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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

If I donate to Wikipedia, I expect that my donation will go to Wikipedia, not to unknown external groups. That's a bait and switch. According to the twitter thread, $22.9 million was given in such grants. That's almost 10x what Wikipedia is paying for hosting. That's not "funneling." That's taking the whole pie.

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It's a donation, not an investment. There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions on your behalf.

You can expect money to be used in some ways, sure, but it's not like WM uses 50% of your donation on vanity projects.

Personally, I wish WM would invest more in the quality of non-English articles. French "toponymie" sections tend to be brigaded for whatever reasons for instance. French linguists wage wars apparently.

Sure, but there's also no obligation to donate to Wikimedia in the first place, and it's quite reasonable to decide that if the organization is flush enough with money that it can donate it to outside organizations, it doesn't need more. (And it certainly shouldn't imply it needs more to keep the lights on.)

You're right. They don't use 50% on vanity projects. They use way more than that. Their donation income last year was around $150 million and their hosting costs were $2.4 million. Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate). That's >80% on BS.

I think you misunderstand what Wikimedia is and does. It's not just Wikipedia and hosting. It is also a lot of research into their Wikidata free knowledge database (look it up) for instance.

It requires a lot of people and core knowledge to develop and run. To some extent Wikimedia is a research company too.

a semantic web holdover project that nobody has heard of or uses is tens of millions of dollars per year?

it is sad to say, but it is obvious that the general good name of the wikipedia project is parasitized by nonprofit sector careerists.

Their 2021 personnel costs were nearly $70 million, plus another $12 million for consulting. Their awards and grants budget was about $10 million.

Their engineering/devops/pm personal costs was $70M?

It is genuinely interesting to me[1]. Is there a better listing available somewhere else?

Programs totals are: $69,371,450 I was expecting to administrative totals to be higher: $11,531,675

[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

> Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate)

On this site, you will find many who will breathlessly insist that the only way to run a website at scale is through top tier engineering solutions developed by teams of highly paid engineers. I am not sure why the calculus changes so much for a non profit. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that they have $8 million in processing fees just for their donations.

I have no idea what is the right number they should be spending, but I know their costs are much higher than servers and bandwidth.

And if they pay tons of other foundations that aren't them, with the money I donated to them, then they're not getting my money anymore. Or probably a lot of peoples'.

If the money is being sent elsewhere, it means they are receiving more than they can manage. That changes the fundraising message. If a friend said please help me with my medical bills, then you later find out a portion of the money was spent on something unrelated, you are either going to give them less money the next time around or nothing.

> That changes the fundraising message.

And this is exactly the problem everyone has had with Wikipedia's WMF-fundraising messages for years.

Any banner that says "This donation is needed for Wikipedia" is objectively false.

Wikipedia itself does not need donations.

And the WMF isn't even spending 50% of those donations it does receive on Wikipedia.

It may not legally meet the definition, but it feels like fraud.

> It's a donation, not an investment. There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions on your behalf.

Certainly.

But WMF's banners begging for donations strongly imply otherwise. It's deceptive.

> There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions on your behalf.

That’s the whole point of nonprofits?

From Wikipedia (ha!):

> Key aspects of nonprofits are accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to every person who has invested time, money, and faith into the organization. Nonprofit organizations are accountable to the donors, founders, volunteers, program recipients, and the public community.

> There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions

Uh, people have gotten in a lot of trouble in the past for claiming to raise money for specific causes and using that money for something else. I'm guessing Wikimedia is on the legal side of this fairly gray area, but as a blanket statement, you're mistaken: Wikimedia is very much under a specific legal obligation to use funds collected through charitable fundraising for that charity.

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