I've seen far too many comments of people who fell for that lie and donated even though they really didn't have money to spare, because the fear of losing such an important resource drove them to it.
https://x.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
I love Wikipedia as a free source of history, but I have no interest in donating money to them as a proxy in the culture war.
This thread (public link: https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1579776106034757633) mostly suggests that is where that funding is going. It also picks on a few specific cases and positions them as bad, but given that the thread is written from the standpoint that racial equity is bad, I'm not inclined to take the couple of cherry picked examples at face value. There are valid reasons to critique them.
The criticism is that the Wikimedia Foundation makes people believe that Wikipedia needs funding, so that people donate thinking that they contribute to Wikipedia. Personally I have nothing against the Wikimedia Foundation, but when I learned that I was not actually donating to Wikipedia, I felt tricked. They lost my trust because they made me feel like I was tricked.
The Wikimedia Foundation host Wikipedia. The servers, power, connectivity, bandwidth and engineers who maintain it are all paid from donations on the site.
I know Wikipedia has a reputation for cringe donation drives, but at a basic level I don't disagree with them raising money, with what they're raising it for, or with most of how they pitch the donation requests, as continuing to maintain and improve Wikipedia. Focusing on the split between the Wikimedia Foundation (the org you donate to) and Wikipedia (the product they produce) is a bit of a red herring in my opinion.
"culture war" in this context was me quoting a 3yo Twitter thread that made a lot of people, inc myself, realize that Wikipedia's "appeals" are deceptive. I was trying to get the comment up before the train left the station and I lost service. I didn't do further research as to what the organizations were.
I don't like the implication that by stopping my support of Wikimedia, I'm potentially racist/pro-racism. That doesn't feel intellectually honest. I was supporting Wikipedia because I think it's a valuable public resource. When I want to support a different goal, I give to an organization that specializes in it directly.
Bait-and-switch appeals make me feel like Wikimedia is not a responsible steward of its donations. It doesn't matter what they're giving the money to; it's not what they implied they needed it for.
I was not trying to imply that by stopping your support for Wikipedia you’re potentially racist; rather that by referring to anti-racist organizations using the term “culture war” you are potentially racist.
The foundation does not csre about wikipedia. They dont even try to clean it up from the agents who "shape" articles. You very often can see a situation where two admins help each other. Nobody reviews this really. I mean you can ask a "check user" - who will decline to check if the admins arent sock puppet accounts / multi accounts.
Nobody from foundation fights the deletionist, dishonest admin clique and people who discourage everyone feom editing wikipedia by racing to have the most reverts.
(Also what is with the random quotes added to every article now, that look like writing of 12 year olds. No more concise articles)
Because the Wikimedia Foundation has Wikipedia, which I love, doesn't mean I love (or even know) everything the Wikimedia Foundation does. I would donate to Wikipedia, but they apparently don't need it.
Same thing for Firefox: I would donate to Firefox, but I have to give to Mozilla that does a bunch of other stuff and doesn't even treat Firefox the way I would want them to. So I don't donate.
The constant calls for donations are to support the foundation, not the website, but they make it look like Wikipedia could disappear at any moment.
Their cost for bandwidth is a rounding error vs their salaries and other costs that the foundation racks up.