“I make more money than last year” when i make lwss inflation-adjusted

“we have reached record incomes” when you make more money than ever but still less than you should (i.e. your competitor went bankrupt and you failed to capture their customer-base)

It’s all about the 💫Framing🌟

In addition to what frazorth said, you can change how a statement is interpreted by simply using a passive voice. Compare “Alice was hit by Bob” to “Bob hit Alice”. Both statements are identical, but the former is a lot less accusatory towards Bob. This technique is used when reporting about Police abuse, or about how the civilians in Gaza are treated.

You’ve never heard of people bending the truth?

Saying something factually correct, but misleading because parts are omitted?

Things like “lies of omission” basically.

Which wikipedia article? Check the references of that article. That’s your answer.

And just like that, I had an attack of perspective. Why am I in this conversation? Everyone watching seems to understand that you’re changing your story and talking nonsense, so it seems unnecessary for me to say anything else for their sake. And it seems highly unlikely that, on your side, you’re going to suddenly come to some kind of realization along the lines of, “You know what? Reality does have an anti-Russian bias, and quite a strong one, so it makes perfect sense that a source that made an attempt at publishing objective truth would be against Russia in terms of the ‘bias’ of a lot of the facts that it publishes. As well as being against Israel, NATO, or ‘the West’ in general, when those governments in turn do terrible things. I think I should spend less time carrying water for genocidal maniacs who happen to wear the right color hat, and start being reasonable.”

So I hope your talking points go really well. You’ve said that Wikipedia is terrible. Well done! Mission accomplished. Feel free to continue, I won’t stop you.

the article you’re talking about reads like a case of “our holy narrative-correcting taskforce vs their pagan misinformation agents”

[bad actors] put in the effort to build reputation…, mixing legitimate page edits with the more politically sensitive ones

through subtle changes like casting doubt on the objectivity of pro-Western accounts

they also mention adding links from Russian state-owned news, but the article doesn’t indicate that those things happen in the same incidents though mentioning it in the same sentence is certainly an attempt to conflate them. It’s one thing to remove insufficiently reliable sources, correcting misrepresented facts, and banning the wreckers that consistently produce it, but I think there is an issue if validly-sourced edits are being censored by “bias adjusters” (NPOV purposes withstanding) just because the content is deemed to have been written by a suspected bad actor.

Yeah that’s just horseshoe theory with extra steps and gymnastics to be able to say that far left is okay, really, they never do anything wrong, trust me!

Unless they do as tankies ARE the far left

Dammit. That’s too funny and I want someone to share this with but nobody i know is the right mix of wierd to get it

Yeah, far right says the same and I’m not buying it from them either

Better than letting that survey money expire and staying 100% with Google.

Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline. I don’t see how to estimate how much of that “salaries” part is related to Wikipedia rather to their other business. But even taking the most optimistic possible reading, I think it’s still true that the marginal value of donations to Wikimedia foundations will not be in support of Wikipedia’s existence or even in improvements to it, but in them doing more unrelated charity.

(If you want to donate specifically to charities that spread knowledge, then donating to Wikipedia makes more sense, though then in my opinion you should consider supporting the Internet Archive, which has ~8 times less revenue, and just this year was sued for copyright infringement this year and spent a while being DDOSed into nonfunctionality - that’s a lot of actually good reasons to need more money!).

Love that everyone on this thread is a financial analyst and a 501c consultant.

For-profit companies have the slim margins they do because they’ve successfully detached humanity from their spending obligations. Wikipedia does not need to do quarterly global lay-offs or labor off-shoring when their technology doesn’t meet release deadlines. They are a nonprofit. They exist to bring factual, accessible information to the world. If you support for this cause, donate. If you don’t, don’t donate or don’t use. If you care for the cause but want the CEO to take a paycut, well, find them one who will stick around for more than a few years on less than the average mega CEO salary. Because most of them have not.

Usually it’s a gateway argument towards the right…

Truthfully, it’s just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.

Sometimes.

Sometimes it’s a pretty accurate statement.

I used to run a medium-large charity. I have a fair bit of experience in fundraising and management. Most donators would be shocked at how little their donation actually achieves in isolation. Also at the waste that often goes on, and certainly the salaries at the upper tiers.

And I could also say that guilt is exactly why people donate. It’s to feel good about themselves, they’re buying karma. Central heating for the soul. I won’t say that’s a bad thing, but it is a thing. It’s also exactly how charities fundraise, because it works. That’s why your post and tv adverts are full of pictures of sad children crying. Every successful charity today is that way because it knows how to manipulate potential supporters. Is that always wrong? Of course not, charities couldn’t do good things without money. But sometimes the ethics in fundraising are extremely flexible.

I wondered when writing my comment whether people would combine this with the vague statement in the opening post and conclude “aha, I will now take this as misinformation without checking”, but then I looked at your other comments and saw you were actually talking about some India-related conspiracy I heard nothing about. Yet apparently you nevertheless think my comment is intentional misinfo?? That isn’t very coherent, is it now?