In reality, the Wikipedia Foundation is doing just fine. In fact, they make so much money from donations, they spend (read: waste) massive amounts of it on various social ventures instead of using it on the service that caused people to donate in the first place.
Wikipedia runs one of the busiest websites in the world with a staff much smaller than any of those other sites. Like any company -- there's going to be priorities different than mine and waste.
But I'm ok being asked to chip in for what I get.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites
If you give money to, I don’t know, a charity for hungry kids in <insert poor country>, they will send you MORE begging mails, not less.
The whole thing just feels skeezy. They may have a noble mission, and they may need a $300m endowment when previously $100m was the target[2], but they should make that case. Acting like the site is in trouble and desperately needs every penny all the time is just dishonest. It’s like a televangelist is running the place. Now matter how much you give they desperately and urgently need more more more.
0. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
1. https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...
2. https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/22/wikimedia-fo...
I think almost every charity, or business, ever created spends some proportion of it's income on advertising / outreach, to increase future income. If they cut that 12%, and it decreased their income to half, or a third, of it's current value, would that make you happy?
Also, please point me to "The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running.". I've not seen anything like that in any banner I've seen this year. I'd be interested to know if you get different banners to me? Or, are you just assuming the banner says that?
Most of the arguments, including yours, are 100% qualitative. "They're a good site, so give them money." Or "other charities also spend money on advertising."
We should instead be quantitative : "Yes, you are a worthy cause, but you have plenty now. Other charities are more deserving."
We can argue about that extra 30%, but it’s not what people are expecting to pay for.
On your point 1, it is incredible normal for non-profit organizations to spend quite a bit of money on fundraising. They do this because spending less brings in less, and bringing in less means they cease to exist. As weird as it is to spend a million throwing a party to bring in five million, it works, and it brings in money from different people than letters in the mail or banners on a website do. 12% is half of what Charity Watch still deems "highly efficient" and earns them an A-[0].
On your points 0 and 2, I'm puzzled about what you suggest as an alternative. Should they fire all but a skeleton staff and only operate the website as-is on as little as possible with no expansion into other languages or areas of interest? Maybe that's your implied suggestion, but they clearly disagree.
If the once-a-week banners bother you that much, it suggests that you are using the site very, very frequently. You can either support their mission or not, as you wish, and all of the banners are easily dismissed or ignored. I don't think they're nearly as dishonest as you do, but then, I've worked for non-profits in the past and can read a Charity Watch page.
And I’m afraid you’ve bought into the “Wikimedia is on the verge of extinction” nonsense. There is no need for a skeleton staff and bare bones operations. They have a $300m endowment! They said, as recently as two years ago, that they only need a $100m endowment to meet their mission indefinitely.
What changed that merits a 3x increase? Do they really need to raise $120m per year, as they do now, to avoid the skeleton staff of doom that you propose?
I’ve posted supporting links elsewhere in this thread. I like Wikimedia. They do good work. Their management has run amok and is trapped in a spiral of raising ever-more money to justify more expensive management.
no.
the banners never bothered me when I used the website daily, multiple times a day. They bother me immensely now that I use wikipedia once / twice a month. Now, every time I open it there is the banner asking me to donate (every time more invasive).
This is not to say there's no excess, or that resources couldn't be allocated internally more effectively - I'm not going to put up some kind of strawman - but:
1. I took a 20% pay cut so that I could do more work for the Foundation. Worth it.
2. Posts that say "Wikipedia only has [x] more articles but budget has gone up [y]" are beyond stupid. Any idea how many projects besides Wikipedia are run by WMF - for instance, ever heard of Wikimedia Commons? Any idea how litigious and heavily-regulated the world has got, and how much effort has to be poured into softening some of the emerging laws, mounting judicial challenges against the rest, etc? Any idea how much funding every usergroup and chapter (sometimes more than one per country, e.g. in Spain) is asking for? Any idea how much effort is put into developing features that encourage new people to start editing, not just consuming? Any idea how expensive it is to support and facilitate the big "Movement" discussions (aimed at decentralising the movement!) and the User Code of Conduct discussions? How hard it is to have a viable Trust & Safety team for so many projects, 300+ languages, and people from all over the world to support?
3. After a big outcry about the banners a month ago (that was a long time coming, no denial), the drafting and design of the banners is much softer this year than the last. And guess what, they're much less effective, and now projects are being cancelled, staff departures aren't being backfilled, and jobs are at stake. That may be worth it, but let's at least be honest about the downsides.
Accountability and criticism are fine - but when absolutely no intellectual effort is put into keeping that criticism balanced and on-target, then all you've ended up doing is making people who work here, rather than raking in the big bucks working for Big Tech, feel shitty. And guess what: you lose extra marks for bringing up cancer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...) when many people working here will be dealing with actual cancer, either personally or among their friends or family, at the moment.
Though personally, I think it's even better when people join the community of active users (whether Wikipedia or any of the other projects) and help out directly!
(ironically, most poor country photos are from Panoramio from before it went to Google Maps.)
Maybe the problem is that only 43% of donations are used for operations[1]?
0. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
Furthermore, the WMF fundraised $165 million in FY 2021-2022 already. That should more than cover staff salaries already, which were $68 million in 2020/2021.
The root of the issue is that the WMF does a lot, gets a lot of money for doing it, and puts back an abysmally small amount back into the thing they are most well known for: Wikipedia. So why would Wikipedia editors want to continue advertising it if they get little to no benefit from doing so?
It's an unfortunate position to be in as a Wikimedia employee.
"Abysmally small" is a bizarre and uninformed characterization. Please read anything written on the topic; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2022_ban... is a fine starting point.
In fact, only 2.7 million dollars is spent on the actual hosting, you know, that thing that is absolutely drop dead required to run a site. That is 1.8% and is split amongst the various sites other than English Wikipedia. That sounds a hell of a lot like “abysmally small” to me.
And, as I said, it wouldn’t be a part of a currently running donation campaign. Maybe it would affect budgets years from now, but the foundation is not running at the equivalent of paycheck to paycheck. The current donation drive would in no way shape or form impact the current projects that are being run, and if they are, then that’s indicative of massive mismanagement more than anything.
So please, show me exactly where I’m wrong, with explicit sources, instead of claiming I’m uninformed and pointing me to the most generic of pages on this.
Re paycheck to paycheck: look, I'm not a finance guy, but I have it on good authority (sorry, no links) that the current campaign's performance is having _some_ effect; you're welcome to tell them it shouldn't, I guess?
Sure, there's some stupid money (and the recent upheaval is helping with that), but there's a lot of non-stupid money, and it's not like they're epically mismanaging the money.
Apologies for the lack of sources, but everything relevant is public, I think, and you've found the budget already.
Ops might be essential, but it’s not $88 million dollars. Nowhere near.
It’s your responsibility to back up your claims with links. Telling someone it’s all public and to trust you and your good authority is, frankly, not enough.
Also, the Wikimedia Foundation explicitly asks for funding for Wikipedia. As far as I know, no one asked the Wikimedia Foundation to perform anything past that. This seems to be comparable to Mozilla‘s situation, who try to grow past Firefox with ideas nobody asks for but they lose sight of what their main product.
50% of money goes towards staffing. WF just overhired and pays ludicrous exec salaries, so now they must pay the price.
From my experience, and I worked there for 7 years, Wikimedia pays below average for the industry, though the benefit package is absolutely top-notch.
Isn't it the job of the Wikimedia Foundation to let people know just these things in a way they can understand? Why is it the responsibility of users to dig into the financials of a non-profit begging them for money rather than the other way around?
edit: And if the answer is that if people were given detailed and accurate information they'd be less likely to donate then... that answers the question of why you shouldn't donate.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
At some point you have to ask yourself "what would victim blaming look like, and how different is that from this"
These don't seem to allow me to actually answer the questions OP brought up but merely give high level summaries of X% is spent on these N things or the strategic areas without money allotment. If the point of OPs questions is that knowing that information would make me more likely to donate then I don't know that information.
>At some point you have to ask yourself "what would victim blaming look like, and how different is that from this"
Interesting how questioning giving a money to a specific non-profit is now called victim blaming. I guess corporations really are people now.
"Yes the criticism is wrong, but that's your fault for not informing the critics" is absolutely victim blaming.
You seemed to have missed the point, while saying it. The point is the banner makes it seem like Wikipedia needs money, when it's actually all the other projects, which OP presumably does not value, which need the money.
> now projects are being cancelled, staff departures aren't being backfilled, and jobs are at stake.
That sounds like a desirable thing, get it back to reasonable spending levels.
I use Wikipedia, not any of these other projects.
> Any idea how expensive it is to support and facilitate the big "Movement" discussions
I don't care about the "movement"
> and the User Code of Conduct discussions?
I don't care about this either, but how on Earth is that expensive?
You are asking me to donate to things I don't use, and don't care about, and are not necessary to the product that I use. If you allowed me to donate specifically to Wikipedia, I would (and I did until I realized I wasn't). Why don't you segregate funds between Wikipedia and the rest of WMF?
As for the spam level, I know that the reason that it has gone up is because you need more money to fund this stuff that I don't care about and could run Wikipedia on a small fraction of the donations you get. That's the issue. Not how "soft" the banner design is. You are using Wikipedia as a bait and switch fundraising operation for a lot of other stuff that, honestly, very few people know or care about or would donate to if it weren't for the Wikipedia focused fundraising.
Managing restricted donations is a pain from an accounting perspective and incurs a lot of overhead. I don't deal with nonprofits at WMF's size, but most that I've been a part of won't manage restrictions unless the donation is very large. The amount of additional fundraising that comes in for even pre-defined restrictions isn't worth the overhead of it.
>many people working here will be dealing with actual cancer
Just because cancer is a real thing doesn't mean it can not be used as a metaphor. Death is similarly used as a metaphor all of the time.
And that’s the whole crux of the argument that OP conveniently ignored: that the banners make it seem like Wikipedia needs the money, when it doesn’t. WMF, on the other hand, does need it so it can continue to grow its spending exponentially on causes no one cares about and have nothing to do with Wikipedia itself (which is what people actually care about and probably think their donations are being used to support).
As for facilitation: I think you're not thinking very deep about what it takes to ensure non-English speakers are treated decently.
Doubtful. But even if true, they are still ridiculous. I load a page and start reading. Suddenly the text I am reading is replaced by that huge begging message that takes up basically my entire screen. So I scroll down (sorry, Jimmy "Please don't scroll past this" Wales) and find my place again. As I scroll down, hey presto, the beg screen is replaced with a beg footer.
As for all those other projects... Give people a choice between donating "for Wikipedia operating expenses only" or "for all Foundation projects". Let people decide which they personally value more. I bet Wikipedia gets so much money you can set up a trust and never beg again, while those other projects stay budget-limited. But you don't do that, instead using misleading language like "reflect on the number of times you visited Wikipedia this year, the value you got from it, and whether you're able to give $2 back" to fund non-Wikipedia projects. Just stop it.
Every time I see a banner, I dismiss it for a week, and I don't see one again for a week.
Even wikia, which was spun at first as “slightly more commercial wikipedia”, later became Fandom, which is something so horrible that I don’t want to look at
Look at WikiTravel which is more commercial WikiVoyage… they immediately went and stuffed it with ads and trackers.
And I mean wikimedia is fine NOW, but economy is going down, I will be happy if it has a certain rundown.
I am not entirely happy about all decisions that they do, but they’re still not pushing me any tracker. I am fine with closing some pop up.
what sort of new internet are you living in?
My edit was reversed by a troll with some axe to grind on the article.
I attempted to discuss in the talk page and the troll basically said "you are wrong and the source is wrong", but cited no source supporting the claim, no policy stating there was something wrong with the specific source, and I cited policies supporting my use of the source.
Another editor showed up and agreed with me, and undid the troll's reversal, which the troll then restored the article to its state prior to my edit.
I undid the troll's restoration. Shortly thereafter I received a notice that I had been reported for some category of malicious editing. The troll reported me and the other editor for being sock-puppet accounts, and within 20 minutes my account and the other editor's accounts were deleted, my IP address banned from editing, and the edits to the article were deleted from record.
I received a notice that I can appeal the decision by sending an email to whatever the final governing board for all of Wikipedia is, which is a publicly published email address. I assumed this a "talk to the hand" step that results in nothing but wasting my time, since there is no way for me to disprove the sock-puppet claim (other than to state the fact that it is a lie) and all the evidence of the changes were vaporized.
(I did attempt to post a rebuttal to the claims, but when I clicked the post button, my account had already been deleted so the post was never posted.)
I had been editor of Wikipedia since shortly after they migrated to the new format (e.g., MediaWiki).
Wikipedia is not anything like what it originally started as.
What else are we going to do? Are we going to close the browser window and not use Wikipedia?
en.wikipedia.org##.cn-fundraising
en.wikipedia.org##.frb-country-US.frb-rml-enabled.frbThis is precisely what I do. There are plenty of other ways to find useful information on the internet and of course there are dead tree books.
Lately the wikimedia foundation just comes off as the whiny entitled rich kid who's upset that their parents only bought a brand new Acura instead of a Jaguar for their birthday. I'm not going to encourage the behavior by giving it attention.
You can use Wikipedia all you want. But suggesting that there is no choice is ridiculous.
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Main_Page
EDIT: Wikipedia had the WikiLess source code taken down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33101853 and this comment has been downvoted, which is not a complaint but an observation.
I was trying to find the source code but instead landed at the following GitHub project for a wikiless app. The README.md is quite interesting:
2) What is the justification for NOT "tolerating" it beyond the "stop using it" or "stop donating to it" avenue? Is there a crime that should be reported?
3) Publish a story highlighting the problems. Several of these circulate periodically. The people who care about this already know it, and everyone else just ignores the banners.
4) Ads have ***destroyed*** the general web browsing user experience for anyone who isn't actively using adblockers. Why is that tolerated? Repeat exercise.
Humans. It's humans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost...
Separately: the Wikipedia Foundation having too much money sounds like the kind of problem I’d prefer to have, rather than it not having enough. Even if it means they “waste” money (in your estimation), it provides financial independence in a way that’s critical for the service they provide.
Either Wikipedia is doing well, and they will continue asking for money to continue doing well.
Or, Wikipedia is not doing well, and they will continue asking for money to do better.
For you, if you don't like Wikipedia and/or the banners, just stop going to it if it doesn't provide any value.
The number of employees is obviously going to rise if you choose to spaff more money.
Money is fuel. It should not ever become such a constraining resource and saying they can get by with less is trivializing the way they conduct operations and the impact the are obligated to peruse.
I don’t see this argument being made as it relates to for-profit companies. Is a nonprofit unworthy of fundraising because they have “enough” already? Who defines that? Are they not worthy because they bring value to society rather than individual shareholders? Nonprofits still operate as businesses and they also want to see growth. I’m not sure how any reasonable person would see a problem with that.
My problem is that they lie about the state of their organization and use that money for things totally unrelated to what their mission should be.
I really do not care that they have 250 Million in assets, but I do care that they are still using alarmist "Wikipedia is about to die" messaging to raise funds and then use that money to fund unrelated and undisclosed charities. I am asking for honesty and accountability.
(Never mind that OP is asking disingenuously, just adding my vote.)
Really? What makes you think it's all or even mostly waste?
From a 2017 post:
> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005,[20] but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting,[21] has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...
[0] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...
But to answer the question: because it's one of the few annoyances (and probably the only one) on that website. Other than the one month long banner I personally have no complains, Wikipedia is one of the best websites on the internet imo.
A bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia representing hundreds of thousands of volunteer human hours of effort; replacing (sorry, “disrupting”) extremely expensive Britannica books means to me the orange site has lost it’s way.
Be it here, on Reddit, or any site with a content voting system, the vote buttons always end up being ‘this is what I could have said’ and ‘get bent’ buttons.
Funnily enough, imageboards seem to have it figured out: post something interesting, your thread or comment gets engaged. Post drivel - everyone ignores you. Meritocracy.
I can try to summarize if you like, but it's probably explained elsewhere in this story's comments.
"Ask HN: How to find work while homeless?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22442454
This is a discussion forum, not a blog.
I think the core of the argument is that they don't need the money, but act like they do to keep the site running but actually run a huge surplus.
> the orange site has lost it’s way
You can change the color in account preferences to any hex color you want.
Jokes aside, I don’t know whether the criticism is valid, but aren’t we all here to find out? Or disagree?
See you tomorrow
You are NOT donating to free encyclopedia. You are donating to their parent company, which spends fraction of your donations on the encyclopedia, the rest goes to other questionable causes. That what bothers everybody.
I tolerate it because I like the resource, and I donate a small amount of money most years.
When organizations ask for money I don't immediately get defensive and start researching talking points as to why they don't really need it. Maybe I should, but I don't. So yeah, chalk one up to a naive rube with a lack of awareness. And no desire to setup custom blocking filters that inevitably are more work to maintain than they're actually worth.
Because they are doing so under the false pretenses of urgency and desperation, when they are very well off.
If you are going to use that money to give it to random undisclosed charities advertise that. Have the pop-up say "The Wikimedia foundations desperately needs your donations, so that we finally can give your money to undisclosed charities.", don't pretend like Wikipedia is about to die, the organization is extremely well off and you should be honest about that.
>It's better to have the money and waste it than not have the money and not waste it.
That is such an awful thing to say. They are still taking the money of people who believe they are keeping Wikipedia alive, but then use that exact money to give to undisclosed charities. How can you not see that as a problem?
Just a single one?
Meanwhile they refuse to roll out an onion service, which would enable folks to read it without fearing chilling effects and reduce the load on the network’s limited number of exit nodes, which due to a combination of sociological and technical reasons are much more onerous to run than relays.
Wikipedia overwhelmingly focuses on the wishes of editors, a small and separate group from the users (readers) in a manner unbecoming an alleged charity.
https://defcon.org/images/defcon-17/dc-17-presentations/defc...
It's worth acknowledging that they've been willing to moderate their tone in response to things that seem overly misleading (https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...). If you could sit down with Jimmy Wales and the WMF bosses in private, I suspect they'd tell you that they don't want to trick anyone, but that you have to do some kind of attention-grabbing stunt to effectively fundraise these days. And really, is that wrong?
What's so great about implicitly saying untrue things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...
i've never donated, but they dont need to know that.
As for being a "sharp-eyed accountant": you don't have to be one of those to ask where the money is going. If it's going to reward the best volunteers or get better servers, fine.
Charity Navigator gives them a 99% rating: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
You can look at their 990 form on the IRS website:
==================== The Form 990 is a document that nonprofit organizations file with the IRS annually. We leverage finance and accountability data from it to form Encompass ratings. Click here to search for this organization's Forms 990 on the IRS website [1] (if any are available). Simply enter the organization's name (Wikimedia Foundation) or EIN (200049703) in the 'Search Term' field.
It measures compliance and bureaucratic procedures, and that's about it.
I could ask here "why do you call it a borderline scam?"
I think it is, too, but I'd love to see you show it to us.
That's a strong statement that requires some proof and links to the sources.
Wikipedia is certainly more worthwhile for someone who is likely to use it regularly, than say an online newspaper that actually refuses to share the article content with an infrequent visitor that might be directed to that particular site a handful of times during the year. Often wikipedia asks for much less.
I'd probably donate, if not for the hundred plus hours I worked expanding their knowledge base in the early 00s ... it was all deleted as far as I can tell - most of that data wasn't ever going to be covered in a "must be in an existing ISBN book / ISSN publication" policy that was brought in sometime later on.
The expectation that non-profits should be run on fumes is silly.
I think the reason is that we expect, or assume, non-profits to have a better ethical stance than for-profit organization. That's the point of a non-profit organization after all: doing something because they feel it's the right thing to do, regardless whether it is profitable or not.
+100. But Charity Navigator can help you find those. The IRS form 990 discloses how much they pay their highest-paid employees.
This could very well be, but it goes against what first comes to the mind of most people when talking about a non-profit: the name itself implies that those companies are "not for profit" after all.
EDIT: I also think that the reason why most countries have a special tax law regarding non-profit organization, is to help people that want to do "the right thing" even if it is not profitable, not to provide their officers with an easier way to enrich themselves. So if a non-profit is being used by their officers to enrich themselves, I think it is correct to see them as people that are cheating the system. If they are doing it in a way that is technically legal, I would say they are probably exploiting some loophole.
EDIT (replying to your edit): They are neither cheating nor exploiting any loophole. At least in the U.S., there is no limit to the total compensation that a non-profit corporation may pay to its officers. The law refers to “reasonable” compensation, which of course is meaningless. In 2019 there were so many officers of “charitable” corporations earning more than a million dollars annually that the IRS instituted an excise tax on their earnings (21% I think).
Why would you expect someone joining a charity to take a huge shit on the charity’s primary mission? And expect donors to like it?
Think about it, all the work is done by volunteers. Server costs are negligible because it’s all cached plaintext that can fit on a single server if you need it to. There’s basically no costs.
And yet… hundreds of millions get withdrawn. It ain’t going to Wikipedia. Wikipedia was financially secure through investments a decade ago. It’s fraud.
No, but Jimmy Wales clearly is.
Why isn't there a "shut up and go away and never bother me again" button?
Because it's gotten to the point that I have just started avoiding Wikipedia.
If you're asking, "why doesn't someone do something about it" there are people actively encouraging the foundation to lay off. In fact, now you can click a "I already donated" button to silence them when you couldn't before.
Also, they don't show it to logged in users, so the people making the product aren't being hounded for additional donations
Do you have some specific examples? Further, how much are they 'wasting' as a function of their reserves?
I use incognito mode by default in my browsers and Wikipedia has become unusable with the constant begging. I stopped donating on a yearly basis when I realized their intrusive begging scheme had turned into a hobby.
If it works with other people, so be it.
There is a banner, yes, but it doesn't say anything like that.
Are other people seeing other things, or is the discussion about a banner (yes, there is a banner) that doesn't ever say what's being claimed?
For reference, I see this. It reads reasonably to me, and never makes crazy claims about shutting down.
Wikipedia is not for sale. A personal appeal from Jimmy Wales
Please don't scroll past this 1 minute read. This Friday December 23rd, as 2022 draws to a close, I humbly ask you to reflect on the number of times you visited Wikipedia this year, the value you got from it, and whether you're able to give £2 back. If you can, please join the 2% of readers who give. If everyone reading this right now gave just £2, we'd hit our annual goal in a couple of hours. The price of a cup of coffee is all I ask.
Wikipedia is different. No advertising, no subscription fees, no paywalls. Those don't belong here. Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation relies on readers to support the technology that makes Wikipedia and our other projects possible. Being a nonprofit means there is no danger that someone will buy Wikipedia and turn it into their personal playground.
If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, please donate now, it really matters.
Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia Foundation.
You can't donate to Wikipedia, the banners on Wikipedia lead to Wikimedia donations.
It is quite unethical:
1. They have enough donations to keep Wikipedia running for decades, yet each year banner gets more and more manipulative, pretending WP is on the brink of collapse.
2. IIRC less than 5% of money are actually used towards Wikipedia needs.
3. Not to mention that WP authors essentially work for free.
Why is it tolerated? Because most people don't even know you're not donating to Wikipedia. And the product is just too good to care.
Yes.
It's not a social network / advertising machine. Hosting is a tiny fraction of Wikimedia spending: a mere $2.4M in 2021. I was surprised to learn they spend more on awards and grants than on hosting.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/2ov45h/wp_w...
Wikipedia has far more money then they know what to do with, their entire foundation is very affluent and there is no risk of them facing any hardship. Your donations have exactly zero influence on Wikipedia staying up or even staying independent. Your money goes into a web of charities (undisclosed which exactly), at best some poor people might profit of a few percentage points of your money, why not just donate to some real charity instead.
As far as "general charities" go Wikimedia foundation is pretty awful and your money doesn't help Wikipedia (the website) in any case. I would never donate to such a shady organization, using such disingenuous tactics and awful transparency.
In case you're not aware, this might be time to step away from the subject. Or not, live your life.
Because it is a complete and utter lie. The Wikimedia foundation is extremely wealthy and under no financial stress. They Have hundreds of millions in assets[0].
A charity should be honest and open about what they are doing with the money they are taking. Wikimedia foundation isn't and is fundraising as if they were about to go under.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
It's not the donations that are the problem, but the pure bullshit narrative to fleece people a few times every year.
Exactly. Their message is alarmist, as if they couldn't stay afloat. Most people believe it, I certainly did. And it seems reasonable, it is a gigantic and totally add free site, how could they not be facing financial troubles? But they aren't and if they want to fund vanity projects, they should advertise that they are doing exactly that.
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/firefox-money-investigating-t...
All the old heroes have started rotting from the inside and turned to fungus.