Why is the Wikipedia Foundation's begging tolerated?

All the other top websites [1] either are selling my information (Meta) , exist to show me ads (Google), or I pay monthly for (Netflix).

Wikipedia runs one of the busiest websites in the world with a staff much smaller than any of those other sites. Like any company -- there's going to be priorities different than mine and waste.

But I'm ok being asked to chip in for what I get.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites

The Foundation is my client, but these views are only my own:

This is not to say there's no excess, or that resources couldn't be allocated internally more effectively - I'm not going to put up some kind of strawman - but:

1. I took a 20% pay cut so that I could do more work for the Foundation. Worth it.

2. Posts that say "Wikipedia only has [x] more articles but budget has gone up [y]" are beyond stupid. Any idea how many projects besides Wikipedia are run by WMF - for instance, ever heard of Wikimedia Commons? Any idea how litigious and heavily-regulated the world has got, and how much effort has to be poured into softening some of the emerging laws, mounting judicial challenges against the rest, etc? Any idea how much funding every usergroup and chapter (sometimes more than one per country, e.g. in Spain) is asking for? Any idea how much effort is put into developing features that encourage new people to start editing, not just consuming? Any idea how expensive it is to support and facilitate the big "Movement" discussions (aimed at decentralising the movement!) and the User Code of Conduct discussions? How hard it is to have a viable Trust & Safety team for so many projects, 300+ languages, and people from all over the world to support?

3. After a big outcry about the banners a month ago (that was a long time coming, no denial), the drafting and design of the banners is much softer this year than the last. And guess what, they're much less effective, and now projects are being cancelled, staff departures aren't being backfilled, and jobs are at stake. That may be worth it, but let's at least be honest about the downsides.

Accountability and criticism are fine - but when absolutely no intellectual effort is put into keeping that criticism balanced and on-target, then all you've ended up doing is making people who work here, rather than raking in the big bucks working for Big Tech, feel shitty. And guess what: you lose extra marks for bringing up cancer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...) when many people working here will be dealing with actual cancer, either personally or among their friends or family, at the moment.

Despite all the negative about wikipedia, it’s still sort of part of “old internet” that I don’t want to die.

Even wikia, which was spun at first as “slightly more commercial wikipedia”, later became Fandom, which is something so horrible that I don’t want to look at

Look at WikiTravel which is more commercial WikiVoyage… they immediately went and stuffed it with ads and trackers.

And I mean wikimedia is fine NOW, but economy is going down, I will be happy if it has a certain rundown.

I am not entirely happy about all decisions that they do, but they’re still not pushing me any tracker. I am fine with closing some pop up.

I think it’s tolerated because.. we don’t have a choice other than to tolerate it.

What else are we going to do? Are we going to close the browser window and not use Wikipedia?

1) You have surely heard, or perhaps have even said, "If you don't like it, don't use it."

2) What is the justification for NOT "tolerating" it beyond the "stop using it" or "stop donating to it" avenue? Is there a crime that should be reported?

3) Publish a story highlighting the problems. Several of these circulate periodically. The people who care about this already know it, and everyone else just ignores the banners.

4) Ads have ***destroyed*** the general web browsing user experience for anyone who isn't actively using adblockers. Why is that tolerated? Repeat exercise.

Humans. It's humans.

It's not exactly tolerated by Wikipedia community, see this discusssion:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost...

I tolerate it because I don't care. They could keep the banner there year round and I would still use it and not care.

Are there no prisons, no workhouses? What a perfect time of year to complain about people begging.

I don’t know what tolerate means in this context: I’m pretty sure I clicked “close” once and it hasn’t shown up again.

Separately: the Wikipedia Foundation having too much money sounds like the kind of problem I’d prefer to have, rather than it not having enough. Even if it means they “waste” money (in your estimation), it provides financial independence in a way that’s critical for the service they provide.

I'm curious, if an employee is doing "just fine", do they not deserve a raise if they did a good job?

Either Wikipedia is doing well, and they will continue asking for money to continue doing well.

Or, Wikipedia is not doing well, and they will continue asking for money to do better.

For you, if you don't like Wikipedia and/or the banners, just stop going to it if it doesn't provide any value.

What would “not being tolerated” look like? Closing the request and ignoring it and not contributing money? If so, then that’s what I’m doing. And probably most everyone else.

I’ve worked a lot with nonprofits. Having a pool of static funds available is not indicative of sustainability. If you are asking for funds only when you are running out, it is far too late for you.

For the same reason that archive.org's begging is tolerated, obviously. They provide a unique, irreplaceable service that can only be sustained by charitable contribution.

(Never mind that OP is asking disingenuously, just adding my vote.)

> they spend (read: waste)

Really? What makes you think it's all or even mostly waste?

You can login, opt out of the banner and it won't be shown to you anymore.

But to answer the question: because it's one of the few annoyances (and probably the only one) on that website. Other than the one month long banner I personally have no complains, Wikipedia is one of the best websites on the internet imo.

Goodbye Hacker News.

A bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia representing hundreds of thousands of volunteer human hours of effort; replacing (sorry, “disrupting”) extremely expensive Britannica books means to me the orange site has lost it’s way.

"Every time you go to Wikipedia" meaning "in December, until you click it to go away"?

I tolerate it because I like the resource, and I donate a small amount of money most years.

When organizations ask for money I don't immediately get defensive and start researching talking points as to why they don't really need it. Maybe I should, but I don't. So yeah, chalk one up to a naive rube with a lack of awareness. And no desire to setup custom blocking filters that inevitably are more work to maintain than they're actually worth.

No need to tolerate, it’s a non-profit, it’s not owned by anyone. Just join and do things better than they do, provoke change and transparency from within if you can’t tolerate it no longer.

If they can raise the money, why shouldn't they? Being over-funded is a good problem to have from the perspective of any non-profit.

I cancelled my monthly donation. I was quite happy to pay for Wikipedia, but hearing that they are doing fine, and lacking any insight into what the wikimedia foundation does, I stopped. Plenty of other places to give tzedakah.

Very few human donors are benevolent but sharp-eyed accountants, looking for the places where their money is actually most needed. Instead, it's all about places where their donation will (1) make them feel better about themselves, (2) boost their social cred and status, and (3) benefit themselves & folks who they identify with.

>In reality, the Wikipedia Foundation is doing just fine. In fact, they make so much money from donations, they spend (read: waste) massive amounts of it on various social ventures instead of using it on the service that caused people to donate in the first place.

Meanwhile they refuse to roll out an onion service, which would enable folks to read it without fearing chilling effects and reduce the load on the network’s limited number of exit nodes, which due to a combination of sociological and technical reasons are much more onerous to run than relays.

Wikipedia overwhelmingly focuses on the wishes of editors, a small and separate group from the users (readers) in a manner unbecoming an alleged charity.

https://defcon.org/images/defcon-17/dc-17-presentations/defc...

https://blog.torproject.org/tips-running-exit-node/

Fundraising is unfortunately something where the commons has been deeply polluted. My Congressmembers regularly send me emails which are outright lies, purporting to be a "membership renewal" or a "special survey" or an "urgent petition" until you click in and see they want money. So when I see something like the Wikipedia banners, which are restricted to their own site and don't explicitly say anything untrue, it's hard to get worked up over it.

It's worth acknowledging that they've been willing to moderate their tone in response to things that seem overly misleading (https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...). If you could sit down with Jimmy Wales and the WMF bosses in private, I suspect they'd tell you that they don't want to trick anyone, but that you have to do some kind of attention-grabbing stunt to effectively fundraise these days. And really, is that wrong?

i just click on the "i already donated, stop showing me this message" option.

i've never donated, but they dont need to know that.

> In reality, the Wikipedia Foundation is doing just fine. In fact, they make so much money from donations, they spend (read: waste) massive amounts of it on various social ventures instead of using it on the service that caused people to donate in the first place.

That's a strong statement that requires some proof and links to the sources.

As a simple resource, it's imperative it remains free of corporates with their own agendas, and to a lesser extent, advertising. The best way to fail is not have sufficient funds for emergencies.

Wikipedia is certainly more worthwhile for someone who is likely to use it regularly, than say an online newspaper that actually refuses to share the article content with an infrequent visitor that might be directed to that particular site a handful of times during the year. Often wikipedia asks for much less.

I'd probably donate, if not for the hundred plus hours I worked expanding their knowledge base in the early 00s ... it was all deleted as far as I can tell - most of that data wasn't ever going to be covered in a "must be in an existing ISBN book / ISSN publication" policy that was brought in sometime later on.

An organization which runs an extremely useful non-for-profit business that runs the occasional nagging ad and flies some oversalaried executives around to ego-boosting events is hugely inoffensive to me. I mean honestly, I don't think say Microsoft goes a week without doing a dozen worse things to its users.

You do know you're welcome to simply not use Wikipedia. You can even use it and not donate anything. Their "begging" is "tolerated" because it's their site and they are entitled to post anything they like on it.

We would consider companies foolish if they left sales on the table, even if they didn't immediately need it. Why would non-profits be expected to not fundraise as aggressively as possible?

The expectation that non-profits should be run on fumes is silly.

Wikipedia is actually privately owned. They raised enough money to fund thenselves indefinitely a long time ago but then they got bought out. All these donations are now funneled into the shareholders of the parent company.

Think about it, all the work is done by volunteers. Server costs are negligible because it’s all cached plaintext that can fit on a single server if you need it to. There’s basically no costs.

And yet… hundreds of millions get withdrawn. It ain’t going to Wikipedia. Wikipedia was financially secure through investments a decade ago. It’s fraud.

If this is the worst thing happening to you today, you’re having a great day.

Don't like it? Don't visit it.

"Wikipedia is not for sale."

No, but Jimmy Wales clearly is.

Why isn't there a "shut up and go away and never bother me again" button?

Because it's gotten to the point that I have just started avoiding Wikipedia.

In the strictest sense, it's tolerated because it's an acceptable price to get the product.

If you're asking, "why doesn't someone do something about it" there are people actively encouraging the foundation to lay off. In fact, now you can click a "I already donated" button to silence them when you couldn't before.

Also, they don't show it to logged in users, so the people making the product aren't being hounded for additional donations

> In fact, they make so much money from donations, they spend (read: waste) massive amounts of it on various social ventures instead of using it on the service that caused people to donate in the first place.

Do you have some specific examples? Further, how much are they 'wasting' as a function of their reserves?

No, it's not tolerated, at least from me.

I use incognito mode by default in my browsers and Wikipedia has become unusable with the constant begging. I stopped donating on a yearly basis when I realized their intrusive begging scheme had turned into a hobby.

If it works with other people, so be it.

What banner is even being discussed here? I don't see any banner about wikipedia "shutting down at any moment due to lack of funding".

There is a banner, yes, but it doesn't say anything like that.

Are other people seeing other things, or is the discussion about a banner (yes, there is a banner) that doesn't ever say what's being claimed?

For reference, I see this. It reads reasonably to me, and never makes crazy claims about shutting down.

Wikipedia is not for sale. A personal appeal from Jimmy Wales

Please don't scroll past this 1 minute read. This Friday December 23rd, as 2022 draws to a close, I humbly ask you to reflect on the number of times you visited Wikipedia this year, the value you got from it, and whether you're able to give £2 back. If you can, please join the 2% of readers who give. If everyone reading this right now gave just £2, we'd hit our annual goal in a couple of hours. The price of a cup of coffee is all I ask.

Wikipedia is different. No advertising, no subscription fees, no paywalls. Those don't belong here. Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation relies on readers to support the technology that makes Wikipedia and our other projects possible. Being a nonprofit means there is no danger that someone will buy Wikipedia and turn it into their personal playground.

If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, please donate now, it really matters.

Tolerated by whom? The general public? People occasionally create Wikipedia competitors; it generally doesn’t go well. If you find it intolerable, you can presumably use one of those (though note that the content is generally, well, made-up).

Just to clarify, there's no Wikipedia Foundation, there's Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia Foundation.

You can't donate to Wikipedia, the banners on Wikipedia lead to Wikimedia donations.

It is quite unethical:

1. They have enough donations to keep Wikipedia running for decades, yet each year banner gets more and more manipulative, pretending WP is on the brink of collapse.

2. IIRC less than 5% of money are actually used towards Wikipedia needs.

3. Not to mention that WP authors essentially work for free.

Why is it tolerated? Because most people don't even know you're not donating to Wikipedia. And the product is just too good to care.

I read this satirical thread about what would happen if Wikipedia didn't make money from donations and had to get acquired by a company like Comcast and thought, hm, I'd rather that not happen. I donate every year.

https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/2ov45h/wp_w...

Apart from ublock filters you can use the Wikiless frontend. An addon like libredirect will redirect to an instance automatically.

I guess it isn't, it's just that many people know how to use (and configure) an adblocker in their browser....

What is the Wikipedia Foundation? Is it some kind of scam impersonating the Wikimedia Foundation?

I have no issue with a charity asking for money. I give them a regular donation.

Just leave 'em. Did a muBlock rule for the pop-up.

The Wikipedia iOS app doesn’t seem to seek donations.

Feel free to not use Wikipedia if they offend you.

I don’t tolerate it - I don’t give them any money.

The Mozilla foundation situation is equally hopeless these days:

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/firefox-money-investigating-t...

All the old heroes have started rotting from the inside and turned to fungus.