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.
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.
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.
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:
> 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.
> 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"
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.
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.
> > 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.
> 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.
> 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.
...I would rather that the translation efforts be done by the community & translation services than by the foundation itself. Pushing the effort of translation onto the foundation gives them authority over the translated material, & consequently authority on the original material itself.
In principle, I would like the scope of work for any foundation to be as minimal as possible, & to be directly related to the direct operations & maintenance of the service being provided. Any additional efforts beyond that invites scope creep & will inevitably bloat any organization with non-related work.
> 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).
> 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/Fex9854WIAIHSun?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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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?