Red is associated with social democracy, socialism, communism in most countries; almost only in the US is it the color of the conservative party.

I would only consider donating in the first place if it were not only free to access, but also licensed under a free license. I have donated to freely licensed projects before, but not to merely freely accessible websites.

OT but: How does this Mastodon/Lemmy integration even work? OP seems to be posting on Mastodon but we are commenting on Lemmy which makes everything look confusing.

No, it doesn't.

The Wikimedia projects are made by volunteers, almost none of the money goes to actually making the content. Some of it does go into keeping the servers running or into software development.

And some of it goes into expanding an ever-increasing bureaucracy, which is tasked among other things with enforcing intransparent "global bans" or lighter sanctions against contributors the WMF doesn't like (opinions of the editing community don't matter at all on these). If they had less money, perhaps they would lay off some of their trust and safety team and not catch some people who are making useful contributions by evading global bans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer

There are so many more worthy free knowledge organizations to donate to: OpenStreetMap, FOSS projects (e.g. Software in the Public Interest), even Miraheze.

I have read of tourists coming to Vienna and thinking there is anything worth seeing north of the Danube.

Unless you count the UN headquarters, there isn't. All of that is a completely unstructured and boring mix of industrial, commercial and residential zones mostly built after WW2 like you find anywhere in the world.

Technically these kinds of things are decided by the Wikimedia Foundation but they'll usually not do things that the editing community of the local wiki doesn't want.

In 2014 the WMF forced a new software feature (Media Viewer) on all wikis and enforced this by "superprotecting" the JavaScript on the German-language Wikipedia so local admins (who at one point even blocked the Deputy Director of the WMF from editing) couldn't disable the new media viewer. The WMF doesn't really want these kinds of constitutional crises to happen again.

Is this real?

We used to think that if we had user-generated content, we would all be immune to governments, corporations and other powerful actors spreading propaganda because we would get our information from each other, not them.

Turns out: governments, corporations, other powerful actors are perfectly capable of paying "users" to "generate content" and not even disclose this.

The Internet used to be an exciting development, now it's just like, yeah it exists, so what.

by not ever using == and !=, but only === and !==

and then federate with Mastodon?

Yes. In my teenage years, these kinds of web forums were the norm, now they are almost as outdated as Usenet or mailing lists. I think that is a shame because I found web forums utterly addictive while on reddit and lemmy I tend to quickly run out of things to read.

for fuck's sake why does this get upvotes here

For teenage me the Internet was the only escape from the horribleness and stress of my offline life. Probably for many current teenagers too (if you are one of them: trust me, life will get better as an adult). There is no way I will ever support "keeping children off the Internet" and not just because it requires adults too to verify their age, also because it is a bad idea in the first place. Teenagers might not always make great decisions about everything, but this is also true of adults.