Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
cyounkins.medium.com
cyounkins.medium.com
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
- "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.
I also consider having to make any extra action on the website as the link not working.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/22/wikimedia-fo...
(sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation)
Apple, in comparison, has $200 billion in cash reserves. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-companies-most-cash-reserv...
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.
That much spend seems unsustainable long term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!
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.
EDIT: @dylan604 (replying here due to HN throttling): Section 230 shields Wikipedia from most liability/exposure: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/successes/wikipedia
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:
MediaWiki
Meta-Wiki
Wikibooks
Wikidata
Wikinews
Wikiquote
Wikisource
Wikispecies
Wikiversity
Wikivoyage
Wiktionary
>> 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.
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.
A lot of people are willing to spend big money to shut down truth.
It takes a lot of people and money to raise $150m/year ;->
10M$ in expenses to get 120M$ really isn't so bad.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
IIRC, nearly 100% of all content moderation is done by Wikipedia volunteer editors, so that's not actually an operational expense of theirs.
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.
Maybe we could ask Mozilla. /s
At least Wikipedia is not actively working on sabotaging their flagship product.
Just take a look at how fast people around the globe are editing it.
https://wikistream.toolforge.org/
Not that I like those tactics to beg for money but, yes, keeping it running while ensuring accuracy requires a lot of staff.
I still don't resent their asking and I still donate.
Wikipedia is a truly worthwhile service and I'm happy they have much more money than they need to scrape by.
You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by. I think that is a bad way to run any operation.
The vast majority of those expenses are not Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's cancer is the Wikimedia organization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, just because the "email industry" routinely uses bad practices, that doesn't make it okay for wikimedia to do so.
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.
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?
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.
> having a different from and reply-to
is not about what the op is complaining.
the offending header is
> From: "jimmy@wikipedia.org" <donate@wikimedia.org>
i.e. the address uses a display-name (in rfc2822 nomenclature) made to look like an unrelated, personal email address.
(and the reply-to actually matches from)
i wouldn't quite call it abuse but it is certainly deceptive.
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:
From: "legitster@legitster.com" <rahim@encona.com>
i.e. using the 'name' part of the from header to make it seem like the email is from a different email address.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It puts me off donating.
If it were any other way, it wouldn't be this way.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
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.
Super awesome project methinks
[citation needed]
https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
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.
In 2016 a prominent Wikipedian saw the exponential trend and wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2..., aka "Wikipedia has Cancer".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?).
Management is milking the cow and has been for years.
This is tricky because they rightfully have a stellar brand value, I am not sure that will last forever.
As you know, the fish always rot from the head, this is a good example.
In other news, NPR pledge drives are so annoying.
Do you know how many people in the world have an internet connection?
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.
Year goal 20/21: $108M https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikim...
Year goal 21/22: $150M https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
I'll take an NPR pledge drive over the 1-800-KARS-for-KIDS commercial any day.
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.
edit: fine, downvote me, I am just memorializing a fallen hero. guess I will do it alone
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.
None of that makes these minor issues a problem.
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.
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?
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.
With advertisers you build your product to sap as much attention as possible.
With corporate sponsors you start to let them moderate your product.
With annoying users for money you at least want your users to like you instead of making them a product of some kind or another.
That way everyone will learn its value to them and they could collect some $$$
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)
- Other operating expenses: $10 million
[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#a1-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
$50k/year for their mid-tier offering. "Contact us" after that.
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'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.
Because the initial mission is still, by and large, done by volunteers and unpaid editors.
Wikimedia is a bloated leech
This year I've had three (two in September, both from donate@wikimedia.org, and one from jimmy@wikipedia.org in October saying 'We've had enough').
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).
Wikipedia is one of the few things on the Internet that feels right.
If they need to play the same shit game as everyone else, so be it.
The tone of resentment here from the commenters is disappointing - it's like Wikipedia needing money is somehow not OK.
Wikipedia is a precious, troubled project IMHO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...