He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:
- Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
- Narrative is fundamentally false
- Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess
I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.
Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.
Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots
I do the research and script writing for a documentary company. In 2023, I noticed that the pages of serial killers I’d been researching, started mentioning political affiliation in the top paragraph… but they all said Democrat (or socialst, communist sympathizer, anti-fascist, etc). Then, one of the murderers I was researching, who was literally a Republican politician who killed his wife , said Democrat and I had a team investigate. It got corrected, but we have no idea if it was one person or a group that changed the pages. Someone out there wants murderers to be associated with democrats.
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I don’t trust Wikipedia, but I do think they’re a good STARTING POINT for research, the problem comes when it’s used as the end-all be-all
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Can you be specific about this misinformation so I don’t just point fingers at anyone who doesn’t worship the ground Wikipedia walks on. Like what are they saying and why isn’t it true?
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Who hates Wikipedia:
- Tech bros
- Russia
- Israel
- Other generic fascists
Wikipedia is just another website run by some privileged dickheads and their mods.
I’m not bothering to argue whether it’s better or worse than other websites.
But only a fool would trust it or believe that it’s inherently “good”.
As long as people keep in mind what Wikipedia is, there should be no issue. There’s a reason teachers never allow it as a source, but it is great as an introduction to any topic, from which point you can further your own research.
The entire 485 word intro to his Wikipedia page is unsourced:
There’s a Forbes source on his wealth.
I’m pretty sure it’s Elon.
DOWNLOAD A COPY OF WIKIPEDIA NOW. RIGHT NOW. DO NOT WAIT.
WIKIPEDIA WILL BE RUINED IN (just guessing) THREE MONTHS (I hope I’m wrong)
lol, no it won’t….
Or even better, donate to wikipedia. I know I just did.
Do download a copy of Wikipedia but give them some credit. This isn’t the first nor last attack on information freedom (see internet archive)
NO NO CREDIT GIVEN MUST SHOUT
Can I get a TLDR. I’m on the page about downloading it, but there are so many files to download which makes me think I am looking at the wrong stuff.
Wikipedia is pretty large now, even for text only versions. So the most recommended option to download/read an offline version is by using “Kiwix”.
Kiwix is a reader designed to open and operate archived websites like Wikipedia that are stored in a .zim (think z-file compression but for websites).
Kiwix is open sourced and readers can be installed on your pc, phones, self-hosted as a website, etc.
You can check out their Kiwix library for a list of curated zim’s beyond Wikipedia that are updated on a schedule
You can also use their zimit tool to archive websites on your own as well.
It took a day for me to grasp all these concepts since they were designed mostly for Wikipedia archival purposes but it’s amazing how robust the tools and community are.
I consider myself pretty savvy but I’m also at a loss. I thought and still think you can download all the text but there are so many readers there, different file types. When I finally got to some raw data it was from 2008.
If you want to use Kiwix as posted by @ChogChog@lemmy.world above, you can find the data here: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/kiwix/zim/wikipedia/
The latest (January 2024) total dump for Wikipedia (English) is:
wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim…but there’s other languages and sizes available as well.
“the page”? Do you mean kiwix?
People posting misinformation? On Lemmy? No. It can’t be.
People posting misinformation? On
Lemmythe Internet? No. It can’t be.👍👍
I heard the guy who wrote Lemmy ate a GMO tomato, and enjoyed it.
I don’t understand, all tomatoes have been gmo since the chemtrails started appearing in the fall of 52
Misinformation… you mean lies?
You can use true statements to spread misinformation, I guess.
How does that work?
Information without context can create a different narrative than that same information with context.
You see this in racially biased crime reporting. Without context, you see that one demographic is disproportionately prone to being arrested and convicted of crimes. The conclusion being aimed for is the expected racist one.
With context, you see that criminality is roughly equally distributed, but that certain classes of crime are enforced with prison more often, that different demographics get disproportionately more attention from law enforcement, and that due to socioeconomic factors different demographics are more likely to inhabit income brackets where the likely types of crime are more likely to be harshly enforced.Information without context can be misleading. If someone seems to care about the conclusion you take away more than some bit of context that makes that conclusion less forgone, thats a sign they might be pushing a narrative.
There is, unfortunately, a contrasting rhetorical trick where someone provides such an overwhelming amount of context that you cannot possibly handle all of it in a reasonable amount of time.
Exactly where the line is is unfortunately not something I think there’s a simple answer for determining. I try to determine if it seems like the person is using the information to support their point, or if they’re using it to drown out opposition.
The best propaganda is built on a foundation of truth. You’ll see this on fascist websites that love to flood their feeds with “black on black crime” stories, to heavily promote “white woman attacked by black man” news narratives, and to repeatedly post images of young black/latino men with facial tattoos or in mug-shot photos. Any individual statement can be validated as true, but deliberate miss-sampling of information leads the audience to develop broad negative biases towards certain demographics.
Then you get a drum-beat of assertions about skin color as a heuristic for public safety. People are asserted as dangerous because of their skin color and you need to be proactive in keeping yourselves away from these people through… white flight and neighborhood gentrification, panicked public responses to black people, reporting black people in your neighborhood to the police as “suspicious”, leaning towards prosecution/high sentencing of black suspects when you’re a member of a jury pool, organizing with your neighbors to harass and expel black neighbors, pressure your school/local community center to hold back/suspend/expel black students disproportionately, and otherwise make your community hostile to black residents until you get a segregated neighborhood through public pressure.
The combination of the cherry-picked information and the advocacy for populist segregation leads to more interracial conflicts and an increased anxiety between white and black residents. This sets off a wave of self-confirming incidents - you get to see more black people in your neighborhood punished by authority figures, which leads naive viewers to believe more of the “minorities are inherently evil” media narratives. More conflicts feed into the social media scene of cherry-picked video clips and biased news articles, with “innocent white person victimized by evil black person” becoming received wisdom rather than something you need to read in a headline anymore.
People are trained into becoming racist over time by the engineered social dynamics.
Things like “lies of omission” basically.
Check out the NYTimes when they’re not just lying… Any hegemonic media really.
In addition to what frazorth said, you can change how a statement is interpreted by simply using a passive voice. Compare “Alice was hit by Bob” to “Bob hit Alice”. Both statements are identical, but the former is a lot less accusatory towards Bob. This technique is used when reporting about Police abuse, or about how the civilians in Gaza are treated.
“I make more money than last year” when i make lwss inflation-adjusted
“we have reached record incomes” when you make more money than ever but still less than you should (i.e. your competitor went bankrupt and you failed to capture their customer-base)
It’s all about the 💫Framing🌟
You probably have more than the average amount of legs too.
That comment is very mean
tap for explanation
Because it’s the mean average
You’ve never heard of people bending the truth?
Saying something factually correct, but misleading because parts are omitted?
Lying by omission is still a lie.
Misleading by omission is deception
Lemmy is too small to be a worthwhile target for musk-like campaigns. It’s usually just people escaping their echo chambers to get their rage fix. If you’re able to think for yourself, there’s really no negative impact and scrolling past is a great solution.
It’s not and if anything the fact it’s small has advantages. Small is easier to turn into an echo chamber.
If you can push bullshit onto a small but passionate group of people online they’ll do all the hard work for you. They’ll recruit, polish/tailor the message for other audiences, and spread it across the wider internet.
And we know it works, because that’s exactly how the whole “Q-anon” thing operated. Some vague, crazy bullshit on an obscure imageboard became a nearly mainstream “movement”.
in a bot world no niche is too small to fill with digital garbage
Eeeeh, more debatable since someone would actually need to write the capability for the bot to talk to the platform. It’s still a much lower threshold, but it’s not a free ride.
The misinfo crowd has been twiddling their collective thumbs since the election and trump winning. Can’t make up bs about egg and gas prices anymore. They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc. Guess they found a new target. Exact same MO. Repeat the claim ad nauseam, refuse to acknowledge any contrary argument, their argument is objectively false.
They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc.
That’s not even new.
Dismissively saying “OK boomer” has been around for several years.
Not the same.
I mean actively blaming specific generations for political and financial issues. Yeah, we blame the boomers for a lot, but now the complainers are shifting focus.
The politically elite are so used to puppeteering public sentiment with ease, and so confident in their efforts to suppress education in America that they have stopped trying to be sneaky. All American ‘news’ is propaganda and the this is a blatant attempt to divide the public on one of the last free resources for factual information**. Free as in non-criminalized. These types of posts by EM are to incite division in order to amp-up for the criminalization of information. And it’s not very difficult to see.
**factual when readers uphold its integrity through critical consumption and editing.
The ability to control the narrative of public discourse is one of the first things that needs to dismantled. The propaganda machine and it’s made up culture war/distraction needs to go.
And the fact that it’s escalated to the point of wealthy elites trying to dismantle public access to information should be deeply alarming for all of us… because then all we have for information is what they tell us… and that’s a dystopia i have no intention of experiencing.
Those tactics won’t really work here but if there’s a small army of them on super low IQ platforms their lies can spread.
There are major issues with wikipedia, I say this as someone with thousands of edits. But I know exactly who you are talking about and they spread pure BS.
The last time I saw them their account was called “ihatewikipedia” or “fuckwikipedia” or something like that lol and they were just spreading conspiracies. Or useless drama. Like they were going on about how wikipedia “invades your privacy”, it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing.
it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing
Unless something changed, this part was at least partially true at one point. But only for anonymous edits iirc. Usually happened for IPs shared by a lot of people like from a campus or some VPNs, probably due to a lot of vandalism from such IPs.
Yes it does. That was my response to them. But this is pretty acceptable to prevent vandalism.
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.
The wikimedia foundation has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
Yes, they have a lot of server hardware, and some IP (ie, like logos and such).
Now they have ten more
Last time I heard about wikipedia’s donation campaign (maybe
24 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.and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight
Was this “weird research” basically research into things like “Why are white, wealthy males the ones most likely to be WP editors?”
I actually took a look at Wikipedia’s accounts last week as I remembered that campaign when I saw the latest campaign and did some due diligence before donating. I didn’t donate, but I’m still glad Wikipedia exists.
What I remembered: That hosting costs were tiny and Wikimedia foundation had enough already saved up to operate for over a hundred years without raising any more.
What I saw: That if that was true, it isn’t any longer. It’s managed growth.
I don’t think they are at any risk of financial collapse, but they are cutting their cloth to suit their income. That’s normal in business, including charities. If you stop raising money, you stagnate. You find things to spend that money on that are within the charity’s existing aims.
Some highlights from 2024: $106million in wages. 26m in awards and grants. 6m in “travel and conferences”. Those last two look like optional spends to me, but may be rewards to the volunteer editors. The first seems high, but this is only a light skim
Net assets at EOY = $271 million. Hosting costs per year are $3million. It’s doing okay.
If you’re curious; https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
Yep. Just like for-profit companies, having a diverse range of revenue streams is necessary for securing the financial health of the organization. While Wikipedia receives significant donations from companies like Google and Microsoft, it is essential to also solicit contributions from individuals to ensure that their income is not overly reliant on a single source. Just like in for-profits, Wikimedia likely determines the percentages of income from various sources needed to maintain this diversity. This concept seems particularly important for Wikipedia given its mission to provide unbiased information.
On another note, I’ve seen your same “100 years” notion mentioned a few times on this post. I can’t imagine that everyone who’s saying it independently had the idea to analyze their financial statements and calculate projections over 100 years. Is this an article you’re quoting? Just curious.
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. I don’t see how to estimate how much of that “salaries” part is related to Wikipedia rather to their other business. But even taking the most optimistic possible reading, I think it’s still true that the marginal value of donations to Wikimedia foundations will not be in support of Wikipedia’s existence or even in improvements to it, but in them doing more unrelated charity.
(If you want to donate specifically to charities that spread knowledge, then donating to Wikipedia makes more sense, though then in my opinion you should consider supporting the Internet Archive, which has ~8 times less revenue, and just this year was sued for copyright infringement this year and spent a while being DDOSed into nonfunctionality - that’s a lot of actually good reasons to need more money!).
Great points and thank you for the shoutout for Internet Archive. I just made my first donation.
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
Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?
What a bad-faith argument. You seem willfully obtuse towards any data presented to you and unnecessarily hostile in all of your comments. 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. 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. Wikipedia should be setup to succeeded indefinitely at this point if it weren’t for these decisions.
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.
I’m going to try to keep this super simple:
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).
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?
At this point, I sincerely think you are being obtuse; unless you believe everyone at Wikipedia, on average, is receiving 22% raises, every single year. This is not Wikipedia “paying the people who work for you,” it’s aggressive expansion, at an exponential level. In the words of Guy Macon from almost a decade ago, “Wikipedia has Cancer.” I don’t believe any company, non-profit or for-profit, can sustain this limitless expansion in the long run. And Wikipedia’s management does this all while trying to guilt trip people for donations, usually under the guise of needing it to survive. In sum, I don’t agree with the financial decisions of Wikipedia’s management, and therefore, no longer donate to them.
On the other hand, I don’t dislike Wikipedia or the services they provide. I’ll echo your own words: I like Wikipedia, I think it’s good, and I never said otherwise. I even referenced their website when writing all of my responses on this topic. I find it unfortunate that you interpret these sort of critiques as “and so Wikipedia sucks.” Furthermore, I don’t like how you justify your hostility based on critical responses. This is a discussion board, not an echo chamber. However, I’m very thankful that you didn’t respond with “go fuck yourself” or “kiss my ass” like you did in your last response to me. Also, I hope your having a good start to the weekend. ✌
Love that everyone on this thread is a financial analyst and a 501c consultant.
For-profit companies have the margins they do because they’ve successfully detached humanity from their spending obligations. Wikipedia does not need to do quarterly global lay-offs or labor off-shoring when their technology doesn’t meet release deadlines. They are a nonprofit. They exist to bring factual, accessible information to the world. If you support for this cause, donate. If you don’t, don’t donate or don’t use. If you care for the cause but want the CEO to take a paycut, well, find them one who will stick around for more than a few years on less than the average mega CEO salary. Because most of them have not.
Love that everyone on this thread is a financial analyst and a 501c consultant.
So people shouldn’t have an opinion unless they’re professionally qualified? I’m not sure that’s how the internet works.
And also, people absolutely should check how their money will be spent when they consider donating. It’s their money, remember.
If you support for this cause, donate. If you don’t, don’t donate or don’t use.
I get that, and it’s often true I think. But when the thing that they do that you use and like is such a tiny part of their spending, is it still true?
I care about Wikipedia’s website. I would donate to that. I don’t care about the other 90% of the things they would spent my donation on. Should I still donate?
If you’re asking that question because you’re genuinely conflicted about donating and you’re not just here spreading divisive nonsense on behalf of Elon Musk, you could do a deeper delve into the entire foundation or look up the Wikipedia page on Income Statements.
You seem to be hung up on the operating expenses. That’s just a finance term for certain operational costs like the electricity bill and insurance. It does not mean the total of what it costs to run the organization and that everything else is in excess. Similarly, salary expenses includes everyone from the HR department to the custodians, not just the rich CEOs.
As I explained, I was going to donate. I did my due diligence about where my money would go and made my decision. I provided the link to Wikipedia’s own declared for the benefit of others and shared some of my reasonings elsewhere in this post.
But in your world, anyone who questions anything is a shill for Musk? Or just those who hold a differing opinion to yours?
salary expenses includes everyone from the HR department to the custodians, not just the rich CEOs.
No shit, Sherlock. But where did I mention CEOs? Where did I mention Musk, come to that?
Anyway, I’m done arguing with you. Goodbye.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do think, however, that a company that’s not drowning in money wouldn’t be giving a bunch of generic research grants.
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.
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.
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.
I will investigate this claim independently.
That’s not allowed on Wikipedia, you have to use verifiable information from reliable secondary sources instead.
There was a big “information” campaign against donating to wikipedia say 6 months - 2 years ago, anyone know what happened/why?
Apparently that particular round of slander was not as successful as this one.
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.
I’m donating 10 a month. Least I can do. It’s one of the last “good” places on the internet
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
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!
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.
