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Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly

Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely useful. For what it's worth, Charity Navigator gives them 4 out of 4 stars with a 98.33/100 rating: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703 https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703 Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas, but nobody cares.

threatofrain 4y ago
I'd also add that while arguments that Wikipedia is bloated beyond their mission is worthy of discussion, saying that Wikipedia should only be funding their current site is too narrow. I think Wikipedia should be able to pursue projects such as their wiki textbooks idea (which was ultimately a failure, but still worth trying).
- cwillu 4y ago
  It's fine to pursue projects outside the core mandate, but don't do it with money you were given under the pretense that the core mandate was at risk.
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    Agreed. I'd appreciate it if there were a way to restrict the usage of donations to the causes I care about within the foundation.
    - seneca 4y ago
      That's essentially pointless though. They may earmark your $10 for the core mission, but that just means another $10 that wasn't specified doesn't have to be used for the core, and gets used for their political initiatives. It's entirely semantics and doesn't change behavior at all unless an overwhelming majority earmark their donations the same way.
      - jgwil2 4y ago
        That "unless" clause at the end of your comment is precisely the point though. Just because you don't want to support most of the things that WMF are doing doesn't mean that others don't want to. If a majority of donors earmark their donations, then they will collectively have rebuked the foundation. If a majority of donors don't earmark their donations, then they will have collectively approved of the foundation's actions.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I'm entirely fine for funds to be spend on developing technology or even hosting of such resources. On other hand, as any of it is spend on political propaganda while they have huge reserves... No money from me. If you want to do lies and propaganda start a new charity.
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  I think that's fair enough, but there's also a reasonable criticism that they are a) not being straight about that ambition in their fundraising efforts and b) some of their projects are significantly more political than textbooks. And trust me, agreeing with Unherd about anything does not sit naturally to me.
- Taywee 4y ago
  I'm fine with pursuing other projects, it gets weird when they end up spending huge amounts of their money by giving grants to other organizations. I'd have no problem donating knowing they use it to fund projects, but knowing that they pretty much redonate much of it makes it feel pointless.
akolbe 4y ago
The issue is that they make it sound like they are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia running when they are actually wealthier than ever before. The whole premise of Wikipedia (or aspiration, at least, and yes, not always fulfilled ...) is that people should have information so they can't be manipulated. It kind of sucks to see the very organisation hosting the site do the opposite, don't you think?
- ianai 4y ago
  Marketing. They hired someone(s) with marketing experience.
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    Half-truths. They hired someone with half-truths (bordering on lies) experience.
    - cheschire 4y ago
      Corporate wants you to find the difference between these two.
      - ethagknight 4y ago
    - LightG 4y ago
      So. Marketing?
      - kordlessagain 4y ago
        It is possible to raise interest in something without lying about it. Whether you will fully understand it or not is up to you.
        4y ago
rany_ 4y ago
I don't get the outrage either. It's almost like people want Wikipedia to be barely scrapping by which isn't good. Having some money in your reserves is fine.
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  If lifespan was the goal they would keep the extent of their organisational structure to the minimum. But this is obviously not the case with now more than 500 employees and some with big paychecks.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  An organization that has the goodwill of the hacker community has to perpetually walk the line on the edge of pauper to maintain its virtue, lest it be seen as selling out and no longer worthy of the goodwill of the hacker community. It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.
  - cxr 4y ago
    If they were running ads that said, "Hey we sort of have the money we need to keep doing this for a while, but you can give us some more money if you want to help", then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Wikipedia's current ads are both misleading and more intrusive than ever. 550 employees is huge, especially for an organization that doesn't even pay those employees to create and edit the content on the site. It's so far away from "on the edge of pauper" that the point you're making—even if true for other, non-Wikimedia realms—is completely irrelevant here.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money. The psychology of fundraising is extremely well researched.
      - cxr 4y ago
forgotpwd16 4y ago
Wikisource is also nice functioning as a public library. For reference Wikiquote may also be useful.
Blikkentrekker 4y ago
I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues. When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw. I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.
- spookie 4y ago
  It's kind of sad of anglo-centric their pages are for some countries and historical events. I'm European, and even I can see some bias in there.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    I could believe it. Next you see it, can you share a link here? It might be nice for discussion.
  - Blikkentrekker 4y ago
    Indeed, that's a common issue too with historical events. But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally. From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.
scandox 4y ago
Their communications about donations are just awful. As long as I get these sappy, puppy-dog-eyes appeals I will never donate to them again.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Yeah man, and how dare the Red Cross manipulate people with pictures of starving children in their famine relief ads? A graph showing the intersection between available calories trending down and required calories staying constant would land so much better on HN.
  - scandox 4y ago
    Wikipedia isn't a human in desperate plight. That's kind of the point I'm making.
  - emptyfile 4y ago
    You might be confused, we're talking about Wikipedia not the Red Cross. Wikipedia doesn't help starving children in any way.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    It's ironic that you use Red Cross as an example. An organization that has been proven again and again to be among the worst charity orgs you can donate to, repeatedly spends money on anything else but charity, and often does things that are both antithetical to their stated mission and unethical to boot.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      They're terrible to their employees too. And related to that, some of the practices raise eyebrows. (For example, letting children play in your freezers and around your blood and plasma donations.)
phpisthebest 4y ago
In some ways Charity Navigator is like the BBB, and people need to take those ratings with a grain of salt. What is not said here, but I think it was started this article there was a break-down on Twitter [2] recently where someone broke down the grants Wikimedia Foundation gives to other charities, A lot of Wikimedia has become advocacy for social issues not the spread of free information. Some of those Social issues many of the donors to Wikimedia may not agree with, and it being redistributed to some pretty controversial organizations. People donating to Wikimedia thinking they are advancing Wikipedia but in reality the bulk of the foundation spending is issuing grants to other charities. >>Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget I am reminded of this TED talk[1] from several years ago that talks about fundraising and charity [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou... [2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579778161889652736.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579778161889652736.html
- navaati 4y ago
  Hey, what is "the BBB" here ?
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Better Business Bureau
  - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
    Better business bureau https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    BBB == Better Business Bureau a private organization in the US that "rates" business based on certain factors and customer complaints. It is often confused with having some kind of governmental authority, approval, or validity when in reality they just a non-profit trade organization. Very similar to charity navigator but rating for-profit businesses
disruptiveink 4y ago
Unfortunately, I think this is the most practical take to take here. WMF is "only" doing what pretty much all other large NGOs do, only they are in a highly visible position where: a) they operate on the Internet and b) their volunteer userbase is extremely obsessed about cataloguing and editing data, so it naturally follows they'd also be interested in the financial data around the organisation itself. This is not to say they shouldn't be held accountable, but I do wonder what's the percentages of large charities that are "much worse" in terms of "we exist mostly to pay pretty good salaries to people whose purpose is to fundraise so we can repeat the loop".
imgabe 4y ago
It’s deceptive. People give money thinking they are supporting one thing, and it gets used for something else.
foldr 4y ago
> the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas Is there a reference here that I'm missing?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Apparently medical conferences are the biggest days of the year for the sex industry, although IIRC it was actually cardiologists who held the top spot.
  - lupire 4y ago
    I don't think ACS is paying for the sex and drugs tho.
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      They kind of are, because they sponsor research and conferences.
lupire 4y ago
Charity Navigator is very narrow. They check that paperwork is up to date and that fundraising expenses are low. They don't check for effectiveness or if "program spending" is doing anything. A low CN rating is bad, but a high CN rating isn't good.
dm319 4y ago
Be wary of the cogs grinding in the background that can lead to an article like this hitting popularity. There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia - disagreements with the way certain topics are represented, and the way wikipedia has become a huge resource for information and news is not good news for everyone. I spend way more money on entertainment being piped into my TV, or deliveries happening a day quicker than I do on a website I use several times a day.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  > There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia Check the wikipedia page for the author of the article, he has been against wikipedia for 20 years now. Got his job in the Daily Telegraph by insulting Google and wikipedia repeatedly about how woke they are.
  - dm319 4y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. I don't like to characterise 'left' and 'right' as being more or less factual, but we've experience a distorted massaging of facts in my country from papers like the Daily Telegraph. There are a bunch of people who like to say things to persuade people of their point of view, and are upset when the evidence doesn't agree with them. I can see something like wikipedia making these people upset.
allisdust 4y ago
They will do this to all (relatively) open systems because its easier to criticise when things are open. Wait till they get ad enabled version of Gikipedia (by Google) shoved down their throats in the future.
concordDance 4y ago
The outrage is over misleading donators. Wikipedia is very cheap and in no danger of running out of money, but the ads make people think otherwise. Additionally, only a small fraction of the money goes to wikipedia (including software dev for it).
a_c 4y ago
More useful questions to ask are how much good they do and how much harm they cause. I use wiki daily. I gain so much from it that the 10 quids a month seems like a bargain. The wiki outrage looks like a variation of bike shedding, the more people know, they more opinion they have
oever 4y ago
Here's a site with faceted search on WikiData: https://wikipedia.peerdb.org/ https://wikipedia.peerdb.org/ And here's an alternative way to browse Wikipedia and WikiData: https://conze.pt/ https://conze.pt/ These sites are possible because the Wikimedia Foundation puts a lot of effort into making it easy for others to retrieve the data and reuse them.
blagie 4y ago
Having worked at non-profits a lot, more money doesn't make them better. It brings in exactly the wrong sort of people. I would never donate to the university I went to, because the endowment is too !@#$$ big. It's more than enough to sustain itself, and the remainder goes into wacky financial schemes which hurt the whole organization.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
The author of this has a decades long history of really disliking Wikipedia, so it seems unlikely that he's genuinely concerned about their funding levels. It's just another thing to attack them with. Why he's so consistently angry with Wikipedia is still a bit of a mystery to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski#Criticism_of_English_Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski#Criticism_of...
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  The irony of his outrage being documented on his Wikipedia page
- fatbird 4y ago
  Orlowski was acting very polite in this article (and presented some compelling points) compared to most of his work at The Register, but he’s always been a beacon of “yellow journalism” [0]. I’ve always thought it was less a crusade than a favourite target. [0] “journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.”
- blululu 4y ago
  This is kind of a cheap ad hominem attack. There is a lot of legitimate criticism of the WMF, and it has been a problem for a long time so I don’t see why the criticism should stop. The most vituperative critics of WMF are typically active Wikipedians. When a nonprofit is consistently acting against the desires of the community they are set up to support and when you as an unpaid volunteer feel like they are putting your work in jeopardy for their own benefit then you might be upset.
chrisweekly 4y ago
"oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas" Hyperbole / slander?
ouid 4y ago
The question is not whether WMF is good, the questions is whether more money will make them better or worse. I think it's clear that the wealthier WMF gets the worse it will be.
lanfeust6 4y ago
According to a recent SA post here - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397?publication_id=89120&post_id=77709610&isFreemail=true https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397?..., : "Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead?"
jamesfisher 4y ago
How much did we pay them to add max-width to the CSS?
et2o 4y ago
Truly an unnecessary dig at oncologists. If that happens it is not frequent. The more relevant association for clinical oncologists would be ASCO, which has its annual conference in Chicago this year.
DeWilde 4y ago
When I donate to Wikipedia I expect that money goes to keeping Wikipedia alive not for the Wikimedia organization to redistribute the funds as they fit. Why do I need a proxy for charity? If I want to give to some cause I will do so directly.
Chris2048 4y ago
So, are web-admins and WP contributors getting to "snort blow off hookers" then?
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
> The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go That’s just a damning argument against most charities. Like, you can say “the US is still a good place as far as human rights go”, yeah, ok, is it a good reason to stop talking about rights?
mint2 4y ago
It’s a free service with no advertising and people don’t like that it asked them for money a few weeks out of the year. If they listen to the radio NPR pledge drives must irritate them to the point of flames coming out their ears. Or if they read free newspapers like the guardian online they must loath it as much as Wikipedia, or more because it doesn’t just do ask a few weeks out of the year. No one is forced to use Wikipedia. If Being occasionally asked to chip in is too much to bear then don’t use it. I’ll confess I’m not totally enthused by the way they frame it, but I’ve used it for decades so I have donated one time. I mean it’s free and useful and I’d feel cheap if I use something for decades and never chip in
- mint2 4y ago
  Just to add one more point of context, nearly every commercial service does a ton of advocating and donating to causes that is not related to their core business. I have no choice but to provide some Cell phone and internet providers money to do those things because paying them is necessarily to function in society.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I think the point is that they're misleading about where the money is going. Most people assume it's to keep the website going, not for sponsoring political interests of the people running wikimedia. It's the same reason people get mad at Mozilla.

threatofrain 4y ago

I'd also add that while arguments that Wikipedia is bloated beyond their mission is worthy of discussion, saying that Wikipedia should only be funding their current site is too narrow. I think Wikipedia should be able to pursue projects such as their wiki textbooks idea (which was ultimately a failure, but still worth trying).

cwillu 4y ago
It's fine to pursue projects outside the core mandate, but don't do it with money you were given under the pretense that the core mandate was at risk.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  Agreed. I'd appreciate it if there were a way to restrict the usage of donations to the causes I care about within the foundation.
  - seneca 4y ago
    That's essentially pointless though. They may earmark your $10 for the core mission, but that just means another $10 that wasn't specified doesn't have to be used for the core, and gets used for their political initiatives. It's entirely semantics and doesn't change behavior at all unless an overwhelming majority earmark their donations the same way.
    - jgwil2 4y ago
      That "unless" clause at the end of your comment is precisely the point though. Just because you don't want to support most of the things that WMF are doing doesn't mean that others don't want to. If a majority of donors earmark their donations, then they will collectively have rebuked the foundation. If a majority of donors don't earmark their donations, then they will have collectively approved of the foundation's actions.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I'm entirely fine for funds to be spend on developing technology or even hosting of such resources. On other hand, as any of it is spend on political propaganda while they have huge reserves... No money from me. If you want to do lies and propaganda start a new charity.
Mindwipe 4y ago
I think that's fair enough, but there's also a reasonable criticism that they are a) not being straight about that ambition in their fundraising efforts and b) some of their projects are significantly more political than textbooks. And trust me, agreeing with Unherd about anything does not sit naturally to me.
Taywee 4y ago
I'm fine with pursuing other projects, it gets weird when they end up spending huge amounts of their money by giving grants to other organizations. I'd have no problem donating knowing they use it to fund projects, but knowing that they pretty much redonate much of it makes it feel pointless.

akolbe 4y ago

The issue is that they make it sound like they are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia running when they are actually wealthier than ever before. The whole premise of Wikipedia (or aspiration, at least, and yes, not always fulfilled ...) is that people should have information so they can't be manipulated. It kind of sucks to see the very organisation hosting the site do the opposite, don't you think?

ianai 4y ago
Marketing. They hired someone(s) with marketing experience.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Half-truths. They hired someone with half-truths (bordering on lies) experience.
  - cheschire 4y ago
    Corporate wants you to find the difference between these two.
    - ethagknight 4y ago
  - LightG 4y ago
    So. Marketing?
    - kordlessagain 4y ago
      It is possible to raise interest in something without lying about it. Whether you will fully understand it or not is up to you.
      - 4y ago

rany_ 4y ago

I don't get the outrage either. It's almost like people want Wikipedia to be barely scrapping by which isn't good. Having some money in your reserves is fine.

Silverback_VII 4y ago
If lifespan was the goal they would keep the extent of their organisational structure to the minimum. But this is obviously not the case with now more than 500 employees and some with big paychecks.
shadowgovt 4y ago
An organization that has the goodwill of the hacker community has to perpetually walk the line on the edge of pauper to maintain its virtue, lest it be seen as selling out and no longer worthy of the goodwill of the hacker community. It's a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Hackers love scrappy upstarts. Succeed too hard and you cease to be a scrappy upstart.
- cxr 4y ago
  If they were running ads that said, "Hey we sort of have the money we need to keep doing this for a while, but you can give us some more money if you want to help", then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Wikipedia's current ads are both misleading and more intrusive than ever. 550 employees is huge, especially for an organization that doesn't even pay those employees to create and edit the content on the site. It's so far away from "on the edge of pauper" that the point you're making—even if true for other, non-Wikimedia realms—is completely irrelevant here.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    If they were running ads like that, they wouldn't make any money. The psychology of fundraising is extremely well researched.
    - cxr 4y ago

forgotpwd16 4y ago

Wikisource is also nice functioning as a public library. For reference Wikiquote may also be useful.

Blikkentrekker 4y ago

I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues. When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw. I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.

spookie 4y ago
It's kind of sad of anglo-centric their pages are for some countries and historical events. I'm European, and even I can see some bias in there.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I could believe it. Next you see it, can you share a link here? It might be nice for discussion.
- Blikkentrekker 4y ago
  Indeed, that's a common issue too with historical events. But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally. From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.

scandox 4y ago

Their communications about donations are just awful. As long as I get these sappy, puppy-dog-eyes appeals I will never donate to them again.

rippercushions 4y ago
Yeah man, and how dare the Red Cross manipulate people with pictures of starving children in their famine relief ads? A graph showing the intersection between available calories trending down and required calories staying constant would land so much better on HN.
- scandox 4y ago
  Wikipedia isn't a human in desperate plight. That's kind of the point I'm making.
- emptyfile 4y ago
  You might be confused, we're talking about Wikipedia not the Red Cross. Wikipedia doesn't help starving children in any way.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  It's ironic that you use Red Cross as an example. An organization that has been proven again and again to be among the worst charity orgs you can donate to, repeatedly spends money on anything else but charity, and often does things that are both antithetical to their stated mission and unethical to boot.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    They're terrible to their employees too. And related to that, some of the practices raise eyebrows. (For example, letting children play in your freezers and around your blood and plasma donations.)

phpisthebest 4y ago

In some ways Charity Navigator is like the BBB, and people need to take those ratings with a grain of salt. What is not said here, but I think it was started this article there was a break-down on Twitter [2] recently where someone broke down the grants Wikimedia Foundation gives to other charities, A lot of Wikimedia has become advocacy for social issues not the spread of free information. Some of those Social issues many of the donors to Wikimedia may not agree with, and it being redistributed to some pretty controversial organizations. People donating to Wikimedia thinking they are advancing Wikipedia but in reality the bulk of the foundation spending is issuing grants to other charities. >>Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget I am reminded of this TED talk[1] from several years ago that talks about fundraising and charity [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou... [2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579778161889652736.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579778161889652736.html

navaati 4y ago
Hey, what is "the BBB" here ?
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Better Business Bureau
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  Better business bureau https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  BBB == Better Business Bureau a private organization in the US that "rates" business based on certain factors and customer complaints. It is often confused with having some kind of governmental authority, approval, or validity when in reality they just a non-profit trade organization. Very similar to charity navigator but rating for-profit businesses

disruptiveink 4y ago

Unfortunately, I think this is the most practical take to take here. WMF is "only" doing what pretty much all other large NGOs do, only they are in a highly visible position where: a) they operate on the Internet and b) their volunteer userbase is extremely obsessed about cataloguing and editing data, so it naturally follows they'd also be interested in the financial data around the organisation itself. This is not to say they shouldn't be held accountable, but I do wonder what's the percentages of large charities that are "much worse" in terms of "we exist mostly to pay pretty good salaries to people whose purpose is to fundraise so we can repeat the loop".

imgabe 4y ago

It’s deceptive. People give money thinking they are supporting one thing, and it gets used for something else.

foldr 4y ago

> the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas Is there a reference here that I'm missing?

rippercushions 4y ago
Apparently medical conferences are the biggest days of the year for the sex industry, although IIRC it was actually cardiologists who held the top spot.
- lupire 4y ago
  I don't think ACS is paying for the sex and drugs tho.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    They kind of are, because they sponsor research and conferences.

lupire 4y ago

Charity Navigator is very narrow. They check that paperwork is up to date and that fundraising expenses are low. They don't check for effectiveness or if "program spending" is doing anything. A low CN rating is bad, but a high CN rating isn't good.

dm319 4y ago

Be wary of the cogs grinding in the background that can lead to an article like this hitting popularity. There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia - disagreements with the way certain topics are represented, and the way wikipedia has become a huge resource for information and news is not good news for everyone. I spend way more money on entertainment being piped into my TV, or deliveries happening a day quicker than I do on a website I use several times a day.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
> There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia Check the wikipedia page for the author of the article, he has been against wikipedia for 20 years now. Got his job in the Daily Telegraph by insulting Google and wikipedia repeatedly about how woke they are.
- dm319 4y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I don't like to characterise 'left' and 'right' as being more or less factual, but we've experience a distorted massaging of facts in my country from papers like the Daily Telegraph. There are a bunch of people who like to say things to persuade people of their point of view, and are upset when the evidence doesn't agree with them. I can see something like wikipedia making these people upset.

allisdust 4y ago

They will do this to all (relatively) open systems because its easier to criticise when things are open. Wait till they get ad enabled version of Gikipedia (by Google) shoved down their throats in the future.

concordDance 4y ago

The outrage is over misleading donators. Wikipedia is very cheap and in no danger of running out of money, but the ads make people think otherwise. Additionally, only a small fraction of the money goes to wikipedia (including software dev for it).

a_c 4y ago

More useful questions to ask are how much good they do and how much harm they cause. I use wiki daily. I gain so much from it that the 10 quids a month seems like a bargain. The wiki outrage looks like a variation of bike shedding, the more people know, they more opinion they have

oever 4y ago

Here's a site with faceted search on WikiData: https://wikipedia.peerdb.org/ https://wikipedia.peerdb.org/ And here's an alternative way to browse Wikipedia and WikiData: https://conze.pt/ https://conze.pt/ These sites are possible because the Wikimedia Foundation puts a lot of effort into making it easy for others to retrieve the data and reuse them.

blagie 4y ago

Having worked at non-profits a lot, more money doesn't make them better. It brings in exactly the wrong sort of people. I would never donate to the university I went to, because the endowment is too !@#$$ big. It's more than enough to sustain itself, and the remainder goes into wacky financial schemes which hurt the whole organization.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

The author of this has a decades long history of really disliking Wikipedia, so it seems unlikely that he's genuinely concerned about their funding levels. It's just another thing to attack them with. Why he's so consistently angry with Wikipedia is still a bit of a mystery to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski#Criticism_of_English_Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski#Criticism_of...

was_a_dev 4y ago
The irony of his outrage being documented on his Wikipedia page
fatbird 4y ago
Orlowski was acting very polite in this article (and presented some compelling points) compared to most of his work at The Register, but he’s always been a beacon of “yellow journalism” [0]. I’ve always thought it was less a crusade than a favourite target. [0] “journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration.”
blululu 4y ago
This is kind of a cheap ad hominem attack. There is a lot of legitimate criticism of the WMF, and it has been a problem for a long time so I don’t see why the criticism should stop. The most vituperative critics of WMF are typically active Wikipedians. When a nonprofit is consistently acting against the desires of the community they are set up to support and when you as an unpaid volunteer feel like they are putting your work in jeopardy for their own benefit then you might be upset.

chrisweekly 4y ago

"oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas" Hyperbole / slander?

ouid 4y ago

The question is not whether WMF is good, the questions is whether more money will make them better or worse. I think it's clear that the wealthier WMF gets the worse it will be.

lanfeust6 4y ago

According to a recent SA post here - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397?publication_id=89120&post_id=77709610&isFreemail=true https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397?..., : "Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead?"

jamesfisher 4y ago

How much did we pay them to add max-width to the CSS?

et2o 4y ago

Truly an unnecessary dig at oncologists. If that happens it is not frequent. The more relevant association for clinical oncologists would be ASCO, which has its annual conference in Chicago this year.

DeWilde 4y ago

When I donate to Wikipedia I expect that money goes to keeping Wikipedia alive not for the Wikimedia organization to redistribute the funds as they fit. Why do I need a proxy for charity? If I want to give to some cause I will do so directly.

Chris2048 4y ago

So, are web-admins and WP contributors getting to "snort blow off hookers" then?

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

> The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go That’s just a damning argument against most charities. Like, you can say “the US is still a good place as far as human rights go”, yeah, ok, is it a good reason to stop talking about rights?

mint2 4y ago

It’s a free service with no advertising and people don’t like that it asked them for money a few weeks out of the year. If they listen to the radio NPR pledge drives must irritate them to the point of flames coming out their ears. Or if they read free newspapers like the guardian online they must loath it as much as Wikipedia, or more because it doesn’t just do ask a few weeks out of the year. No one is forced to use Wikipedia. If Being occasionally asked to chip in is too much to bear then don’t use it. I’ll confess I’m not totally enthused by the way they frame it, but I’ve used it for decades so I have donated one time. I mean it’s free and useful and I’d feel cheap if I use something for decades and never chip in

mint2 4y ago
Just to add one more point of context, nearly every commercial service does a ton of advocating and donating to causes that is not related to their core business. I have no choice but to provide some Cell phone and internet providers money to do those things because paying them is necessarily to function in society.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I think the point is that they're misleading about where the money is going. Most people assume it's to keep the website going, not for sponsoring political interests of the people running wikimedia. It's the same reason people get mad at Mozilla.