akolbe

43 ms·

511.
by akolbe 4y ago
Especially given that they're getting people in India to earnestly beseech their compatriots to give and save Wikipedia: https://twitter.com/aakash_dwivedi/status/153562117215852953... https://twit
512.
by akolbe 4y ago
For some historical perspective, this is what the Wikimedia Foundation VP of Engineering and Product Development said about Wikipedia's money needs in 2013, less than 10 years ago: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail&
513.
by akolbe 4y ago
That makes sense. :)
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by akolbe 4y ago
They do give refunds. See "What is your refund policy?" on this page: https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ They say: If for any reason you wish to have your donation refunded, please contact us via email at
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by akolbe 4y ago
The sad thing is that it seems to be people who are actually poor who are most affected by this kind of sales pitch. As is mentioned on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#S... ! (you have
516.
by akolbe 4y ago
To sum up, in its 2020/2021 financial year (running from July 2020 to June 2021, Wikimedia took about US$ 90 million more than it spent. Its net assets increased by $51 million: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia&#x
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by akolbe 4y ago
Wikipedia is great. But it has become a cash cow and people are being used and tricked into donating. People reading the fundraising banners (currently shown in India and Latin America) often think that Wikipedia must be struggling to keep
518.
This is how much money Wikipedia really has...(youtube.com)
23 points by akolbe 4y ago|17 comments
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Fact-Checking Raju Narisetti in the Indian Express(lists.wikimedia.org)
3 points by akolbe 4y ago|0 comments
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by akolbe 4y ago
:)
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Those Thieving Image Farms(en.wikipedia.org)
19 points by akolbe 4y ago|2 comments
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by akolbe 4y ago
Some staff are also working on a for-profit project, assisting Big Tech companies with access to wiki data: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise This is designed to bring in additional revenue in the ye
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by akolbe 4y ago
As this page, based on Form 990 disclosures, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie... shows, the Wikimedia CEO's salary e.g. roughly doubled from 2010 to 2020, a period when US inflation was
524.
by akolbe 4y ago
The volume of Wikipedia edits has been fairly constant since 2007: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contrib... And, just to repeat the point, Wikipedia edits are not made by Wikimedia Foundatio
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Three stories of Ukrainian Wikimedians during the war(en.wikipedia.org)
4 points by akolbe 4y ago|0 comments
526.
by akolbe 4y ago
I guess I should note here as well that the Wikimedia Foundation does not write or curate any of the content of Wikipedia. All of this is done by unpaid volunteers. When Wikipedia first became a top-ten website in 2007, the Wikimedia Founda
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by akolbe 4y ago
Well, the salaries have gone up quite a lot. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie... And Wikipedia fundraising messages, like those used currently in India and Latin America, regularly imply tha
528.
by akolbe 4y ago
See also the News and Notes section in the Signpost, Wikipedia's community newspaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... This dicusses the Wikimedia Foundation's Form 990 dis
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The Wikimedia Endowment – a lack of transparency(en.wikipedia.org)
4 points by akolbe 4y ago|9 comments
530.
‘Crypto Ruined My Life’: The Mental Health Crisis Hitting Bitcoin Investors(vice.com)
10 points by akolbe 5y ago|2 comments
531.
by akolbe 5y ago
Wikipedia is worth being stewarded by people who do NOT use it to mislead hundreds of millions of people. Think about it.
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by akolbe 5y ago
People complained then, in a light-hearted way. Lots of funny memes. But in those days, the banners were tiny, and other than the pupils of the death stare, they didn't follow you around and keep count of how often you'd seen them
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by akolbe 5y ago
I don't know what the Internet Archive's financials are like, but donating to the Internet Archive arguably aids Wikipedia as well. It prevents link rot. This is becoming ever more important over time.
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by akolbe 5y ago
I thought the Grayzone ban was interesting too. There is always the option of leaving it up to editors, and/or explicitly attributing any opinions or fact claims so the reader can see where they come from. However, I wonder how much th
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by akolbe 5y ago
Thanks. That's a very interesting way of looking at it actually that hadn't occurred to me: "The (Ad-)Free Encyclopedia (If You Pay For It)". Still, I can understand people who have just been suckered into donating being
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by akolbe 5y ago
I agree that there is a complete culture mismatch. People come in with a mindset shaped by Silicon Valley and the nonprofit sector. It all seems to be about "organisational growth" and making money, money, money. Lots of committee
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by akolbe 5y ago
This completely spurious notion, that the Wikimedia Foundation "often struggles to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running", was nicely parroted by Trevor Noah here in this interview with then-Wikimedia CEO Katherine Ma
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by akolbe 5y ago
I think users have only tolerated it to date because they genuinely thought the Wikimedia Foundation was struggling to keep Wikipedia ("The Free Encyclopedia") up and running ... rather than trying to collect hundreds of million
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by akolbe 5y ago
Apparently, fundraising banners will be back on Monday, asking for money for the Endowment. The Endowment, started in 2016, was originally envisaged to raise $100 million by 2026. It reached its target this June, five years early: https:&#
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by akolbe 5y ago
The section title for the announcement is: 20 Update on Annual Fund Campaign Direct link: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Update_on_A... See sections preceding the announcement for some of the complain

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