To everyone who has entered Wikipedia, which I understand is the vast majority of you, the notice of ‘Dear readers, Let’s get to the point. Today we ask you to help Wikipedia …‘. The Wikimedia Foundation is funded by these donations, appealing to its goal of “free knowledge”. However, this foundation already has more than 300 million dollars in funds, one that we remember is, non-profit.
And yet Wikipedia continues to ask its readers for donations. In fact, for years he has been doing it in a somewhat abusive way, which Craig Younkins comments in his blog de Medium. And it is that under the name of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the company asks users to donate through e-mails. These emails, however, skip all ethics to achieve their purpose: that the user donates.
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How to hook the user to donate
According to Younkins, In a period of five years he has received up to three emails from “Jimmy Wales” asking to donate on the platform under the phrase “I won’t ask again“, that is, “I will not ask again” in Spanish. Younkins has donated in the past because he genuinely likes the portal. However, he complains about the foundation’s abusive practices, and a clear example of them is this type of email.
One of the tactics in these emails, according to Younkins, is to write something that hooks the user. A phrase that fits into the box that Gmail shows, and that then does not appear anywhere when you open it. This, according to Younkins, is done by generating the email in a multi-part message format, where “the component text/plain has the text snippet desired. “This is how the phrase”This is Jimmy, signing off. I won’t ask again“It appeared to Younkins in this box as a claim, and that within the message it did not exist.
The multi-part system was devised to allow the same content in different formats, something Younkins considers an abuse. What’s more, Another of the tactics is to make it appear that the e-mail comes from “[email protected]”, when in reality it is a message coming from the address “[email protected]”. These emails appear even when the user has unsubscribed from donations, since Younkins himself assures that he did so previously, but that he believes that “he is being added to a new list every year”.
The main problem with these emails is the way Wikipedia asks its users to donate through unethical tactics. Everyone can understand that donating on Wikipedia can be a positive thing, but it can become somewhat questionable when these practices are used.
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