Talk:Giving What We Can

moved stuff
I've moved some stuff from the original page to this, to avoid loss of information, but I don't think that fit in well with the page as originally written. It relies on references and sources that seem to have no connection with GWWC per se, and seem like original research meant to substantiate specific claims rather than a neutral description of what exactly GWWC claims. However, with a re-wording, these may be re-incorporated into the article.

The results of this research show that the cost-effectiveness of available interventions ranges from 0.02 to 300 DALYs per $1,000, with a median of 5. As such, moving money from the least effective intervention to the most effective would produce about 15,000 times the benefit, and even moving it from the median intervention to the most effective would produce about 60 times the benefit. Therefore, choosing the median intervention over the most cost-effective ones can involve losing 85% of the potential value.

An example of this in practice is that the money it costs to provide a single guide dog ($40,000), helping one person overcome the challenges of blindness, is the same as can be used to cure over 2,000 people of blindness caused by trachoma.

This, and other such examples are the key motivation behind the Giving What We Can’s guiding principle that cost-effectiveness is an essential consideration when donating to charity.

Vipul (talk) 17:57, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

similar resources
I've edited the similar resources section by subdividing the links. I feel this is necessary because the previous way of doing it is misleading; all of these resources are alike in that they evaluate charities, but only a subset of them actually evaluate cost-effectiveness. For example, Charity Navigator will tell you what percentage of donations go toward overhead costs. But that has nothing to do with the cost effectiveness of the cause; it only tells you how much is being paid on overhead. People interested in cost effectiveness research cannot use these other evaluators, since they are useless in terms of telling you how cost effective each charity is. &mdash; Eric Herboso 03:13, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

media coverage
Of course, I (or anyone) can find references to this organization (or any other) in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, and other media. So? WP:promotion, WP:puff, maybe WP:COI. It's ok that newspapers, etc do that, but to backflip and re-cite them HERE, is self-promotion. This section adds nothing to the content of the article, and ought to be deleted.Sbalfour (talk) 19:52, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

List of recommended charities
This text was removed from the article by {user|Staszek Lem} in a good-faith edit with a description of "nonencyclopedic/promo".
 * Currently, these charities are most highly rated by Giving What We Can:
 * Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)
 * Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI)
 * Deworm the World
 * Project Healthy Children (PHC)

My opinion is that this material is equally relevant as e.g. 85th Academy Awards, Reference Daily Intake, Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, Category:Michelin Guide starred restaurants, or (obviously) GiveWell, and should be maintained in the article.

Before making any changes with respect to this content, however I wanted to solicit feedback from other editors to determine if there is a WP:Consensus regarding the correct approach. Thoughts? Vectro (talk) 03:25, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Agreed. It should go back into the article. Edwardx (talk) 09:51, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Since I see objections, let me explain my reasoning in more detail, since my edit summary (nonencyclopedic/promo) is too brief.
 * "Currently" is not an encyclopedic way. It is good only for newspaper or for charity home page. It is no guarantee that "currently" is current
 * It is undue promotion of current recommendations. Last year ones are just as good.
 * As I see from the article, the criteria of the recommendations are controversial.
 * It is unclear from what pool of charities the recommendations are selected. I don't believe hundreds of thousands from all over the world were estimated.

Therefore in my opinion, such lists will be neutral and noncontroversial under following conditions:
 * They will be added every time a new comparison result is published
 * They will be supplied with reference to the press-release or smth.
 * The accompanying text clearly indicates from which pool of charities the selection was done.
 * Any other nontrivial information from the corresponding press-release.

You yourself provided above the link to GiveWell and may see how it may be done.

In this way it will be a useful insight in the works the GWWC (ie. increase encyclopedic value of the article), not just a promo for 3-4 charities out of countless thousands. Staszek Lem (talk) 23:03, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

P.S. The footnote for Prinston chapter leads to Ruthers. Cut-and-paste error? Staszek Lem (talk) 23:03, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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awkward - MacAskill
so the organization's website says that MacAskill was a co-founder and this Singer book from 2015 says that too, but none of the sources currently in the article from that time (BBC, Times, etc) say that - they only talk about Ord and his wife. not sure what to do with that. Jytdog (talk) 03:43, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I decided to go ahead and cite him as a founder. remains weird. Jytdog (talk) 04:35, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
 * He was still a PhD student at the time so his story wasn't interesting enough to be covered.  K . Bog  18:20, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
 * That is.... hm. Entirely unsourced (and you should never write unsourced things about living people, anywhere in WP).  I looked for an explanation in reliable sources and found none.   Pls see your talk page about this, as well.. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I just looked here where it says he got his DPhil in 2013. The media stories were all in 2010 or 2011 or so. I presume no one really cares about what PhD students are up to.  K . Bog  19:29, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Pledge
The pledge is discussed in the body of the article. Having the specific Pledge section is redundant, UNDUE, and too much along the lines of what WP:Avoid mission statements. It is also entirely sourced from their website, and has trivia in it, sourced only to their website, about a tweak they made. In-bubble and not encyclopedic. Can we please remove this. Jytdog (talk) 19:24, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Working over
btw if you were still working over the article, Kbog, my apologies for jumping in to address the cn tag. Jytdog (talk) 19:31, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Remaining promotionalism
1.Excassive links to related charities 2. Positive claims based on opinion of itself and related charities 3. All discussion is from the philosophical point of view of the founders.  DGG ( talk ) 04:42, 29 March 2017 (UTC)


 * What excessive links - the see also section? Those are the ones associated with the charity. But, it's no big deal. Done.


 * Which claims are positive? The methodology of GWWC is well documented in secondary sources, and that's what's stated in the article. That it focuses on effectiveness instead of other metrics and compares more broadly are simple (and controversial) facts of its approach.


 * What would discussion look like if it wasn't from the "philosophical point of view of the founders"?  K . Bog  04:48, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Hey DGG, I appreciate your scrutiny. Please look at the references and let me know if you think they are not mainstream or something... i went looking and found the best refs i could. also if there is one or more important refs left out please bring them! Jytdog (talk) 05:05, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

A page with a list of Pledgers(GWWC members)
There are some biographies here that mention that the person took the pledge, I thought about making an article that's a list that puts them all in the same place.

I'm new so I thought I would ask.

Is there any rule against this? If I took the Pledge as well, is that some kind of conflict of interest? Any thoughts welcome.

Samiwamy (talk) 21:19, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Founding in 2007, MacAskill not a cofounder
I ran across a tweet suggesting that Giving What We Can was founded in (at latest) 2007, and I double checked the Wayback machine. I also notice that while the Wikipedia page says 2009 and says MacAskill is a co-founder (who met Ord in 2009), the sources don't seem to back this up. What do others think? I'll add citation need tags for now. Jmill1806 (talk) 23:25, 11 October 2022 (UTC)


 * The organization's website itself lists William MacAskill as "Co-Founder of GWWC". On any other article, that would be sufficient to just list someone as a cofounder, without needing any source listed. If a third party source is required, there are numerous outlets that list MacAskill as cofounder.
 * The tweet you reference is suggesting that this is a lie — that because GWWC had a web presence in 2007, yet MacAskill didn't meet Ord until 2009, that means he must not have been a cofounder because cofounders have to meet each other. This could be wrong in several ways: maybe the cofounders didn't meet until later; maybe the org got a website first but didn't do a hard launch until well after this (this is happening to my org right now!); maybe they're using the word "co-founder" to mean one of many people that started supporting the org online, rather than someone who actually handled the executive stuff. I don't have particular evidence for any of these possible explanations, but I don't think we need any of them. It is sufficient to just look at the org itself which lists MacAskill as a cofounder.
 * I'll leave the citation needed tags for now, but if others agree with my take, my recommendation is to remove them. If others feel that would be premature, please comment here so that we can reach a consensus on this. &mdash; Eric Herboso 03:47, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Is this "hard launch" explanation persuasive? The 2007 version of the website certainly seems to be an organization in every way I can think of. I would like others to comment because I feel conflicted between the organization's own statement and the apparently different timeline recorded on the internet (and perfectly referenceable by Wikipedia sourcing standards, as I understand them). If NYT and other news has repeated the organization's own statement, I'm not sure how much weight that should have. It's not like they came up with that on their own. I'm sure they were just told it by Giving What We Can (GWWC) and repeated it without question. We need to avoid WP:OR in either direction. Perhaps leaving the 2009 co-founder modifier in but noting the organization had a website, pledge, etc already in 2007 would be the right compromise. Jmill1806 (talk) 12:08, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Content
I've read the comments above and don't wish to sound critical here about the article as I'm not expert enough to take a view on the subject. But having landed here from a related subject and read the whole thing, I'm honestly left wondering exactly what GWWC is today. It doesn't seem to be a charity or a company and it says in the article that it doesn't do research. An accumulating list of people who say they will give away a proportion of their income doesn't constitute an organisation. It seems to me to have been campaign which is part of a larger movement (EA?) but is essentially in abeyance. I can see the website via the link, of course, and that suggests GWWC has a fair number of staff. Yet if these are real jobs (including a director of research for an 'organisation' the article says does no research), then the article surely needs a much better handle on exactly what they do and therefore whether or not they are truly an ongoing organisation rather than a kind of brand within the EA movement? Emmentalist (talk) 12:06, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Following my comments above, I followed the links at the article and went onwards one step from there. This certainly constitutes original research. I'm not suggesting what follows here should be incorporated in the article per se, but I do think it might help inform and frame improvements. GWWC is listed at the Effective Ventures Foundation websitel as an organisation supported by the latter. The Effective Ventures Foundation is a well-resourced (£10m carried on to this year and £2.3m spent in the FY to '22) not-for-profit linked to a new entity called Effective Ventures Ltd which is not old enough to have filed accounts. The same website includes the Centre for Effective Altruism as one of the organisation it 'supports'. But that entity describes itself as a project of the Effective Ventures Foundation. Moreover, it describes GWWC as, in turn, a 'project' of the centre for effective altruism's. Indeed, there is much explanation at that website about how the centre for effective altruism also decided to designate the GWWC an 'organisation' rather than a 'project'. So it seems that the description of GWWC as an organisation extends from the centre for effective altruism's internal nomenclature. This does not, of itself, mean that calling GWWC an organisation is incorrect here. However, GWWC is called a 'project' at its Centre for Effective Altruism wikipedia article, and while that article is confusing and sometimes incorrect about the centre's status and operations (e.g. it is described as both a charity and a project of another charity - the latter has been true since 2022), GWWC is, as said above, described as a 'project' at the centre's website and it is entirely clear from the same website that the operations of GWWC are entirely under the ultimate control of the centre. What GWWC seems to be, then, is a project of a project of a 'federation' of projects funded by the Effective Ventures Foundation (since this final entry is linked to a US entity there may or may not be more layers above depending on the exact funding sources). It is relevant too, I think, that GWWC seems never to have been registered as a company or charity, so it is not clear what kind of 'organisation' it has been even in the past. In respect of calling GWWC an 'organisation', I offer the example of a university. We would certainly consider that an organisation. And we might well consider an important sub-entity of a university an entity too. In this case, the Centre of Effective Altruism seems to be a reasonable analogue. However, it is hard to think of any cases where this would go further. Would we call, for example, a well resourced lab inside a department a discrete organisation? Perhaps, but that really would surely require justifying in respect of autonomy and activities? At present, GWWC seems to be a badge for a pledge but little else is public. It may run its own budget but it is not, it seems, in any meaningful sense autonomous. In other words, it seems to be better described as a project of the centre's rather than an organisation. This has become a bit of an essay, so enough from me. To make a final point, however, I think the importance of the organisation/project debate is that it extends, from my point of view, from a trend in Wikipedia articles which relate to the EA movement to segue into promotion of people and projects. I sense some aggrandisement. This sometimes leads, in my opinion, to articles framed as PR rather than as helpful and interesting Wikipedia articles. The EA movement is interesting and even important so it would be better if articles which relate to it were improved. My loose thoughts only. Emmentalist (talk) 15:40, 10 June 2023 (UTC)