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Comment by troymc | Hacker News Reader

Unlike the author, I'm not very worried about Wikipedia. Yes, they ask for donations, but that's not a sign that they're dying; donations are their main revenue source. That might be unusual among the web's top sites, but it's not in the grander scheme of things, i.e. there are lots of charities and nonprofits.

I didn't know that LLM training sets used Wikipedia. I would have thought that the CC-BY-SA license (on all text) would keep them away. It's not like Chatbot-4000 can cite all the Wikipedia articles used to train it, nor is Chatbot-4000 going to license all its output under a CC-BY-SA license (as required by the license terms).

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Wikipedia has assets north of 100MM last I read about it. They don’t need donations to run the core wiki media products for a real long time. Their appeal for donations is absolutely distasteful and misleading. All the money they get they use for projects a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with. Such disingenuous behavior from supposedly the “best of us” is why public loose trust in all of modern progressive movement.

Is it just me? 100m doesn’t seem like “a lot” of money to cover legal, rent, infrastructure, engineers, administration, for a “really long time” to me. Having a reasonable buffer seems like a responsible thing to do.

To run just Wikipedia it seems quite sufficient. It’s KTLO on multidecade old technology with no real upgrade or new feature added in as much time and no exponential scaling needs. They should be set for a decade if not More even if their engineering stack is shit (which it’s not). They publish their spending. They are not spending on their website.

Honest question: What projects are potentially disagreeable?

Are you suggesting that: "free knowledge, open source and open data, transparency, privacy, and collaboration" are ideas that "a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with?"

(I fully admit that I may be missing something from the few minutes of research)

I am interested in this because I believe that the users of social platforms are far better served by non-profits like Wikipedia instead of the enshitification that is fueled by the profit motive.

When most people see the Wikipedia donation banners, they think they're barely surviving, and that their donation goes towards running the site.

That's very far from reality. The money goes to Wikimedia Foundation, which is swimming in cash and reserves only a fraction of the money to run actual Wikipedia. That organization now has hundreds of highly paid administrators. Not a cent goes to any Wikipedia contributor nor does this staff directly contribute to Wikipedia itself at all.

Out of this Wikimedia Foundation, they created some spin-off organization that answers to nobody and gives away grants. To what a conservative commenter might call "woke" projects without any tangible return on investment.

But the point isn't whether you agree with that label or not, the point is that the organization is incredibly misleading in what it asks donations for, how their financial state is, how their organization really works, etc.

It's quite similar to Mozilla. You want to support Firefox development but instead the money goes to a foundation which spends it on lots of well-intended but generally useless projects.

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