I should have realized that whenever Trump gets hyper-focused on some niche issue that isn’t on the tiny list of stuff his brain comes up with by default, someone smarter than him told him about it and hyped him up about what he should do.

When I imagine Trump in six months ordering the US military to invade Greenland and take it over, a small hopeful thought occurs to me that maybe this will be the wake up call that the aware-of-reality people really needed. That it isn’t going to be okay if we just keep doing the system because it’s always taken care of us so far.

Maybe it will turn out to be a good thing, in the long run. Maybe not.

Somehow I don’t think taking to the streets and escalating the political violence between the people with all the money and power, and the rest of us, is going to lead us to the bright future I would like to imagine.

There’s a reason the American Revolution wasn’t organized along the lines of assassinating Tory leaders at random, and hoping that would do it. Freedom of association, protest, organization, and the press are guaranteed for a reason, and freedom to take shots at the leaders you don’t like is not, also for a reason.

It bothers me quite a lot that all across the world, the masses are showing unified discontent with liberal governments and friendly acceptance to fascism or fascism-light.

Canada, France, US, UK. All places that are notable opponents of the people who are good with seizing the reins of Western social media and bending it to the opinions that they’d prefer that people hold about their liberal governments.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311370/wikimedia-foundation-annual-funding/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311451/wikimedia-foundation-annual-expenses/

They raised more money, so they spent more money. That’s how it’s supposed to work when you’re a nonprofit. At no point did they spend more than they made. They used it to employ some people and fund some research. So in your mind, in order to avoid “limitless expansion” and “I don’t agree with the financial decisions of Wikipedia’s management”, they should have just kept it in the bank? Or told people not to donate? The last time people donated, we got Wikipedia for it. That sounds great. I’m in favor of giving them more money so they can keep doing more stuff like that, because it seems like it’s working.

Your complaint makes absolutely no sense, and I just sent them another $20.

Their financial statements are public: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

There’s no profit, since they are a nonprofit. They have a couple of years’ operating expenses saved up, which is nice. They’ve been giving away a lot of it to various research projects, and they pay everyone a comfortable salary, which is also nice. People in the comments have been assuring me that this is a sign that they’re incredibly corrupt, for example describing the research project thing as a bad thing (sponsoring “weird” research) or saying it’s a problem that they paid the CEO around $700k in one year.

Actually, they started out with the earlier claims like that they were friendly with fascists or that $300M went missing every year, and then only switched over to “their financials are good and they pay salaries, and that’s a problem, all they should need to pay is hosting” once all the earlier stuff failed to hit. It doesn’t sound like they’re hurting for money, but maybe being aggressive about soliciting donations is the reason they’re not hurting for money. They don’t get substantial income from anything other than donations, it looks like. But yes, if you wanted to support a project that really needs it, maybe the Internet Archive is a better place to start.

Quoting myself from elsewhere:

This is how modern social media propaganda works. One person says wikipedia is kowtowing to fascist governments and doxxing its members. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that $300 million “excess” went missing and no one knows where it went, implying that someone is skimming off money and we shouldn’t be donating because the whole thing is corrupt. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that wikipedia is slanting all its coverage to a pro-Western, pro-Israel slant and covering up the truth through a narrative enforcing task force. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion, someone else combs through their financials and finds out that the CEO is making some money, and uses phrases like “bleeding the foundation dry” or “all while content is created by volunteers.”

You can look through my profile to see the exchanges where people say all of those things and then I respond, if you want to see in depth where and how people are saying it, and my arguments for why it isn’t true.

It is the universal cry of the loser that everyone else is a loser, too. It makes them feel better.

Correct. The Evil Slavic Menace is banning it outright, instead.

By Zachapertio - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153366379

Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline.

Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?

What a bad-faith argument.

I’m just going to let that little exchange stand on its own.

I took a look at the most recent 990 form you reference, and it lists compensation for a mere 13 individuals, with a total compensation just over $4-million in sum.

Hm, you’re right. I had looked at some kind of summary that listed people for every year, and somehow thought that it was breaking down salaries for everyone, but it’s only the top people.

Let’s look a different way. https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf&page=9 says that there are 233 people who earn more than $100k (so basically, full-time people in a white-collar role). So if you make a ballpark estimate that for each one of those people, there’s one other person doing janitorial work or similar that makes average $50k/yr, and average out the $88M they spent on salary in 2022 over all those 466 people, you get $327k per year for the white collar people. Presumably there’s also some amount on part-time work, or grants, or something like that. But the point is, it’s not that there is some absurd amount of money going missing. It’s just that they employ a few hundred people and pay SF-tech-company salaries.

This is in no way counter-evidence that spending (ultimately due to the decisions of these executives) is at runaway levels. Salaries and wages have increased 22% compounding year-over-year for the last four years on average. This is a 120% increase in only four years (from $46,146,897 to $101,305,706).

These trends have been continuously called out for almost a decade now, but this exponential growth continues nonetheless. All while expenses for core responsibilities remain flat.

Didn’t you just get super offended that I pointed out that paying the people who work for you is, in fact, a “core reponsibility”, and so this argument doesn’t make sense?

I’m happy with Wikipedia paying their people. If there was one person making $5M per year, then I’d be fine with that, even though there isn’t. If there was one person making $50M per year, maybe I’d have some questions, but nothing like that is happening.

Wikipedia should be setup to succeeded indefinitely at this point if it weren’t for these decisions.

You said I sound hostile. Stuff like this is why. I’ve been dealing with maybe 5-10 different people who all have some kind of different reason of bending their way around to the conclusion “and so Wikipedia sucks.” I don’t think spending money that’s coming in, on paying people to do Wikipedia work, spells doom for Wikipedia. I don’t think that makes any sense. And, there’s been such a variety of “and so that’s why Wikipedia sucks” comments I’ve been reading that all don’t make any sense if you examine them, that it’s made me short-tempered to any given one.

I like Wikipedia. I think it’s good.

It’s not any kind of judgment about right or wrong. It’s just an observation that some nutty behaviors like kicking someone out of your web forum the instant they dissent in any way, or openly defending your chosen government even when it’s killing people like they’re spraying for weeds in the garden, are unique to far-right individuals and tankies, and unknown and abhorred pretty much everywhere else.

but I have no way of checking it since they don’t provide a breakdown of the salaries involved

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.

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.

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

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”

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.

Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline.

Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?

The salaries mostly are in the $100k-350k range, maybe up to $500-700k in the C suite. They’re perfectly reasonable by the standards of a San Francisco tech company that operates at the scale that Wikipedia does. The full list of exact salaries and recipients is listed in their form 990 filings if you want to read them for yourself.

Edit: Phrasing

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.

You’re right, I was misremembering Poe’s law. We need a law for “there is no point of view so idiotic that someone won’t be out there passionately proclaiming it, not because they are a propaganda troll, but because they really believe it.”

There are plenty of Reddit-like boards which feature people who generally know what they’re talking about. Reddit used to be one, years ago, remember jokes about how the comments were a better way to learn the truth of the story than reading the article?

There are places on Lemmy that are like that, too. Weirdly enough, this comments section is a good example. The people voting are extremely capable to identify the bullshit and downvote it, it’s actually very accurate. Just have a look around. It’s not always like that. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, and some of the tech-focused communities are notable places where the idiots outnumber the rest of the people, but it’s not at all a universal feature of Reddit-like general purpose forums. It just takes a little while to build the culture that way, and a lot of Lemmy is actively hostile to building it because the wrong people are so aggressive about pushing the wrongness, and it kind of chases people away unless they’re cool with that.

I can only assume those encouraging Wikipedia’s current path hope for someone with a bigger checkbook to come by and bail them out (with strings attached, of course).

Lol

The executives are the ones bleeding the foundation dry.

Kiss my ass. The form 990s show all salaries for developers, administrative staff, executives, and all. You picked the one year when the CEO made $789k, instead of $200-400k, and then claimed that the CEO making four times the engineer salaries is “bleeding the foundation dry” and eating up the whole $186M they brought in that year, or something. The CEO makes about double what the developers make, in most years, and the developers have competitive salaries. Good. That’s how it should be.

This is how modern social media propaganda works. One person says wikipedia is kowtowing to fascist governments and doxxing its members. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that $300 million “excess” went missing and no one knows where it went, implying that someone is skimming off money and we shouldn’t be donating because the whole thing is corrupt. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that wikipedia is slanting all its coverage to a pro-Western, pro-Israel slant and covering up the truth through a narrative enforcing task force. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion, someone else combs through their financials and finds out that the CEO is making some money, and uses phrases like “bleeding the foundation dry” or “all while content is created by volunteers.”

Get the fuck out. Stop coming up with new bullshit to use to attack wikipedia. I don’t care if the CEO made $700k. I hope it doubles, and I hope they use my $10/month to make it happen. Wikipedia is doing great stuff, and the vigor with which this variety of transient Lemmy villains is popping out to use this various array of bad-faith bullshit to attack them only demonstrates to me that they’re doing something right.

Side note: loving the jump from ‘I didn’t realize we were fighting anywhere’ to ‘we’re not fighting like that.’

Oh, no, that’s not what I was saying. If I wanted to make a sincere response, I would say that fighting in Syria and Yemen is hardly new and hardly represents a world war. But most of my patience to talk with you is exhausted at this point, I’m just sending replies out of sort of a morbid curiosity.

Also from a sincere standpoint: Israel did not just use a nuclear weapon in Syria, because if they had, it would have been detected by the monitoring systems of plenty of states, western and not. There are plenty of people who would have talked about it, to the point that it would be dominating the news cycle, in al-Jazeera and via statements at the UN, even if it were somehow embargoed from every single Western outlet without fail.

Generally, my system for determining who’s worth listening to is to take some of their claims, see whether they’re total bullshit, and if a few times when I do that, they are not, then I start trusting that source to some extent. So I’ve done that to you and you’re saying some screaming bullshit about Israel using nuclear weapons, I think because you’re so addled by propaganda that you didn’t even notice that it was such an absurdly over-the-top claim to make that it betrays the disconnection with the truth of a lot of your more subtle claims that are on the surface more plausible.

A person who evaluates statements in terms of, “Is it against the West? True! Is it for the West? False!” could, of course, believe it, but that’s an incredibly stupid way to try to determine what is and isn’t true. You can get yourself worked into an absurdly blinkered view of reality that’s so off-kilter than down is up and up is down. But of course, since you’ve clearly read your Chomsky, you already knew that, so I didn’t need to tell you.

I’m done. Have a good one.

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.

Okay, I get it. The first use of a nuclear weapon in war since 1945 is just something that every single news organization is totally ignoring except for one web site I’ve never heard of from India that has it right when literally every other organization Western and not, is ignoring it. Al-Jazeera? No way. Sputnik? They won’t even touch it. Nope. We have to go to India.com. Then we can find the truth.