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Since WMF really cranked their fundraising popups into high gear ~6 weeks ago people have been posting articles here protesting about the foundation and on ever

Since WMF really cranked their fundraising popups into high gear ~6 weeks ago people have been posting articles here protesting about the foundation and on every thread there is someone who takes this standpoint. It's your money, but this attitude also strikes me as being very stubborn when confronted with the possibility that your charity is being wasted. The critique is not merely administrative bloat or waste. The critique is about the magnitude of these problems. There is always waste but WMF has more than comparable non-profits like Internet Archive and when you have board members kicking large sums of money around to their other non-profits then there are questions of a serious ethical breach. The critique is about the deceptive nature of the WMF ad campaign. The critique is about how the WMF does very little of the actual work in running Wikipedia but takes the lions share of the cash from the community of volunteers. The critique is pretty detailed and well articulated and it is not simply a technical objection that anything beyond servers is a waste. This representation is of the critique is pretty unfair given how much thought and effort people have put into spelling out their case against WMF. Again it's your money but I would strongly suggest doing your homework before defending the WMF.

admax88qqq 4y ago
> Since WMF really cranked their fundraising popups into high gear ~6 weeks ago WMF cranks their popups every year around this time. I haven't found them to be any more obtrusive this year than every other year. > The critique is about how the WMF does very little of the actual work in running Wikipedia That's fair, I just disagree with the critique's I've heard. Most commentators are taking what I consider to be a very narrow view of what it means to "run Wikipedia."
- kemayo 4y ago
  > Most commentators are taking what I consider to be a very narrow view of what it means to "run Wikipedia." The people who're most up in arms about it tend to focus on just the hosting costs, without considering the cost of paying even a skeleton devops crew, let alone paying for ongoing development (of which the WMF funds at least a pretty solid majority). Reasonable people can disagree about whether the WMF is spending its money correctly, of course, or whether it's overspending on otherwise-necessary categories. I dislike the implicit argument that we shouldn't pay people to work on open source projects, though.

admax88qqq 4y ago

> Since WMF really cranked their fundraising popups into high gear ~6 weeks ago WMF cranks their popups every year around this time. I haven't found them to be any more obtrusive this year than every other year. > The critique is about how the WMF does very little of the actual work in running Wikipedia That's fair, I just disagree with the critique's I've heard. Most commentators are taking what I consider to be a very narrow view of what it means to "run Wikipedia."

kemayo 4y ago
> Most commentators are taking what I consider to be a very narrow view of what it means to "run Wikipedia." The people who're most up in arms about it tend to focus on just the hosting costs, without considering the cost of paying even a skeleton devops crew, let alone paying for ongoing development (of which the WMF funds at least a pretty solid majority). Reasonable people can disagree about whether the WMF is spending its money correctly, of course, or whether it's overspending on otherwise-necessary categories. I dislike the implicit argument that we shouldn't pay people to work on open source projects, though.