A less sneaky way for X promoting a "New Wikipedia": For every post with a Wikipedia link, before posting X would show a message about why it Old Wikipedia is problematic, and offer to automatically change it to New Wikipedia.
Maybe a pop-up asking users if they wish to stay with the default (new Wikipedia) or continue using old bad Wikipedia. Changeable in settings. Opt-out nudge approach.
Or even simpler: Wikipedia content could per default be displayed in-page, like Facebook Instant Articles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Instant_Articles). Ofc with link to original / fulfilling all license obligations
Could be sold as user-convenience (even as "helping wikipedia to save on server costs"), with much less risk of being politicized.
But the effect would be still the same: less people see the WP's calls for donations.
This could actually be a call to all webmasters (e.g. Substack, but also Wordpress): Use plugins to display WP content in-site. Legally, it's not problem due to WP's license.
What we all suspected. Thanks, Emil. Wikipedia has fallen to Conquest's Law: any enterprise not explicitly right-wing will in time become left-wing. See Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. government, and all the rest.
I know I'll probably get blasted for this, but here goes:
Between all of this fighting over right-wing and left-wing kerfuffle, we could just agree to act civilized to the people around us?
And there must be a reason why so many not initially radically right-leaning groups eventually gravitate towards left-wing beliefs...maybe because it is inherently based on the value of each person acting within a group?
Left wing values are not balanced. Malicious envy seems to be the primary driver, and any means to support their desired political outcome are valid. Ethics does not play a role in left wing decision making at an organizational level, whereas it does in right with organizations (provided left wing individuals don’t get into management).
What's "destroying civilization" is the fact that some politicians are forcing their beliefs on others and creating a less safe environment for everyone.
Right wing politicians say, "You're taking away our personal rights and freedoms by putting in more restrictive gun laws" and yet they are doing the same to queer children, and students, and women, and visible, cultural, ethnic, and religious minorities. You might think these are the same thing, but in this case it's a question of life and death, not a question of owning a another dangerous toy.
I'm not going to take sides here--I resist that simply because I'd self-distort the issues in question--but the place to start is to ask if the rights being violated, as you mention, are contractually (legally) assured in some fashion. If not, then such violations are more prone to subjective interpretation.
Yes, many politicians are forcing their beliefs on people. The Republicans do it to some extent although most of what you are talking about is not depriving people of rights, it's resisting indoctrination and protecting children from medical mutilation. Currently, the Democrats are by far the bigger threat to freedom and democracy. You mention minority religions -- it's the Democrats who are attacking Jews and upholding murderers, rapists, and torturers.
Well, you've sure given me a lot of material to work with here!
You say Republicans are simply trying to resist indoctrination. Indoctrination by who? Democrats? The woke movement? The word "indoctrination" itself implies a power dynamic and suggests that the "indoctrinators", if you will, are more powerful than those supposedly being indoctrinated.
The word "mutilation" also denotes a lack of consent or willingness. Children who undergo gender reaffirming surgery (which I'm guessing is what you're talking about when you say "medical mutilation" for children) are far less likely to commit suicide (source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8888486/). Are you saying you would rather a child die than recieve the care they need and deserve?
Democrats are not upholding criminals. It's the Republicans who are voting a (literal) criminal to the nation into a position that will allow him to have the power to make decisions that will ruin many people's lives.
The Democrats control most of the media including the tax-funded NPR, they control education. They have great influence in the tech companies in censoring and blocking access to what they don't want to hear. Children are not capable of consent to drastic surgical and hormonal interventions. Many face a lifetime without an ability to achieve orgasm, have children, or nurse children. This is not "care." Or it's care in the same way that slavery is freedom and war is peace.
How can you say that Democrats are not upholding criminals? Thieves, muggers, and other scum are not prosecuted while political opponents are the target of unrelenting and unconstitutional lawfare. I dislike Trump a great deal but he would be far less damaging to the country than Biden or whoever replaces his barely-living corpse. Trump blusters a lot but what damage has he done? His trade policies are stupid but Biden has been no better.
You know, it's interesting to consider that we're assigning a center-to-left drift for *groups*, but in my experience I've very often seen a center, or even left, drift to the right. And seldom have I seen the opposite: a drift leftward.
So, a vast generalization to play with, mentally: groups tend to move leftward, while individuals tend to move rightward.
"At the end of 2023, Wikimedia (again, Wikipedia's parent organization) has a staggering 250 million dollars in assets."
Which is, per the numbers given, between one and two years of operating expenses, which are also growing over time, so that doesn't seem that weird to me.
"So what are they spending the other 166 million dollars on? Well, for starters, they give away 24 million to various organizations."
Well, "for starters", except that's really the only thing that you take issue with, other than a couple of inflated salaries for senior people (much like, say, every other organization in existence). You basically act like 100m in salaries is all trash because their board are making bank but honestly there's like two people on this board that cost more than a single senior software engineer at a FAANG company and it's almost certainly true that Wikipedia employs a bunch of software engineers who probably account for a huge chunk of that salary.
You seem to erroneously conclude that the only "true" cost of running Wikipedia is the server hosting costs, as though you could just leave Wikipedia sitting there and nothing would happen, but that's just not how large software systems work.
I think your description about the equity spending is hyperbolic but even on its own terms you have only really shown that $4.5m of $180m in donations has definitely gone anywhere you object to.
the first job on their jobs page https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs is about "the inclusion of women and non-binary contributors" to "grow encyclopaedic content to better reflect gender-diverse topics"
the bigger crime here is the routine bullshit jobs nonprofit sham. musk's cuts at twitter show how few ppl you actually need. dont need many ppl to build and run mediawiki and all the other stuff. could cut 95% of staff and run the same.
I don't think Twitter is a great comparison because it's basically a collapsing company and has had at least one big public technical failure (the Ron DeDantis campaign interview). It also takes a while for this sort of damage to accrue - I would expect Twitter to have more and more technical debt and eventually start having more obvious manifestations of it, if they stick around that long.
it is a good comparison. it has been 18 months of ppl making those exact same claims, and...nothing. not even 30 mins of the site being down. even with all the stupid stuff musk did it survived. the business surviving is a diff q from the site breaking.
Wikipedia is not a technically challenging service to operate in 2024. Anyone who hast setup/hosted their own mediawiki instance knows this. There is no excuse for $100 million payroll here. None. Salaries at companies like Google and Facebook are an inappropriate comparison because those are surveillance capitalist projects where the real work of the company is cutting edge data science. Wikipedia does not require MS and PhD grads from MIT.
I really doubt "hosting your own mediawiki instance" has all of the same technical or organizational problems as hosting and operating the one millions of people use daily.
Also having worked at Google I can tell you that the lion's share of the engineering work there is definitely not "cutting edge data science". Most of it is just like everywhere else, building CRUD services and moving data around with slight transformations.
Cherchez la (blanc as it is in this case)femme. Katherine Maher got her Bachelors (!)in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and no doubt the blonde was very popular with the faithful... She's typical of the well remunerated white women that are dotted all over global organisations and corporations engaging in a relentless anti white male agenda.
Agree. I do wonder what is going on in their minds. Lets assume they succeed, what then? Is it a death wish you think? Do they not travel? Most of the world is nothing like the Northern European society she grew up in, which is what much of the US still is. In about 60-70 percent of the world a woman cannot walk about safely. Do they not understand this?
I am baffled when I see this animus aimed at the only group who gave women the vote voluntarily just to keep them happy.
Further proof that those drawn to hard Left and Marxist ideas are abnormal.
I cannot be the only person to reluctantly come to the conclusion I do not wish to live alongside people who spend every waking hour scheming to undermine social norms, stability and the basic foundations of society. It is simply too exhausting and when I read articles like this I am not surprised, but I am dismayed. What is wrong with them?What kind of world do people like Maher want to live in?
I now believe it is simply not possible to live in a society with people like this because what they create is not some racially perfect equitable society. They create San Fransisco, and its blatant decline and failure does not stop them one bit. They just find even more racism, sexism and inequity to blame so they can try again.
It’s impossible to live with these people because no matter how incompetent they are, they demand to be in charge and they insist that they’re smarter than you because they have more credentials.
I get that. But what are they seeing? What do they see when they look at San Francisco or Portland. Even parts of London. We all see the decline. How are people like Maher created? Can she really believe her world will improve with no white men in it? It has to be mental illness.
"What kind of world do people like Maher want to live in?"
Here's my realistic take on this type of person: They unquestioningly believe, without the least reservation, that they'll be on top in the emerging new world they seek to create.
It's a function of arrogance, and the irony is, if *anyone* in the effete western world has privilege, it's these self-same people.
Yeah, infesting a charitable organization, undermining its overt purpose, bending it toward prog agendas, diverting its funding toward prog causes, and increasing salaries for the infiltrators, is standard operating procedure for trust fund elites. I scented their stink on wikimedia over a decade ago and stopped donating. Useless creeps like Maher are practically raised to game the system like this. Funny to see how far out of hand it's gotten since then.
Ironically last generation's prog infestation in the educational institutions used to forbid students from using wikipedia, while it was still useful, citing bias and inaccuracy in spite of numerous "studies showing" it was better on average than commercial encyclopedias at the time. Now that their bugman comrades have fully skinsuited the organization it actually is full of bias an inaccuracy and basically worthless. So of course now citing wikipedia is academically acceptable.
The majority of the grants go to other country's local Wikimedia groups. For instance, Wikimedia Germany, which runs Wikidata. It used to be any money raised in those countries went to those countries locals orgs, so disbursing it instead was a compromise. Also some of the grants are for technical projects. Calling it a scam because you didn't like one tiny grant that was for two years is pretty dishonest.
Do you have a breakdown? I'm calling it a scam because they raise money for one purpose, and obviously hide the real things they are spending the money on.
They are reducing staff which includes software developers as a result of people not liking how much money they're spending, if you read the report. Grants is the only category remaining stable, ironically, presumably not only for the reasons stated but also because local Wikimedia chapters will get mad if there are budget cuts. Keeping the editors happy essentially.
The finances are all completely public. Maybe they should hire more comms people to fight this kind of misinformation but then people will complain about that too.
They’re financing authoritarian communist organizations with user donations. Those orgs are explicitly against an open market of ideas and the spreading of truth.
Therefore the conclusion must be that wikipedia leadership is against those things.
Katherine Maher already said truth gets in the way of progress, because she’s a retarded authoritarian who gets paid a lot of money to lead the fight against free speech.
And for the record, I remain amazed at the resentment (and guilt and projection) resident in Maher. The resentment! Where does that come from? Its pure social poison (and emotional poison for her) I just cant believe the levels, and lack of gratitude and grace in these people.
This sounds like criminal and civil fraud. Basically, fraud is the use of false statements to get someone's money:
"In the United States, common law generally identifies nine elements needed to establish fraud: (1) a representation of fact; (2) its falsity; (3) its materiality; (4) the representer’s knowledge of its falsity or ignorance of its truth; (5) the representer’s intent that it should be acted upon by the person in the manner reasonably contemplated; (6) the injured party’s ignorance of its falsity; (7) the injured party’s reliance on its truth; (8) the injured party’s right to rely thereon; and (9) the injured party’s consequent and proximate injury. See, e.g., Strategic Diversity, Inc. v. Alchemix Corp., 666 F.3d 1197" https://www.robertdmitchell.com/common-law-fraud
I don't know in what county or state the prosecutor would have to be located to prosecute this.
I expect for civil fraud a class action suit could be brought. Probably a court would look kindly on giving the law firm 20% for its trouble and directing the money to be used to fund the substitute Wikipedia you suggest. Thus, this would be a profitable lawsuit for some law firm.
Yes, probably civil scam lawsuit might be possible, but given their near-infinite budget, any legal case would have to be under the funding of some rogue billionaire.
On the other hand, if you think a lawsuit stands a significant chance of recovering a big chunk of Wikipedia's assets, that could be pretty attractive for a lawyer who gets paid as a fraction of assets recovered.
>be used to fund the substitute Wikipedia you suggest
problem for the substitute is not funds, but getting users, editors, links and position in search engines (which prioritize websites with original content)
Thanks for doing the legwork here. For what it’s worth, I donate to Wikipedia. Now that I’ve seen this, I never will again.
Woe is thinking about those 200 USD I gave to Wikipedia as a naive student and didn't invest in Bitcoin.
Cool, I on the other hand, now that I know this, am going to start donating to them.
Exactly, same!
A less sneaky way for X promoting a "New Wikipedia": For every post with a Wikipedia link, before posting X would show a message about why it Old Wikipedia is problematic, and offer to automatically change it to New Wikipedia.
Maybe a pop-up asking users if they wish to stay with the default (new Wikipedia) or continue using old bad Wikipedia. Changeable in settings. Opt-out nudge approach.
Or even simpler: Wikipedia content could per default be displayed in-page, like Facebook Instant Articles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Instant_Articles). Ofc with link to original / fulfilling all license obligations
Could be sold as user-convenience (even as "helping wikipedia to save on server costs"), with much less risk of being politicized.
But the effect would be still the same: less people see the WP's calls for donations.
This could actually be a call to all webmasters (e.g. Substack, but also Wordpress): Use plugins to display WP content in-site. Legally, it's not problem due to WP's license.
I want to create a new wikipedia for sure. It’s a mess in it’s current state…
What we all suspected. Thanks, Emil. Wikipedia has fallen to Conquest's Law: any enterprise not explicitly right-wing will in time become left-wing. See Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. government, and all the rest.
It gets worse. It's not even Conquest's law. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/john-osullivans-first-law-all-organizations-that-are-not-actually-right-wing-will-over-time-become-left-wing
I know I'll probably get blasted for this, but here goes:
Between all of this fighting over right-wing and left-wing kerfuffle, we could just agree to act civilized to the people around us?
And there must be a reason why so many not initially radically right-leaning groups eventually gravitate towards left-wing beliefs...maybe because it is inherently based on the value of each person acting within a group?
Left wing values are not balanced. Malicious envy seems to be the primary driver, and any means to support their desired political outcome are valid. Ethics does not play a role in left wing decision making at an organizational level, whereas it does in right with organizations (provided left wing individuals don’t get into management).
Forcing people to do what you want with underhanded means is not civilized. It is destroying civilization.
What's "destroying civilization" is the fact that some politicians are forcing their beliefs on others and creating a less safe environment for everyone.
Right wing politicians say, "You're taking away our personal rights and freedoms by putting in more restrictive gun laws" and yet they are doing the same to queer children, and students, and women, and visible, cultural, ethnic, and religious minorities. You might think these are the same thing, but in this case it's a question of life and death, not a question of owning a another dangerous toy.
I'm not going to take sides here--I resist that simply because I'd self-distort the issues in question--but the place to start is to ask if the rights being violated, as you mention, are contractually (legally) assured in some fashion. If not, then such violations are more prone to subjective interpretation.
Does this make sense to you?
Yes, many politicians are forcing their beliefs on people. The Republicans do it to some extent although most of what you are talking about is not depriving people of rights, it's resisting indoctrination and protecting children from medical mutilation. Currently, the Democrats are by far the bigger threat to freedom and democracy. You mention minority religions -- it's the Democrats who are attacking Jews and upholding murderers, rapists, and torturers.
Well, you've sure given me a lot of material to work with here!
You say Republicans are simply trying to resist indoctrination. Indoctrination by who? Democrats? The woke movement? The word "indoctrination" itself implies a power dynamic and suggests that the "indoctrinators", if you will, are more powerful than those supposedly being indoctrinated.
The word "mutilation" also denotes a lack of consent or willingness. Children who undergo gender reaffirming surgery (which I'm guessing is what you're talking about when you say "medical mutilation" for children) are far less likely to commit suicide (source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8888486/). Are you saying you would rather a child die than recieve the care they need and deserve?
Democrats are not upholding criminals. It's the Republicans who are voting a (literal) criminal to the nation into a position that will allow him to have the power to make decisions that will ruin many people's lives.
The Democrats control most of the media including the tax-funded NPR, they control education. They have great influence in the tech companies in censoring and blocking access to what they don't want to hear. Children are not capable of consent to drastic surgical and hormonal interventions. Many face a lifetime without an ability to achieve orgasm, have children, or nurse children. This is not "care." Or it's care in the same way that slavery is freedom and war is peace.
How can you say that Democrats are not upholding criminals? Thieves, muggers, and other scum are not prosecuted while political opponents are the target of unrelenting and unconstitutional lawfare. I dislike Trump a great deal but he would be far less damaging to the country than Biden or whoever replaces his barely-living corpse. Trump blusters a lot but what damage has he done? His trade policies are stupid but Biden has been no better.
‘Left-wing’ is nothing more than the tyranny of deception. Don’t be ridiculous.
You know, it's interesting to consider that we're assigning a center-to-left drift for *groups*, but in my experience I've very often seen a center, or even left, drift to the right. And seldom have I seen the opposite: a drift leftward.
So, a vast generalization to play with, mentally: groups tend to move leftward, while individuals tend to move rightward.
If this is true, what might it imply?
Education in exact sciences is a always a drift to the ‘far-right’.
This analysis seems a little overhyped.
"At the end of 2023, Wikimedia (again, Wikipedia's parent organization) has a staggering 250 million dollars in assets."
Which is, per the numbers given, between one and two years of operating expenses, which are also growing over time, so that doesn't seem that weird to me.
"So what are they spending the other 166 million dollars on? Well, for starters, they give away 24 million to various organizations."
Well, "for starters", except that's really the only thing that you take issue with, other than a couple of inflated salaries for senior people (much like, say, every other organization in existence). You basically act like 100m in salaries is all trash because their board are making bank but honestly there's like two people on this board that cost more than a single senior software engineer at a FAANG company and it's almost certainly true that Wikipedia employs a bunch of software engineers who probably account for a huge chunk of that salary.
You seem to erroneously conclude that the only "true" cost of running Wikipedia is the server hosting costs, as though you could just leave Wikipedia sitting there and nothing would happen, but that's just not how large software systems work.
I think your description about the equity spending is hyperbolic but even on its own terms you have only really shown that $4.5m of $180m in donations has definitely gone anywhere you object to.
the donations are a problem but you are right the 100m is worse. their staff and contractor page has 563 people https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors the breakdown
advancement=96
communicaton=38
finance and admin=39
legal=52
product=154
talent and culture=31
technology=149
the first job on their jobs page https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs is about "the inclusion of women and non-binary contributors" to "grow encyclopaedic content to better reflect gender-diverse topics"
the bigger crime here is the routine bullshit jobs nonprofit sham. musk's cuts at twitter show how few ppl you actually need. dont need many ppl to build and run mediawiki and all the other stuff. could cut 95% of staff and run the same.
this is why ppl shouldn't waste money donating.
I don't think Twitter is a great comparison because it's basically a collapsing company and has had at least one big public technical failure (the Ron DeDantis campaign interview). It also takes a while for this sort of damage to accrue - I would expect Twitter to have more and more technical debt and eventually start having more obvious manifestations of it, if they stick around that long.
it is a good comparison. it has been 18 months of ppl making those exact same claims, and...nothing. not even 30 mins of the site being down. even with all the stupid stuff musk did it survived. the business surviving is a diff q from the site breaking.
Wikipedia is not a technically challenging service to operate in 2024. Anyone who hast setup/hosted their own mediawiki instance knows this. There is no excuse for $100 million payroll here. None. Salaries at companies like Google and Facebook are an inappropriate comparison because those are surveillance capitalist projects where the real work of the company is cutting edge data science. Wikipedia does not require MS and PhD grads from MIT.
I really doubt "hosting your own mediawiki instance" has all of the same technical or organizational problems as hosting and operating the one millions of people use daily.
Also having worked at Google I can tell you that the lion's share of the engineering work there is definitely not "cutting edge data science". Most of it is just like everywhere else, building CRUD services and moving data around with slight transformations.
Cherchez la (blanc as it is in this case)femme. Katherine Maher got her Bachelors (!)in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and no doubt the blonde was very popular with the faithful... She's typical of the well remunerated white women that are dotted all over global organisations and corporations engaging in a relentless anti white male agenda.
Agree. I do wonder what is going on in their minds. Lets assume they succeed, what then? Is it a death wish you think? Do they not travel? Most of the world is nothing like the Northern European society she grew up in, which is what much of the US still is. In about 60-70 percent of the world a woman cannot walk about safely. Do they not understand this?
I am baffled when I see this animus aimed at the only group who gave women the vote voluntarily just to keep them happy.
Further proof that those drawn to hard Left and Marxist ideas are abnormal.
I cannot be the only person to reluctantly come to the conclusion I do not wish to live alongside people who spend every waking hour scheming to undermine social norms, stability and the basic foundations of society. It is simply too exhausting and when I read articles like this I am not surprised, but I am dismayed. What is wrong with them?What kind of world do people like Maher want to live in?
I now believe it is simply not possible to live in a society with people like this because what they create is not some racially perfect equitable society. They create San Fransisco, and its blatant decline and failure does not stop them one bit. They just find even more racism, sexism and inequity to blame so they can try again.
It’s impossible to live with these people because no matter how incompetent they are, they demand to be in charge and they insist that they’re smarter than you because they have more credentials.
I get that. But what are they seeing? What do they see when they look at San Francisco or Portland. Even parts of London. We all see the decline. How are people like Maher created? Can she really believe her world will improve with no white men in it? It has to be mental illness.
Not necessarily.
Arrogance alone could do it, but on a sliding scale the less arrogance present in the individual, the more neurosis is needed, I think.
Oh, in my experience in the corporate world what they see is the proles failing to execute their brilliant visions.
It’s not their policies that fail, it’s the people failing them.
Yes, I guess that would be the obvious cope. The idea was great, but the execution was left to clowns hence the mass death event, lol.
"What kind of world do people like Maher want to live in?"
Here's my realistic take on this type of person: They unquestioningly believe, without the least reservation, that they'll be on top in the emerging new world they seek to create.
It's a function of arrogance, and the irony is, if *anyone* in the effete western world has privilege, it's these self-same people.
That is very likely if they are narcissists since they have a deluded view of the world.
If Elon made his own Wikipedia, wouldn't every article just say:
░M░Y░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ ?
Yeah, infesting a charitable organization, undermining its overt purpose, bending it toward prog agendas, diverting its funding toward prog causes, and increasing salaries for the infiltrators, is standard operating procedure for trust fund elites. I scented their stink on wikimedia over a decade ago and stopped donating. Useless creeps like Maher are practically raised to game the system like this. Funny to see how far out of hand it's gotten since then.
Ironically last generation's prog infestation in the educational institutions used to forbid students from using wikipedia, while it was still useful, citing bias and inaccuracy in spite of numerous "studies showing" it was better on average than commercial encyclopedias at the time. Now that their bugman comrades have fully skinsuited the organization it actually is full of bias an inaccuracy and basically worthless. So of course now citing wikipedia is academically acceptable.
The majority of the grants go to other country's local Wikimedia groups. For instance, Wikimedia Germany, which runs Wikidata. It used to be any money raised in those countries went to those countries locals orgs, so disbursing it instead was a compromise. Also some of the grants are for technical projects. Calling it a scam because you didn't like one tiny grant that was for two years is pretty dishonest.
Do you have a breakdown? I'm calling it a scam because they raise money for one purpose, and obviously hide the real things they are spending the money on.
They're not hiding, it's all completely public.
https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Finances has a breakdown of how much the grants portion is going to be spent specifically on wikidata.
They are reducing staff which includes software developers as a result of people not liking how much money they're spending, if you read the report. Grants is the only category remaining stable, ironically, presumably not only for the reasons stated but also because local Wikimedia chapters will get mad if there are budget cuts. Keeping the editors happy essentially.
Do you have a complete listing of all things the money goes to? I only see bits and pieces around.
Well maybe they should point that out.
The finances are all completely public. Maybe they should hire more comms people to fight this kind of misinformation but then people will complain about that too.
They’re financing authoritarian communist organizations with user donations. Those orgs are explicitly against an open market of ideas and the spreading of truth.
Therefore the conclusion must be that wikipedia leadership is against those things.
Katherine Maher already said truth gets in the way of progress, because she’s a retarded authoritarian who gets paid a lot of money to lead the fight against free speech.
Wikipedia pays their employees salaries? And has slightly over one year of expenses in reserve?
Sounds truly scandalous.
Great article, but I’m just surprised there are so many people who didn’t already know this.
Wikipedia being wholly corrupt has been common knowledge on the right for easily a decade.
And for the record, I remain amazed at the resentment (and guilt and projection) resident in Maher. The resentment! Where does that come from? Its pure social poison (and emotional poison for her) I just cant believe the levels, and lack of gratitude and grace in these people.
There’s a club, and we’re not in it. A story as old as time.
Speaking of Wikipedia forks, Vox Day and friends did that years ago:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page
Not sure how current it is.
Do you have any Wikipedia alternatives that don’t rely on getting support from a highly charged political figure like Musk?
There's a few already. None of them are worth using right now. https://justapedia.org/index.php?title=Main_Page https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
This sounds like criminal and civil fraud. Basically, fraud is the use of false statements to get someone's money:
"In the United States, common law generally identifies nine elements needed to establish fraud: (1) a representation of fact; (2) its falsity; (3) its materiality; (4) the representer’s knowledge of its falsity or ignorance of its truth; (5) the representer’s intent that it should be acted upon by the person in the manner reasonably contemplated; (6) the injured party’s ignorance of its falsity; (7) the injured party’s reliance on its truth; (8) the injured party’s right to rely thereon; and (9) the injured party’s consequent and proximate injury. See, e.g., Strategic Diversity, Inc. v. Alchemix Corp., 666 F.3d 1197" https://www.robertdmitchell.com/common-law-fraud
I don't know in what county or state the prosecutor would have to be located to prosecute this.
I expect for civil fraud a class action suit could be brought. Probably a court would look kindly on giving the law firm 20% for its trouble and directing the money to be used to fund the substitute Wikipedia you suggest. Thus, this would be a profitable lawsuit for some law firm.
Yes, probably civil scam lawsuit might be possible, but given their near-infinite budget, any legal case would have to be under the funding of some rogue billionaire.
On the other hand, if you think a lawsuit stands a significant chance of recovering a big chunk of Wikipedia's assets, that could be pretty attractive for a lawyer who gets paid as a fraction of assets recovered.
>be used to fund the substitute Wikipedia you suggest
problem for the substitute is not funds, but getting users, editors, links and position in search engines (which prioritize websites with original content)
i need to give wikipedia my entire life savings asap