It feels a bit cherry-picked... and I counted $500k of examples listed. The more I read of the rant, the more I felt that the author is trying to manipulate me.
> Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded
Feels like there must be more to the story... and was a million dollars spent on this? Or more like $5000? Again, feels like they're trying too hard to incite outrage. (Perhaps that's the way on Twitter)
But it isn't, the original "Wikipedia has cancer" article has no connection whatsoever to these "culture wars" screeches. This Twitter thread is trying to tie it's critique over $500k of the hundred million budget to a well established different criticism to leech off legitimacy for it's partisan-infested shitposting.
Well, there is money on the line. Lots of money based on the statements linked in parents post. If I were to read it cynically, I would comment that someone, who was expecting to see a donation did not so they decided to start an all out information war with Wiki over this.
That said, even if cherry picked, the example provided is sufficiently damning for me to refrain from donating if it was determined to be true ( I am not a donor to that cause so I have no horse here ).
<<Feels like there must be more to the story..
I agree with this wholeheartedly. There is a concerted effort to go after Wiki for one reason or another. The situation they find themselves in is not new, but has only recently became an issue in public eye. And I am saying this as a person, who is leaning towards saying 'Wiki does not NEED more money; other charities should get a slice'.
The thread you provide is overly alarmist. Wikipedia giving a few millions to social justice groups isn't "funneling" much first compared to political financing as a whole, and is not "culture war."
I would urge people looking at this thread to think about the idea of "culture war," who is selling and profiteering from making it a front page issue (it's not).
If I donate to Wikipedia, I expect that my donation will go to Wikipedia, not to unknown external groups. That's a bait and switch. According to the twitter thread, $22.9 million was given in such grants. That's almost 10x what Wikipedia is paying for hosting. That's not "funneling." That's taking the whole pie.
It's a donation, not an investment. There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions on your behalf.
You can expect money to be used in some ways, sure, but it's not like WM uses 50% of your donation on vanity projects.
Personally, I wish WM would invest more in the quality of non-English articles. French "toponymie" sections tend to be brigaded for whatever reasons for instance. French linguists wage wars apparently.
If the money is being sent elsewhere, it means they are receiving more than they can manage. That changes the fundraising message. If a friend said please help me with my medical bills, then you later find out a portion of the money was spent on something unrelated, you are either going to give them less money the next time around or nothing.
Sure, but there's also no obligation to donate to Wikimedia in the first place, and it's quite reasonable to decide that if the organization is flush enough with money that it can donate it to outside organizations, it doesn't need more. (And it certainly shouldn't imply it needs more to keep the lights on.)
> There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions on your behalf.
That’s the whole point of nonprofits?
From Wikipedia (ha!):
> Key aspects of nonprofits are accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to every person who has invested time, money, and faith into the organization. Nonprofit organizations are accountable to the donors, founders, volunteers, program recipients, and the public community.
And if they pay tons of other foundations that aren't them, with the money I donated to them, then they're not getting my money anymore. Or probably a lot of peoples'.
> There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions
Uh, people have gotten in a lot of trouble in the past for claiming to raise money for specific causes and using that money for something else. I'm guessing Wikimedia is on the legal side of this fairly gray area, but as a blanket statement, you're mistaken: Wikimedia is very much under a specific legal obligation to use funds collected through charitable fundraising for that charity.
You're right. They don't use 50% on vanity projects. They use way more than that. Their donation income last year was around $150 million and their hosting costs were $2.4 million. Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate). That's >80% on BS.
I think you misunderstand what Wikimedia is and does. It's not just Wikipedia and hosting. It is also a lot of research into their Wikidata free knowledge database (look it up) for instance.
It requires a lot of people and core knowledge to develop and run. To some extent Wikimedia is a research company too.
> Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate)
On this site, you will find many who will breathlessly insist that the only way to run a website at scale is through top tier engineering solutions developed by teams of highly paid engineers. I am not sure why the calculus changes so much for a non profit. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that they have $8 million in processing fees just for their donations.
I have no idea what is the right number they should be spending, but I know their costs are much higher than servers and bandwidth.
It's a conflict of interest, no matter your politics, when an organization is supposed to be a neutral purveyor of knowledge. (unless I somehow misunderstood the purpose of Wikipedia, which is possible)
Just want to point out that "neutral" doesn't always mean apolitical, even though it may be convenient to think so. Hypothetically, if in a two party system there is a "burn and ban the books" party, and a "let's really not burn the books" party, the moral obligation of a neutral purveyor of knowledge is to do everything in its power to stop the "burn the books" club. How Wikipedia is interpreting that can be questioned, but not the fact that it should try to further the cause for its existence.
Not OP, but most of the controversy has been about age restrictions on the books "Gender Queer: A Memoir" which contains images of graphic scenes of gay sex and oral sex as well as a girl encouraged to “taste” herself by her own siblings or “Lawn Boy” which describes a man talking approvingly to his friend about having oral sex with a grown man when he was only in fourth grade. I'm not aware of any 'bans' per se, but the books have been removed from some school libraries or made subject to age restrictions.
Based on your descriptions, it's hard for me to conclude that these books are "targeting children sexuality" as the OP put it. Teens are--shock of shocks!--sometimes sexually active, even by choice. My brother was sexually active in the 4th grade. Is it that weird for literature to represent those kinds of experiences? I can see where one would make it generally unavailable to the very young, or maybe only with parental permission, but does this seem like a project to "turn kids gay" (as alleged by some one star amazon reviews)? No, lol.
> My brother was sexually active in the 4th grade.
I think a lot of people would find 9-10 years old a bit young for sex. One is also generally not a 'teenager' until 13 and indeed many of the age restrictions are for materials like these books with respect to pre-teens.
I think 9-10 years old is a bit young for sex. Did my brother? Apparently not! No one was making any claims about the ages of teenagers, just providing an anecdote that consensual sexual activity (insofar as two 4th graders can consent) can happen at ages where us older folks think it is inappropriate.
Age restrictions are arbitrary. Are there some 16-year-olds I'd trust more with a vote than 25 year olds? Yes.
In any case, and to reiterate my prior point, none of this seems to be "grooming" or "pedophilia."
Grooming generally consists of showing kids porn, drugging them and then raping them and making them feel guilt over their own abuse so that they do not disclose it.
So it's understandable that people are concerned by people who want to give sexually explicit material to preteens.
And some authors of children's works have long attracted controversy, like Piers Anthony who had that hotline to contact him in his books (1-800-HI-PIERS) and who wrote extensively about child sexuality both in children's books (the "adult conspiracy" in Xanth) and quite explicitly in his adult works, like Firefly which has explicit sex involving a 5 year old girl.
Quotes of that and some similar works of his can be found here, you have been warned:
I think it's fair to be concerned about such things, and I say that as someone who read much of the Xanth series as a teenager and only figured out how damned creepy it was a very long time afterwards.
Note that I do not claim to have any proof that he's a pedophile, nor do I have any evidence of him harming any kids. But at the same time, I think it's fair for people to want to keep their children away from dirty old men like him and I wouldn't give any kids of mine a Xanth book.
It seems to me that both of the books you cited actively promote not feeling guilt about what you seem to allege is grooming...wouldn't that undermine your argument? In fact, it seems that the more kids are armed with appropriate sexual education and--importantly--consent education, the less vulnerable they will be to sexual abuse. [0]
And perhaps you have been so blinded by your moral panic, but you appear to not have been reading my posts: I agree with you that texts like this should be restricted for younger kids. (I haven't stated this, but I vehemently disagree with outright bans that make them unavailable to all.) I merely contend that this is not in fact grooming or pedophilia, and that what the right is engaged in is yet another example of the moral panics they gin up to gain political power. (See: war on drugs, satanic panic, et. al.[1])
The right is weaponizing this panic, and ultimately conflating pedophilia with the LGBTQ community. See: countless anti-drag legislation, armed militias showing up at pride events, et. al.
The fact remains that most child predation happens by a person the child knows [2]
Basically to sum up: I agree with you on restricting the availability of books with sexually explicitly content in regards to young kids. I disagree with outright bans. Kids are sexually active creatures--whether anyone likes it or not. Lack of education about this topic leads to suboptimal outcomes: teen pregnancy, sexual violence, etc. These books don't strike me as grooming or pedophilia, and in fact, they seem to be the basis of a moral panic being used to gain political power.
I'm not sure how you see shame as the real harm from this, because it goes significantly deeper than that. I do think we may be talking past each other on some things, though, and may not disagree on certain points. Generally speaking, the disputes are concerning what type and at what age children should be taught things and what input parents should have.
Regarding moral panics, those are at the root of most political activism. I don't find this surprising in any way.
Finally, regarding the 'armed militias', I assume that relates to the 'sniper' story, unless there was some other story I wasn't aware of (which is possible)? I'll just mention that the story appears to be dubious in terms of whether there were any actual 'snipers', and the original allegation was that they were there to protect the drag queen story hour, not to shoot them:
You're talking about rape. I am talking about books. You seem to implicitly claim that one causes the other, or makes it more likely. I dispute that claim. Stop conflating books with rape.
Its weird for you defend children sexuality and then bring up an anecdotal point to defend it. Your brother being sexually active in the 4th grade (10 years old by my estimation) is not a good thing.
I am just pointing out that the age of onset of sexual activity is a distribution, and that nothing nefarious needs to happen to make it so, even at the tail ends. While I would not want my kids (who are older than 4th grade) to be sexually active at their current age, it is important to note that nothing bad happened in my brother's case.
In a related issue: is banning books going to lead to fewer bad outcomes? Unlikely.
Just out of curiosity, at what age do you think it is appropriate for a human to be sexually active by choice?
I think it's a pretty bold exaggeration to go from "banning books from school curricula" or even "from school libraries" to "banning books period". Conservative attempts to restrict sex education are misguided, but no books are actually being banned. Personally, I tend to feel betrayed when I'm warned of a horrible thing happening and investigate to find out it just isn't so.
Wikipedia is not a PAC, they are not NARAL or LPUS or YAF or Center for American Progress.
It isnt alarmist to notice that Nice, Professional, Educated people have been guiding institutions that are ostensibly neutral (Wikipedia, or at risk of being spicy, the ACLU) taking great pains to support a worldview that is popular with only 8% of the US population, let alone the population of the world (https://hiddentribes.us/). They are doing so at the expense of their stated mission, in Wikipedia's case - this means taking money that could be used for hosting endowments, translations, original research and using it to forward the worldview and cultural dominance of a very small group.
I don't think most of the donors know the money is used for things other than Wikipedia and that Wikimedia is very well off. This is an even bigger ethical lapse than funnelling money into charities people might not agree with.
God this shit it tiresome, giving money people doing social justice isn't funneling money into some "culture war" -- at best you could say that the groups involved see the greatest opposition to their mission is political but these groups aren't political except as a means to an end. They would, (and do, I'm part of one) support politicians on both sides of the aisle so long as they support their mission.
You would be surprised how amenable Republicans at the local level, who don't have to keep up appearances on Twitter, are to social justice -- doubly when someone in their family is a member of one of those disadvantaged groups.
You don't get to say "I don't like this so I'm going to say it's political and then demand you stay out of politics." Literally everything is political.
See I am not American and don't care about American culture war, Republican Democratican, or whatever you guys are using as an excuse to burn down buildings.
It's plain wrong to put banner ads in third world countries like Brazil and India, sounding like wikipedia doesn't have money to run their servers.
It's plain wrong to funnel that money to executives.
People who make wikipedia great aren't even involved with this. They have enough money to run servers, and a potential donation doesn't create additional content. They are trying hard to hide that fact with some clever wording.
This is textbook example of __dark pattern__ which highly privacy focused people love to point out when a bootstrapped startup collects telemetry data from their little application.
The Wikipedia fundraising effort is sounds like a metric driven C suite executive desperately trying to make charts "stonk".
That depends , if they took a principled position that, say trans rights groups were censoring notable science re: gender and sexuality and donated to FIRE - an organization that is specifically devoted to maintaining the academy as a place of inquiry, but incidentally opposes social justice missions, that seems like it could be in keeping with Wikipedia's wider mission and legitimate.
However, I'd feel like sponsoring the Ben Shapiro superpac would be obviously over the line - not because they're "conservative" or "against social justice", but because the way in which it opposes "social justice" is not an incidental aspect of protecting freedom of information.
Similarly, funding the pre-2015 ACLU could have a similar argument made - even though they had a liberal bent well before the Harvard amicus brief.
Depends, is the funding literally just for “fuck these people in particular who have social justice missions” or do you really mean “donating to groups whose missions I don’t agree with and who in due course end up opposing social justice groups.” Because the former is just mean while the latter is fine.
>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
Foolish me, I thought it was Gilded Age-level income inequality, and its subsequent funding of authoritarianism that was giving us the dysfunction of the 21st century. Good thing we have this crack journo to tell us it's...
Post-modernist deconstruction of what is viewed as "white people culture" (meritocracy, high-trust societies, traditional gender roles and family) inspired by the Frankfurt School[0] of philosophy and older concepts[1].
They're funneling tens of millions of dollars of donations into the US culture war.