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Comment by admax88qqq | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia is and continues to be the best resource on the web. I really don't care to armchair run their parents organization. I'll continue to donate and hope that they know what they're doing.

I think HN gets too tunnel visioned on the technical side of the project. Look at how many comments reduce Wikipedia to it's "hosting" costs. There's more to running an organization than the servers.

All large organizations experience waste and spend some money poorly. It's basically an operating expense at scale. The net value creation tends to still be positive.

I believe there's more to running a successful global comprehensive and free encyclopedia than hosting. To keep the content and community vibrant, to expand into new languages and communities. These things probably require more than just "hosting". I don't know what's required but I'll continue to donate to WMF and hope for the best.

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Since WMF really cranked their fundraising popups into high gear ~6 weeks ago people have been posting articles here protesting about the foundation and on every thread there is someone who takes this standpoint. It's your money, but this attitude also strikes me as being very stubborn when confronted with the possibility that your charity is being wasted.

The critique is not merely administrative bloat or waste. The critique is about the magnitude of these problems. There is always waste but WMF has more than comparable non-profits like Internet Archive and when you have board members kicking large sums of money around to their other non-profits then there are questions of a serious ethical breach. The critique is about the deceptive nature of the WMF ad campaign. The critique is about how the WMF does very little of the actual work in running Wikipedia but takes the lions share of the cash from the community of volunteers. The critique is pretty detailed and well articulated and it is not simply a technical objection that anything beyond servers is a waste. This representation is of the critique is pretty unfair given how much thought and effort people have put into spelling out their case against WMF.

Again it's your money but I would strongly suggest doing your homework before defending the WMF.

> Since WMF really cranked their fundraising popups into high gear ~6 weeks ago

WMF cranks their popups every year around this time. I haven't found them to be any more obtrusive this year than every other year.

> The critique is about how the WMF does very little of the actual work in running Wikipedia

That's fair, I just disagree with the critique's I've heard. Most commentators are taking what I consider to be a very narrow view of what it means to "run Wikipedia."

> Most commentators are taking what I consider to be a very narrow view of what it means to "run Wikipedia."

The people who're most up in arms about it tend to focus on just the hosting costs, without considering the cost of paying even a skeleton devops crew, let alone paying for ongoing development (of which the WMF funds at least a pretty solid majority).

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the WMF is spending its money correctly, of course, or whether it's overspending on otherwise-necessary categories. I dislike the implicit argument that we shouldn't pay people to work on open source projects, though.

This is a misframing of the issue here. It’s not that we should only consider hosting costs, I’ll eagerly concede this straw man argument is indeed poor.

The issue is that relative to other projects WMF runs, Wikipedia is more popular and also inexpensive to run.

Fundraising to users of the popular product, while diverting the funds raised to ancillary products is already misleading by itself.

Making urgent claims that the popular product may suffer without funds, when diverting those funds elsewhere — now it’s not just misleading but gives me a strong stench of being unethical.

> Making urgent claims that the popular product may suffer without funds, when diverting those funds elsewhere — now it’s not just misleading but gives me a strong stench of being unethical.

This reminds me of the emails the various US political parties send out around trending issues, ex. "You need to send us $5 TODAY to keep [opposing party] from [doing something that's in the news]." Obviously this money goes to the party fund and not to fighting the specific issue they're campaigning on and the wording of these is overly alarmist.

The issue people have is less what Wikipedia does with the funds donated to them, then how they advertise. If you advert suggests you are about to go under, but in reality you are spending money left right and center on various other charities, with only vaguely related mission statements, then you are taking advantage of the god will of your donators, that is the problem here.

>All large organizations experience waste and spend some money poorly.

Sure and if their advertising was in any way honest about their financial situation people would mind much less.

Personally I would never donate to an organization which repeatedly claims to be at the brink of collapse, while managing very significant amount of funds and investing them into vanity projects. If I wanted to donate money, why wouldn't I donate to anything else?

> If you advert suggests you are about to go under, but in reality you are spending money left right and center on various other charities, with only vaguely related mission statements, then you are taking advantage of the god will of your donators, that is the problem here.

This, totally. That's the reason for me too.

They do good work but the way they ask really ticks me off. And it's been like this forever, when they still featured the sad-sam Jimmy Wales pic.

They do great work but I'll rather give to archive.org that also do amazing and important work, need it a lot more and don't cry about it so much.

Part of the danger is that the excess of funds is used to create permanent costs (e.g. hiring more people than needed, running on more servers than needed, creating more management layers than needed) that then become a danger to the organisation if there are ever lean times. It's very easy to increase costs, and very difficult to reduce them safely.

This gets exacerbated when the management get all excited about their pet projects and reroute funding & resources to those instead of the main thing that the funds were supposed to be for. Mozilla is the classic example of this - the Firefox team is not a priority when the funds get low, because of the various hare-brained projects the management have come up with.

Wikipedia is a precious thing. I want to support wikipedia. The vast majority of the money that goes to the WMF supports salaries and wages for 'programs' but there is no further breakdown publicly available, other than to say that those are not general, administrative, or fundraising wages related to the core mission.

The WMF does a lot of interesting and good work, and I have no doubt much of it is vital to the mission of wikipedia, but they amount of money it consumes with zero transparency makes me wonder if it's being spent effectively. They need to open the books of the foundation so that people can be confident again that they're supporting useful work and not vanity projects of fund administrators who have an enormous pile of money to throw around.

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