You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary. I'm not sure why that would be the case.

I think people may be focusing on these high-level figures a bit too much. The Wikimedia website has other information about what it is they are actually doing.

> Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running"

Fair enough, I can imagine how that could be an issue. As one opposed to such manipulations in general, a critique of the sort of messaging being used is something that I would welcome.

> Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.

Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string of blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear as possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's comment.

This is answered by

> Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running"

> banner that makes no claims

Look at this example [0]. If you read that, what would you say the money is going to?

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Founda...

It’s like Mozilla and all of their non-Firefox/Thunderbird bullshit. Bloat for the sake of bloat.

> Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string of blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear as possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's comment.

It's also a mis-use of the term. It's for live debates when you just dump a series of questions on the opponent without giving them time to respond, trying to make them look stupid to observers. Doesn't really apply to text like here, when you can take as long as you need to type of the reply.

I suspect the OP would be perfectly fine with Wikimedia hiring translators to translate more of the 6.5 million English articles into other languages which are often considerably less developed. Or funding more development of their textbooks, dictionaries and other content. They clearly have ample funds that seem to be going to more dubious ends.

...I would rather that the translation efforts be done by the community & translation services than by the foundation itself. Pushing the effort of translation onto the foundation gives them authority over the translated material, & consequently authority on the original material itself.

In principle, I would like the scope of work for any foundation to be as minimal as possible, & to be directly related to the direct operations & maintenance of the service being provided. Any additional efforts beyond that invites scope creep & will inevitably bloat any organization with non-related work.

This does not read like a good-faith interpretation to me. Small-o objectivism and personal liberty are not at all incompatible with a "woke" perspective on race; I daresay relativism -- particularly moral relativism -- is a minority opinion even among leftists. Nor is it necessarily the case that being woke means you're in favor of enforced rebalancing on the basis of race, ethnicity, etc. Wokeness, in my experience, is far more concerned with issues of justice than with rebalancing (which I take to mean something akin to affirmative action or reparations).