit becomes essentially a feudal structure, with
| idealistic volunteers doing all of the productive work while
| highly paid managers consume all of the donation income. As
| long as fundraising investment has a positive ROI in terms of
| donations, management will find new ways to spend it. They
| will hire more and more parasitic administrators, and if
| things are particularly lucrative, they will donate to other
| organizations run by people they know in the industry. Always
| good to have someone else owe you a favor when times get
| tough.
|
| This will continue until the organization grows so big that
| it collapses under the weight of its own structure. In the
| case of Wikipedia, some of the serf volunteers have figured
| this out and described it as "Wikipedia has Cancer" https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| manholio wrote:
| this is a very interesting take. Is it a sample of personal
| research or is it based on some external source?
|
| I have this exact view that "everything is politics". For
| profit businesses are just a particular case of a top down
| authoritarian political structure, but they work
| politically too in the broad sense, people fighting for
| power, influence and resources. it's the only constant i
| can think of regarding human behavior across cultures and
| types of organizations.
| michaelt wrote:
| It sounds a lot like a restatement of https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_la... about
| bureaucracy - or
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
| tootie wrote:
| Malinvestment is a problem at any large organization. I don't
| see any reason to believe this is nefarious or unethical. Nor
| do I grudge Wikipedia for being to incredibly efficient at
| running their core business that they so easily outraise their
| needs. Raising money to grant to other organizations is a very
| common model in the charity world so it's hardly unprecedented
| either.
| vesinisa wrote:
| I think a distinction should be made between a foundation and
| a charity. A foundation uses an endowment to fulfill the
| agenda defined by its charter on the society. Only a small
| portion of the foundation's capital is used each year, as the
| foundation aims to be a more or less a perpetual
| organization.
|
| A charity generally uses all of its annual income on its
| "cause", and needs to constantly raise more capital.
| Wikimedia sure seems to behave more like a charity than a
| foundation despite its name. I find this regrettable because
| it is probably the only non-profit internet organizations
| whose fundraising volume would allow it to behave more like a
| true foundation if it chose so.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Wikimedia should first and foremost strive to secure the
| technical and financial continuity of the project by e.g.
| investing a lion's share of the donations to a distributing
| fund that provides perpetual passive income from e.g. stock
| market dividends.
|
| Stock investment funds are a favorite American pastime, but
| when shit hits the fan you get wiped out pretty easily. No
| matter if you're looking at heavyweights like Facebook (-68%
| YTD) or even the S&P 500 (-19% YTD). With interest rates going
| up across the board, IMHO I think we're in even worse times for
| shareholder investors, simply because the free money well that
| drove the last ten years worth of "gains" has been turned off
| and won't be re-activated any time soon.
| ptero wrote:
| The poster mentioned long-term passive income, which to me is
| spot on. The strategy used to generate it can be debated, but
| the goal is very common and many methods, while not
| guaranteed stood the test of time pretty well. For example,
| look at university endowments and various privately-funded
| research fellowships that run for many decades, through booms
| and busts of the stock markets.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| IIRC these are usually required to only invest into super
| secure stock classes like government bonds - which actually
| was a problem on its own during the last years as most of
| the government bonds considered secure enough were ultra
| low or even negative (Germany!) yield, so the funds and
| endowments actually lost money due to inflation.
| ptero wrote:
| Not really, at least not for all of them. US college
| endowments, for example, invest into all sorts of things,
| from highly illiquid developing market investments to
| options, ventures and hedge funds.
|
| A couple of times at MIT I saw an overview with a general
| allocation. I do not remember the details and was not
| particularly curious, but it certainly had "we can invest
| in whatever we need and want" flair. It got a >14%
| average annual _investment_ return for the last 10 years,
| not something one could get with government bonds. You
| can look at the endowment reports of the Ivies; many
| publish some outlines every year.
| 300bps wrote:
| _This is the root of the problem. Wikimedia rises too much
| money_
|
| 100% agree and it's endemic to the people running any
| organization not held accountable. There's a port authority
| near me that was formed to maintain key bridges. The tolls on
| these bridges is exorbitant.
|
| The people who run the authority use it as their own personal
| slush fund, donating money to things like ballet schools and
| other pet projects.
|
| Maybe these projects are the most worthy thing in the world but
| forcing people to donate to them under threat of arrest (for
| not paying bridge tolls) is immoral.
| bredren wrote:
| This reminds me of The Burning Man Organization.
|
| "Non-profits" in general are very poorly understood and seem
| to slip under the radar of accountability at the governmental
| and board levels.
|
| 501c3 has the household name, "non-profit." It is a case
| study of an extraordinarily well-branded idea and how that
| shapes perception.
|
| My experience with these types of organizations and their
| governance puts me in a default defensive default posture.
| Too many have found out ways to exploit the capabilities.
|
| At least with a regular corporate entity, there is no mistake
| the company is out to reward its ownership.
| [deleted]
| rchowe wrote:
| People were able to re-brand "charity" to "non-profit" in
| the US as well -- in part because if you have a $500k
| salary as CEO of a charity that looks like you're taking
| money, but if you have a $500k salary as the CEO of a non-
| profit...
| zinekeller wrote:
| It blew up now, but a user has pointed out (since _2017_ ,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Guy_Macon/Wi...)
| that Wikimedia Foundation has spiraled out of control:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C....
|
| Even though I'm not German, I (still) donate to Wikimedia
| Deutschland (which is legally separate to Wikimedia Foundation)
| since that I see them as the "janitors" which actually
| experiments with new software that could be useful to Wikipedia
| et al., like for example Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org).
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is why I don't donate to any organization ever. If it's
| organized it's by definition political and I don't donate to
| politicians /s
| bendbro wrote:
| This, but without sarcasm, and with mostly peaceful violence.
| Ekaros wrote:
| This, but without sarcasm.
| tiagod wrote:
| I have donated to Wikimedia in the past. I had been a bit annoyed
| for the last few years at how the money was being used and the
| declining state of the (volunteer) editor community.
|
| A couple months ago I visited the site on an incognito session
| and got presented with this: https://i.imgur.com/HsjfAsn.jpg
|
| Found it really scummy. A family member told me a few days later
| he donated because he thought the site was in risk, after being
| presented with the same text. This is someone who makes 600$ a
| month... Knowing this charity is getting hundreds of millions of
| USD *in excess* and is convincing people on the other side of the
| world who don't have much cash hanging around based on shaming
| and misleading statements, and that it's the charity that's
| supposed to be representing and taking care of what I consider
| one of the most important things on the internet... feels wrong.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| It's all about the money, great save work place with a really
| nice salary. They don't care a Bit about Wikipedia.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| The wikimedia foundation is a kleptocratic blight upon wikipedia.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| The money I used to give to WMF has been going to Internet
| Archive instead, hopefully more people will do the same.
|
| Edit: akolbe says it better than I could
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403985
| airhangerf15 wrote:
| Why would you give to them?! They actively censor entire
| websites from their archives under political pressure. They
| have openly gone against their core values.
| RickJWagner wrote:
| Wikipedia has become politicized. It's really a shame, because it
| could have been (and was, I think) a great source of straight-up
| information.
|
| No more. I trust Wikipedia as much as I trust Fox news or CNN or
| MSNBC now.
| dhruval wrote:
| I think it is still a great resource for non controversial
| subjects.
|
| For eg. The math explanations are amazing
| bombcar wrote:
| Many even biased sources can be amazing sources, you just
| have to remember to recall the bias. Is Wikipedia likely to
| bias a math article? Probably not. Would Fox News incorrectly
| report a giant spool rolling down the road? Probably not.
|
| The nice thing about bias is it's a form of laziness, and as
| such can often be easily noticed, and subsequently dismissed.
| jasmer wrote:
| Let's consider the good news here: we can have NGOs provide
| effective, foundational services for reasonable costs.
|
| Some issues belong in the 'commons' due to elements of 'public
| good'.
|
| I'm not making a political statement, this is just pragmatic
| reality.
|
| If something like Wikipedia can exist without having to die due
| to lack of funding, well, maybe we can also do such things for
| 'search' and 'public messaging' (aka Twitter).
|
| In this manner, we can forgo issues of 'total marketing
| surveillance' and having an excess of irrelevant ads for so many
| things which might be oriented towards public good and should not
| have artifacts of commercialization. (And I'm not even against
| Ads, just their ubiquity and irrelevance).
|
| Let's not fret too much about $5M in 'goodwill' money sent out to
| Tides but contemplate the sliver lining here.
|
| Of course, we should keep our eye on these things, Tides is maybe
| a benevolent actor, but they are also a political actor that sent
| money to Canada to support issues which were ultimately related
| to electoral outcomes.
| koreanguy wrote:
| shubhamjain wrote:
| The original thread emphasized too much on a few grants, which I
| feel is a minor issue considering how small part of the annual
| revenue they were. Not surprised Wikipedia is able to defend it
| easily.
|
| > "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5
| million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the
| Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides
| Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for
| actual grants made to the community - a figure dwarfed by the
| Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020-2021.
| There was no lack of money for grants.
|
| The actual problem is that the Foundation reached its endowment
| goal, five years before the the deadline it set [1], and yet,
| they keep guilt-tripping and pretending as if they are running
| out of money. How's it not profiteering? They could be honest and
| add, "We have already reached our goal. But raising more could
| help us find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge," and
| they would be completely in the right. I bet fewer people would
| donate if they realized that they are not funding running
| expenses, at all.
|
| Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest
| you look into doing it for Internet Archive. The complexity of
| their project and running expenses is way more than Wikipedia,
| and yet, they just received 12% of the amount that Wikipedia got
| in 2020 [2]. They just have $4M in net assets, and yet, I have
| never seen them guilt-tripping regular users.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
|
| [2]:
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >a minor issue considering how small part of the annual revenue
| they were
|
| It isn't when their messaging acts like they're gonna go under
| without your donation when in reality they have millions to
| burn on frivolities.
|
| "Non-profit" tale as old as time, impossible to run an honest
| business when the grift depends on guilt.
| slim wrote:
| Also so much money + neutral image + an international network
| this broad, attracts the wrong kind of people
| mellosouls wrote:
| Unfortunately, I suspect it's a long time since wikipedia had
| a neutral image.
| mavhc wrote:
| Being pro reality is now a political position
| hardnose wrote:
| One glance at the edit history on the Project Vertias
| entry will prove the lie of this theory...
| [deleted]
| mcv wrote:
| If Wikimedia has too many donations for their own costs, maybe
| they should give some to the Internet Archive. It's certainly
| related to their goal of preserving information.
|
| But more importantly: Wikimedia needs to be honest and
| transparent, including about what they're raising funds for. If
| their own costs are thoroughly covered and they're raising
| funds for others, they need to be honest about that, and not
| pretend that they still need the money. That's deceptive and
| completely contrary to their mission.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| <<If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you
| look into doing it for Internet Archive.
|
| I kinda wanted to focus on this portion, because Wikipedia does
| not seem to face fresh round of lawsuits, while Internet
| Archive appears to be very much a target in sights of various
| copyright holders, who are unhappy over its activities[1].
|
| [1]https://www.inputmag.com/culture/internet-archive-
| copyright-...
| 23skidoo wrote:
| Wikipedia for almost the past decade has reminded me of those
| televangelists that would beg for donations to keep the lights
| on and that Uncle Sam was kicking the door down to seize their
| assets. Then they'd drive home in a brand new Cadillac.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| That was my thought too on reading; those grants are a pretty
| small portion of budget (not even a big portion of _surplus_ )
| so don't seem like a big deal.
|
| But if I understand it right, they have a $50 million _surplus_
| on a ~$150 million budget? Why are they still fundraising so
| aggressively in such a situation? (Under some circumstances,
| such a huge surplus leftover can even make the IRS suspicious
| of a charitable organization 's tax status, although this may
| not apply legally to the particular kind of organization
| Wikimedia is).
| akolbe wrote:
| A $51 million surplus on a $112 million budget, to be exact:
|
| https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi.
| ..
|
| Though in fact, the real surplus was nearly $90 million,
| because _in addition_ , their Endowment, held at the Tides
| Foundation (and therefore _not_ included in Wikimedia
| Foundation assets) increased from $62.9 million:
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endow.
| ..
|
| to over $100 million:
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endow.
| ..
|
| in the same year.
|
| Note also that each year the Wikimedia Foundation pays at
| least $5 million into its Endowment. These payments are
| included in the Foundation's _expenses_ :
|
| https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-
| fundrais...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I'm definitely going to stop giving any money to wikimedia
| as a result of their on-screen fund drives. And I actually
| support that expenditure to fund that "Knolwedge Equity
| Fund", and don't find anything unethical about wikimedia
| supporting such a fund with a small portion of their
| budget, especially when they have extra. (I think it would
| be appropriate to send some to the Internet Archive too).
| But they clearly don't need my money.
| throwoutway wrote:
| > so don't seem like a big deal
|
| The big deal is people being duped.
|
| 9.8M divided by $25 (my best guess on what an average person
| might donate) is 392,000 people being duped into giving $25
| to something they did not intend to give money to.
|
| The 30% surplus is just salt in that wound
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a
| situation?
|
| They've got many millions of users and billions of page
| views, so if all it takes is a little banner to bring in
| millions of dollars, and a little, slightly deceptive tweak
| to the language to bring in millions more...do you really
| expect them to decline that opportunity? What real,
| measurable incentives do they have to not fundraise? You can
| hardly blame those grant applicants when they ask their
| really, really rich friend for some support or a day or two
| of fundraising to achieve that support.
|
| There aren't financial or legal consequences, especially for
| the smaller group doing the asking.
|
| It's really hard, especially in 2022, at the level of a
| global multi-million dollar, multi-billion page view
| organization to make decisions on vague, difficult to measure
| concepts like ethics and reputation.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I think most people "really expect" Wikipedia/Wikimedia to
| act ethically and responsibly, yeah -- which is why their
| fund-raising is so successful. If they lose that
| reputation, it will be less so.
|
| Certainly I don't donate money to organizations I don't
| "really expect" to act ethically and responsibly. Do you?
| SilasX wrote:
| Do I expect a non-profit organization with a charitable
| mission to decline opportunities to aggressively browbeat
| the public for money it doesn't need? Yes, yes I absolutely
| do.
| naasking wrote:
| > They've got many millions of users and billions of page
| views, so if all it takes is a little banner to bring in
| millions of dollars, and a little, slightly deceptive tweak
| to the language to bring in millions more...do you really
| expect them to decline that opportunity?
|
| Yes, because destroying your credibility risks destroying
| future fund raising potential.
| jaywalk wrote:
| "When being unethical brings in so much money, how can you
| expect them to act ethically?"
|
| How is this materially different than if I started a
| GoFundMe saying I needed money for my mortgage and other
| bills, but actually using it to take a huge vacation? You
| see, if I didn't take that vacation, I would have burned
| out from my job, lost it, and then been unable to pay my
| bills (after my savings ran out).
|
| Why defend this blatantly unethical behavior?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > But if I understand it right, they have a $50 million
| surplus on a ~$150 million budget? Why are they still
| fundraising so aggressively in such a situation?
|
| If there is one thing that the COVID pandemic has shown us,
| it is that resilience is a _very good_ idea - and that grave
| crises can easily last years at a time or yet another grave
| crisis comes up like the Ukraine invasion, followed by energy
| price explosions and insane inflation.
|
| It is a decent idea to have at least five years worth of
| financial runway these days... you never know what is coming
| up (or well, we do, climate change, but that still leaves a
| host of other issues that can go badly wrong).
| mhb wrote:
| So they shouldn't be giving their rainy day fund away to
| random other organizations.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I mean, they aren't. The amount they are giving to this
| Information Equity Fund is a small portion of the
| endownment they are building up; plus it's not "random",
| it's something they decided was mission-aligned. You
| disagree with that assessment, but it's not "random";
| they've always given other grants too, and continue to,
| I'm not sure if you and others are opposed to _all_
| granting from wikimedia or just disagree with this
| particular choice. You are allowed to disagree with this
| particular choice without being required to object to all
| granting of course -- I feel like people are feeling
| compelled to argue that wikimedia ought to never give any
| grants to any third parties, when they really just don't
| like this particualr choice. There is no reason for such
| a compulsion.
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
|
| But meanwhile... fund-raising to build up a "rainy day"
| fund of 5x your annual operating budget is... just not
| something non-profits generally do. It's certainly not
| standard practice. Of course most organizations wouldn't
| be able to pull that off even if they decided it's a
| goal, most orgs don't have the capacity to fund-raise an
| extra 50%+ beyond their operating budget "just in case".
| I think it's debatable whether it's a wise or responsible
| use of funds or a good goal.
|
| So I disagree with both of y'all!
| mhb wrote:
| There are already many comments saying this but the main
| objection is asking for money to do one thing and then
| doing something else with it. A secondary objection, for
| many, is the nature of the other thing they are doing
| with the money.
|
| In the context of this particular thread, GP advocated
| for funding of organizational resilience. While this also
| isn't what Wikimedia was asking for money for, it would
| probably be less objectionable to those who disagree with
| the ultimate destination of their donation.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| And yet nobody seems fired up about the other grants
| wikimedia gives, and has for years, while some are
| insisting it's just the prinicple of wikimedia giving
| _any_ grants that they object to, what they are actually
| focusing on, and their lack of concern with even
| mentioning those other grants while getting really fired
| up about this "equity" fund (a topic very likely to fire
| people up), makes me think that's what's going on must be
| primarily not secondarily about this particular thing.
| mhb wrote:
| It seems silly to argue about whether the people who are
| making an argument are misrepresenting what their
| concerns are instead of just believing what they say. But
| it sounds like you are ready to make some sort of
| conspiratorial assertion for why that could be.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's the big problem I have with these fundraisings.
|
| They are using the exact thing that make most of us hate
| advertising: deceiving claims, annoying banners, and revenue-
| driven A/B testing. The only thing they don't seem to do (yet)
| is personal data collection / targeting. When I see them I
| can't help but think "how did these got through my ad blocker?"
| [*]
|
| They don't have to do that, they can afford not to use typical
| advertising tactics and still get enough money for continued
| operation.
|
| *: The reason I think Wikimedia fundraisers don't appears in
| most block lists is that as a rule, self-promotion is not
| considered advertising. Same reason why you can see ads for the
| latest Microsoft products when you go to microsoft.com.
| posterboy wrote:
| > Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I
| suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive
|
| Wikipedia could forward a little sum if need be, technically?
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > I bet fewer people would donate if they realized that they
| are not funding running expenses, at all.
|
| And there you have it.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I know the AMerican library system isn't exactly awash in
| money, but why is Wikimedia not getting a huge amount of
| donations from the library budgets? It is practically the
| definition of the base intent of the library system brought
| into the internet age, and arguably is the internet's greatest
| achievement.
|
| Sure you could start quoting things about undue influence, but
| I go into a library and don't exactly see lots of influence
| from the government on collection content, or censorship of
| encyclopedias. About the only political hotpotato I've seen
| about libraries is an occcaisional funding complaint by the
| ultra-small government wing.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything you said. I also think that
| wikipedia should adopt a much less cringey fundraising style.
|
| However...
|
| I feel like wikipedia tends to attract a highly
| disproportionate amount of criticism, especially about
| fundraising, budget inflation and editing/deletionism. In one
| sense, this is a good thing. Criticism and scrutiny keep
| organisations honest.
|
| In another sense, there's a nihilism to it. Wikipedia is
| perhaps 100X more resource efficient than a Facebook. It's far
| more respectful of its users than any bigtech. It embodies
| otherwise naive ideals of the early web. It has performed _way_
| better than commercial peers in the face of the decade 's
| misinformation and political fact wars... including
| journalistic ones. It keeps its nose much cleaner than big
| nonprofits like the Red Cross. All freely available to
| everyone, highly accessible, supported by optional donations.
| Wikimedia is a beacon.
|
| FOSS has been tamed. The rivers of the WWW have been dammed.
| "Don't be evil" got fired. It feels like Wikipedia is subjected
| to a bigotry of higher expectations specifically _because_ it
| doesn 't suck. There's a crabs-in-a-bucket feel to it that
| disturbs me.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I hold Wikipedia to the moral standards of the old idealistic
| internet precisely _because_ it 's one of the last bastions
| of the tech world that I still thought of as 'pure'. I'm not
| going to judge them by the standards of the rest of the
| scumbag internet. I'm going to judge them by the standards of
| an organization i respect. If they want to degrade themselves
| back into the class of 'organization I wouldn't trust to have
| my email address' so that I judge them by those standards
| instead they're well on their way to doing so.
| akolbe wrote:
| It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer
| labour. The people earning the most money from that volunteer
| labour aren't even the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Big Tech
| companies who use Wikipedia and Wikidata content to populate
| Knowledge Graph panels (Google, Microsoft Bing), have their
| voice assistants read Wikipedia articles in response to
| questions (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant), etc.
|
| The Wikimedia Foundation is a partner of all these
| organisations. Amazon regularly donates a million to the
| Wikimedia Endowment, there is a little-publicised Google
| partnership ...
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_Wikimedia_Founda.
| ..
|
| ... the South Asian "Regional Partnerships" Manager moved to
| Wikimedia from Google:
|
| https://archive.ph/jf3FT
|
| ... as did the originator of the Wikidata and Abstract
| Wikipedia projects, and the seed money for Wikidata came from
| Microsoft founder Paul Allen and Google:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2.
| ..
|
| etc.
| dalbasal wrote:
| OK... this is the kind of thing I am talking about.
|
| " _It 's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer
| labour._"
|
| That's one of the reasons, and it's not a bad reason at
| all. In fact, I would say that wikipedia couldn't buy what
| it gets for free at any price. It's also for other reasons.
| Wikipedia serves lightweight websites. It has a lightweight
| management structure. It has a lightweight content
| moderation function.
|
| None of these are incidental. They are what efficiency is
| made of.
|
| In any case, what is your comment demonstrating other that
| everything can be criticised. By what standard, is
| wikimedia _worthy_ of your scorn?
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Ensuring your charitable donations are actually doing the
| good you think it is, is difficult enough that there are
| organizations specifically created to rate them and
| verify what they say. When a charitable organization does
| a poor job of it, they rightly earn the scorn they
| receive, because they are betraying a trust. I donate to
| a number of charities (including Wikipedia) and if any
| one of them were found to be operating as it appears
| Wikipedia is, I would move my money elsewhere, which is
| what I intend to do in this case.
| birksherty wrote:
| > find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge
|
| No. People who visit and donate, only wants it to go to the
| site they are using and for its development. Not to some other
| things that they don't know.
|
| If Wikimedia wants money for all these things, they should
| mention what are these exactly without hiding.
|
| 4/5 million is still huge amount.
| akolbe wrote:
| You're right, but that is what the post you are replying to
| was proposing: they should _say what they are raising the
| money for_.
|
| Then people can decide, instead of being panicked into
| donating because they are made to think there is an urgent
| need for money "to defend Wikipedia's independence" or "to
| keep Wikipedia online".
| 300bps wrote:
| But the post also said misappropriating the funds "is a
| minor issue".
|
| It's not a minor issue to say you're raising funds for X
| and to then give those funds to Y just because it only
| amount to Z% of your budget. And in this case Z% is
| actually pretty high.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Most of these grants are not even _that_ bad - they 're
| explicitly trying to foster the creation and sharing of
| knowledge _about_ highly under-represented populations,
| which is clearly within the remit of Wikipedia as a broad
| community. But then you do get truly weird stuff like the
| $250k grant to SeRCH, an organization that purportedly
| aims to support minority folks in STEM pursuits.
| Unfortunately, that "support" seemingly involves posting
| obscure YouTube videos featuring bizarre rants about
| "hyperspace" and their "intersectional scientific
| method", whatever that is. It's highly dubious that this
| stuff can actually help minorities succeed in science, to
| say the least.
| akolbe wrote:
| Moreover, most of the money to date has gone to U.S.
| organisations.
|
| This is truly bizarre if you consider that the Wikimedia
| Foundation raises funds in places like India, South
| Africa and South America - with heart-wrenching messages
| about donations being needed to keep Wikipedia online,
| independent, subscription-free and so on:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpos
| t/2...
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| The point is not that they're bad/good - the point is
| that Wikipedia is presenting us with heartfelt pleas to
| keep the servers running, while also running a massive
| budget surplus and donating our money to other people who
| we've never heard of.
|
| And the lack of transparency makes corruption incredibly
| likely. How much of the donated money has been siphoned
| off to the bank accounts of Wikimedia executives? How
| many grants have been awarded because of kickbacks,
| bribes, etc? I have no evidence that any of this has
| happened, but there is no evidence it didn't, either.
|
| There are basic, simple, good governance practices that
| are being ignored here. Which is very suggestive that the
| people involved are actually corrupt and resisting the
| implementation of good governance practices.
|
| Also, the ongoing pleas for donations when those
| donations are clearly not required is very suggestive.
| Why are Wikimedia executives asking for this money when
| they don't need it, if they're not siphoning off into
| their own accounts?
| kup0 wrote:
| Yeah the fact that the large transfer to Tides happened
| at the same time that the Tides CEO became General
| Counsel for Wikimedia seems pretty gross (and I say this
| as someone that in general would agree with Tides'
| mission otherwise)
|
| To quote the page this HN submission links to: _"
| Concerns expressed then focused on the secrecy of the
| grant, the break with the participatory grantmaking
| principles the Foundation had until then embraced, and
| the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's
| move in the 2019-2020 financial year from General Counsel
| of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General
| Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation"_
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "Keeping the servers running" is useless if the project
| itself is not flourishing. Nobody wants a dead, out of
| date Wikipedia. So broad support for the project and
| community is what really matters.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Which is fine, but tell us that. The impression I get
| from the donations plea is that the money goes directly
| to support Wikipedia because it needs it to keep the
| servers running.
|
| And they need to be clear about the grants made, how much
| was given to whom, for what purpose, what was the
| rationale for this grant to support Wikipedia? and did
| the grant achieve its objective?
| [deleted]
| newswasboring wrote:
| But it doesn't really help Wikipedia, at least not in a
| measurable way. From the original article opinion of long
| time wikipedian Steven Walling
|
| > Given that this is a pilot and there have been serious
| concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding
| grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable
| impact on Wikimedia projects, I would encourage you to
| stop
| akolbe wrote:
| The Wikimedia Endowment has amassed $100 million in five
| years, half the time anticipated, and there has never
| been a single audited financial statement or Form 990
| disclosure, because the money is stashed away with the
| completely opaque Tides Foundation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpos
| t/2...
|
| The public has no way of knowing how much Tides is paid
| to host the fund (and the Wikimedia Foundation refuses to
| say when asked), nor is there any way of knowing whether
| and to whom any money from this fund has been paid out.
| Even if there is no abuse, this sort of set-up is so
| clearly _vulnerable_ to abuse that one wonders why anyone
| would choose it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Not only vulnerable - if you were going to siphon away
| money into your bank account, this is exactly how you'd
| set that up. This looks like it was _designed_ to be
| abused.
| akolbe wrote:
| Okay, I get your point. Speaks to the organisation's
| basic lack of honesty, which is arguably the _real_
| problem here. That 's come up before - a recent poll
| among Wikipedians judged the WMF's fundraising emails
| "unethical and misleading":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978
| dathinab wrote:
| No at least I find out quite appropriate of they spend less
| then 5% to support projects with similar goals as long as
| they have a surplus. I mean you are donating to the
| organization not the website and at least for me that had
| always been clear.
|
| That the banners where misleading is IMHO they main issue
| with the secondary issue being the not so grate transparency
| for this external usages.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Can you provide a good example of someone doing this?
|
| I saw the Wikimedia example, and it didn't appear to me that
| they were hiding anything. So I'd be curious to see an
| example of this being done well.
|
| Edit: To be clear, I'm looking for examples like Wikimedia,
| where the donations are being used for multiple things.
| ineedasername wrote:
| * No. People who visit and donate, only wants it to go to the
| site they are using and for its development.*
|
| Not if it was clear the money was going to other avenues of
| increased knowledge.
|
| Then the donator knows what they're getting into and can
| choose accordingly. Nothing wrong with that.
| systemicdanna wrote:
| That's exactly why I am not going to donate this year, and I
| donated annually for almost a decade now. I love Wikipedia,
| will support it if it gets in trouble. But I am not rich
| enough to donate to some random causes, especially if I find
| them wasteful and even ethically questionable.
| akolbe wrote:
| Well said indeed.
| [deleted]
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Wikimedia gets a TON of money each year, way way way more than it
| needs to support "The Projects" (including salaries of
| developers). Yet the fundraisers still cry out like if you don't
| give them money, the site might go offline. Also most everyone at
| the WMF is not getting paid amazingly (seeing is how they are San
| Francisco based).
|
| And I don't know how it is now, but back in the day (about 10
| years ago or so) their spending internally was hilariously
| wasteful. It's been a while, but based on what news keeps coming
| out about them... I don't think it's gotten any better.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I am aware that quite a few years ago the Australian chapter of
| the WMF had systemic rorting. People were paid to travel overseas
| and report on conferences. Instead, they disappeared, did not
| write any reports and used it as an overseas holiday.
|
| This has been a problem for a very, very long time.
|
| Stop giving money to Wikipedia. They don't need it, and they
| don't publicise what they spend it on.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's amazing to me that people presented with a very simple
| "travel for free and report on a conference" can't even be
| bothered to at least provide some simplistic report to maintain
| the charade.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Previous HN discussion about Wikimedia squandering money, all of
| two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533
| [deleted]
| dandare wrote:
| Given the progressive/woke bias of Wikipedia, I am scared to ask
| what was that money really used for.
| trabant00 wrote:
| > Wiki Education Foundation Executive Director Frank Schulenburg:
| "there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and
| ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct
| measurable impact on Wikimedia projects"
|
| I think this is the best criticism as it avoids going into
| politics and addresses the practical issue.
|
| From https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund:
|
| > Many of the barriers that prevent people from accessing and
| contributing to free knowledge are rooted in systems of racial
| oppression.
|
| I don't think there would be a scandal if the money would have
| been used for the fund stated purpose: to help access and
| contribution to Wikipedia.
|
| The money instead has gone to a political lobby group:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would donate to wikipedia if they would commit to becoming a
| smaller organisation, with a smaller staff.
|
| 10 fulltime staff should be plenty. ~5 developers/devops people
| to run the site and slowly make changes, and 5
| marketing/branding/business/finance people for everything else
| that needs to be done.
|
| Pay those 10 staff well, but cap it at that and don't aim to grow
| headcount or scope beyond being a great online encyclopaedia.
|
| Ironically, they probably wouldn't need my donation if they only
| had 10 staff.
| karencarits wrote:
| And perhaps a team to make innovations in the knowledge domain.
| Another comment mentioned wikidata, which is an interesting
| project to organize knowledge in a relational database. I would
| love to see the federated version where you can reference
| concepts in remote graphs, but the development is very slow. I
| wish they would prioritize such kind of projects
| qwery wrote:
| Wikipedia/Wikimedia is and always was a politically radical
| (progressive, socially-aware, woke) project.
|
| The "somewhat-viral" complaint (and its echo) fails to point out
| any concrete wrongdoing. The example grant recipients are
| presented as failures without any evidence. Figures are cherry-
| picked and abused.
|
| Where the complaint does succeed is in showing an intense disgust
| for the social justice movement. So, don't donate to Wikimedia if
| you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of money
| going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people being
| encouraged to (& see themselves as allowed to) participate in
| science and journalism. Go buy a copy of Encarta.
|
| Wikipedia hasn't been around for that long, was the first of its
| kind, and it doesn't exist by default. Please criticise it well
| -- make it stronger.
| fleddr wrote:
| "Where the complaint does succeed is in showing an intense
| disgust for the social justice movement. So, don't donate to
| Wikimedia if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small
| amount of money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-
| male people being encouraged to (& see themselves as allowed
| to) participate in science and journalism. Go buy a copy of
| Encarta."
|
| Thanks for making the debate worse. It's basically "do what I
| say or you're a racist".
| feoren wrote:
| There are two main arguments under debate here.
|
| One argument is "Wikipedia is guilt-tripping users into
| donating without making it clear they don't need the money
| for hosting, and it's more likely to go to Wikimedia-given
| grants."
|
| That argument is completely fair. Lots of evidence has been
| given about their finances and it's pretty obvious that this
| is a completely legitimate criticism of Wikimedia and its
| fundraising style.
|
| The second argument is "YOUR money is going to support GAY
| and BLACK people!!!!!!! WOKE POLITICS! CULTURE WARS!!!!!!!"
|
| That second argument is absolute utter bullshit nonsense
| supported by some of the worst cherry-picked examples I've
| ever seen and backed by the same trite get-out-of-racism-free
| dog-whistle jargon that we've seen over and over again from
| overtly racist groups. That is the argument GP is
| criticizing. Yes, the people who get infuriated at the idea
| of nonprofits supporting black women in STEM are indeed
| racists. That's what the word means.
| fleddr wrote:
| You're doing the exact same thing: reverting to instinctive
| binary positions and name-calling. Throwing away the baby
| with the bath water. The thing you accuse the original
| source of, you're mirroring.
|
| Sure enough, there really are people whom dislike
| minorities altogether for whatever twisted reasons. Awful
| people, no argument here.
|
| Yet you're looking over a sizable group who have no issue
| with minorities, they have an issue with equity politics,
| which flies in the face of equality and is racist and
| sexist by design. People whom find it incredibly
| patronizing and insulting to call an entire demographic
| "marginalized".
|
| Those people are not conservative nor are they racist. We
| use to call these people progressive. Center to center-
| left, classic liberalism. Many aren't on board at all with
| the postmodernist version of progressive politics. Yet they
| are lumped in with "racists", this is how you keep a
| culture war going. Just keep doubling down, and keep losing
| ever more support.
| feoren wrote:
| Cherry-picked is right! The original thread picks on the SeRCH
| foundation, which got a little over 1% of the grant money based
| on their own figures. The grant was to "support and expand
| their signature program ... which amplifies the voices of
| Black, Indigenous, women of color and non-binary people of
| color in STEM fields". That's what the money is going toward.
| There are a lot of people who become enraged at the idea of
| their money going toward causes like that, and those people are
| called "bigoted asshole racist pieces of shit." Indeed those
| people should not donate to Wikipedia.
|
| I don't pretend to know what the hell the sentence about
| counterspaces and hyperspace and fluid "place-times" means, but
| it sounds like someone reading the words "hyperlink" or
| "daemon" and concluding the Internet is woo-woo mysticism.
| They're shaking their fist at these words without even
| attempting to understand what they mean. They say in that very
| sentence that they're borrowing terms from fiction because they
| find them useful. It's the height of cherry-picking and straw-
| manning to criticize all of Wikipedia's grant-giving because 1%
| of it went to a recipient with otherwise noble goals that uses
| weird words sometimes.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| > So, don't donate to Wikimedia if you are also repulsed by the
| thought of (a small amount of money going towards) young, non-
| white, possibly non-male people being encouraged to (& see
| themselves as allowed to) participate in science and
| journalism.
|
| Oh no, no, no. This is a lie and a mischaracterisation. No one,
| and I mean no one, has a problem with "young non-white non-
| male" people being encouraged to participate.
|
| As for "allowed", you know all too well this is plain bs. There
| is nothing disallowing "non-white non-male" people from
| participating.
|
| Here, let me lay out for you just one of the insane diatribes
| this foundation puts forth:
|
| > The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting
| away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal
| supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an
| environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of
| communities of color worldwide.
|
| https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
|
| Questions for you:
|
| 1. Do you agree this is a racist diatribe?
|
| 2. Why is the above not worded like this, and instead makes
| racial references?
|
| > The Wikimedia Foundation defines equity as shifting away from
| region centric attitudes, attitudes of supremacy, superiority,
| power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive
| and reflects the experiences of a multitude of people.
|
| 3. Do you agree saying something like "jewish media" is
| equivalent to saying "white supremacy"? Not all jewish people
| are involved in the media. Not all white peoples are
| supremacist. Using phrases such as "jewish media" increases
| hate towards jewish people. Using phrases such as "white
| supremacy" increases hate towards white peoples. Do you agree
| both outcomes are equally bad?
|
| 4. Do you agree "create an environment that is inclusive and
| reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide" is
| an exclusionary and racist statement? Furthermore it can be
| construed to be a call to genocide as it implies people that
| are "not of color" are either not welcome or perhaps not around
| anymore.
|
| 5. Do you agree "people of color" is it's self an eurocentric
| term, the very thing the foundation claims to want to shift
| away from?
|
| Unlike what you are implying, people broadly speaking have no
| issues with "non white non male" people participating in
| society or anything else. What they have a problem is double
| standards, blatant racism, hypocrisy and nonsensical self-
| contradictory ideas. Or, you know, woke insanity.
| airhangerf15 wrote:
| > if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of
| money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people
|
| I'm disgusted by discrimination in any form. Why not have money
| go to the poor, no matter what their race or gender? I don't
| understand why people are apologizing for and defending
| obviously racist and communist organizations that Wikimedia is
| donating to.
|
| And let's be frank, how many of these organizations have
| leadership that's buying multi-million dollar homes with those
| "donations" under the guise of creating "creative spaces" ..
| another very famous garbage-charity was just outed by an
| incredible documentary (made by a black woman, not that it
| should matter) for pumping millions into personal real estate
| purchases that were disguised as business buildings. Where is
| the IRS to go after these people?
| gcau wrote:
| I use Wikipedia a lot and will never, ever donate a single dollar
| unless there's radical changes (that we know we'll never happen).
| If there was a better alternative to Wikipedia without all it's
| beaurocratic and managerial BS I would donate to it. Wikipedia is
| a lost cause now in that regard I think.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I long stopped using wikipedia for anything that involves the
| media, is contemporary, is political or otherwise
| controversial, due to the sheer amount of bias _because_ of the
| "reliable" sources rules, which simply don't reliably work for
| any of those.
|
| For the "hard" sciences they generally are pretty reliable.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > or otherwise controversial
|
| I find that articles about political theories and movements
| are usually fairly good. Articles about history, especially
| the history of regions where nationalist movements are
| active, are another matter entirely. Those are political
| battlegrounds. They tend to have 10 or more archives of the
| talk page, indicating that the article is widely disputed or
| even "owned".
|
| Any article about the Middle East, for example, is heavily
| gatekept; I won't even try to fix punctuation on such
| articles, I treat them only as a source of links to more-
| reliable material.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Political theories, yeah I can see them having some rigor.
|
| For movements? Very much depends on what media sources
| think of them, because they are the "reliable sources".
| This gets even more pronounced when they have a conflict of
| interest, for example "This subset of media sources is
| engaging in behaviour that indicates a conflict of
| interest" easily gets you labelled as everything bad in the
| world by those very same outlets. Which then get cited as
| reliable sources, and through those citations other outlets
| start mirroring that and so on.
|
| Until the reliable sources are mostly in agreement and you
| can't do shit about it.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| I just wish I could donate directly to the devs working on
| Wikipedia and to the hosting costs. Same goes for Mozilla,
| actually. I want to support Firefox developers, but not Mozilla.
| I won't donate to either anymore even though I am a Firefox user
| and rely on Wikipedia a lot in my daily life as well. Maybe the
| devs should all set up Patreon or GitHub Sponsors accounts. I'd
| be happy to support them that way.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Basically the reason why I will not donate to any large
| organization. Imagine donating to an organization because you
| think it helps them pay for their servers or devs and then it
| enters an intangible web of different obscure organizations, all
| donating to one another in some obscure way. The cause it goes to
| is "external organizations that support knowledge equity by
| addressing the racial inequities preventing access and
| participation in free knowledge", which is about the most
| nebulous, meaningless "cause" imaginable. Where does the money
| go? Unkown. Who benefits? The charities.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| They throw in the term "racial inequities" specifically so they
| can call anyone who questions the funds "racist." It's a tried
| and true tactic used for fraud.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| INTPenis wrote:
| Just personal cynical opinion here but as soon as large amounts
| of money are in complex circulation like that, vultures appear.
| I don't trust for one second that some of that money isn't
| being siphoned off in various creative ways that most civilians
| couldn't imagine understanding.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| You don't even have to be creative. These charities pay
| friends who work as administrators in those charities and
| accomplish nothing.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Like most things in the current year, most of it amounts to
| jobs programs for university graduates of dubious
| usefulness, and patronage systems for political machines.
| tootie wrote:
| Every American nonprofit publishes all their financial data by
| law. They're called 990 forms. Typically a year or two lag from
| filing until public but you can always see executive comp,
| major outlays and income sources, trustees, etc. It's
| incredibly cynical to just assume they're up to no good. Large
| orgs do work at scale that smaller ones never can. Certainly
| some of them are bad, but they're behavior is almost never
| secret.
| akolbe wrote:
| The Wikimedia Endowment contains over $100 million of
| donations. Find me one Form 990 for it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2.
| ..
| [deleted]
| tootie wrote:
| Well the entire issue is that it's a tenant of the Tides
| Foundation which does file a 990 which is where all this
| info comes from about how the money is spent. It's not
| clear if tenant money is earmarked or otherwise set aside.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Stripped of jargon, that sentence is saying "many people can't
| access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is
| basically true if you account for second-order effects. For
| example, a major reason why Haiti is poor and has few Wikipedia
| users is centuries of European and American prejudice and
| straight-up racism against former slaves.
|
| Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for
| poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but
| unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You can't blame racism and colonialism for countries being
| poor when they were also poor before that happened.
| zztop44 wrote:
| It's Haiti. It doesnt exist before the racism and
| colonialism. Of course, something existed on the same land,
| but that wasn't Haiti.
| fallingknife wrote:
| They have been independent for over 200 years. And who is
| left to be racist? The country is pretty much all black.
| jl6 wrote:
| Worth a read:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy
| dmix wrote:
| Haiti finished making interest payments in 1947 (75 years
| ago). Apparently the Dominican Republic had the same GDP
| per capita as Haiti in 1950, so post-WW2 they roughly
| started off in the same boat. One of their economy's has
| skyrocketed (relatively) and the other has stayed
| completely stagnant, despite being on the same island and
| having access to much of the same natural resources:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59
| /GD...
|
| It's always been a curious contrast and a sad one.
| joenot443 wrote:
| > "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia
| because of racism", which is basically true if you account
| for second-order effects
|
| This kind of very shaky use of second-order effects is
| dangerous and is responsible for some of the most well-
| intentioned but also destructive policy changes in the last
| 20 years.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > the most well-intentioned but also destructive policy
| changes in the last 20 years
|
| For example?
| joenot443 wrote:
| Too many examples to list and I encourage you to do your
| own reading, but a low-hanging fruit is the ongoing legal
| battle of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and
| Fellows of Harvard College. Policy which was intended to
| make admission standards more equitable have succeeded in
| making them shockingly discriminative.
|
| As I said, everyone involved I assume was acting out of
| good faith, but it's incredibly easy to see in retrospect
| how misguided their decision making was.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > well-intentioned
|
| I'm not so sure that's always the case.
| constantcrying wrote:
| That is missing the point. The point is that Wikipedia baits
| people by begging for help to keep the site up. Then, the
| raised money is funneled through different layers of
| charities (each obviously taking a cut) to then end up in a
| vague, totally unclear cause.
|
| "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because
| of racism" is not a thing you can pay money to fix. These are
| not server costs, where you can present the donor a bill for
| where his money went.
|
| Who received the money ultimately? What happened because of
| that money? What could have been avoided because of that
| money?
|
| Can you answer these questions? Would you donate to any
| organization which did not tell you these answers? Certainly
| I will not.
| rippercushions wrote:
| First up, I actually agree that the _specific_ fund
| donation here is highly sketchy, especially the way it
| bypassed the usual processes and in particular the conflict
| of interest involved with the counsel hopping jobs between
| the WMF and the recipient. So I 'm not even going to try to
| justify it.
|
| However, the WMF also _does_ have a history of concrete
| actions to improve access to Wikipedia: it funds chapters
| around the world, seeds obscure language versions that
| would otherwise not be sustainable, and does stuff like
| sponsoring flights for students and Wikimedians living in
| poor countries to various Wiki conferences. I 'm totally on
| board with this and I think it's a fine use of a reasonable
| portion of the Foundations' money, as long as it doesn't
| imperil the main mission, which it clearly doesn't.
| akolbe wrote:
| It's the culture at the very top of the WMF that has
| allowed this "sketchy" fund to come about. It's even
| worse with the Wikimedia Endowment at the Tides
| Foundation. That's over $100 million in donations
| collected over a period of 6.5 years without a single
| Form 990 disclosure, without a single audited financial
| statement ever published:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpos
| t/2...
|
| Transparency is being reduced more and more; stopping
| publication of the quarterly reviews is just another
| symptom.
| birksherty wrote:
| People who donate, do it only for the website, not for
| any other cause. The donate banner is a lie. Now when
| they are spending elsewhere, they are deceiving the
| donors. Period.
|
| If they want money for all these things, they should
| clearly mention this while asking money in Wikipedia.
| People will donate for that. This is the reason of the
| issue. Not because people hate any community.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Personally, I 'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving
| access for poor people around the world regardless of skin
| color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of
| style._
|
| I'm pretty sure the foundation _could_ fund such work with
| the full support of the community, if they went about it in a
| different way.
|
| For example, if they transparently said they were going to
| try paying professional researchers/editors/translators to
| beef up articles on subjects that were under-represented;
| they took a systematic look at subjects and determined Haiti
| was under-represented; and they spent $x00k towards some
| concrete goal, like getting Haiti more
| articles/words/featured articles than Star Wars.
|
| Or if paying editors is unpopular or ineffective, they could
| fund efforts to recruit more volunteer contributors to the
| Hatian-language wikipedia, spending $x00k and measuring
| success by the increase in article count, how long the newly
| recruited volunteers stay around for, and suchlike.
|
| You know - transparent priorities, with goals expressed in
| terms of wikipedia contributions.
| itsthelowiq wrote:
| Haiti has been independent for a very long time.
| luckylion wrote:
| Why not create, or donate to, a separate non-profit that
| focuses on improving access for poor people? Asking
| established entities to shift their focus to your favorite
| topic (or just making them, if you succeed to subvert them)
| feels like a sneaky way to bypass convincing people of your
| goals, and just redirecting funds that were meant to go
| elsewhere.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Because people wouldn't donate. They want to donate to
| Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a highly successful product. So
| much so that people will voluntarily pay 100x what it takes
| to run it. In a normal business this would be profit, and
| the owners would be able to pocket it.
|
| But, Wikipedia is a non-profit, so they have to be a bit
| more clever in how they pocket the money. First you create
| a parasitic management structure. But if your
| administrative expenses are 80% of donations, that looks
| bad. So you donate to another non-profit, and that counts
| in financial statements as money put to work as charity.
| Then that non-profit can siphon off its share of
| administrative expenses, and repeat the cycle.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Because people wouldn 't donate. They want to donate
| to Wikipedia._
|
| Then convince people to donate. Re-appropriating their
| donations seems like a good way to throw out the baby
| with the bath water.
| Jickandra14 wrote:
| Jotra7 wrote:
| chasd00 wrote:
| i never realized how much money they have. I suggest everyone not
| donate until the page load time increases because they're having
| to scale back their infrastructure. I've always assumed donations
| went directly to bandwidth and servers.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Same as Mozilla Foundation ... they are kept alive by Google
| money, so Google can say that they have no monopoly on browsers.
|
| Their side projects are money sinkholes. Would never give money
| to Mozilla.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Wikipedia is not short on cash_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 - Oct 2022 (482
| comments)
|
| _The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on
| political activism_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710 - Oct 2022 (43
| comments)
|
| Related and less recent:
|
| _Poll of Wikipedians concludes: Wikimedia fundraising emails are
| misleading_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978 -
| Sept 2022 (113 comments)
|
| _Wikipedia fundraising banners paused over weekend in response
| to complaints_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603858 -
| Dec 2021 (22 comments)
|
| _Ask HN: Is Wikipedia running out of money?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29523033 - Dec 2021 (28
| comments)
|
| _Wikipedia is loaded, so why's it asking for donations?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402703 - Dec 2021 (251
| comments)
|
| _Wikipedia is swimming in money-why is it begging people to
| donate?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 - May
| 2021 (595 comments)
|
| _Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569239 - Sept 2020 (74
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: Do you donate to Wikipedia? Is their donation request
| motivating?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135871 -
| Aug 2020 (17 comments)
|
| _Wikipedia fundraising strikes again - an open letter to
| Wikipedia_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509582 - Oct
| 2017 (23 comments)
|
| _Wikimedia Foundation 's runaway spending growth_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429067 - Oct 2017 (121
| comments)
|
| _Wikimedia Foundation spending_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 - May 2017 (409
| comments)
|
| _Wikimedia Foundation Raises $20 Million From 1 Million+ Donors_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416127 - Jan 2012 (22
| comments)
|
| _Lessons learned from wikipedia 's fundraising banner design _ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908546 - Nov 2010 (37
| comments)
|
| _Optimizing Wikipedia 's Fundraising Banner Ads_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006438 - Dec 2009 (14
| comments)
|
| Others?
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| I had a recurring donation set up for wikipedia. I really like
| it. It's useful. But I hate woke politics. So, yeah, I no longer
| have that recurring donation.
|
| I genuinely don't understand why people feel the need to shove
| their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >I genuinely don't understand why people feel the need to shove
| their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
|
| They're in a cult and they don't realize it. Woke politics has
| every negative hallmark of a cult. Original sin,
| excommunication, heresy...
| theblazehen wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what woke politics they have?
| mellosouls wrote:
| The advocacy fund is linked in the article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund
|
| _Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal
| sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy
| initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care,
| labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women 's
| rights and human rights._
|
| While those policy areas are not in themselves necessarily
| negative, they have a clear political slant which is the
| ground associated with woke activism.
|
| It's not obvious what it has to do with Wikimedia.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also they sound extremely localised. As someone outside
| extremely wealthy and rich USA why should my money go to
| that sort of political organizations there. Why don't they
| use their own money for it?
| happymellon wrote:
| None of those sound bad, but one organisation that tries to
| focus on all of them?
|
| You'll end up trying lots of things but poorly, or find
| that they cross influence to make things efficient. Why
| work on labour issues when you can deal with women's labour
| issues?
|
| And especially if they are being funded via manipulation,
| such as paying for Wikipedia's servers, means they would
| lack the oversight from donors which is not an effective
| way.
| chris_wot wrote:
| It's also an American organisation, and yet the WMF has a
| global remit.
| concordDance wrote:
| denton-scratch wrote:
| This isn't true.
|
| I edit Wikipedia regularly, and have done for 20 years. I
| don't believe transwomen are women. I am not banned.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Do they know that is your stance, and have you edited
| articles to reflect it?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I haven't filled-in a profile page, and I haven't had
| occasion to make any edit concerning transness, sex and
| gender. My Wikipedia handle is a name I've used in other
| places, so a determined stalker could draw inferences
| about my views; but I haven't used the handle outside of
| Wikipedia for a decade.
|
| I have opinions about the Middle East that, if expressed
| in my editing, would get me into trouble - but probably
| not banned; my edits would simply be reverted in a
| microsecond.
|
| Editing with an opinion is fine; you just get reverted.
| Nobody bans you. You get into trouble if you try to take
| a stand: e.g. revert the revert, or if you take it to the
| talk page, or ask for admin review.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| > Editing with an opinion is fine; you just get reverted.
| Nobody bans you. You get into trouble if you try to take
| a stand: e.g. revert the revert, or if you take it to the
| talk page, or ask for admin review.
|
| Neo liberal society in a nutshell. And people wonder why
| authoritarian regimes and attitudes are getting more and
| more traction in the so called free west.
|
| You can say whatever you want as long as you do as you
| are told.
|
| Actually not even this is true for quite a while.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Neoliberalism is an economic viewpoint, not a
| sociological one.
|
| I don't know a good word for the "safe", modern, liberal
| point-of-view. Perhaps that's why everyone calls it
| "woke", a word that I don't use, because it's usually
| meant as an insult. In the USA, "liberal" seems to be an
| insult too.
|
| The viewpoint I'm referring to is that of educated,
| urban, mainly white people, who sympathize with oppressed
| minorities, but are scared of any kind of revolution,
| because they depend on capitalism.
| batch12 wrote:
| > They prohibit people from editing who believe child
| sexual activity isn't harmful[1],
|
| From the linked page: > Wikipedia does not tolerate
| inappropriate adult-child relationships. Editors who
| attempt to use Wikipedia to pursue or facilitate
| inappropriate adult-child relationships, who advocate
| inappropriate adult-child relationships on- or off-wiki
| (e.g. by expressing the view that inappropriate
| relationships are not harmful to children), or who identify
| themselves as pedophiles, will be blocked and banned
| indefinitely.
|
| Looks pretty sane to me? If it's only one "party" that
| draws this line, what are those that don't?
| concordDance wrote:
| > Looks pretty sane to me?
|
| Expressing the view off site that sexual relationships
| between adults and children are not harmful results in
| being prevented from editing wikipedia.
|
| This is an ideological test on who can edit.
| Elinvynia wrote:
| Then don't be a pedo off-site, easy.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| There are many. I will point out one, because it brings me to
| a broader point. Thinly vailed racism against a global
| minority.
|
| The following is a direct quote from one of the "foundations"
| they sponsor.
|
| > The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting
| away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal
| supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an
| environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of
| communities of color worldwide.
|
| https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
|
| I want to contrast this to what happened recently to Kanye
| West when he mentioned jewish media.
|
| The immediate response to "jewish media" was "there is no
| such thing", problems in the industry are due to individuals
| and saying "jewish media" is dangerous because it pains an
| entire group with a broad brush.
|
| Why is no one's response to this blatantly racist diatribe
| the exact same?
|
| Why is it wrong to say "jewish media" but ok and acceptable
| to say "white supremacy"?
|
| Not all jews are involved with the media and not all media-
| involved jews are malevolent. Likewise, not all white people
| are supremacist.
|
| Why is one ok but not the other?
|
| I have even seen, in mainstream outlets, "jewish media" being
| called a "call to genocide". Why is that a call to genocide
| but not "reflects the experiences of communities of color
| worldwide" - What happen to the white peoples? Is the
| sentence implying they are no longer welcome, perhaps no
| longer around ?
|
| Why isn't their statement:
|
| The Wikimedia Foundation defines equity as shifting away from
| region centric attitudes, attitudes of supremacy,
| superiority, power and privilege to create an environment
| that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of a multitude
| of people.
|
| I refuse to give money to racists, especially ones attempting
| to opress a global minority.
|
| We need as a society to make a choice. Either all racism is
| unacceptable or none is. You can't have it both ways. You
| can't in the same breath say "jewish media is an anti semitic
| term" and follow that up with "dismantle white supremacy".
| You can't proclaim "black lives matter" and harp on someone
| saying "white lives matter". You can't claim to strive
| towards equity and say "reflects the experiences of
| communities of color worldwide". It needs to reflect
| everyone's experience.
|
| Nothing good will come of racist policies like the ones
| supported by this "foundation".
| Philorandroid wrote:
| Because they, like every other racist, believe that _it 's
| justified this time._
|
| One of my old TTRPG players adamantly defended an anti-
| white tirade they'd made, justifying it with horse-blinder
| arguments of inherited sin ("our ancestors did X, therefore
| we we are guilty of X") and of the belief that non-whites
| need to be handed a crutch in order to survive modern
| society. It was enlightening to hear a true believer
| honestly state and defend a double-standard as they did,
| even if the dissonance was as maddening then as it is now.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Why is it wrong to say "jewish media" but ok and
| acceptable to say "white supremacy"?_
|
| Who controls the tone of these discussions? Those who
| control mass media.
| drc500free wrote:
| Are you saying that Jews control mass media?
| drc500free wrote:
| The significant difference is that the USA has historically
| been a country whose social order is primarily defined by
| White Supremacy. This was codified in law through Slavery
| and all the way up to the Civil Rights Act which tens of
| millions of Americans fought against, tooth and nail.
|
| We are in the midst of a large scale disagreement over
| whether White Supremacy is STILL in effect.
|
| Most non-Whites say that the USA still is, and that they
| are disadvantaged both by the disparate accumulation of
| capital during overt white supremacy (which tends to
| reinforce itself in a capitalist economy), and how non-
| whites are still treated by people with power (e.g. cops,
| doctors, hiring managers).
|
| Most Whites say that it is not, that accumulated capital in
| general is meaningless because they specifically don't have
| any of it, and that any claims of disparate treatment in
| the present day are over-sensitive attention seeking from
| people who have been raised to think of themselves as
| victims.
|
| "Jewish Media," on the other hand, is and always has been a
| false anti-semitic trope since Media first began. It stems
| from general anti-semitic conspiritorial beliefs that all
| abstract, ineffable systems are controlled by a monolithic
| and shadowy organization of "The Jews" in order to
| subjugate other peoples. It's a subset of anti-semitic
| tropes that have been applied to the media, banks, unions,
| and communism - basically any non-tangible system that
| affects peoples lives, confuses them, and scares them. The
| mere existence of any Jewish bankers, lawyers, union
| organizers, media personalities, movie producers, or
| communist agitators is seen as proof that "The Jews"
| entirely run whatever that thing is.
|
| While there are some surface-level linguistic similarities
| between "White Supremacy" and "Jewish Media," one is a
| historical fact that may or may not be present-day fact and
| the other is a historical lie that has been used to murder
| millions.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| oefrha wrote:
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund (Warning:
| filled to the brim with pc vocab.)
|
| That was painful to read. If I wanted to promote "knowledge
| equity" I would focus on education in low and middle income
| countries, rather than pouring money on affirmative action in
| the richest country in the world and throwing fuel on culture
| war in said country and elsewhere.
|
| I used to donate a small amount annually. No more from now on.
| mavhc wrote:
| So you'd suggest they gave money to, for example, Media
| Foundation for West Africa: The Media Foundation for West
| Africa (MFWA) is a non-governmental organization dedicated to
| protecting and defending the right to freedom of expression,
| particularly for media and human rights defenders, throughout
| the 16 countries in West Africa
|
| or
|
| Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (US$250,000): The
| Arab Reporters in Journalism (ARIJ) is a nonprofit
| investigative journalism organization based in Jordan?
| oefrha wrote:
| You missed the word "education" in my comment.
|
| Books, Internet-in-a-Box, etc. for poor children in
| underdeveloped countries, now that kind of projects would
| be knowledge equity.
| feoren wrote:
| > pouring money on affirmative action in the richest country
| in the world
|
| Are they spending that much money in Norway?
| marcinzm wrote:
| >I genuinely don't understand why people feel the need to shove
| their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
|
| My perception is that every major ideological group is doing
| this and has been since civilization started. Most people don't
| mind as long as the ideology aligns with their own ideology.
| __s wrote:
| The major ideological groups which don't do this aren't
| talked about, which may cause you to think they aren't major
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Time to change my Amazon smile recipient!
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I've been donating to the EFF for years now. Sadly the ACLU is
| anti-civil liberties these days.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| How is this not fraud?
| torstenvl wrote:
| It is. Soliciting donations under false premises is an
| extremely common form of fraud. But it almost assuredly won't
| be treated that way, given Wikipedia's general good citizenship
| plus a lack of political will to oppose anything in the name of
| "equity."
| yakubin wrote:
| The original thread:
| <https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633>
|
| Just wow. I've been hearing about Wikipedia having a surplus of
| money for a while, it didn't bother me. But after seeing what
| sort of nonsense they're funding I'm cancelling my donations.
| ThouYS wrote:
| lol, I won't donate to wikipedia this year. Why on earth do they
| give grants out anyway? The only thing I want is wikipedia.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I have no comment about the main article, but I agree about the
| other unrelated point below - that Commons is really start to
| show its age.
|
| It's kind of comical how YouTube and flickr is listed there as
| the "new boys on the block", but I agree that there should be
| more development on making Commons easier to use.
|
| Try to upload photos to Commons... they don't even have phone
| apps and using the web uploader is really cumbersome.
|
| (I also hate wikidata with a passion, but it seems like there is
| a push for this Semantic Web nonsense from the very top of
| wikimedia so what am I gonna do)
| shp0ngle wrote:
| maybe if wikimedia gave more money to development and less to
| random grants, it would be better. but I don't know. This
| community stuff is always hard to pull off.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I won't donate to Wikipedia ever again until they will give an
| assurance of some kind that the money aren't going to third
| parties.
| the-printer wrote:
| I mean with Obsidian v1 release who needs Wikipedia, get to
| blowing on your knowledge cartridges and start linking your
| thinking; amiright?
|
| In all seriousness, I wonder if there's an unbiased timeline of
| the organization and when and how things started to get hairy.
| lantry wrote:
| Every time something like this makes the hn frontpage, I increase
| my monthly recurring donation by 1$. Wikipedia is literally the
| best thing to come from the modern Internet and I'm not willing
| to let it die, no matter how "problematic" the Wikimedia
| foundation becomes.
| pca006132 wrote:
| The hosting cost is just tiny comparing with their other
| budgets, maybe having less income can make them spend less on
| something else?
| teraflop wrote:
| Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives
| _way more_ money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that
| therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your
| calculations at all?
|
| Do you really mean to say that the content of Wikipedia is so
| valuable that no matter what else Wikimedia does, it still
| deserves as much funding as possible? Even though the Wikimedia
| Foundation did not create that content, and doesn't own it in
| either a moral or legal sense? Do you not see how that creates
| some really bad incentives for the health of Wikipedia?
|
| (Personally, I don't have huge disagreements with the actual
| worthiness of most of the causes that Wikimedia chooses to
| support, but I think the way it fundraises for them is wildly
| deceptive.)
| dontbenebby wrote:
| > _Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already
| receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and
| that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your
| calculations at all?_
|
| Thanks for highlighting this. I am concerned about
| architectural decisions like the refusal to add a dot onion
| service, paired with never navigating the original sin of
| people who created their own name pages and edited them
| abusing that social position to deny that others are notable.
|
| The fun comes when someone flips that logic around: "I was
| born in the 80s, who are these pedophiles who met me as a
| child who keep thinking they can... coerce me? Haven't they
| read the constitution? I thought they put a crazy catch all
| in the 9th amendement to avoid some of these retarded takes".
|
| For context, I'm on the autistic spectrum, so I can use the
| word, and I attended an approved private school before
| eventually graduating from one of the most allegedly
| prestigous high schools in the... let's say county?... in the
| mythical "suburbs of Pittsburgh".
|
| And to be fair, many of the people I'm angry at are not
| pedophiles -- they're just totally normal people who keep
| voting for literal fasciss over and over and then expecting
| me to smile and wave like it's 1996 still.
|
| (It's not gonna happen.)
|
| I think we, as a society, need to think about how to handle
| edge cases where folks purposefully make bad decisions under
| uncertainty for purely sadistic reasons, and yeah, that's
| kind of shitty they don't invest that money such so that it's
| perpetually self sustaining or donate it over to more
| infrastructure related projects like Mozilla, Tor, or the
| various projects associated with HTTPS.
|
| (Doesn't SSL or something have a bug?)
|
| - Greg
| usrusr wrote:
| But what is the most likely cause of death for Wikimedia? It's
| not running out of money to operate servers or maintain the
| knowledge of keeping them ruining: it's collapsing under it's
| own wealth, rising costs and inefficiency to a point where one
| day they actually will be unable to maintain servers and
| knowledge. Money attracts people eager to get it under their
| control, and determined wealth-seekers will always outdo their
| more idealist peers in ascending to that control. And chances
| are they'll fool everyone including themselves, believing that
| they are believers when in fact they wouldn't have come close
| to thinking about joining up without that glimmer of gold
| leading their attention.
|
| Note that I'm not suggesting that idealists must remain poor,
| I'm suggesting that there needs to be balance and I don't see
| Wikimedia anywhere close. I'd rather donate to a frugal
| Wikimedia for getting them from reserveres equivalent to six
| generations of operation without new donations to seven
| generations of reserves than for yet another expensive side
| project that roughly correlates with some interpretations of
| Wikipedia ideals.
|
| If those side projects have adequate merit they'll find
| donations on their own, but if they can only fund themselves
| hiding behind the wikipedia front, they don't deserve your
| dollars.
| kapsi wrote:
| So that Twitter user started talking about Wikipedia funding the
| "culture war", and I stopped reading. I guess it's my own fault
| for reading what an anime avatar has to say.
| theknocker wrote:
| [deleted]
| bacchusracine wrote:
| Isn't this the exact thing they went after Jim Bakker for?
| Raising too much money for a specific purpose and then taking the
| excess money and using it for other projects?
| aasasd wrote:
| Gotta say, when I read about how Bram Moolenaar, the author and
| maintainer of Vim, works sometimes to build schools in remote
| areas of Uganda and encourages users to donate to that cause--not
| once did I question how that is helpful or what he's doing with
| people's money.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| There is a difference between:
|
| >Hey guys when I'm not working on this thing I'm building homes
| for some of the poorest and neediest people on earth. If you
| want to help me here is a link.
|
| And
|
| >HEY YOU USE WIKIPEDIA RIGHT? GIVE US MONEY TO KEEP IT GOING YA
| JERK (we will donate the money to orgs completely unrelated to
| Wikipedia and which exist to try and make people hate each
| other)
| OJFord wrote:
| He doesn't claim vim's going to stop working if you don't
| donate to that effort though.
|
| Wikipedia's banner ads make it sound like it desperately needs
| support even to keep running as it is.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > build schools in remote areas of Uganda
|
| That cause is a lot more noble than the causes that wikimedia
| supports.
| return_to_monke wrote:
| I am not sure if you're supporting, or opposing what Moolenaar
| does here. But a large difference is, that, although i am not
| sure if there's any sort of transparent reports available on
| the project, they don't ask "donate so I can keep working on
| vim", they specify "Donate to help poor Ugandan children"
| aasasd wrote:
| That's what I'm saying, in part. Mr. Moolenaar's reports on
| his own on-the-grounds activities are quite clear (from what
| I remember now, a bunch of years later), and the goal of
| 'build some schools' doesn't make me wonder 'what exactly
| does that mean'.
|
| Moreover, the encouragement to donate to that charity is
| written into the license of Vim, and still I never went 'ugh,
| why does he pollute the software with politics' or anything
| like that.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| They absolutely do say "To motivate Bram and others to
| continue working on Vim please send a donation." It's the
| second sentence on https://www.vim.org/sponsor/
|
| They GO ON to say that they'll use the money to help kids in
| Uganda, which is great (both for transparency and the thing
| itself).
| dhruval wrote:
| Very interesting read
|
| I donate every year as I get tremendous value from Wikipedia.
|
| I am still inclined to continue, but will allocate more to other
| not for profits this year, as the foundation is just wasting
| money that can be better spent elsewhere.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-31 23:02 UTC)