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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Agreed. Wikimedia is a hugely profitable business, operated on a pay-what-you-want business model. It is impossible to tell just how profitable because the published accounts don't distinguish between spending that supports the encyclopedia and community (paying the salaries of the Wikimedia software developers, subsidising conference attendance for Wikipedia editors from poor countries etc.) and spending which is actually distributing profits to the pro-establishment leftist causes that Wikipedia's stakeholders like.

Per this 80,000 hours article, fundraising for ineffective charities (or for-profits masquerading as charities) is one of the most destructive things you can legally do because it reduces donations to effective charities. The Wikimedia Foundation know that their appeals are deceptive and that their marginal grantee is ineffective, so I have no qualms about calling them an evil organisation. (This is despite the fact that, unlike most Motteposters, I do not consider the pro-establishment left to be per se evil).

The English Wikipedia community who are actually editing the encyclopedia are eccentric but not evil, and produce a pretty good encyclopedia.