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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

There is no such exemption.

As evidence I point to Boys Town, a philanthropy that quite literally exists to take care of orphans. It amassed a large fortune that exceeded anything justifiable by their core mission. In the 1970s, a tip from Warren Buffett on this won The Omaha Sun (which he owned at the time) a Pulitzer for reporting on the resulting scandal. (He was also an investor in The Washington Post which won a Pulitzer in the same year for reporting on Watergate.)

See https://www.philanthropydaily.com/nonprofits-mission-drift-b... for verification. And evidence suggesting that that particular charity has continued down the same path.

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Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn't run out of orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on orphans.

A better charity to compare with Wikipedia would be the the Washington Monument Restoration Project.

See https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc72.htm

Once the Washington Monument is completely restored you can't spend any more money restoring the Washington Monument. If donations keep coming in, you shouldn't spend them on giving executives of the charity free ski vacations (yes, the WMF actually did that) You should instead build up an endowment that is eventually big enough that the interest covers all Washington Monument maintenance forever. Then and only then should you tell donors "look, we don't need any more money for restoring the Washington Monument. If you give us a donation we will use it for other things, starting with restoring the Lincoln Memorial".

Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn't run out of orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on orphans.

Do you have a source for that?

My understanding is that boys town did run out of orphans who met their requirements. There simply aren't enough orphans in the USA with no family to take care of them who slip through the cracks of the adoption system.

But that fact didn't slow their appeals for more money.

That said, my understanding is based on my memories of a book that I don't presently have a copy of.

Ah. I had no idea that they ran out of orphans. If they did, then it would be a perfect analogy. Boys town takes care of all the orphans that it is their mission to take care of, keeps collecting donations and spending on other stuff. The Wikimedia Foundation does everything needed to put an encyclopedia -- the thing that it is their mission to take care of -- keeps collecting donations and spending on other stuff. Thanks for the great analogy, and I apologize for misunderstanding and assuming that there would always be plenty more orphans to take care of.

I am going to think about this, do some research, and see if I can turn it into an essay on Wikipedia about collecting money after the job is done. Thanks!

Didn't the march of dimes also keep taking in donations after polio was eradicated?

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"

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