Five reasons you should not donate to Wikipedia, ...preemptive anti-fund drive Options

[thekohser]

We all know that come December or January, the WMF is going to put up the banner ads and donation "thermometer" in order to scrounge up another million bucks from donors who don't realize the monster they're feeding.

I think Wikipedia Review could get a lot of media attention if we prepare a page (probably on the new blog) that would list "Five reasons you should not donate money to Wikipedia". The list should be simple, not foaming at the mouth, and objective in its tone. Can we come up with 5 really good reasons, then wait until the WMF fund drive starts, then spring the blog page on Digg and Reddit and Slashdot?

I would start with the following ideas:

1. Your non-profit donation will ultimately line the for-profit pockets of Jimmy Wales, Amazon, Google, the Bessemer Partners, and other corporate beneficiaries. How? Wikipedia is used as a commercial traffic engine, with 4,000+ external links to Wales' Google AdSense-supported Wikia sites, plus 25,000+ links to Amazon product stores. Clearly, others are making millions from the success of Wikipedia. Do you want to further endorse their profiteering?

2. While Wikipedia is disguised as an encyclopedia, it is actually nothing more than a fluid forum where ultimate editorial control belongs to a corps of administrators, most of whom act without real-world accountability because they don't reveal their real names, locations, and potential conflicts of interest -- even though they will not hesitate, through "complex investigations", to "out" the real names, locations, and perceived conflicts of interest of other, non-administrative editors. Why give your real-world dollars to a virtual-world multi-player forum? Have you made your donation to Second Life, too?

Will you please help keep this thread going with additional ideas? What have you ever seen happen on Wikipedia that makes you say, "Ugh, why would anyone ever give their hard-earned money to that project?"

Possible other ideas:

3. Citizendium is a new encyclopedia project founded by a co-founder of Wikipedia. There, the editors do disclose who they are in real life. You probably donated to Wikipedia last year, so why not spread the wealth to new projects like Citizendium this year?

4. Do you live in Brazil, Israel, or Saudi Arabia? Wikipedia has gone to painstaking detail to host articles about how your countries allegedly practice apartheid. If that's how you want your country described for the rest of the world, get out your checkbook.

5. Do you want your grade-school children looking at graphically-described, photo-rich pages about nipple piercings, anilingus, labia piercings, child modeling (erotic), frenum rings, strappado bondage, erotic spanking, incest pornography, smotherboxes, and Courtney Cummz and her directorial debut 'Face Invaders'? Send them to Wikipedia, while you make a donation to support the hosting of this and other material that would be shocking to most adults, housed on servers that make no attempt to filter what even pre-pubescent children can access.

Greg

This post has been edited by thekohser:

[Mndrew]

43. Wikipedia promises to give knowledge to the children of Africa while blissfully ignoring their real needs - food, water, and shelter.
44. Authors are able to maintain their point of view over articles through merciless editing and sweettalking administrators.
45. Articles on fanon are far longer than those on more established and encyclopedic topics.
46. Many a hard-working individual has seen his name defamed by a "biography" of falsehoods and misinformation on Wikipedia.
47. Furthermore, when these people appeal to get their articles removed, they are banned. Their banning is usually made public by a Google search for their name.
48. It vehemently disallows legal threats against its people, no matter how justified they are in a real society.
49. Users on Wikipedia can do literally anything behind the guise of their anonymity, leaving the world privy to their every maneuver.
50. Someday, somewhere, this could all affect you - and there is nothing you will be able to do about it.

I hope my 50 made for a good coup de grace. Cheers and enjoy!

Don't hesitate to reword them, either. I tend to view myself as a good writer but feel there is always room for improvement.

[LamontStormstar]

43. Wikipedia promises to give knowledge to the children of Africa while blissfully ignoring their real needs - food, water, and shelter.
44. Authors are able to maintain their point of view over articles through merciless editing and sweettalking administrators.
45. Articles on fanon are far longer than those on more established and encyclopedic topics.
46. Many a hard-working individual has seen his name defamed by a "biography" of falsehoods and misinformation on Wikipedia.
47. Furthermore, when these people appeal to get their articles removed, they are banned. Their banning is usually made public by a Google search for their name.
48. It vehemently disallows legal threats against its people, no matter how justified they are in a real society.
49. Users on Wikipedia can do literally anything behind the guise of their anonymity, leaving the world privy to their every maneuver.
50. Someday, somewhere, this could all affect you - and there is nothing you will be able to do about it.

I hope my 50 made for a good coup de grace. Cheers and enjoy!

Don't hesitate to reword them, either. I tend to view myself as a good writer but feel there is always room for improvement.

I already got 50 here some time ago and asked people for idea

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=12663&hl=

I got so many conflicting criticisms I didn't know where to go. But we should get a good list together soon.




Mine were.......


50 Reasons why not to donate to The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia):


1. It's taken over google almost always listed first before other websites.
2. Next on the list in a google search after Wikipedia are the endless spammy mirrors.
3. It's then filled the web with misinformation.
4. It's now filling the world with falsehoods.
5. Libel on Wikipedia even when removed from Wikipedia lasts forever on all the spammy mirrors.
6. Wikipedia tells search engines not to follow any external links, except those to its favored sites such as its for-profit site, Wikia, where basically Wikipedia is pushing traffic to.
7. Wikipedia promotes certain sites such as amazon.com in links and in return, Amazon.com gives them huge donations, violating Wikipedia's non-profit status.
8. Wikipedia sometimes blacklists linking to sites merely because the sites criticize Wikipedia.
9. Wikipedia also sometimes blacklists linking to competitors of their major donors on completely made-up charges, such as when they blacklisted overstock.com
10. Imagine a website full of the worst scum of society. Then imagine them all pretending to be intellectuals. That’s Wikipedia. Not just administrators, but most everyone there.
11. A large percentage of their administrators are under the age of 15.
12. If you’re a renowned expert using your real name on Wikipedia and some administrators (e.g. kids) decide they don’t like you and ban you, then Wikipedia writes about you and ruins your reputation.
13. Wikipedia hurts real encyclopedias and helps to make them go out of business.
14. Wikipedia gives its software out for free, enabling attack sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica that would otherwise be stuck as blogs to become monstrous wikis that take over google.
15. Wikipedia even itself is an attack site in its articles and its writings about former users they don’t like.
16. Wikipedia and corporations that donate massive amounts of money into it go around intimidating any serious critics of Wikipedia.
17. What gets on wikis is determined not by what is right, but by the people who have enough time to edit war and work up the ranks to administrator and higher (aka. a role-playing game).
18. Administrators are anonymous and obviously some people would secretly have more than one administrator account.
19. Jimmy Wales doesn’t manage the wiki properly.
20. Jimmy Wales used to be a pornographer.
21. Wikipedia has tons of very gross and sexual pictures in it, even child pornography.
22. Wikipedia gives poor synopses for movies, books, etc. They don't give any details unless its spoilers whereas places like yahoo movies do it right.
23. They wouldn't let someone use Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee as their username, which makes light humor on the finding by the Wiki Scanner that someone from the Australian government vandalized an article by adding "Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee" to it.
24. Citizendium is slightly better run than Wikipedia and so would be more worthy of your donation.
25. Wikipedia has gone to painstaking detail to host articles about Brazil, Israel and Saudi Arabia practice apartheid. If that's how you want your country described for the rest of the world, get out your checkbook.
26. Wikipedia is liable to get sued and your donation would just be paying their legal fees and not helping an encyclopedia.
27. People have been stalked and harassed in real life because of it.
28. The harassment has even caused some people to have mental breakdowns.
29. Their tracking of people is basically IP addresses so any bad user can return, play nice to become an administrator, then cause trouble.
30. Most people deeply into the community hate any new changes to the site and enjoy reverting things that aren’t vandalism all day.
31. Almost all edits on articles are vandalism, fighting over content, and reverting, rather than improving articles.
32. Wikipedia will never remove old revisions and at best they hide them so a lot of their money is spent on the hard drive space to retain all text from vandalism, reverting, and edit wars.
33. Wikipedia compresses all the vandalism and garbage within old revisions all together at once so not only is it hard drive space but even more expensive processing power that uses their money.
34. Governments and organizations pay people to edit toward their bias into articles.
35. There are reports that even administrators trusted with the highest powers are paid.
36. Wikipedia falsely considers an internet troll to be someone who disagrees with an administrator and then lets real trolls run loose, ignored by or sometimes even supported by the administration.
37. The administrators have the power to change history but all are anonymous by default.
38. Wikipedia is not going to help children in third world countries because the bulk of its content is in the languages of first world countries and pretty much nothing is in the rest.
39. Wikipedia administrators sometimes give insulting and libelous messages as their reasons they ban you.
40. Most of their administrators are drunk with power.
41. The dispute resolution process is designed so that administrators can ban any editor long before the editor can get someone to do something about their complaint.
42. Wikipedia makes most of its administrative decisions in secret on its IRC channels and then back on its website its administration disavows any connection between itself and its IRC channels.
43. Whenever you edit a wiki article, you have to watch it for the rest of your life and fight people to make sure the edit sticks, or admit you wasted your time because your edit will eventually be removed.
44. Wikipedia’s neutral point of view was originally designed by Larry Sanger for experts to write and article and a neutral party review it, but instead what’s called neutral is whatever side that wins an edit war.
45. One of the main administrators, SlimVirgin, sockpuppeted on the account “Sweet Blue Water” and instead of a userpage stated it’s a blocked sock puppet, the userpage is deleted and protected from recreation. The administrators also refuse to keep a sockpuppeteer tag on SlimVirgin’s userpage, despite everyone else who socked has one.
46. The “let’s change reality” type of Wikipedia thinking spilled into real life and made Pluto no longer a planet.
47. The software design allows for if one person doesn’t like another, they can go through all their enemy’s old edits and stalk them for the editor’s personal information and things to revert.
48. Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia’s administrators always considers criticism of Wikipedia or its administrators as a personal attack and trolling.
49. Although Wikipedia pretends it doesn’t use voting, Wikipedia makes all its decisions based on a vote of all the non-banned accounts that bother to vote, which they call consensus. The ones that are bothered to vote most are lunatic extremists and these are who run Wikipedia from administering, to policy making, to article decisions, and even are the ones who vote for the arbitration committee and the arbitration committee are the ones who get to decide all the big decisions and they have a track record of making horrible decisions.
50. Jimbo Wales tries to use Wikipedia to rewrite history and claim himself as sole founder of Wikipedia.






This post has been edited by LamontStormstar:

[LamontStormstar]

Wikipedia is doing a huge donation drive! We really need to spread these reasons out to stop the donation this year!




So far with everyone's input, we have 59 Reasons why not to donate to The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia).

Here they are:


1. It's taken over google almost always listed first before other websites.
2. Next on the list in a google search after Wikipedia are the endless spammy mirrors.
3. It's then filled the web with misinformation.
4. It's now filling the world with falsehoods.
5. Libel on Wikipedia even when removed from Wikipedia lasts forever on all the spammy mirrors.
6. Wikipedia tells search engines not to follow any external links, except those to its favored sites such as its for-profit site, Wikia, where basically Wikipedia is pushing traffic to.
7. Wikipedia promotes certain sites such as amazon.com in links and in return, Amazon.com gives them huge donations, violating Wikipedia's non-profit status.
8. Wikipedia sometimes blacklists linking to sites merely because the sites criticize Wikipedia.
9. Wikipedia also sometimes blacklists linking to competitors of their major donors on completely made-up charges, such as when they blacklisted overstock.com
10. Imagine a website full of the worst scum of society. Then imagine them all pretending to be intellectuals. That’s Wikipedia. Not just administrators, but most everyone there.
11. A large percentage of their administrators are under the age of 15.
12. If you’re a renowned expert using your real name on Wikipedia and some administrators (e.g. kids) decide they don’t like you and ban you, then Wikipedia writes about you and ruins your reputation.
13. Wikipedia hurts real encyclopedias and helps to make them go out of business.
14. Wikipedia gives its software out for free, enabling attack sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica that would otherwise be stuck as blogs to become monstrous wikis that take over google.
15. Wikipedia even itself is an attack site in its articles and its writings about former users they don’t like.
16. Wikipedia and corporations that donate massive amounts of money into it go around intimidating any serious critics of Wikipedia.
17. What gets on wikis is determined not by what is right, but by the people who have enough time to edit war and work up the ranks to administrator and higher (aka. a role-playing game).
18. Administrators are anonymous and obviously some people would secretly have more than one administrator account.
19. Jimmy Wales doesn’t manage the wiki properly.
20. Jimmy Wales used to be a pornographer.
21. Wikipedia has tons of very gross and sexual pictures in it, even child pornography.
22. Wikipedia gives poor synopses for movies, books, etc. They don't give any details unless its spoilers whereas places like yahoo movies do it right.
23. They wouldn't let someone use Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee as their username, which makes light humor on the finding by the Wiki Scanner that someone from the Australian government vandalized an article by adding "Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee" to it.
24. Citizendium is slightly better run than Wikipedia and so would be more worthy of your donation.
25. Wikipedia has gone to painstaking detail to host articles about Brazil, Israel and Saudi Arabia practice apartheid. If that's how you want your country described for the rest of the world, get out your checkbook.
26. Wikipedia is liable to get sued and your donation would just be paying their legal fees and not helping an encyclopedia.
27. People have been stalked and harassed in real life because of it.
28. The harassment has even caused some people to have mental breakdowns.
29. Their tracking of people is basically IP addresses so any bad user can return, play nice to become an administrator, then cause trouble.
30. Most people deeply into the community hate any new changes to the site and enjoy reverting things that aren’t vandalism all day.
31. Almost all edits on articles are vandalism, fighting over content, and reverting, rather than improving articles.
32. Wikipedia will never remove old revisions and at best they hide them so a lot of their money is spent on the hard drive space to retain all text from vandalism, reverting, and edit wars.
33. Wikipedia compresses all the vandalism and garbage within old revisions all together at once so not only is it hard drive space but even more expensive processing power that uses their money.
34. Governments and organizations pay people to edit toward their bias into articles.
35. There are reports that even administrators trusted with the highest powers are paid.
36. Wikipedia falsely considers an internet troll to be someone who disagrees with an administrator and then lets real trolls run loose, ignored by or sometimes even supported by the administration.
37. The administrators have the power to change history but all are anonymous by default.
38. Wikipedia is not going to help children in third world countries because the bulk of its content is in the languages of first world countries and pretty much nothing is in the rest.
39. Wikipedia administrators sometimes give insulting and libelous messages as their reasons they ban you.
40. Most of their administrators are drunk with power.
41. The dispute resolution process is designed so that administrators can ban any editor long before the editor can get someone to do something about their complaint.
42. Wikipedia makes most of its administrative decisions in secret on its IRC channels and then back on its website its administration disavows any connection between itself and its IRC channels.
43. Whenever you edit a wiki article, you have to watch it for the rest of your life and fight people to make sure the edit sticks, or admit you wasted your time because your edit will eventually be removed.
44. Wikipedia’s neutral point of view was originally designed by Larry Sanger for experts to write and article and a neutral party review it, but instead what’s called neutral is whatever side that wins an edit war.
45. One of the main administrators, SlimVirgin, sockpuppeted on the account “Sweet Blue Water” and instead of a userpage stated it’s a blocked sock puppet, the userpage is deleted and protected from recreation. The administrators also refuse to keep a sockpuppeteer tag on SlimVirgin’s userpage, despite everyone else who socked has one.
46. The “let’s change reality” type of Wikipedia thinking spilled into real life and made Pluto no longer a planet.
47. The software design allows for if one person doesn’t like another, they can go through all their enemy’s old edits and stalk them for the editor’s personal information and things to revert.
48. Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia’s administrators always considers criticism of Wikipedia or its administrators as a personal attack and trolling.
49. Although Wikipedia pretends it doesn’t use voting, Wikipedia makes all its decisions based on a vote of all the non-banned accounts that bother to vote, which they call consensus. The ones that are bothered to vote most are lunatic extremists and these are who run Wikipedia from administering, to policy making, to article decisions, and even are the ones who vote for the arbitration committee and the arbitration committee are the ones who get to decide all the big decisions and they have a track record of making horrible decisions.
50. Jimbo Wales tries to use Wikipedia to rewrite history and claim himself as sole founder of Wikipedia.
51. Wikipedia promises to give knowledge to the children of Africa while blissfully ignoring their real needs - food, water, and shelter.
52. Authors are able to maintain their point of view over articles through merciless editing and sweettalking administrators.
53. Articles on fanon are far longer than those on more established and encyclopedic topics.
54. Many a hard-working individual has seen his name defamed by a "biography" of falsehoods and misinformation on Wikipedia.
55. Furthermore, when these people appeal to get their articles removed, they are banned. Their banning is usually made public by a Google search for their name.
56. It vehemently disallows legal threats against its people, no matter how justified they are in a real society.
57. Users on Wikipedia can do literally anything behind the guise of their anonymity, leaving the world privy to their every maneuver.
58. Someday, somewhere, this could all affect you - and there is nothing you will be able to do about it.
59. If you donate and then the same day someone unfairly blocks you indefinitely and the admins won't undo the block, then despite this you can't get a refund on your donation.

This post has been edited by LamontStormstar: