The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism | Hacker News Reader

The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism

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118 pointsdeworms43 comments

The Twitter thread devolves into various random citations of "wokeism", and that's all fine and well for those who care to argue such examples on Twitter.

But even aside from the culture war quagmire, the first few tweets in the thread are fascinating. Wikipedia is up to 400+ employees now? It's spending grew from $10 million in 2010, to $112 million in 2020? The actual website costs are only $2-3 million per year, and have declined over the past decade?

WOW. It's amazing how entities grow until they become more about themselves than the mission. I don't care about all of the specific grants that the author wants to Twitter-litigate. I'm just done donating money to Wikipedia because 2 cents on the dollar actually going toward the mission is absurd.

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy:

> In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

See also: the clique that has evolved between wiki editors.

I read the opposite. Their operation is so tight and so efficient that one pledge drive a year gives them 4x their operating budget. The product is better than ever. I don't think there's anything unethical in raising funds with a brand name that inspires so much admiration. If they whiff on a few of their grants that's just life in the real world. I doubt the board sign off on or are even aware of how every penny is spent.

> The actual website costs are only $2-3 million per year, and have declined over the past decade?

The HOSTING cost. Not the total cost to run it. That's a big difference.

It’s my understanding that a large percentage of hosting costs are donated by large companies like Google…

Again: irrelevant. Hosting costs are often quite small compared to the ops and dev costs.

I agree. I wish the thread had stopped two or three tweets in. The random right-wing "culture war" ramblings are not cool and they detract from the important message that Wikipedia has solved the problem it was aiming to solve and is now hopelessly lost as an organization.

> Wikipedia has solved the problem it was aiming to solve

"A world where every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge" - that's quite far from being a "solved" problem.

That is a solid example of a mission statement for an organization that doesn't have a mission anymore.

In what sense? Since this is a culture war adherent spouting this stuff, how can you take any of it at face value?

There's nothing biased about the foundation's own financial reports, review them for yourself: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

They place banner ads implying that donations are needed 'to keep Wikipedia thriving for years' which is a weird way to express that they annually collect over 50x their cost of maintenance in donations. And most of what they do collect gets distributed to 1) their employees (employees of the foundation are mostly not directly involved with running Wikipedia, which is edited and maintained by volunteers) and 2) other organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with the operation of the site.

> Wikipedia is up to 400+ employees now?

Woah. 400+ is nearly as many[1] workers as Amazon[2]. Yet somehow nobody ever talks about unionizing Wikipedia's warehouses.

But it's all there in these Tweets: check out donation recipients like SeRCH gaming the Youtube recommendation engine to misinform elevens[3] of viewers.

1: 400 + 1,608,000

2: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...

3: 43 views in that first video alone. And while I can't read the entire title of the one in the corner, the author's screenshot shows 256 views: nearly twenty times the number of elevens in 43.

Edit: sorry, my math was way off there.

256 is only has about 6 times the number of elevens as 43 does. But my broader argument stands.

This is a problem across charities it seems - political activism is not necessarily bad, but when it's all generic woke stuff that has nothing to do with the charity's mission, it becomes really frustrating. The ACLU is another obvious example (as is Canada's equivalent the CCLA that I stopped supporting). But even a hospital I used to support has gotten into the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the merit of that sort of thing, it's not anywhere near the top of causes people expect their hospital donations to go to. It would be nice to see charities much better stick with their mandates and not have this creep that happens where the current thing is somehow automatically an issue for them

Edit: I'm also very interested in the way this story has been ranked on Hn. It's had a lot of votes in a short time that would normally get it right up to the top, yet it's currently on the second page. I know enough that there's not some nefarious thing happening, though it's curious whatever quirk of the algorithm / moderation is keeping the story down in the ranking

> Edit: I'm also very interested in the way this story has been ranked on Hn.

It was submitted and flagkilled a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33167393

I wouldn't be surprised if The Algorithm punished this for being a duplicate.

I work at a nonprofit that is all in on pronoun affirmation. It doesn't mean we've spent a millions of donor funds on pronoun consultants, we just added a field on our active directory. Employees demanded it.

Wikimedia likely has spent quite a lot of donor funds on pronoun consultants. I sat in on some of the meetings.

- Former employee of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Opinions and pronouns are my own.

  >the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the merit of that sort of 
  >thing, it's not anywhere near the top of causes people expect their hospital 
  >donations to go to

If I received a complaint along these lines, I would earnestly explain that we are looking into an electron recycling initiative to compensate for the extra letters in email signatures.

Agree. There are many causes that people across the political spectrum would support a la carte, but for some reason many institutions have recently collapsed into a “must support all of the above” posture. Bring back the single issue institution!

> But even a hospital I used to support has gotten into the business of pronouns and stuff, and regardless of the merit of that sort of thing, it's not anywhere near the top of causes people expect their hospital donations to go to.

You're kidding, right? You won't donate to a hospital because "pronouns and stuff" isn't part of "their mandates"? How about sexual harassment? Should they turn a blind eye to that in the workplace because it's not part of their mandates. Lunch breaks? Birthday parties? Seriously, if pronouns is the reason you stopped donating to an otherwise worthy cause, I don't see the hospital as the problem.

A smug dismissal doesn't change people's minds. You can accept that many people don't go in for their donations being spent this way, try to hide it from them, or write them off as donors. This sort of condescension doesn't do anything.

Yes because the notion that one can choose his pronouns is one of the most insidious lies in contemporary culture.

OK, look, the Twitter thread is gobbledygook. If people really care about non-profit governance, there's a website for that called Charity Navigator which actually rates the charity according to essentially how much donations actually serve the mission. Wikimedia gets the top rating.

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

Pretty much all Charity Navigator is good for is determining how much of a charity's funds get spend on fundraising. Everything that's not a fundraising expense is therefore a "program expense".

You don't really HAVE to go to 3rd parties for this. To their credit, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes their own financials, as audited by KPMG:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

You can browse the breakdown of their expenses on page 5. It does seem like hosting their websites is only a tiny portion of their total expenditures. This is their own published financial statement, hosted on their own website.

The issue is that many don't know they're donating to a charity, regardless of alignment. The popups make it sound like donations go to the running of Wikipedia as a web service, not to political activism.

Important thread. Shame on you, Wikipedia.

>Let's take a look at two big recipients.

Then proceeds to list two cherry-picked grants of $250k each. Ie 1% of the grant money.

Complaints about Wikipedia begging for money while being flush with cash have been around for a long time however this Twitter thread is clearly using that for their own agenda.

Unrelated, I always find the stereotype of the right wing twitter user with the anime girl profile picture amusing.

Are you familiar with the Tides Foundation, who manages the Wikimedia Foundation?

It might be the most politically biased foundation in the world.

Pretty damning if what they allege is correct.

Well that was a wild ride! This reads like a string of tweets... I took some notes along the way:

- The Wikimedia Foundation is not the same thing as Wikipedia.

This is true.

- The foundation's total expenditure increased about tenfold over ten years (2010-2020), to ~112 million USD in 2020

- Yet "Wikipedia seems to be functionally the same website as it was 10 years ago"

Sure, if you reduce it to a website with text that you can read, it was that then and it is that now. Of course, we now know that Wikipedia is not Wikimedia Foundation, so this seems a bit irrelevant...

- In 2021 the Wikimedia Foundation paid ~100,000 USD less for internet hosting than in 2012.

OK. Hosting costs were ~2,500,000 -- now? Slashed! To ~2,400,000! I guess they did some optimisation or got a good deal or something.

- 43% of the foundation's expenses are "direct support to websites", by their own admission

On the page where the percentages screenshot was taken, it explains what this means (and how it's not just server costs). I don't really know if this is a reasonable percentage. But I do know that applying arbitrary judgements to that percentage (it's "less than half") is unreasonable.

It costs money to run the foundation and do the fundraising. The highest single expense listed is "salaries and wages".

- In 2005 Jimmy Wales did a TED talk and the phrase "ragtag band of volunteers" was used. The Wikipedia website at that time was largely run by unpaid volunteers.

I guess Jimbo used to be cool, probably. In 2005, none of the people running Wikipedia even got paid. And the articles are written by creeps on the internet! But these days, the foundation pays its staff. They even employ people to manage the money coming in and going out!

- Wikipedia has a "neutral point of view" policy. But the Wikimedia Foundation, self-proclaimed proponents of free and open knowledge, have politics and a definition of racial equity. They also want the police to not kill people, and please not make protesting illegal.

Organisations with purposes tend to be political. That's what things are. What will really blow your mind is that complaining about someone else's political views is extremely political.

- The foundation gives some of the money they receive (the donor cash) to other organisations that they support.

That's fair enough I guess, but I'm all for criticising where the people's money is going.

- One such not-for-profit, SeRCH Foundation, received $250,000 as a two-year investment. They used the word "hyperspace". They have a Youtube channel and it has long videos on it and they have much smaller view counts than what you would hope for.

If this is the best (worst) example they could find, I don't think I'm going to be convinced...

SeRCH use some language in an unfamiliar and seemingly self-aware way. I don't think it's written for you, mate.

It's $125,000 a year, seeing as we're so concerned about yearly expenses.

It's clear that their Youtube channel is not the entirety of even their video-based "output". The titles of some of the videos shown suggest that it's just a couple of "episodes" of a substantial series ("S7E5").

- Borealis Philanthropy is even more political (than either/both Wikimedia or SeRCH, I guess) and guess what -- they too got a sweet quarter mil for their "Racial Equity in Journalism Fund". The funds are a "one-year investment to support US-based journalism organizations led by and for people of color".

The problem here seems to be that the money was used to support journalism organizations led by and for people of color.

They included a screenshot of some text about another thing that Borealis Philanthropy do or did once which was the "Emerging LGBTQ Leaders of Color Fund". You don't need me to tell you that that was politics.

A quick look at the foundation's financials from other years suggests the amount of "awards and grants" given can vary significantly each year. Show us something concrete that shows that the money going to these organisations is wasted. Show us that the donors don't know what they're donating to or are unhappy about the results.

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