> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before.
Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.
Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.
A large part of my job managing email systems is dealing with unsubscribe issues. If the unsubscribe button doesn't work, it's probably one of these issues:
- "Unsubscribed" is not persistent. If they have a logic that subscribes you to their emails (filling out a form), you will get resubscribed.
- You are unsubscribing a different email than you subscribed with (This is like, 75% of cases we deal with. It could be a forwarder, or a POP download, or a DL, etc).
- You are unsubscribing via the Google link and not the one in the email (not all systems are smart enough to recognize that).
- Something is broken or someone screwed up the logic. If you reach out and inform them, they may have someone seriously look into it (for our company, this would be me).
Or they are truly are scummy company and ignore unsubscribes or pull your address off of the same purchased list again. If they don't respond to you, pull the email headers and figure out who their host is and report them for abuse.
There's another: a business creates new lists and adds old customers to it. Some popular websites have multiple categories of marketing lists that can be unsubscribed from one by one.
It's definitely possible I'm misremembering. I've donated multiple times and it'd be reasonable for them to re-add me upon donation. But I'm pretty sure I've unsubscribed since my last donation in 2019.
It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff.
I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it?
Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that.
It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise.
And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!
For comparison, OpenStreetMap has roughly $800k in reserves and their expenses are a couple hundred thousands dollars per year.
I agree there are probably more justifiable expenses at Wikimedia than that, but that there is a middle ground between the high water mark they're targeting and what other non-profits are operating with. The Internet Archive's annual budget is ~$10 million.
Alexa rank for wikipedia is 13, OSM is 4550. It's not on the same planet. No, not on the same galaxy.
Wikipedia is not only read and written by the entire planet of humans, including the smallest 3rd world countries, it's also a bot feast, and busy powering APIs all over the world.
It got hundreds of links in some articles, which are automatically connected to all other articles in a gigantic graph of data. Oh, each article may also exist in a hundred languages, times each version, thanks to the history of all edits ever performed or suggested.
It's not just links though, now articles have plenty of metadata that generate connections, tables, ranks, toc, indexes, hierarchies, and listings as well.
All that is edited, rollbacked, debated, diffed and rendered almost on the fly for millions of articles, while respecting the permission system, and of course, the fun part, detecting the thousands of attempt at abuses by second.
In the blink of an eye. Because wikipedia is _fast_. It's one of the fastest site around.
Of course now it is also serving billions of images, sounds and videos. And the foundation is also maintaing:
Not to mention animating workshops all around the globes, helping NGO to provide offline wikipedias for poor countries and providing and maintaining the wiki as FOSS.
What's the legal expenses associated with Wiki? I could see some people wanting to sue for information linked to/about them. OSM probably doesn't have that same type of exposure.
Correct me if I’m wrong, I was under the impression that Section 230 means most lawsuits are summarily dismissed. Without it you have the first amendment which as you say means you probably eventually win but it’s a much bigger hassle.
>>> As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million.
>> It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff.
> It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise.
How much of that money and staff goes to actually running the site and maintaining the software? IIRC (and correct me if I'm wrong), a large fraction actually goes to other efforts.
Hosting and actual sysop expense is quite limited. I think 15ish years ago when Brion Vibber started to do it full time, he ran the whole Wikimedia operation pretty much on his own, with an annual spend of low six digits (and that included his salary, hardware, hosting, the whole shebang).
Spending $100m a year on dev work, conferences, grants, D&I staff etc is a luxury, the site could be kept running for less than 1% of the cost (and dozens of big companies would do it for free just for the PR benefits).
Maybe the only other function apart from hosting/sysop that is essential to WMF's operation are the lawyers that prevent it from being shutdown in entire countries by lawsuit-happy individuals.
"It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise." {citation needed}, as they say. Some parts of the Wikipedia "global" movement are so small, they didn't even realise for example, most of "Scots" Wikipedia was pure gibberish. The so called movement is a galaxy of tiny rocks revolving around one massive black hole, English Wikipedia, and even that project is so small as to feel quite parochial. As a result, there are backlogs everywhere, especially in important but difficult work, like copyright problems.
Same scale? We're talking about almost static pages, with some videos / audio. At heart wikipedia is very simple and did not changed much from 15 years ago.
Between content moderation, dev, security, infrastructure and such, then the support needed, I can easily see how Wikipedia can grow to 500 people. They're offering a stable product that has a presence in almost _every country in the world_, serving an insane volume of data. This is not a random startup, I'm actually amazed they pull it out with just 500 people
True, but I don't think you can keep the volunteers if you're in maintenance mode. The scale of volunteers needed requires some responsiveness, some support.
It's the best kept secret of Wikipedia that the volunteers generally despise the Foundation, and their long history of being unresponsive to their concerns and slow to act on their priorities while forcing the volunteers to adapt to what the Foundation finds things to spend all this money on, is a big reason for it.
> True, but I don't think you can keep the volunteers if you're in maintenance mode. The scale of volunteers needed requires some responsiveness, some support.
Some, but not much I'd wager. My point is it's not like they have a big line item for paying full-time 100 moderators or something, so "moderation" doesn't belong with the other items on that list.
There has been some concern about their inflating spending for a while. I'm honestly not well versed in if this is some potential disaster or problem like it can be made out to be, but it does seem like Wikimedia will generally find ways to spend money they get, whether it's a good use of the funds or not.
With an Alexa rank of 13 and very real competitors that are large tech companies (every search engine now tries to answer your question instead of presenting Wikipedia anymore) seems to be quite appropriate to me.
I wouldn't be so sure. Many flagship software projects launched the Foundation have been greeted with outright hostility by the volunteer community, precisley because they don't seem to be of much use, and in some case often hamper, the basic task of writing and maintaining English Wikipedia.
Thanks!
I checked on Charity Nav https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
It says they spend 9 cents to raise every dollar, almost exactly your numbers. Overall, they are rated superbly.
Yeah. I always wonder if the complainers do the same deep analysis and whining about how for-profit companies spend their income, or if they just plunk down $120 for Xbox Game Pass and leave happy. Is Wikipedia worth $20 a year to me? Yeah. So they can have it and spend it how they like. Just like Microsoft can with my Game Pass subscription.
You aren't paying for a product. It's crazy people don't even realise that Wikipedia isn't free because they're just nice people who prefer prefer run on donations not capitalism. It's free because they don't own a single word of their encyclopedia. That was how it was set up. They knew they couldn't charge for it, because they weren't paying anyone to write it, and aren't offering any guarantee that you can trust it. It can be copied and hosted freely by anyone. Wikipedia can do what it likes with your money, except, of course, pay someone to write and maintain a trustworthy encyclopedia. Not by choice, by law.
My thoughts too, "living paycheck to paycheck" doesn't sound like it ensures Wikimedia's survival. We'd all be shouting "Save Wikipedia!" if they have a bad year were expenses are up and donations are drastically down and they end up going offline due to not having enough reserve to help it.
Cancer? Wow. Personally, I expect they have a lot of good they can do in the world. And I believe they need resources to do it. What do you do that is so virtuous that you can call Wikimedia a cancer?
> What do you do that is so virtuous that you can call Wikimedia a cancer?
That's a very caustic statement, and it's not your place to judge, but if you're inviting me to soapbox:
Personally, I give my charitable dollars to Against Malaria Foundation to buy insecticidal bed nets. They've raised $342 million in total since their founding and distributed ~137 million nets. GiveWell estimates the program costs about $3000-5000 per life saved; or to put it another way, they've saved roughly 68,000 lives.
The WHO estimates that 409,000 people died of malaria in 2019 alone; there's a lot left to do here.
WMF has raised more than double that (~$800 million), over a similar time frame. Of that, Wikipedia's current hosting expenses and compensation for authors and editors totals something like $2.5 million annually.
If you think that's a good use of your charity dollars, great. We can agree to disagree. If you have any spare capacity, though, I would highly encourage giving to Against Malaria Foundation, or any of GiveWell's other top charities.
The $100m Endowment was their hedge against donations drying up, being a big enough cash hoard to allow them to stay online indefinitely if donations dropped to zero. It is now fully funded. I wonder how many people even realise this is the case, and will carry on donating under the false impression Wikipedia needs their help to survive.
> You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by.
Not at all. The only reason Wikimedia do not have enough money to run Wikipedia in perpetuity is because of Wikimedia's exponential spending growth in non-"Pedia" projects.
I would love for them to spin off a Wikipedia-only endowment that funds Wikipedia forever. It would (likely) not need to take any future donations. The level of money Wikimedia take in is far, far in excess of "just what [Wikipedia] need[s] to get by."
The problem I have with Wikimedia's fundraising is that it is disingenuous.
Wikimedia's gross mismanagement of the donation revenue threatens Wikipedia's long-term viability, which is something donors should probably care about.
> But open the email and you don’t see that text anywhere!
In the email industry, we call this a "pre-header". The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense. If you put any text above the body, it won't render in the email but will still be parsed by the inbox preview function (since it ignores any html it sees). This was mostly an exploit back in the day, but clearly email clients love it because they doubled down on supporting it.
Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed. Both of these features are built into every email client and service.
I thought this was going to be a complaint about their clearly hyperbolic messaging, but OP is really frustrated about some of the most basic features of email. I wonder if he has yet learned that the letters he gets from the White House are not actually sent from the White House.
> The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense.
No it's not. Emails can have both text and HTML versions, and the email client will decide which one to show in different contexts (e.g. if someone is on a device that can't show formatting and/or image content). Using the text part to include content that is never intended to be rendered as the full email is abuse of this feature.
> Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed.
What you're describing is from being jimmy@ and having reply-to as donate@
But this is not what the article describes. The emails do not have a separate reply-to address. They have a from line which is something like:
In theory the message representation can probably be video, audio (for display-less devices), HTML and plain text. The content of the message should be the same for each version (e.g. a CEO announcing a buyout, it'd be silly if a different version announces bankruptcy instead), but that's probably not a must since it can't be policed.
I just looked through my email, and you're right that many companies use preheaders (though usually with display: none). But I would classify most of them as summaries of the email content. The email from Jimmy Wales, in contrast, uses it for deceptive purposes: it shows a completely different text fragment that sounds like a brief personal email.
Also, just because the "email industry" routinely uses bad practices, that doesn't make it okay for wikimedia to do so.
The ideal use of preheader is to cut away some of the chaff in the head of the email - text about logging in, account info, etc. They are tough to consistently plan for as each email client chooses a different length of text to preview.
We've tested some pretty funky attention-grabbing ones, but nothing as blatantly exploitative as these. I really only see this kind of stuff coming in donation emails - I suspect recipients are more forgiving of it when it comes from a non-profit.
It's not a bad practice, it's the preferred method by their customers.
You can tell people's real preferences by the actions they take based on messaging. In aggregate a hard sell like this is people's preferred way of buying. The people who aren't going to buy unsubscribe increasing deliverability, the people who are going to buy are pushed off the fence into buying.
On every email a sale is made, either you close them on a reason they can donate, or they close you on a reason they can't. Make no mistake, a sale is made.
Guy says he'd donate if he didn't get emails like this, 5 years of not donating, and not donating before their email campaign, proved that was a lie.
it’s market preference. No sane company caters their marketing to people who aren’t buying.
For instance Nike customers like social justice marketing, many of their non-customers find the tactics abhorrent.
Customers of Wikipedia like information being at risk non-customers find it abhorrent.
Does the email not contain an unsubscribe link? Or any other illegal practice? Are they harvesting emails off the internet or did the OP enter their email and continue to remain subscribed to content they dislike?
The email doesn't have a different From and Reply To, it has an email address where the sender's name should be. The author's complaint is that the sender claims to be one email, when it's actually from another.
Fair point! Although the name field isn't particularly sacred in its own way (your inbox may already be littered with things like "No Reply" or "Taco @ Trello").
I suspect this really comes down to spam filters. Most emails would generally avoid a shell game like this for fear of spam filters - but I imagine emails from Wikimedia have enough authority that they can get away with it more.
It's also just not well done. It would be trivial for them to send the email from jimmy@wikipedia.org. I'm actually glad they use a consistent email address for this stuff though as it makes it easier to file.
A very small fraction of the money is going to keep the servers running. The editors of Wikipedia are unpaid.
The software projects ran by Wikimedia have not been very impressive. What happened to proper discussion pages, for example? That has been going on for more than a decade.
The "make a book" function has been literally broken (see: non-functional, with a "sorry about that" message) for years now. It used to be my favorite part of Wikipedia and now you can't do shit with it.
The Wikipedia movement is in survival mode, and has for a while now being summarily dumping those things that require lots of volunteer effort to maintain, for very little return in terms of page views. Naturally, none of that has anything to do with the finances, because the job of maintaining Wikipedia content falls to the unpaid.
It’s incredible how many people say they’d love to support an ad-free social network, frequently use Wikipedia, and don’t donate to Wikipedia.
This is a problem for so many charities. People passionately agree with the mission, want to donate, can afford to donate… and yet don’t donate. And then complain when the charity is too aggressive in requesting donations.
I don't donate to Wikimedia anymore because they get plenty of donations and have demonstrated that they don't use the funds wisely. Wikipedia doesn't need more donors. Give your limited charity dollars to a more deserving organization.
Donations are the worst idea ever. They are hard to solicit and then when you do get one people have incredibly unreasonable expectations.
How many people complain about non-profit execs making $200k but will happily buy nike's made by Chinese slave prison labor with out a thought as to how much the exec makes, or what the labor conditions are.
Wikimedia is guilty of allowing people to volunteer their time. If you don't volunteer, nothing bad happens. Compare with try not volunteering your time to make Nike's in the Chinese prison system.
Wikipedia is great but I similarly don't trust their cries for help anymore.
I won't donate till they communicate more honestly or Wikipedia - not wikimedia - needs help. It feels a lot like my local food bank begging for food but it turns out it's only their side venture composting food that's in need.
I share similar sentiments as the article's author: I donated once ~4 years ago, and have been *completely* turned off donating again (despite wanting to, and knowing I should for such a fantastic resource) by such agressive emails, because I feel it's rewarding such behaviour.
Couldn't agree more. As a longtime donor, I feel uncomfortable not donating, but even more uncomfortable at closing a positive feedback loop on bad behavior.
New management is probably the only answer, as Wales clearly feels this is the best way to run this particular railroad. But what will we give up when that finally happens?
The whole situation sucks. It would be so much better if they just knocked off the shady shit.
Lately I've been redirecting donations that would have gone to Wikipedia to the Internet Archive, as I feel their work is at least equally important. But IA's reckless legal behavior is likely to result in my donations going straight to their defense counsel and/or plaintiffs, which is also not something I want to be part of.
Donate once as a one-off and they will Never. Leave. You. Alone. You'll continue getting letters and emails and sometimes even calls for years and years after your last donation.
I've had the same thing with race fundraising charities. I donated to someone else's Best Buddies bike ride fundraising trip and I haven't been able to get off "Maria Shriver's Best Buddies" email spam list for years. They create new email addresses to spam me constantly. It's turned me off of ever donating anything to them again!
Donor-Advised Funds are nice in part because they make it easy to give charities money anonymously. They can't spam you if they don't know who you are.
Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.
This is cotrect. Wikipedia informs poorly on subjects that have political or cultural significance, favoring heavily certain ideologies over neutral presentation of facts. It has been hijacked by activists that make it impossible to introduce any data that is outside of what is fashionable today. Wikipedia still rides its old reputation, but does not deserve it any more.
I either found a way to unsubscribe from these, or I found a way to filter them. I now make a monthly donation, and I see the receipts from those transactions, and that's it. Just the way I like it.
Contrast with the Red Cross, whose annoyance-to-value ratio is far worse, IMHO, to the point that I refuse to donate. Yes they're providing literal life blood to people who may die without it, but have you SEEN their firehose of email?
I don't understand why this continues. It must work better than the alternatives, which is awful.
Wikipedia on non-controversal scientific topics is great.
The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed, instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information.
It continues with the political topics and oh boy, just get to investigating and reading if you care for a look into the deep, dark depths.
The short heads up is, wikipedia is absolutely riddled with one-sided, manipulative information on political topics. Often written by ghost writers, posting stuff 14 hours a day for years without a single day off.
The finances and agressive begging for donations are also highly controversial. I have read multiple investigations accusing them of absolutely not needing any money, and staging a charade while getting huge sums by big interest groups, though I cannot estimate if this is true, or to which degree.
> The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed...
Yeah, table stakes for editing Wikipedia on anything even remotely controversial is an obsessive personality, limitless time, and patience for an huge amount of toxicity.
> ...instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information.
IMHO, it's quite sensible to not allow people to edit pages about themselves, because people tend to have a strong-well understood biases on that topic.
> IMHO, it's quite sensible to not allow people to edit pages about themselves, because people tend to have a strong-well understood biases on that topic.
Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia? There is no way to rectify that information as far as I heard, probably only the legal way, suing for libel, with uncertain outcome facing a multimillion dollar company and the structure of semi-anonymous unpaid writers.
> Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia?
I think Wikipedia's standards are fairly reasonable there: their main criteria is actually traceability to a source, not actual truth. If "truth" was the main criteria, they'd actually destroy themselves because there'd be no practical way to resolve disputes about what that is. That's a limitation of their institutional structure that they know they have.
So if there's a blatant falsehood, you have to point to a valid source with the correct information (or that shows the falsehood to be false). I suppose it might be possible to get something struck if you made a convincing behind-the-scenes case that it is in fact false (though I don't think you could get something included that way).
The problem is their sources on living persons is usually clickbait and tabloids. If you feel like you've been treated unfairly, then there's no authority you can appeal to at Wikipedia. Even if you know an admin, they use a consensus process where if one of these anonymous accounts doesn't like you then they do nothing, and doing nothing for them means all the cruel, biased, misleading, false, and harassing content written by guys with names like Dingolover6969 remains as your #1 google search result. So what can you do other than sue for libel? Problem is you might as well be suing Santa Claus, since not many people understand what Wikipedia does, and these constant donation drives buy them an army of lawyers who'll just point the finger at the tabloids. There's no accountability for them either. The only chance you have of making a successful case is if you can argue you're not a public figure, but it's hard to make that argument if you're an open source developer. Even if you're a billionaire, it might take you ten years and millions of dollars to hold just one online tabloid accountable, only to see it sold off at bankruptcy to another head of the hydra that keeps its old harassing content on the web as read-only static content so that Wikipedia can continue to cite it.
> The problem is their sources on living persons is usually clickbait and tabloids.
I'm pretty sure those aren't considered good sources on Wikipedia (for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NYPOST), and you'd probably have a decent argument for getting something removed because it was sourced to something like that. IIRC, their standards are even pickier for biographies of living people than for regular articles.
> Even if you know an admin, they use a consensus process where if one of these anonymous accounts doesn't like you then they do nothing, and doing nothing for them means all the cruel, biased, misleading, false, and harassing content written by guys with names like Dingolover6969 remains as your #1 google search result.
Do you have an actual example of that?
The actual issue with Wikipedia here is that it has all kinds of weird inscrutable bureaucratic processes that are confusing to outsiders (and often require herculean patience/obsessiveness to navigate to a desired result even when you know them). As far as I can tell, you have no idea how it works and are imagining a bunch of stuff (maybe to explain a bad experience?).
While I think it's a modern wonder of the world, I am skeptical of health topics on Wikiepdia - I read a lot about the positive benefits of Ashwaghanda in scientific journals, seriously I could go and find 20 studies right now. However, Wikipedia says "there is insufficient evidence that it is safe or effective for treating any disease". That's just wrong. I'm guessing if I made a change, it would be reverted by one of those super editors who "own" that page.
That would be a good example of a controversial scientific topic. If there is still money on the line with competing ideas, different persons or groups of interest will try to manipulate the information to their favor. What is sacrificed in the process is the strive for factual information and the scientific process.
That's my biggest problem with it. They raise all this money, and yes, a bunch of it goes to infrastructure. But the thing is, they always seem to find ways to spend whatever money they have, and none of it ever seems to make its way to their most critical and valuable staff: editors, admins, etc.
To be fair, this is one of the few non-profits that benefits most people and that is actually used day-to-day by the majority of people with an internet connection.
But at least they're (mostly) honest? They take up some time, but they're clear about what's happening. The only "deceptive" practice they have is the two-for-one matching grants, which I'm dubious about whether they exist or not.
That sort of matching is real, but usually just a psychological trick to encourage people to donate more.
A foundation or rich person says "hey NPR we wanna give you $10 million" and NPR says "what if instead you match every donation we get dollar for dollar up to $10 million?". That way, they can encourage smaller donors while still getting the original $10 million.
The deceptive part is when they tell you they need your money today "to defend Wikipedia's independence" when in actual reality they need money today so they can increase their annual budget by $42 million (that's the increase from 2020/21 to 2021/22).
The donation matches are typically not grants, but rather _other donors_ playing those games (surely in collaboration with NPR's development dept). They definitely exist.
I agree with this. I'm on "the left", but I don't need a media outlet confirming my biases or stroking my ego. I was originally drawn to NPR precisely because it seemed like a relatively neutral news source (still discernibly left-of-center, but not aggressively so) and because it frequently exposed me to other perspectives; however, it seems to have been dragged into the swamp of "activist journalism" just like everyone else.
NPR and PBS both are among the most accurate/neutral according to a media study. [1] I honestly worry that we're having a political disparity in truth that's pushing a choice between politically neutral and factually accurate.
I mean... you can put anything you want on the internet. I looked up their "methodology" and it's sort of just whatever they think a source/article is. Not really rigorous.
And anyways, they put the WashPo right of NYT? That hasn't been true since ol Jeff B took over.
Since some are complaining about the Ad Fontes methodology, here it is:
"Ad Fontes administers an internal political bias test to analysts, asking them to rank their left-to-right position on about 20 policy positions. That information allows the company to attempt to create ideological balance by including one centrist, one left-leaning and one right-leaning analyst on each review panel. The panels review at least three articles for each source, but they may review as many as 30 for particularly prominent outlets, like The Washington Post, Otero said. More on their methodology, including how they choose which articles to review to create a bias rating, can be found here on the Ad Fontes website."
It's not hard to be "most accurate/neutral" when comparing against every batshit blog and podcast, which is what your source does. In fact, NPR and PBS are clustered among the mainstream news sources, which only supports my "NPR is in the swamp with everyone else" claim. That said, I don't put much stock in JPGs that look like something a high schooler put together with PowerPoint 20 years ago.
The loss of Car Talk and the changes to A Prairie Home Companion all but eliminated my weekend listening. Wait, Wait... is OK but I usually don't tune in without the other stuff to draw me. The other new comedy show (with Coulton and Eisenberg[?], I forget the name of it) isn't very good. Maybe they'll find their footing, but it's been years at this point, and it's still not good. On the Media is really good, but plays at a time when I'm almost never driving, so I rarely catch it.
Their weekday news shows are too corporate-friendly and consist mostly of the same horse-race and monday-morning-quarterbacking campaign strategy garbage that everything else does, when the US is in national political campaign mode, which is like 60+% of the time now. The best US and international coverage on the whole damn station is when they just re-broadcast the BBC.
[EDIT] Oh and there's the huge amount of time they spend either advertising or promoting other NPR shows or podcasts. God damn, it's so much. It's at least as much time as "commercial" radio devotes to that kind of thing. Donate? You fucking play corporate ads! All the time!
Hasn't had a new episode in almost ten years, sadly, and likely will not have a revival as Tom passed away. Apparently radio distribution was slated to stop at the beginning of last month
The most successful nonprofit project in the history of the world and 90% of the comments here are about what they're doing wrong. Get a grip. Your idea about what they could be doing better is ... useless.
That said, some of those email tactics are a little unsavory. But you can bet they test the hell out of them and they do what makes the most money.
That's exactly how the emails come across, optimized to squeeze out the absolute maximum of donations without any regard to non-profit or, say, ideals like integrity.
None of these things are egregious violations of any ethical standard. Wikipedia is not a source of excessive spam, and their beg banners on the website, while mildly annoying (especially if you already donated), aren't so frequent that they bother me. The site has no ads and provides tremendous value to the world. Nitpicking some minor marketing annoyances (which are probably handled by hired guns) comes off as petty.
One could make an argument that Wikipedia already has enough money that they could beg less and possibly survive indefinitely by just managing their current endowment well. One could make an argument that Google and others benefit so much from Wikipedia's high-quality search results that Google should help support them (although I wouldn't want Wikipedia to rely on corporate money). There are plenty of reasons why Wikipedia might not need to beg as often or at all.
Once I had a conversation with somebody that works for Wikipedia email campaigns and she told me she hates this tactics but unfortunately are very effective to raise money. Apparently they test campaigns and they know the style to make people open their wallets.
I used to hate this emails as well but now I get it's the small tradeoff for having an ad-free and free project.
I think Wikipedia is more valuable than Netflix. Thus ideally I should be giving more money to Wikipedia than Netflix so they continue developing and growing. For some reason if I'm not encouraged/pushed I don't give money. And looks like many people/companies tend to give money to companies and products that lock them in, instead of giving money to support free/libre projects that would give them more freedom and without lock in.
I kind of agree with the article, but on the other hand, I don't think I would I have ever donated without their aggressive campaign... Or I maybe would have once and then forgot about it. When I receive their email I'm like, "oh yeah! I should donate, totally forgot in a long time."
I have always found Wikipedias begging for money weird.
Even if they chose to be driven by donations, I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money.
Is it really that bad for non-profits on the internet?
> I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money.
How many of them are good for users, though? Sure, you can slap some Google AdWords on there, but there's a reputational and privacy cost. NPR-style sponsorships? Maybe, but I cringe when NPR does a story on Facebook that's bookended by "Facebook is a sponsor of NPR" a little.
I'm a fan of the current model, in that it makes a conflict of interest quite unlikely.
It makes conflicts of interest a little less likely, but not at all unlikely.
There are myriads of unsolved, ongoing conflicts of interest on any topic other than non-controversial scientific topics with broad consensus.
I can't really any good ways for them to raise money, outside of becoming a subscription service or selling user data. What ways did you imagine? Because the more I think about it, the harder this problem appears to be...
I would guess that's the crux of their efforts now. That is, like it or not, it works. As long as it's effective there's no incentive for them to change.
They should do a "non free wikipedia week": once year for 1 week place a paywall that allows you to pay/donate whatever amount via PayPal, card, crypto or whatever other payment options, so that you can read the articles during that week.
That way everyone will learn its value to them and they could collect some $$$
Wikipedia wouldn't do that for two reasons. One, it would force a lot of people to spend a few seconds thinking about what Wikipedia is and is not. And two, it might prompt Google or Amazon or whoever to do what they have always been legally allowed to do, and copy the entire Wikipedia database and host it themselves.
What are their expenses btw? Are their hosting costs so high? Do they have paid staff beyond some fairly trivial admin? Do they curate articles for cash?
Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to:
Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity.
The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good use.
Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The tech stack runs on its own bare metal (on the scale of a couple thousand servers) and its own CDN (to better protect against censorship and surveillance for the global audience, among many reasons), the total network currently has some physical presence in 7 different datacenter locations around the world, and there's all the redundant transport, transit, and peering network requirements that come with that. The live codebase gets new releases to production multiple times a week. There are many other side-services that run alongside the core MediaWiki codebase. There's constant network attacks on our infrastructure. There's all the infrastructure layer metrics and monitoring stuff. I could go on and on...
On top of all that (which implies reasonably robust techie staffing): there's a Legal department that has to defend against threats to the org from businesses and governments around the world and in general does a ton of amazing work in many different directions (my favorite example was our past lawsuit against the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v._NSA). There's all the usual corporate supporting functions, including finance, travel, talent and culture, etc. Can't fail to mention the Fundraising team itself, of course! :)
The foundation has a big job keeping the soft and hard infrastructure of the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia going. The budget really isn't that unreasonable, and the endowment also isn't anywhere near big enough to replace our annual donation budget and ensure the org remains financially stable in the long run, yet. Usually when one of us goes to a conference and talks about our infrastructure, others are shocked to learn just how small our tech teams are for the jobs they're doing.
Except the organization already has liquid assets nearing twice its annual expenses, on top of the endowment, and >20% of the revenue is simply redirected to other organizations. It's also a little ridiculous to suggest that the infrastructure is substantial, given that the costs are only <2% @ $2.5 million.
I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which the rest of us could learn from, but it's almost irrelevant in regards to the bottom line of the organization.
I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of a robust and functioning organization, the total headcount still seems reasonable.
Yes, the engineering "efforts" are exciting and interesting to learn from. They're also a continuous process that requires a heavy human investment in the form of staff (and staff retention!), and those salaries and benefits are relevant to the bottom line.
On the parts about annual expenses: keep in mind this is a long-term movement and foundation with long-term aims. Being sufficiently financially stable to run another year or two isn't really a win. It still leaves a rather important institution and its projects subject to lots of short-to-medium term existential risk.
You seem to be suggesting that removing the aggressive fundraising from the equation automatically means the revenue goes to $0, and the organization runs out of reserves in one or two years -- except that's not how anything works, and you know it.
Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for using aggressive tactics. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find another organization whose reserves are double both revenue and expenses. So it's rather silly to assert that Wikimedia is in a precarious position.
If the organization is really concerned about not having enough cashflow or reserves, then maybe they should stop giving away 20% of their revenue. Charitable contributions are great, but that's not the proposition being made in the fundraising tactics, which all aim to convince us that Wikipedia is going to die any minute unless every user immediately donates. These are the same tactics that PACs use, and are based on classic social engineering methods with the sole intent of manipulating people into feeling concerned or even panicked. An organization like Wikimedia should not be engaging in these tactics, especially when they provably don't need to.
Sorry, I'm not suggesting anything about the fundraising methods or tactics. I'm just talking about the general idea, floated often in comments on threads like this one, that our budget and/or reserves and/or endowment are unjustifiably large already, as typified by comments of the nature "How much does it take to run a few servers?" and similar.
I get that the article and other comments are about the fundraising, but my comments are not trying to address anything particular about fundraising methods/tactics.
Thanks for the clarification, but you can't really remove the fundraising from a conversation about whether the financials are justified, because that is literally one half of the topic. This is especially true when it comes to criticisms of the financials that you're side-stepping, such as >20% of the revenue not even going to Wikimedia.
To boil it down, somebody asked "are their expenses really that high" and you responded with "yes" even though the evidence says otherwise. You can name all of the individual expenses you want, but their existence does not automatically equate to justification.
OP here. Thank you for work on Wikipedia (seriously!). I can really appreciate that the Foundation has expenses and I think donations is really the best way to get the funds. My only qualm is with the aggressiveness and deception with which those donations are solicited.
Hosting is a trivial cost for them. Bandwidth costs to serve text are super cheap these days, and they can do quite a bit of caching. You might be surprised what the money is actually spent on, but they're reasonably transparent about it
Their complete audited accounts for 2019-20, page 3 [0]
Total expenses: $129 million, of which
- Salaries (~500 staff): $55 million
- Awards and Grants (I suppose this is them donating to other causes?): $23 million
- Hosting: $2.5 million
- Professional Services (mostly lawyers?): $11 million
- Donation processing: $4 million (3% seems reasonable here)
Top expenses are: Salaries and wages ($56M), awards and grants[1] ($23M), professional services ($12M), other operating expenses ($10M), donation processing expenses ($5M), and internet hosting ($2M)[2].
[1] Still trying to figure out what goes into that.
[2] From my own experience and their size and availability, I would expect that to be at least an order of magnitude larger. I'm impressed.
What to do with a problem like Wikipedia. It’s ultimately a fantastic source of information like nothing else on the internet. That has to be worth something right?
Problem is that people probably don’t bother to donate as much as they could or should. I know I haven’t donated.
Is there another way it could be monetised without ads?
The problem, as other posts allude to, is it has too much money and not enough interesting, useful projects to do with it. It's a great example of how a fantastic resource very much can be - and is - funded purely through donations of time and money. They just try to tell you it isn't doing well.
I get a ton of value out of Wikipedia and I donate annually.
Fun fact: If you unsubscribe from the donation email list, you are re-subscribed the next time you donate. It's scummy and infuriating and I hate to think that this kind of crap is what my money is actually going towards.
I've donated thousands to Wikipedia over the years, but I've noticed an increasing amount of bias in the website that made me hit the pause button. At first I saw it in a couple random examples, where I just thought "that's weird" and dismissed it as a random issue. But then I started to look for bias and noticed it much more frequently. And I don't mean just on the left-right American political spectrum, but also in other more complex ways, for example favoring Western scholarship over other scholarship. When I look at the Talk pages, I see regular bad faith application of policies that were written with better intentions.
I'm not the only one to note this issue in recent years. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote a blog post titled "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" last year (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). Although Wikipedia is decentralized, it is an institution. And I feel like we need more than one.
Wikimedia spends like 95% of their money on stuff that isn’t Wikipedia. They’re a classic bloated NGO, where they have some initial mission they can do efficiently but they keep asking for money way down the diminishing returns curve.
That's part of the problem - they have way more money than needed to run the infrastructure, but when they beg for more, they make it sound like they might not have enough to keep the lights on.
They're very firmly on my "do not give money to" list, together with Mozilla (donations go to everything EXCEPT Firefox development, which isn't made particularly clear when you donate, and much of their other stuff isn't worth supporting IMO).
If only it were once a year. Every quarter I get a whole thread spread out over a couple weeks. "Did you see our last email?" "There's still time to save Wikipedia!"
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I didn't know Gates ran a non profit that provided you with food/content/whatever on a daily basis. Not sure in what other scenario this comparison makes sense.
it is well-known in USA non-profits that some fundraising in some orgs takes over, and that those who can "make rain" get long-term status. Counter-point? lots of countries do not have "non-profit" at all.
It's common to all donation based non-profits groups and whether you like it or not, it works. Spamming donation request letters to the previous donors yields better outcome than not to do it.
I’ve said many times if they had just bought Bitcoin with their pledges long ago they would never have had to annoy us with this. I remember saying this when Bitcoin was $1800 in 2017. Even a less risky investment like the SP500 should surely have been enough. It has 4x’d in ten years. It doesn’t take $100 million and 500 employees to run some light Wikipedia pages. All the content is provided by users!
Yeah, your bitcoin remark is totally dumb, but the idea of funding wikipedia by perpetual endowment consisting of some blend of stock and bond index funds is a good one. And indeed, they could have already created an endowment to fund wikipedia in perpetuity, if they didn't ramp up their spending to match their revenue every year.
Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.
Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.
(And no, the company is not Wikimedia) :P