Finnish Police Board Wants Justification For Wikipedia's Fundraising Campaign

linjaaho writes "Yesterday, the admin list of Finnish language Wikipedia received a request for comment from the National Police Board of Finland. The Police Board claims that the fundraising message appearing on the top of the Wikipedia pages is illegal fundraising and is punishable by criminal law. The Police Board asks how much money have they raised and ask for justification for the campaign. This is not the first time the Police Board has attacked fundraising; in 2012, a crowdfunded textbook Kickstarter project was delayed by a similar request for comment."

Comments

Not with a bang, but with a Beta.

[emmagsachs]

What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because it goes against Dice's plans for Slashdot. To their advertisers, Dice presents Slashdot as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. A large precentage of the current userbase might be in IT, but /. is most certainly not a B2B site.

Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, since it has not lived up to their financial expectations, a fact that they have revealed in a press release detailing their performance in 2013:

Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

Beta is not a cosmetic change. It is a new design that deliberately ruins the one thing that makes /. what it is today -- the commenting system. There is nothing wrong with Slashdot, from the users' perspective, that demands breaking its foundations. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize /. at any any cost, and its users be damned. Dice views its users, the ones who create the site, as a passive audience. As such, it is interchangeable with its intended B2B crowd. We, the current users of Slashdot, are an obstacle in Dice's way.

That is why they ignore the detailed feedback they have received in the months since they first revealed Beta. That is also why they now disregard our grievances. Their claims of hearing us are a deliberate snow job. It is only pretense, since at the same time they openly admit that Classic will be cancelled soon:

"Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Dice to fix Beta. Their vision of Slashdot is a crippled shadow of the site as it is today. Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes. Dice doesn't need us, and it wants us out.

Slashdice delenda est!

Re:Not with a bang, but with a Beta.

[emmagsachs]

Not sharing your vision and intentions with your users is underhanded, by it is hardly a conspiracy. Dice is, in my opinion, just trying out a Hail Mary business plan.

Dice made a bad investment in buying Slashdot. Assuming that they aren't using sleight-of-hand accounting, not only did Dice not see the profit they expected, they aren't making a profit at all. In trying to minimize their losses, scavenging the website and its resources is perhaps the only option they think is left.

this idea that Dice is intentionally repurposing Slashdot

The fact remains that, by their own account, /. is a B2B social platform. We all surely agree that, as it is now, /. can hardly be called that. No matter how ill conceived it may sound, that is indeed what they have in mind with their Beta revamp.

if they do so, they lose almost all the value of the existing site, leaving only a well known domain name and some sort of "brand". The former is easy to come by, and the latter is of no value if all its previous "audience" becomes disillusioned with it.

In treating /. as a B2B site, Dice will lose many of its existing users. Since /. is all about the comments, all they will end up with is a no more than a well known IT brand. I assume they expect the number of new visits to very quickly surpass the abandonment rate of their existing userbase. Even if they aren't "out to get us", crippling the commenting and moderation systems (e.g. no visible UIDs nor any direct links to comments) is a hare brained idea that will ruin /. for the majority of slashdotters. It will, in short, create a mass exodus to other forums. Sadly, none of them have a moderation system that comes anywhere close to Slashcode.

If we assume they're losing money with the current format, it might be logical to for them to change formats, though there's a significant risk of alienating the current "audience" if they change it too much too fast, or otherwise handle the transition badly - as they've clearly done. As the old saying goes, "Don't ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence."

I think we're both saying the same thing.

BETA sucks.

[arisvega]

It really does. It lacks functionality, and its main purpose is to make the "NEW! Fresh! Teen! Revamped!" slashdot to look hip on tablets and phones.

Re:wikipedia

[dale.furno]

Yeah, Fuck Beta, Let's support Wikipedia!