RT: https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579778161889652736#thread
If you use Wikipedia, you've seen pop-ups like this. If you're like me, you may have donated as a result.
Wikipedia is an amazing website, and the appeals seem heartfelt. But I've now learnt the money isn't going where I thought...
ℹ To all our readers in the UK,
Please don’t scroll past this. This Friday we interrupt your reading to humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia’s independence. 98% of our readers don’t give; they simply look the other way. If you are an exceptional reader who has already donated, we sincerely thank you. If you donate just £2, or whatever you can this Friday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. We ask you, humbly: please don’t scroll away. If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, take a minute to donate. Show the world that access to reliable, neutral information matters to you. Thank you.
The organisation which administers Wikipedia — to whom the money goes — is the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Wikimedia is a San Francisco non-profit with 400 employees, which has exploded in size in recent years.
In a decade, Wikimedia's spending has soared: from $10 million in 2010 to $112 million by 2020.
This suprised me, seeing as Wikipedia seems to be functionally the same website it was 10 years ago. So what explains this huge increase?
Maybe more people use the site, making it more expensive to run?
No: 2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million — which is LESS than it did in 2012.
In fact, according the Wikimedia Foundation's own website [in 2022], less than half of what they spend goes on directly supporting the website.
Bear in mind - Wikipedia used to be an incredibly cheap, volunteer run website. Watch a minute of this video of Jimmy Wales talking about how Wikipedia operated back in 2005: https://www.youtube.com/v//WQR0gx0QBZ4 (mirror)
So where is the money going? Well, a lot of it Wikimedia gives away to other organisations. And a significant portion of their staff are employed in that process. From 2012 to 2020, the spending on salaries increased fivefold, and $22.9 million was given in grants.
At this point, you should know that while Wikipedia emphasises a "Neutral Point of View", Wikimedia is openly politicized. It is a full participant in America's culture wars, and this helps us understand how they spend the donations.
What we mean by racial equity
The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide. These modes of privilege mentioned above function as setting the dominant social, political, legal, policy-oriented, and cultural norms around the world.
Racial equity means acknoweldging explicit and implicit affirmative actions for White people and groups with privilege related to skin color are created systemically through institutional power, dominance, and control.
Racial equity aims to promote consistent and sustained repair for non-White, non-US and Eurocentric communities and communities that continue to experience harm due to racism and caste-based upon colorism.
Let's take a look at two big recipients.
The SeRCH Foundation received a quarter million dollars of donor cash. Glancing at the website, you could assume it was about the admirable goal of minority representation in STEM
STEM en Route to Change (SeRCH Foundation), United States ($250,000): To provide a two-year investment to the SeRCH Foundation to support the expansion of their signature program, #VanguardsSTEM, which amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, women of color and non-binary people of color in STEM fields. The SeRCH Foundation will leverage cultural production, including multimedia storytelling, to advance non-traditional forms of knowledge creation, to build freely licensed and open rich media content about STEM leaders of color, and address inequitable representation throughout scientific fields.
However on closer inspection, it turns out to be a bit more unusual than that. They're proponents of an "Intersectional Scientific Method" involving "hyperspace"(?)
Abstract
#VanguardsSTEM is an online community and platform that centers the experiences of women, girls, and non-binary people of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. We publish original and curated content, using cultural production, to include a multiplicity of identities as worthy of recognition and thus redefine STEM identity and belonging. #VanguardsSTEM is rooted firmly in Queer, Black feminisms which delineate that the experiences and critiques of Black women matter and that these insights can foster a restorative and regenerative construction of the cultures in which we exist. In describing how #VanguardsSTEM descended from counterspaces, we draw on speculative fiction to define a #VanguardsSTEM hyperspace as a fluid “place-time” that is born digital and enabled by social media, but materializes in the physical world for specific purposes. As Black women in STEM, we consider how our situated knowledges and scientific expertise inform our process. We propose an intersectional scientific methodology to address the influence of embodied observation, embedded context and collective impact on scientific inquiry. Through #VanguardsSTEM, we assert, without apology, the right of Black, Indigenous, women of color and non-binary people of color to self-advocate by fully representing ourserves and our STEM identities and interests, without assimilation.
Their output is extremely long YouTube videos which get about 50 views at a time.In the videos they discuss issues in science like objectivity (they're against it) and bias (they're in favour).
There's been one new video in the last year.
…so, we always want to talk about an “unbiased” approach, but is that really what we want? Objectivity is sort of a “conquering gaze from nowhere”—but that sounds real colonialist to me…
–Anicca Harriot, OTV S7 E5 A Deep Dive into the VanguardSTEM Hyperspace
Also enjoying Wikimedia's largesse was Borealis Philanthropy. Borealis is yet another grant giving organisation: They're even more political, and fully committed to driving America's cultural revolution.
Emerging LGBTQ Leaders of Color Fund
Free the Future: The ELLC Fund Celebrates Visionary LGBTQ Leaders of Color
Key Takeaway: Long-term investment from funders like the ELLC Fund is why young queer and trans movement leaders have been able to make unprecedented strides in the fight for abolishing policing systems, such as the closure of immigrant detention centers and city jails, and the removal of cops from schools.
Slide 5: Understand the Key Questions & Talking Points from The Demand is Still Defund and What’s Next? Safer and More Justice Communities Without Policing.
What Have Organizers Accomplished Since the 2020 Uprisings?
From the Summer of 2020 to early 2021, organizers have: Extracted over $840 million dollars from police departments; secured investments of at least $160 million dollars in communities; Removed cops from schools in 25 cities saving an additional $34 million.
What Does Police Abolition Mean?
…are best equipped to deal with those crises. Mental health service providers, social workers, violence interventionists, victim/survivor advocates, religious leaders, neighbors, family members and friends—all of the people who really make up the fabric of a community—are better equipped to respond to crises than armed strangers who are statistically unlikely to live in the neighborhoods they patrol.
But Without Police, Who Will Protect Us from Robbers & Murderers?
In this transition process, we may need a small, specialized class of public servants whose job it is to respond to violent crimes. We also know that some of our community members building…
Wikimedia gave $250,000 to Borealis's Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. That money was then cascaded down to a dozens of ideologically aligned news outlets across the US.
Thus, the money you give to keep Wikipedia online is diverted to bankroll the inescapable American culture war.
Back in 2017, a Wikipedian called Guy Macon wrote a strident article entitled "Wikipedia has a Cancer". He predicted Wikimedia's runaway spending would bankrupt Wikipedia, resulting in its takeover by Facebook or Google.
Since then, Wikimedia's budget has almost doubled.
What Macon misunderstood is that orgs like Wikimedia are not cancers. They are parasites that cannot survive outside their host. Almost nobody would donate to Wikimedia so it could spend money on these causes. Without Wikipedia, Wikimedia would starve.
In the west, an advanced industry of NGOs, charities, and foundations has evolved which funds so much of the weirdness in our daily lives. A caste of activist-professionals have emerged, which inevitably capture any non-profit with spare cash.
This is what is sometimes called The Blob: a powerful but inconspicuous force that has given us the dysfunction of the 21st century.
@liam
Parasite is a separate organism, that has it's own lifecycle and can be surgically removed.
Cancer is an uncontrolled growth of mutated cells. It is YOU, so if it grows enough, it can spread across the entire body.
Leftist activism is cancer, since removing it does require a complete restart of your immune system, and removing cells from every part of the body.
if you care more about knowledge aggregation, there is a way, i suspect. one component, but not the entire thing would be: instead of making a Wikipedia 2, give people tooling to create decentralized versions. most won't, but not having a single canonical article at all is actually good
@liam
if your decentralization is a federated model, i think this would also give insight into the knowledge base and their process of making sense of the world for respective groups maintaining their cluster
@PostingHellbound @liam
> instead of making a Wikipedia 2, give people tooling to create decentralized versions
I don't think you get my comment.
Twitter didn't rise until Facebook showed serious signs of dying.
As soon as Twitter was bought, people were running to the Fedi, but it still wasn't enough, because Elon didn't push hard enough.
Decentralized alternative can exist, but there is space only for one center of information, and that throne is kept by the useless wikipedia right now. It's existence is making any further progress impossible.
i mean federated stuff is not popular and most people don't give a shit about having accurate beliefs.
this would be more about the sane people using something else that isn't subject to entryism and subversion.
things like wikipedia are an attractive target for wokies because everyone reads it
i'm suggesting letting the retards stay on Wikipedia, which if i'm right, should simply be outperformed by this solution with regards to information aggregation. (but NOT user numbers. unlike political solutions, this isn't for everyone)
@liam
you are underestimating institutional rot, which is invisible for a while then causes a sudden collapse.
i do think you can let them centralize then kick them into hell
@liam @LukeAlmighty
@PostingHellbound @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club @liam @LukeAlmighty@shitposter.club These organizations get bullied into giving up the reigns after malfeasance, corruption, and embezzelement.
@liam When it comes to gigaprojects like Wikipedia, repairing them is impossible.
But starting a new one is impossible, while the old one is still standing strong. Just enjoy watching it die, because only after the reputation is lost can a new project get some hope.