Fund us and we promise we'll stop nagging. For now at least.
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Found while googling the first sentence of wikipedia's fundraising plea....
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Godwin's Law was near the top of the list on my end.
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I clicked through a few pages to see if there were any funny matches - the sodomy one made me chuckle: "Sodomy: You're probably busy so we'll get right to it".
I'm not sure how wikipedia didn't realize that injecting text near the top of your pages is a bad idea when you are leaving it up to the search engine to write your descriptions. Now they have a couple million pages with seo issues.
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Now they have a couple million pages with seo issues.
I should forward them those emails I get several times a day where the nice lady says she can SEO my site for me.
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I should forward them those emails I get several times a day where the nice lady says she can SEO my site for me.
You know her too? Small world!
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You know her too? Small world!
Oh, that's Amy, everybody knows her.
Filed under: some still seek her, though
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I should forward them those emails I get several times a day where the nice lady says she can SEO my site for me.
I never got many of them but the ones that cracked me up the most for were the vanity domain I bought so my wife could have a particular email address. Yeah, go ahead and help SEO up the single-page "there's nothing here" website I put up solely because the domain host had some cheap freebie web hosting package, so I could test the javascript I wrote that would close the popup the hosting package added to get their money back.
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my 1st results
Sodomy wasn't one of them, thank you Google for thinking so highly of me.
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I cheated a little.
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Seems like you've been researching sodomy before...
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Seems like you've been researching sodomy before...
Well my sodomy book isn't going to write itself.
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They really outdid themselves this time. The god damn banner took up half my browser window at work. And at home, where I have the DPI cranked up on the TV PC, it took up the entire screen!
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For some reason, I haven't had it pop up very many times, but I agree; it does seem to be bigger and more intrusive than in the past.
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#9.
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9.Wikimedia Foundation, running intrusive advertizing despite a $60 USD profit from 2014.
$60? That won't get you very far....
Probably wouldn't buy enough pizza to hire the guys to help you turn out the lights and shut the place down.
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I got some similary results to some others, along with some interesting other stuff. Could not resist the Walrus, obviously.
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$60? That won't get you very far....
Probably wouldn't buy enough pizza to hire the guys to help you turn out the lights and shut the place down.
The important bit from the quote you included is here:
@wikipedia said:
9.Wikimedia Foundation, running intrusive advertizing despite a $60 USD profit from 2014.
Dunno if accurate of course, but profit is after costs.
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Letsee, engaging Fermi guesimation-a-tron...
$60 =? $0 i.e. "the 'desired' profit of a non-profit"
Yes. $60 is pretty much $0.
So, either they raise more, or they buy $60 of pizza and beer and turn out the lights. ;)
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@wikipedia said:
9.Wikimedia Foundation, running intrusive advertizing despite a $60 USD profit from 2014.
Dunno if accurate of course, but profit is after costs.
Non-profits may turn a profit. They just don't pay it out to shareholders; instead, it goes in the bank to help build up the “Oh shit!” fund. Once that's large enough, the organisation (or rather its board) can think in terms of investing so that there's another source of income other than donations and earnings, but that's not a high priority thing.
I've got no idea what Wikipedia's finances are like, but that's exactly how all sensible non-profits and charities operate.
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$60 =? $0 i.e. "the 'desired' profit of a non-profit"
Yes. $60 is pretty much $0.
So, either they raise more, or they buy $60 of pizza and beer and turn out the lights.
I'm fairly certain that in their effort to be snarky, they forgot a suffix. And got the wrong number. They have $60M in assets.
I've got no idea what Wikipedia's finances are like
$28M in cash and cash-alikes in 2014, up from $22M in 2013, even though they had $46M in expenses during the year.
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$28M in cash and cash-alikes in 2014, up from $22M in 2013, even though they had $46M in expenses during the year.
Over half a year of running costs? Not bad; they can probably start to safely think about investment so as to protect against future funding droughts.
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http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/12/02/1528227/a-mismatch-between-wikimedias-pledge-drive-and-its-cash-on-hand
Whomever wrote that article is a very short-sighted person with no knowledge of how businesses or NFP's work. The most successful NFP's in the world build up a glut of cash on hand so that they can self-fund through investments and the like. Then they do not have to do fund drives like that all the time.
Our metropolitan art museum has a $750M endowment that has allowed them to be almost entirely free. You can visit anything except the special exhibits (limited-run traveling art exhibitions) for free and there are usually a few days during the runs of special exhibits where you can even visit them for free. Parking is even free.
That would be a great position for Wikipedia to eventually be in. Then The Register would not have to worry about seeing those ads that you can easily dismiss and go about on your way if you do not wish to or are not able to donate.
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When Wikipedia get this low they should use the tactics they are using today.
If they are really that low today? where is the donation button!
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When Wikipedia get this low they should use the tactics they are using today.
If they are really that low today? where is the donation button!
WTF are you talking about? There is just a simple banner advertisement, with a dismiss button that hides it for the rest of your session. They are a NFP that runs the #6 highest traffic site on the entire internet. All of the sites around them in that classification are bringing in shitloads of money and are completely covered in advertisements.
I believe you are in another country, but here we have PBS and then run annual funding drives (or maybe twice a year?). This little meme would be like if someone turned on PBS to watch Sesame Street and when they saw some local celebrity trying to sell tote bags they completely lost their shit and then vowed never to use them again.
Would you rather they only do their funding drive when their COH got down to single digits? When you run an annual fund drive, and have 6 months worth of COH, you are basically broke if you are more than a couple of months away from the next fund drive.
Why is this even a conversation we are having? Why not discuss just how the hell the NFL is a NFP instead. How the hell does that work??
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@Intercourse said:
There is just a simple banner advertisement, with a dismiss button that hides it for the rest of your session.
Of course if you wind up going to Wikipedia 5-10 more times that day, you get the ad on every instance. And as someone else mentioned, the ads are huge this year.
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the ads are huge this year.
You have a point there. AdBlock could probably take care of it for you completely though. I have not done so to Wikipedia because I tend to cut NFP's a lot more slack. Especially one that does great work like Wikipedia has.
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@Intercourse said:
You have a point there. AdBlock could probably take care of it for you completely though.
I have ABP, but for some reason it doesn't cut out Wikipedia. It actually doesn't bother me enough to figure out why and fix it, but those ads are annoying, and I swear they're doing them more frequently than once a year. Feels like 2-3 but I haven't actually counted.
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I swear they're doing them more frequently than once a year. Feels like 2-3 but I haven't actually counted.
Could be. I just went to Wikipedia to see if I could block that frame and it did not pop-up for me this time. Maybe their funding drive is over? Or maybe my Untangle appliance updated to reflect that signature and is now blocking it?
Or, possibly they have put logic in to only pop it once every X hours, because of the backlash?
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@Intercourse said:
Could be. I just went to Wikipedia to see if I could block that frame and it did not pop-up for me this time. Maybe their funding drive is over?
No, I opened the "Space Station Freedom" page twice (because it showed up in autocomplete, so I didn't have to remember the proper format for their URLs and then think of somethig to type in), in two separate new Chrome tabs, right before I made that post. Both times I got an ad. I think it was a different one each time.
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@Intercourse said:
WTF are you talking about?
an indication that what I am talking about is in the right place
@Intercourse said:
Why is this even a conversation we are having? Why not discuss just how the hell the NFL is a NFP instead. How the hell does that work??
is it possible that NFP exploiting the system? nah it is all in our head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT_AK-82ugAbtw like your new avatar
I hear that road is a little bit dangerous a lot of people flipped over there.
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In fact, every time I go there as a new URL I get the ad. From the Freedom page, I copied the address for ISS, and pasted that into the bar: a second ad in the same tab. Then I went poking through autocomplete for other articles, like Sphere and a couple others--just whatever Chrome offered me. Every single time (admittedly I only tried about 5) I got the ad again.
You don't get it if you click a link in an existing article, though, but every time you arrive there, presumably without a referer header, you get the ad.
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Hah, that's the widest and grubbiest subway car I've ever seen.
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I presume that my UTM is catching it now. I find it unlikely that AdBlock would have added it to their standard signatures.
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btw like your new avatar
@accalia hooked me up in the avatar thread.
I hear that road is a little bit dangerous a lot of people flipped over there.
I see what you did there...
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If I use this window, I've gone to different Wikipedia pages from autocomplete/history without any ads even after clicking back to the homepage.
Opened a new incognito window, went to the same pages and I get the massive ad. Dismissed it, went to the home page and got the smaller ad.ABP running in either case.
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@Intercourse said:
There is just a simple banner advertisement, with a dismiss button that hides it for the rest of your session.
Not what they had a few days ago. Epic full-window popover with dollar amounts and comment boxes and payment provider logos and everyfuckingthing. It was fucking disgusting.
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That's still what I get if I go Incognito.
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Holy shit. I have never got what @loopback0 showed. I still give then leniency for being a "good NFP", but now I see your point.
Hey, I am capable of admitting error. I am better than @blakeyrat at least. ;-)
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@Intercourse said:
Holy shit. I have never got what @loopback0 showed.
I've seen that, and variations, but usually a smaller, 3-line version. But like I said, I was getting it every time I came to the site.
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nah it is all in our head
Can anyone watch these videos full screen on mobile? It goes full screen and then disappears scrolling to a random point in the thread
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@ben_lubar - Days Since Last Discourse Bug: null
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I've only seen that once per computer, except for going incognito to trigger it deliberately. The smaller banner is more common.
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But like I said, I was getting it every time I came to the site.
I didn't get it at first. Then I started clicking on the close button or whatever and the next time I got a smaller version. That happened a couple of times and I don't think I've seen it since.
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I was talking about an ad in general, not necessarily the huge one. I get the an ad every time I "first" go to Wikipedia. Most of the time it's the small one.
Type 5 different Wikipedia URLs into the browser, get 5 different ads. Type one in, get an ad, keep clicking links on articles, no more ads. As I said in the first paragraph, most of them will be the small ad.
Edit: also, my block lists in ABP were out of date. I updated them and added one, but haven't gone back and tried that test again--maybe I'd see fewer ads now. Before I was seeing them even with ABP on, although I did have that "whitelist some ads" feature enabled, and Wikipedia may or may not have been in that list.
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At least they copied the small one, not the 80% of the screen version.