• ToiletFlushShowerScream@piefed.world
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    1 month ago

    I did both in the past.
    And promptly lost the RAR license.

    And not feeling so great about wikimedias recent organizational actions.

    The world is complicated

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      1 month ago

      It’s so crazy to me that a non profit is anti union. Like, I know we live in a capitalist dystopia but I guess I didn’t think it was that bad.

      • cosmos8188@leminal.space
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        1 month ago

        The issue with wikipedia goes more than this when the realisation hits that some pages are extremely biased with whole sections relying on a singular reference. Its a non profit alright, but it has its share of gatekeepers that lean on serving factually incorrect info or even commonly accepted but incorrect info.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      WinRAR got what they needed. You did good.

      Wikimedia… Hindsight is a bitch, you either live life not helping places that need it or take chances on helping people you don’t know are assholes.

      TBF, organizational actions aside, they made a thing, it’s pretty damned useful, you can download the thing and keep it forever. I’ve donated to causes that have done less for me.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    I donated to wikipedia once and they went after me every year like I had fed an hungry dog.

    No, I doesn’t got more cookies boy!

    • dimmuborgnine@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I donate to them regularly, or at least I did until I found out they were going to spend my donation on union busting.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, this is why I stopped donating to them

      I donated to them for a few years, $20 a year, so not much. And then one year they sent me an email that was very clearly meant to guilt trip me into thinking I wasn’t donating enough to the platform. So I cancelled the contribution instead.

      • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        Marketing people really love the smell of their own farts. They all feel like they are the smartest people ever.

        I bet the person who typed up that email was thinking “hell yeah, I fucking got those suckers right where I want em.”

    • ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      Don’t. They had 180 million usd income, with operating cost of 3 million usd, and they currently have over quarter BILLION is net assets. They (Wiki foundation) are at the point where they become cancerous to the Wikipedia - e. g. they are currently union busting.

      • DaleGribble88@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        The Crohns and Colitis foundation must have spent triple on mailers and phone calls than I have ever actually donated. It upsets me because I know how much good that organization does, and it’s upsetting to feel that my donation has contributed none to those efforts. Hopefully I’m wrong, but I’m speaking to how the pestering for more money makes me feel.

      • oppy1984@lemdro.id
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        1 month ago

        I donated to st Jude for a while, every month I got mail multiple times a week asking for more money along with my “free gift”. Even talking into account buying supplies in bulk and using every conservative low-ball numbers I estimated I was getting around 60% of my donation back every month. I just gave up and stopped donating, and even sent them a letter telling them why I was ending my donation. I still get mail from them at least once a month and it’s been at least 15 years since I last donated.

        They are doing something extremely important, but I don’t want my donation being thrown away like that. Send me a donation envelope once a month, that’s fine even though I was making my donation online, but the almost every other day mailing that was packed with notepads and return address labels? Nope I’m not fund that. On the plus side I haven’t bought return address labels since Obama was in office, and I doubt I’ll have to buy any until Chad who just graduated from DeVry, becomes our 64th president.

      • Donkter@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Enshittification comes for us all. But we really need to be proactive about saving wikipedia, or at least it’s data.

        • Allero@lemmy.today
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          1 month ago

          Wikimedia Foundation has enough assets to keep hosting Wikipedia for the next 60 years, according to their financial reports:

          https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3f/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY_24-25_Audit_Report.pdf

          Wikipedia will really be fine. It is all the other expenses that raise eyebrows in a major way. This, of course, includes the pay of the executives and high-ranking officials that earn anywhere between $150k to $500k a year, and their salaries keep growing exponentially. At the same time, they spend donated money hiring union-busting firms - presumably, to crush on the latest unionization attempts and keep growing their pay.

          https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries

          • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            It’s good the only thing required for a website is hosting costs that never increase. And not like… maintenance.

            • Allero@lemmy.today
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              1 month ago

              If your operating expenses for a website outweigh hosting 50:1 while most work is done by volunteers, something is seriously wrong with your books.

          • Donkter@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            The concern isn’t that Wikipedia sticks around. It would be the financialization of Wikipedia. Them turning on their workers and paying their executives enormous salaries doesn’t necessarily mean they are compromised, but it’s a concerning pattern that we’ve seen before (hell, reddit is a good example).

        • nforminvasion@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          If you have a spare hard drive lying around (rare amidst this storage famine), consider downloading Wikipedia and a few other things you would be interested in. There are multiple ways to do this, but I’ll recommend Kiwix.

          Literally just for the sake of preserving and archiving information, for a bunch of reasons (fascist retconning, natural disasters, cyber attacks, etc…). You don’t even have to seed it or make it available publicly. Use it if you want, or throw the drive into a drawer.

          If anyone are unable to do this, absolutely no worries. But to those who can, please do. It helps.

  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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    1 month ago

    Just a heads up, Wikipedia has been operating with huge margins, they’re completely safe and do not need donations right now.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    A place I use to work purchased over 1000 licenses, no corporate discount, retail prices over 5 years.
    Stupid dev refusing to use anything but winrar, stupid manager not contacting a reseller for a discount.

  • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    My work was matching donations at one point and Wikipedia was an option so I donated $50 + $50 of corpo money to Wikipedia at one point. They’ve never stopped asking me for more

        • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Wikimedia mainly does the technical work like programming the servers and hosting the website.

          You can think of it as almost like a tech company, they are even partnered with google, another union-busting tech company, tho wikimedia is a non-profit.

          One issue people had is that only a small portion of donations go to wikipedia, and rest go to wikimedia’s other projects.

          For example, they own the wikipedia trademark and sell merch, so donation money goes there also.

          Honestly I overall liked the foundation, their other projects are still “free dictionary” and “free textbooks” and so on. However union-busing is really makimg me dislike them now.

            • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Non-profits still have employees and managers and so on.

              Unions mean non-profits can’t just hire/fire people unfairly, and managers see it as a personal attack on them. They don’t want any less than 100% control.

              Also corporate grants and donations give steady increases to their income, and unions negotiate raises for employees rather than managers when that happens.

              Technically “openai foundation” is also a non-profit too.