> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before.
Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.
Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.
A large part of my job managing email systems is dealing with unsubscribe issues. If the unsubscribe button doesn't work, it's probably one of these issues:
- "Unsubscribed" is not persistent. If they have a logic that subscribes you to their emails (filling out a form), you will get resubscribed.
- You are unsubscribing a different email than you subscribed with (This is like, 75% of cases we deal with. It could be a forwarder, or a POP download, or a DL, etc).
- You are unsubscribing via the Google link and not the one in the email (not all systems are smart enough to recognize that).
- Something is broken or someone screwed up the logic. If you reach out and inform them, they may have someone seriously look into it (for our company, this would be me).
Or they are truly are scummy company and ignore unsubscribes or pull your address off of the same purchased list again. If they don't respond to you, pull the email headers and figure out who their host is and report them for abuse.
It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff.
I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it?
Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that.
> But open the email and you don’t see that text anywhere!
In the email industry, we call this a "pre-header". The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense. If you put any text above the body, it won't render in the email but will still be parsed by the inbox preview function (since it ignores any html it sees). This was mostly an exploit back in the day, but clearly email clients love it because they doubled down on supporting it.
Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed. Both of these features are built into every email client and service.
I thought this was going to be a complaint about their clearly hyperbolic messaging, but OP is really frustrated about some of the most basic features of email. I wonder if he has yet learned that the letters he gets from the White House are not actually sent from the White House.
> The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense.
No it's not. Emails can have both text and HTML versions, and the email client will decide which one to show in different contexts (e.g. if someone is on a device that can't show formatting and/or image content). Using the text part to include content that is never intended to be rendered as the full email is abuse of this feature.
> Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed.
What you're describing is from being jimmy@ and having reply-to as donate@
But this is not what the article describes. The emails do not have a separate reply-to address. They have a from line which is something like:
I just looked through my email, and you're right that many companies use preheaders (though usually with display: none). But I would classify most of them as summaries of the email content. The email from Jimmy Wales, in contrast, uses it for deceptive purposes: it shows a completely different text fragment that sounds like a brief personal email.
Also, just because the "email industry" routinely uses bad practices, that doesn't make it okay for wikimedia to do so.
The email doesn't have a different From and Reply To, it has an email address where the sender's name should be. The author's complaint is that the sender claims to be one email, when it's actually from another.
A very small fraction of the money is going to keep the servers running. The editors of Wikipedia are unpaid.
The software projects ran by Wikimedia have not been very impressive. What happened to proper discussion pages, for example? That has been going on for more than a decade.
I share similar sentiments as the article's author: I donated once ~4 years ago, and have been *completely* turned off donating again (despite wanting to, and knowing I should for such a fantastic resource) by such agressive emails, because I feel it's rewarding such behaviour.
Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.
Wikipedia on non-controversal scientific topics is great.
The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed, instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information.
It continues with the political topics and oh boy, just get to investigating and reading if you care for a look into the deep, dark depths.
The short heads up is, wikipedia is absolutely riddled with one-sided, manipulative information on political topics. Often written by ghost writers, posting stuff 14 hours a day for years without a single day off.
The finances and agressive begging for donations are also highly controversial. I have read multiple investigations accusing them of absolutely not needing any money, and staging a charade while getting huge sums by big interest groups, though I cannot estimate if this is true, or to which degree.
The most successful nonprofit project in the history of the world and 90% of the comments here are about what they're doing wrong. Get a grip. Your idea about what they could be doing better is ... useless.
That said, some of those email tactics are a little unsavory. But you can bet they test the hell out of them and they do what makes the most money.
That's exactly how the emails come across, optimized to squeeze out the absolute maximum of donations without any regard to non-profit or, say, ideals like integrity.
None of these things are egregious violations of any ethical standard. Wikipedia is not a source of excessive spam, and their beg banners on the website, while mildly annoying (especially if you already donated), aren't so frequent that they bother me. The site has no ads and provides tremendous value to the world. Nitpicking some minor marketing annoyances (which are probably handled by hired guns) comes off as petty.
One could make an argument that Wikipedia already has enough money that they could beg less and possibly survive indefinitely by just managing their current endowment well. One could make an argument that Google and others benefit so much from Wikipedia's high-quality search results that Google should help support them (although I wouldn't want Wikipedia to rely on corporate money). There are plenty of reasons why Wikipedia might not need to beg as often or at all.
Once I had a conversation with somebody that works for Wikipedia email campaigns and she told me she hates this tactics but unfortunately are very effective to raise money. Apparently they test campaigns and they know the style to make people open their wallets.
I used to hate this emails as well but now I get it's the small tradeoff for having an ad-free and free project.
I think Wikipedia is more valuable than Netflix. Thus ideally I should be giving more money to Wikipedia than Netflix so they continue developing and growing. For some reason if I'm not encouraged/pushed I don't give money. And looks like many people/companies tend to give money to companies and products that lock them in, instead of giving money to support free/libre projects that would give them more freedom and without lock in.
I kind of agree with the article, but on the other hand, I don't think I would I have ever donated without their aggressive campaign... Or I maybe would have once and then forgot about it. When I receive their email I'm like, "oh yeah! I should donate, totally forgot in a long time."
I have always found Wikipedias begging for money weird.
Even if they chose to be driven by donations, I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money.
Is it really that bad for non-profits on the internet?
What are their expenses btw? Are their hosting costs so high? Do they have paid staff beyond some fairly trivial admin? Do they curate articles for cash?
What to do with a problem like Wikipedia. It’s ultimately a fantastic source of information like nothing else on the internet. That has to be worth something right?
Problem is that people probably don’t bother to donate as much as they could or should. I know I haven’t donated.
Is there another way it could be monetised without ads?
The problem, as other posts allude to, is it has too much money and not enough interesting, useful projects to do with it. It's a great example of how a fantastic resource very much can be - and is - funded purely through donations of time and money. They just try to tell you it isn't doing well.
I get a ton of value out of Wikipedia and I donate annually.
Fun fact: If you unsubscribe from the donation email list, you are re-subscribed the next time you donate. It's scummy and infuriating and I hate to think that this kind of crap is what my money is actually going towards.
I've donated thousands to Wikipedia over the years, but I've noticed an increasing amount of bias in the website that made me hit the pause button. At first I saw it in a couple random examples, where I just thought "that's weird" and dismissed it as a random issue. But then I started to look for bias and noticed it much more frequently. And I don't mean just on the left-right American political spectrum, but also in other more complex ways, for example favoring Western scholarship over other scholarship. When I look at the Talk pages, I see regular bad faith application of policies that were written with better intentions.
I'm not the only one to note this issue in recent years. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote a blog post titled "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" last year (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). Although Wikipedia is decentralized, it is an institution. And I feel like we need more than one.
[+] [-] nobody_nothing|4 years ago|reply
Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.
Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.
(And no, the company is not Wikimedia) :P
[+] [-] legitster|4 years ago|reply
- "Unsubscribed" is not persistent. If they have a logic that subscribes you to their emails (filling out a form), you will get resubscribed.
- You are unsubscribing a different email than you subscribed with (This is like, 75% of cases we deal with. It could be a forwarder, or a POP download, or a DL, etc). - You are unsubscribing via the Google link and not the one in the email (not all systems are smart enough to recognize that).
- Something is broken or someone screwed up the logic. If you reach out and inform them, they may have someone seriously look into it (for our company, this would be me).
Or they are truly are scummy company and ignore unsubscribes or pull your address off of the same purchased list again. If they don't respond to you, pull the email headers and figure out who their host is and report them for abuse.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/22/wikimedia-fo...
(sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation)
[+] [-] colechristensen|4 years ago|reply
I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it?
Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that.
That much spend seems unsustainable long term.
[+] [-] btilly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbydudeza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|4 years ago|reply
Apple, in comparison, has $200 billion in cash reserves. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-companies-most-cash-reserv...
[+] [-] legitster|4 years ago|reply
In the email industry, we call this a "pre-header". The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense. If you put any text above the body, it won't render in the email but will still be parsed by the inbox preview function (since it ignores any html it sees). This was mostly an exploit back in the day, but clearly email clients love it because they doubled down on supporting it.
Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed. Both of these features are built into every email client and service.
I thought this was going to be a complaint about their clearly hyperbolic messaging, but OP is really frustrated about some of the most basic features of email. I wonder if he has yet learned that the letters he gets from the White House are not actually sent from the White House.
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|4 years ago|reply
No it's not. Emails can have both text and HTML versions, and the email client will decide which one to show in different contexts (e.g. if someone is on a device that can't show formatting and/or image content). Using the text part to include content that is never intended to be rendered as the full email is abuse of this feature.
> Having a different from and reply-to is also built into the way email was designed.
What you're describing is from being jimmy@ and having reply-to as donate@
But this is not what the article describes. The emails do not have a separate reply-to address. They have a from line which is something like:
From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
i.e. using the 'name' part of the from header to make it seem like the email is from a different email address.
[+] [-] DominikPeters|4 years ago|reply
Also, just because the "email industry" routinely uses bad practices, that doesn't make it okay for wikimedia to do so.
[+] [-] etskinner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfortuny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] op00to|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 5-|4 years ago|reply
> having a different from and reply-to
is not about what the op is complaining.
the offending header is
> From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
i.e. the address uses a display-name (in rfc2822 nomenclature) made to look like an unrelated, personal email address.
(and the reply-to actually matches from)
i wouldn't quite call it abuse but it is certainly deceptive.
[+] [-] lmc|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wly_cdgr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petters|4 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
A very small fraction of the money is going to keep the servers running. The editors of Wikipedia are unpaid.
The software projects ran by Wikimedia have not been very impressive. What happened to proper discussion pages, for example? That has been going on for more than a decade.
[+] [-] cyounkins|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berkut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oscribinn|4 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.
[+] [-] hammock|4 years ago|reply
If it were any other way, it wouldn't be this way.
[+] [-] johnmaguire|4 years ago|reply
[citation needed]
[+] [-] tshaddox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bashmack|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] btilly|4 years ago|reply
In 2016 a prominent Wikipedian saw the exponential trend and wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2..., aka "Wikipedia has Cancer".
[+] [-] loeg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbuhbjlnjbn|4 years ago|reply
The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed, instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information. It continues with the political topics and oh boy, just get to investigating and reading if you care for a look into the deep, dark depths.
The short heads up is, wikipedia is absolutely riddled with one-sided, manipulative information on political topics. Often written by ghost writers, posting stuff 14 hours a day for years without a single day off.
The finances and agressive begging for donations are also highly controversial. I have read multiple investigations accusing them of absolutely not needing any money, and staging a charade while getting huge sums by big interest groups, though I cannot estimate if this is true, or to which degree.
[+] [-] stephc_int13|4 years ago|reply
Management is milking the cow and has been for years.
This is tricky because they rightfully have a stellar brand value, I am not sure that will last forever.
As you know, the fish always rot from the head, this is a good example.
[+] [-] avalys|4 years ago|reply
In other news, NPR pledge drives are so annoying.
[+] [-] matt_morgan|4 years ago|reply
That said, some of those email tactics are a little unsavory. But you can bet they test the hell out of them and they do what makes the most money.
[+] [-] jbuhbjlnjbn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m8s|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birdyrooster|4 years ago|reply
edit: fine, downvote me, I am just memorializing a fallen hero. guess I will do it alone
[+] [-] caymanjim|4 years ago|reply
One could make an argument that Wikipedia already has enough money that they could beg less and possibly survive indefinitely by just managing their current endowment well. One could make an argument that Google and others benefit so much from Wikipedia's high-quality search results that Google should help support them (although I wouldn't want Wikipedia to rely on corporate money). There are plenty of reasons why Wikipedia might not need to beg as often or at all.
None of that makes these minor issues a problem.
[+] [-] sanbor|4 years ago|reply
I used to hate this emails as well but now I get it's the small tradeoff for having an ad-free and free project.
I think Wikipedia is more valuable than Netflix. Thus ideally I should be giving more money to Wikipedia than Netflix so they continue developing and growing. For some reason if I'm not encouraged/pushed I don't give money. And looks like many people/companies tend to give money to companies and products that lock them in, instead of giving money to support free/libre projects that would give them more freedom and without lock in.
[+] [-] paulintrognon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inferyes|4 years ago|reply
Even if they chose to be driven by donations, I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money.
Is it really that bad for non-profits on the internet?
[+] [-] rich_sasha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonswords82|4 years ago|reply
Problem is that people probably don’t bother to donate as much as they could or should. I know I haven’t donated.
Is there another way it could be monetised without ads?
[+] [-] david_allison|4 years ago|reply
$50k/year for their mid-tier offering. "Contact us" after that.
https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/
https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/
[+] [-] dmurray|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skulk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewguenther|4 years ago|reply
Fun fact: If you unsubscribe from the donation email list, you are re-subscribed the next time you donate. It's scummy and infuriating and I hate to think that this kind of crap is what my money is actually going towards.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
I'm not the only one to note this issue in recent years. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote a blog post titled "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" last year (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). Although Wikipedia is decentralized, it is an institution. And I feel like we need more than one.
[+] [-] 8260337551|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|4 years ago|reply
Wikipedia is one of the few things on the Internet that feels right.
If they need to play the same shit game as everyone else, so be it.
The tone of resentment here from the commenters is disappointing - it's like Wikipedia needing money is somehow not OK.
[+] [-] loeg|4 years ago|reply