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Comment by cptaj | Hacker News Reader

Not wikipedia? It seems way more important

Have you seen how much money they receive and where they squander it all?

Can you share more information on this?

There are fast-growing sections of their budget slated for political-like causes, not technical ones that keep the website online and accessible. They call it the Thriving Movement and it's largely based around DEI-type initiatives.

"The Thriving Movement budget has increased from $14.3 million last fiscal year to $36.7 million in this budget which represents an increase of $22.4 million or 157%. It has also grown from being 13.2% of the Foundation’s overall budget to 24.5%."

Not only is more money going into it, a larger share of their budget is being allocated to it, so a larger share of each donation goes into DEI initiatives. If you're the kind of person that does not think this is a valuable investment of your money, you might not be inclined to donate anymore (or to donate less than before).

I personally believe a 24.5% share of the budget for what are largely DEI initiatives is not something I'd prefer to support with increasing donations, so I have scaled back my donations to them (as well as Mozilla/Firefox for the same reasons). I am sure many people agree with DEI initiatives and donate more. That's fine. We all vote with our wallet.

Source: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-...

As someone who never heard of "Thriving Movement" nor "DEI-type initiaives" before, it seems to be around making the workplace (Wikimedia Foundation) more diverse, equal and inclusive. At a glance, those seems like good things to introduce to global organizations (especially foundations) that is supposed to be represented by the whole world. But I can agree that it seems like a large part of the budget, for being what it is.

But if I understand what you're saying correctly, you're saying it's a negative for them to put such a focus on it?

I'm not morally judging them. If they think it's a good idea, good for them.

I'm just not interested in funding those initiatives at that percentage of budget and would rather send the money to other essential Internet companies who have lesser investments in those ideas. I still give some to Wikimedia, just not as much.

Thank you for explaining your position! Which internet companies do you currently donate to that also publishes exactly what they spend their money on, so you can make sure they don't spend similar amount on similar initiatives?

In my experience, the Wikimedia Foundation seems to be the one who is most transparent about where funds go, while organizations like Internet Archive doesn't make a lot of data public, at least via their own website.

Wikimedia is not unique. CharityWatch is a good place to start. Many high-rated nonprofits detail very specifically where all funding goes.

https://www.charitywatch.org/

Also, Wikimedia may not be as transparent as you think. Here's more information on that, but the whole thread is worth reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32841892

Thanks yet again!

So Wikimedia is a non-profit AFAIK, you have any idea why it's not listed on charitywatch.org?

It's on Charity Navigator. Not sure why it's not on CharityWatch.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

EDIT: However it is not updated for recent years. Likely because Wikimedia is not transparent enough with their financial statements.

> those seems like good things

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If I were a cynical man I might speculate that it's not because things that look good don't get scrutinised as much but that anyone wanting less scrutiny might try painting their aims as "good" and those who object as therefore "bad". But I digress. Wikimedia's mission is[1]:

> to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally

What does DEI at their workplace have to do with that?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Mission

They also don't need millions to achieve a diverse workplace - a more economical option could be to move their headquarters out of SV.

This is an interesting article and comment thread on wiki and their funds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32840097

If you've ever seen how topics are treated in a Wikipedia discussion thread you'd feel like the whole website has zero credibility. There's a reason academics don't let you use it.

The reason is that it is not a direct source of course because the authors cannot be validated. Never met a college professor that said don’t use Wikipedia (if anything it was encouraged) as long as you’re pulling from the citations. I had plenty of high school teachers talk about how awful it is though and I think it was because they just didn’t understand it

I'll take this a step further to say that my graduate algorithms professor assigned Wikipedia articles as reading. The parent blanket statements are just that: overgeneralizations.

I had a similar experience. My cryptography professor regularly linked to Wikipedia articles in his assignments as the reading to go with the assignment. Honestly, the last time I had a teacher really say something against using Wikipedia was in high school.

My undergrad physics professors didn't exactly assign wikipedia articles, but they did tell us that some articles were useful resources for understanding certain topics. In my experience, the more technical a topic, the more likely the wikipedia article is to be reliable. Probably because there isn't much incentive for someone who isn't an expert to edit it.

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