There's something to be said for groups like this one and Standard eBooks (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) doing some work to clean up and beautify public domain books like the ones in Project Gutenberg. Even Standard eBooks mentions that their books are all sourced from Gutenberg.
This group seems much less complete than SE, and in my opinion, they're not nearly as nice looking. I think that's more a matter of personal taste though.
The difference is UX and aesthetics. Planet eBook is a more pleasant experience if you're a casual consumer browsing around for a well-known book to read, while Gutenberg's site suits someone with more specific needs wanting to explore the long tail of public domain content.
To borrow a DevOps analogy, Gutenberg's website handles books as cattle, Planet eBook treats books a bit more like individual kittens insofar as they're hand-picked with (presumably) humans selecting the extracts and covers. The Gutenberg site has an early 2000s programmatically generated UI aesthetic that is similar to Internet Archive and the Wikipedia homepage. (At least in the case of Wikipedia, I've heard there's considerable community resistance to any significant UI changes - it's not just a budget constraint.)
To be clear, Gutenberg has been an incredible resource and gift to society. It's just that there's a need for custom front-ends to match different needs.
Poke around on Google Maps in Kyoto, you'll see _lots_ of swastikas representing temples. It's definitely jarring at first for Western sensibilities, but from India east to the Pacific, people kept using the swastika for what it meant before the Nazis.
(And _since_ they use it -- especially symbolically to mean "temple"! -- it needs to be represented in Unicode.)
Thank you, this is the article that immediately came to mind (but whose title or venue I could not remember) when I saw this post. I found it pretty convincing at the time.
It would have been better if it didn’t feature around his personal assumption of what happened (at least that’s how I recall that article, but it’s been years).
Thanks, I just did that. It said "hide appeals for a week" but that's better than nothing.
As for being a "sharp-eyed accountant": you don't have to be one of those to ask where the money is going. If it's going to reward the best volunteers or get better servers, fine.
You can look at their 990 form on the IRS website:
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The Form 990 is a document that nonprofit organizations file with the IRS annually. We leverage finance and accountability data from it to form Encompass ratings. Click here to search for this organization's Forms 990 on the IRS website [1] (if any are available). Simply enter the organization's name (Wikimedia Foundation) or EIN (200049703) in the 'Search Term' field.
