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There's an option to donate on their website here: https://donate.wikipedia.org/ I'm starting monthly at $5 and possibly bumping up to $10 later on.
There was a big "information" campaign against donating to wikipedia say 6 months - 2 years ago, anyone know what happened/why?
It is about the wikimedia content creators not getting a proper share while the wikimedia foundation acts basicly like Peta, Green Peace and other "Charity"-Buisnesses by using drastic and guildinducing ads even in third world countries. The server activty is funded for aprox the next 100 years and the content is created for free. Most of the money is therefore actually going to around 700 employees in the adminstration, that work on new projects, lobbying or ideas like wikimedia enterprise. But this in turn is not what the ads imply.
Thanks.
Yeah I always thought it be a bit wild they needed money so frequently.
Apparently that particular round of slander was not as successful as this one.
The wikimedia foundation has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
Now they have ten more
Yes, they have a lot of server hardware, and some IP (ie, like logos and such).
Last time I heard about wikipedia's donation campaign (maybe ~~2~~ 4 years ago or so), it was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation's income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight. Did this change? If it didn't, I wouldn't particularly advise anyone to donate to them.
This perspective is very common in online communities about any sort of charity or non-profit.
"Don't donate money to whatever charity, they just waste the money on whatever thing"
Truthfully, it's just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.
Usually it's a gateway argument towards the right...
Well, that's definitely a super trustworthy thing, not at all relevant to the question of whether there is misinformation floating around that is targeted at Wikipedia.
I looked up their financial reports somewhere else in these comments when talking to someone else, and long story short, it's not true. Also, just to annoy anyone who's trying to spread this type of misinformation, I just set up a recurring $10/month donation to Wikipedia. I thought about including a note specifically requesting that it be used only for rather questionable things and funding very weird research, but there wasn't a space for it.
I wondered when writing my comment whether people would combine this with the vague statement in the opening post and conclude "aha, I will now take this as misinformation without checking", but then I looked at your other comments and saw you were actually talking about some India-related conspiracy I heard nothing about. Yet apparently you nevertheless think my comment is intentional misinfo?? That isn't very coherent, is it now?
I was talking about your comment. The idea that because they pay people salaries, including a few hundred K per year for the people at the top, they’re drowning in money and there’s no point in donating as long as they can pay their hosting bills and nothing else, is wrong. Furthermore I suspect that at least some of the bunch of people who suddenly started coming out of the woodwork to say a few variations on that exact same thing are part of some kind of deliberate misinformation, just because it’s kind of a weird conclusion for a whole bunch of people to all start talking about all at once. Doubly so because it isn’t true.
There’s a whole separate thing where one of the other commenters sent me an article saying Israel is attacking Syria with nuclear weaponry and I only don’t know about it because I consume hopelessly pro-Western propaganda sources like Wikipedia, and he sent me India.com as his backing for it. That’s nothing to do with you, though.
I in fact don't think that - to get the sort of people you want to be running your company, a good salary is necessary. I suspect a lot of the people that wikimedia employs are unnecessary because this is way too much money to be spending on salaries overall, but I have no way of checking it since they don't provide a breakdown of the salaries involved. I do think, however, that a company that's not drowning in money wouldn't be giving a bunch of generic research grants.
That's valid, though I note that in the worlds where I am a normal person and not an anti-wikipedia shill, the reason why I'm saying these things now and not at other times is because I saw this post, and you wrote this post because you saw other people talk about some India-related Wikipedia conspiracy theory, and one reason why you'd see these people crawl out of woodwork now is because wikipedia ramps up their donation campaign this time of year, prompting discussion about wikipedia.
The main issue I take with your opening post is its vagueness. You don't mention any details in it, so it effectively acts as a cue for people to discuss anything at all controversial about wikipedia. And the way you frame the discussion is that such narratives "are fundamentally false" because Wikipedia "is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others" - that's assuming the conclusion. It's no surprise that this results in your seeing a lot of claims about Wikipedia that you think are misinformation!
P.S. Rethinking my previous comment a bit, it's probably good overall that reading my comment made you donate to charity out of spite - even a mediocre charity like Wikimedia most likely has a net positive effect on the world. So I guess I should be happy about it. Consider also donating to one of these for better bang on your buck.
To clarify, you don't think not-for-profits should fund grants for things that (by vote of the board) aligns with their mission?
I'm trying to figure out your beef with them.
Yes they do. It’s named by the individual, their position, and the exact salary they earned in each year. Look up the form 990s.
Completely true. I decided that being vague wasn’t great but it was better than brigading against the person I had in mind when that wasn’t the point. I figured people who had seen the stuff would know what I was talking about and figure it out, which mostly turned out to be accurate.
The narrative that led me to make the post was that Wikipedia is doxxing its editors to any fascist government that asks. I talk more about it here:
https://ponder.cat/post/1100747/1312503
Not quite. Personally, I think WP is a force for truth in the world, but that wasn’t why I am justifying this, it’s just me talking.
Also, I had legit forgotten that the government that WP has been fighting in court not to dox its users to, is India. I connected it to a later person who sent me a source from India.com, after spending so much time talking to people who think Israel is nuking Syria or Wikimedia is skimming $300 million of “excess” money off every single year (see the link above where someone references that misinformation and then I address it). Part of the reason I am short-tempered about false claims that make Wikipedia sound bad is that I’ve been talking with people who are making 4 or 5 different big ones just in these comments alone, and they all turn out to be bullshit, but the sum total of all of them getting repeated, I think, can be significant.
Just to be clear, I’m not necessarily saying you are one of those misinformation people. But the claim that Wikimedia has so much money that donations are unnecessary, putting “salaries” they’re spending donations on in quotes, things like that, is definitely one of those misinformation claims.
I will investigate this claim independently.
That's not allowed on Wikipedia, you have to use verifiable information from reliable secondary sources instead.
Pathos is a simple marketing mode that is one of three used by every company and I don’t really see a problem with it. It’s intentionally contrary to the one for-profit companies use to gain revenue—fear.
Was this "weird research" basically research into things like "Why are white, wealthy males the ones most likely to be WP editors?"
really wish there was a way to pay with "Google play" because I found a way to get Google play money by lying to google lol
Well, Google takes 15 to 30% off the in-app purchases made through Google Play, so you would probably be giving back Google their own money anyways, plus it would fool many people who might think they're giving 10€ when actually they're only giving 8,50€ or 7€ to Wikipedia and the rest to Google.
Better than letting that survey money expire and staying 100% with Google.
Opinion rewards?
ding ding ding!
I use a Firefox extension that occasionally googles random jibberish so about once a day I'll get an opinion thing asking about the search results. Today I got one that was asking about 'china next gen aircraft'. I got like 80 cents from it which is 80 cents less I'll have to pay for my mullvad subscription!
I'm donating 10 a month. Least I can do. It's one of the last "good" places on the internet