Top 10 Reasons Not to Donate to Wikipedia

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  1. Your donation will fund Wikia, Inc., which is not a charity. Your non-profit donation will ultimately line the for-profit pockets of Jimmy Wales, Amazon, Google, the Bessemer Partners, and other corporate beneficiaries. How? Wikipedia is a commercial traffic engine. As of December 2008, there are over 14,300 external links from Wikipedia to Wales' Wikia.com sites, which are funded by Google AdSense revenues. Did you know that Amazon invested $10,000,000 in the for-profit Wikia venture? It's therefore rather interesting that there are over 43,000 links to Amazon's retail site from the supposedly non-profit Wikipedia site. Isn't it? Meanwhile, did you know that the popular movie site IMDB.com is owned by Amazon, and you can buy Amazon products directly from IMDB pages? Well, surprise surprise -- there are nearly 174,000 links to Amazon's IMDB site from Wikipedia. No wonder Amazon particularly wished to invest in Wikia, Inc. Its co-founder makes sure that the external linking environment on Wikipedia is hospitable for the Amazon link spamming machine!

    Now here is the really fascinating thing. If you go to Jimmy Wales' "talk page" on Wikipedia, and you ask him whether he feels that this obscene number of links to his for-profit site and those of his investors might be a conflict of interest or self-dealing, Jimbo won't even have time to respond. One or two of his sycophants will fairly promptly dismiss or erase your message; and if you try one more time to ask this question, you're likely to get blocked from editing Wikipedia altogether. Go ahead, try it!

  2. Wikipedia is really a roleplaying game, with no accountability. While Wikipedia is disguised as an encyclopedia, it is actually nothing more than a fluid forum where ultimate editorial control belongs to a corps of administrators, most of whom act without real-world accountability because they don't reveal their real names, locations, and potential conflicts of interest -- even though they will not hesitate, through "complex investigations", to "out" the real names, locations, and perceived conflicts of interest of other, non-administrative editors. Why give your real-world dollars to a virtual-world multi-player forum? Have you made your donation to Second Life, too?

  3. Why not donate to Citizendium instead, as they have real life details. Citizendium is a new encyclopedia project founded by a co-founder of Wikipedia. There, the editors do disclose who they are in real life. You probably donated to Wikipedia last year, so why not spread the wealth to new projects like Citizendium this year?

  4. Wikipedia alleges that Brazil, Israel and Saudi Arabia practice apartheid. Do you live in Brazil, Israel, or Saudi Arabia? Wikipedia has gone to painstaking detail to host articles about how your countries allegedly practice apartheid. If that's how you want your country described for the rest of the world, get out your checkbook.

  5. Jimmy Wales trying to extract another donation
    Think of the children! Perhaps you're philosophically opposed to censorship and think this is a daft point. Can you be sure that your shareholders and customers feel the same way? Wikipedia contains graphic material that would be illegal in most countries - even in the West. This includes images depicting nipple piercings, anilingus, labia piercings, child pornographymodeling (erotic), frenum rings, strappado bondage, erotic spanking, incest pornography, smotherboxes, and Courtney Cummz and her directorial debut 'Face Invaders'[1].

  6. Wikipedia has too much power. Google rank; Ability to set the 'truth'; Page ownerships; Cabals

  7. Wikipedia is in a legally precarious position. Section 230; Libel; Oversight; Katefan; Seigenthaler

  8. Wikipedia's leadership may be corrupt and inept. Jimbo Wales (hiring liars, then telling the press it's not a problem); Anthere (babysitting stipend); Essjay (a liar handed highest rank); Angela (edits Wikia article against policy); Arbcom; Our favorite admins. They stopped publishing their financial statements. They stripped all users of their membership. In fact, according to the lawyer who wrote the original bylaws (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alex756), they stripped all users of their membership in part because of a fear that members would demand financial statements. Multiple top officials/former officials have privately expressed concern over financial wrongdoing by certain board members. At least one former staff member has publicly accused the current board chair of embezzlement. The executive director and head legal council resigned due to problems he had with the organization. Wikipedia lacks a Board of Trustee with a wide base of civic and social stakeholders. WMF is by design narrow and weak, reflecting only the interests of a dysfunctional social networking community.

  9. Wikipedia is unpredictable, inaccurate and unmanageable. Vandalism; Snowspinner; Zoe; that wrestler chap; Plenty more admin/cabal/clique stories; Serious errors in articles; Fortune 1000 companies missing. Wikipedia is filled with wikipedos, they are very dangerous if you have kids editing!

  10. Wikipedia is fully braindead. Citizendium; Answers; Ability of anyone to fork.

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Notes

  1. ^ Cf Worst of Wikipedia
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