I’m already signed up to donate monthly, and I just sent them $20 more because someone told me some dumb shit about how they refuse to donate to Wikipedia anymore because “I don’t agree with the financial decisions of Wikipedia’s management.”

I definitely think there is an active effort to discredit Wikipedia going on Lemmy. Other things I’ve seen people say just over the last few days:

• “The website has a despicable procedure where they dox details of anyone whom they deem as alleged vandals.”
• “Eric Barbour of Metasonix has collected a trove of Wikipedia’s affairs and scandals over the years which is only accessible through hard drive formats to journalists if asked. There’s even a book which has yet to be published and which could be the Hollywood Babylon of Wikipedia.”
• “Wikipedia kowtows to every fascist government that asks them to. Remember when they banned users who called the Holodomer a genocide against the Ukranians by the Russians?”
• “Wikipedia makes a ton of money, way more than neccassary to run the site. The excess is getting funneled into the pockets of millionaires, in the ballpark of 300m/y”
• “Wikipedia is only a source for truth for people that either don’t know what it’s protecting or are in the genocidal cult it is protecting.”
• “Wikipedia has poured efforts into bolstering western narratives, specifically against China and Russia, and to promote pro-NATO narratives.”
• “The intelligence orgs and think tanks are also making up the source information. That’s how it works. They make up the initial info, launder it through a source, coordinate with the media to reference that source, get their editors to use the laundered info as a source in their wiki edits, etc. It’s a self-referential and self re-enforcing disinformation scheme.”
• “Within the last maybe 10 years or so, the credibility of its sources have started to come into question, at least on some of their recently authored/edited articles.”
• “It was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation’s income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight.”
• “As contributions continue to grow, the spending category that is growing far faster than any other is salaries and wages. Their CEO made $789k in 2021, all while content is created by volunteers. I like Wikipedia and the content they host; however, I think any increase in contributions is just going to line the pockets of the executives.”

The retreat from “they’re betraying their users to fascist governments and funnel their donations into the pockets of millionaires” gradually becoming “they paid their CEO $789k in one year, if you pick the year when the CEO made the most in comparison to the other years, and I’m going to try as hard as I can to make that sound as sinister as I can.”

It was, to me, really notable how the variety of different crazypants things that were easily disproval all coalesced into “they’re taking your donation money and spending it frivolously on things they don’t need to be spending it on,” which still isn’t quite what happened, but at least bears some passing relationship with the truth, and won’t make people look as silly for saying it.