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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35577 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2022/Candidates/Guide

It's election season at Wikipedia. If you want to ask ArbCom candidates about whether or not they think Wikipedia is biased and vote accordingly, you can. It might simply cause the most die-hard progressive ideologues to be elected in the short run, but in the long run it could shed light on something not often discussed. What was that thing where the Wikimedia foundation was giving grants to some CRT-type charity that people thought was highly dubious? I think Yudkowsky retweeted about it. You could ask about that.

Edit: of course, whether or not these candidates care about AGI X-risk is more important than their politics.

I think you should look into what ARBCOM is.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

In addition to its role in dispute resolution, the Committee determines which editors have access to CheckUser and Oversight permissions, and considers certain matters where exceptional factors such as privacy preclude a public hearing.

Arbitrators are volunteer users—usually experienced editors and administrators—whom the community of editors at large elects to resolve the most complex or intractable disputes that may arise within the community, and to oversee the few areas where access to non-public information is a prerequisite.

and what they generally do

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/WikiProject Tropical Cyclones closed 27 May 2022 (AN notice)

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They have absolutely zero influence on the Wikimedia Foundation or any of their funding decisions. As much as possible they are not involved in the substance of any editing decisions and are all about behavior. Even if the entire committee was ideologically aligned with you they would not accomplish any of the things you think they have the ability to.

This is like saying we should make sure Catholic umpires are hired by the MLB so a salary cap can be implemented.

It seems like what you actually care about is Board elections which happened a few months ago.

I’d prefer to see this comment without all the sarcasm.

Do you have any candidates that you’d actually support as level-headed technocrats?

I was not being sarcastic about anything. I'm not sure when you think I was being sarcastic.

Is there any ready information out there about the views of different candidates for Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee? Reading Wikipedia's candidate guide and questions to the candidates really did not shed any light on which of them may be more, or less, committed to fairness and balance on the site.

You can submit questions to the candidates.

What was that thing where the Wikimedia foundation was giving grants to some CRT-type charity that people thought was highly dubious? I think Yudkowsky retweeted about it.

https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579776106034757633.html

If you use Wikipedia, you've seen pop-ups like this. If you're like me, you may have donated as a result.

Wikipedia is an amazing website, and the appeals seem heartfelt. But I've now learnt the money isn't going where I thought...

The organisation which administers Wikipedia - to whom the money goes - is the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Wikimedia is a San Francisco non-profit with 400 employees - which has exploded in size in recent years.

In a decade, Wikimedia's spending has soared: from $10 million in 2010 to $112 million by 2020.

This suprised me, seeing as Wikipedia seems to be functionally the same website it was 10 years ago. So what explains this huge increase?

Maybe more people use the site, making it more expensive to run?

No: 2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million - which is LESS than it did in 2012.

In fact, according the Wikimedia Foundation's own website, less than half of what they spend goes on directly supporting the website.

Bear in mind - Wikipedia used to be an incredibly cheap, volunteer run website. Watch a minute of this video of Jimmy Wales talking about how Wikipedia operated back in 2005:

So where is the money going? Well, a lot of it Wikimedia gives away to other organisations. And a significant portion of their staff are employed in that process. From 2012 to 2020, the spending on salaries increased fivefold, and $22.9 million was given in grants.

At this point, you should know that while Wikipedia emphasises a "Neutral Point of View", Wikimedia is openly politicized. It is a full participant in America's culture wars, and this helps us understand how they spend the donations.

Let's take a look at two big recipients.

The SeRCH Foundation received a quarter million dollars of donor cash. Glancing at the website, you could assume it was about the admirable goal of minority representation in STEM

However on closer inspection, it turns out to be a bit more unusual than that. They're proponents of an "Intersectional Scientific Method" involving "hyperspace"(?)

Their output is extremely long YouTube videos which get about 50 views a time

In the videos they discuss issues in science like objectivity (they're against it) and bias (they're in favour).

There's been one new video in the last year.

Also enjoying Wikimedia's largesse was Borealis Philanthropy. Borealis is yet another grant giving organisation: They're even more political, and fully committed to driving America's cultural revolution.

Wikimedia gave $250,000 to Borealis's Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. That money was then cascaded down to a dozens of ideologically aligned news outlets across the US.

Thus, the money you give to keep Wikipedia online is diverted to bankroll the inescapable American culture war.

Back in 2017, a Wikipedian called Guy Macon wrote a strident article entitled "Wikipedia has a Cancer". He predicted Wikimedia's runaway spending would bankrupt Wikipedia, resulting in its takeover by Facebook or Google.

Since then, Wikimedia's budget has almost doubled.

What Macon misunderstood is that orgs like Wikimedia are not cancers. They are parasites that cannot survive outside their host. Almost nobody would donate to Wikimedia so it could spend money on these causes - without Wikipedia, Wikimedia would starve.

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.

Wikipedia is an amazing and important website. But it doesn't need your money. It has enough to stay online, improve and grown.

What it needs more donations for is to fund one side in the United States' culture war.

A sad footnote to this: In 2021 SeRCH ran their own funding programme, "Hot Science Summer".

In deciding who to fund, the key criteria was use of the Intersectional Scientific method. Everything else - a scientific background, data - was optional. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the projects was into spatial learning in the California Two-Spot Octopus, for which the researcher got 12 hatchling octopuses.

Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded.

This doesn't even mention the Tides Foundation.

Yikes, that's WP:CANVASSING!

Wish I had time to stalk all the accounts running for it like I usually do. Don't recognize any names on here though, which is probably a good sign. Do you know any of them?

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