Dude,Where's My Donations? Wikimedia gives another $1M to non-Wikimedia projects

> As of December 31, 2021, the Endowment held $105.4 million. There is currently $99.33 million in the investment account and $6.07 million in cash. An additional $8 million raised in December will be transferred to the Endowment in January 2022.

Damn. Regardless of their questionable politically-motivated donations, I feel like they're being disingenuous when they plaster the "PLEASE DON'T IGNORE THIS" donation banners all over Wikipedia. Seems like they have tons and tons of cash.

Wikipedia has been one of the most beautiful creations of the Internet and they continue to be trustworthy. I don't really see anything worthy of bad faith assumptions about Wikipedia's $70K donation Filipino American National Historical Society. Seriously people find better causes. Protest real issues.

But don't take donations for a service and then use them for a charity: that's lying to donors.

The money you donate is not going to support Wikipedia as you know it. The people writing the wikipedia articles you read will not see a cent of the money you donate, as Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced community effort by volunteers. The server costs, the techie employees hired to manage the servers, develop the wiki software, mobile applications, etc, are less than 3% of their current expenses.

Your donations are going to Big Nonprofit, a type of industry that attaches itself to any community it can get its hands on, and then focuses on 2 goals only: 1) survive at all costs, and 2) grow forever. There will never be a day where Big Nonprofit will say "we have enough money". Or "mission accomplished, we can close this department". Never.

Big Nonprofit attaches itself to a host (core mission, core product, community, whatever you want to call it), and slowly takes it over, while still presenting as the original host. It uses deception, and intentional blurring of the line between host and parasite, to use people's support of the host to the benefit of the parasite. More and more responsibilities are put under the rug of the initial mission goals, and these responsibilities grow to infinity.

And one day, if/when money gets tight, what do you think happens? Will Big Nonprofit trim its fat a little bit? Laughable! No, the host is sacrificed so the parasite can live. This is how companies like Mozilla end up sacking actual engineers like the Rust team, while still keeping hundreds of non-techie trustfund kids doing "activism" from lavish Bay Area offices.

You cannot get around this. Maybe you wisened up, saw the blurred lines, and figured "I'll just donate directly to the project I support". You cannot donate directly to Wikipedia the website, or to Firefox the web browser, or to Rust (when it was a Mozilla project). Big Nonprofit made sure to cut off those avenues for you. Your money can only be spent the way Big Nonprofit wants, i.e. on itself.

Here's (https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/08/wikimedia-fo...) where your donations end up going. Regardless of whether you support these groups or not (I think they're race grifters), they have nothing to do with Wikipedia, encyclopedias, or even off-topic-but-still-sorta-relevant goals like wanting more poor people to use Wikipedia. You'll notice one thing they all have in common: they have no truly measurable metrics for success. Because Big Nonprofit can't grow if the question "what benefits are we getting by spending donation money this way?" can be answered. Bezos and Musk could gift them their entire fortunes overnight, and the only change at the end of the year will be more Big Nonprofit employees hired, and more fund-raisers campaigns.

You can see some people who raised the issue of where all this money is going here (https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...), including mysterious multi-million donations to outside nonprofits, a huge ballooning in operating expenses, etc. The people raising these issues are rebuked by Wikimedia employees whose signatures and blogs show they spend a lot of time at various conferences around the world and virtue signaling for diversity. I wouldn't want my gravy train of free trips to Bangkok to end either.

- https://archive.org/donate/

- https://supporters.eff.org/donate/

- or some open source project you use maybe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective

So, when people talk about Wikipedia being completely funded and not needing more money, they are lying. Flat out lying. Rather, they are saying "Wikipedia has enough money to serve me, everyone else doesn't matter."

Wikipedia's goals (which have been well-published and posted for a long, long time now) aren't just about a website. It's about giving everyone free access the sum of all human knowledge.

In 2008, Jimmy Wales said this: "'to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal."

It's not just to "Host a wiki, which for the majority of people here, they think that's the purpose."

When they fundraise, it's for the entire mission. And until everyone has access to the sum of all human knowledge, they are still running short.

As for these groups, they all fit with that goal, of getting people access to this information, of providing information, of achieving that goal.

Feel free to disagree with their goal, but stop lying and pretending it has enough money. It doesn't, since it hasn't achieved its mission yet. The only thing you are saying when you say they are lying is that you got yours, everyone else can suffer.

> "One concern was the lack of community input into the process that led to the fund's creation".

For the steward of a project like Wikipedia, it's true that a consensus-based governance structure would be appropriate. However, these are notoriously difficult to maintain in practice, frequently becoming split into partisan groups that obstruct decisions from being made. The Wikimedia Foundation currently has a self-selecting board of limited size, and so it is their responsibility to make decisions on their own in what they feel is in the best interests of the stakeholders. This does not preclude them from asking what the community of Wikipedia users want, but these are not the Foundation's only valid stakeholders.

> "Another was the use of money which was generally solicited on the grounds of being necessary to fund Wikimedia projects, meaning that many donors likely did not know or intend for their funds to be given to unrelated organizations."

This is indeed frustrating, but it is absolutely not uncommon for such organisations to use rhetoric in their fundraising. If the Wikimedia Foundation employ typical marketing individuals, they are most likely to run typical marketing campaigns for their fundraising. I am not defending the misleading advertisements, but I would point out that there is nothing shockingly unusual about this specific case.

> "Two of the grant recipients from the first round seem to have not shared financial reports detailing how the money was spent."

The Wikimedia Foundation will have done what they thought was due diligence; it feels too early to me (it is less than a year after the grant was announced) to claim that A. the beneficiaries are fraudulent, and B. that the Wikimedia Foundation could have reasonably determined this. I will admit that my alarm bells are ringing at the haphazard nature of the website of one of the two beneficiaries lacking a financial statement at the moment (https://iipsj.org).

> "This is a strange comment, as it would seem entirely within the power of the board to determine what information the minutes of its own meetings should contain."

This aspect is unsurprising to me, as it is generally not the board's responsibility to produce the minutes of their meetings. This is technically the responsibility of the Executive Director. The ED (sometimes called the CEO, or as an anachronism the General Secretary), is typically the most senior remunerated executive and does not sit on the board, but usually attends the board meetings in order to represent the staff. The actual writing of the minutes is usually delegated by the ED to the Secretary, who may be a board member or staff member depending on the organisation. The Board certainly have the power to refuse approval of the minutes, but it sounds from Jimbo Wale's quote that no one believed that the minutes were actually incorrect in this case, and therefore didn't want to upset the apple cart by withholding their approval.

--- In conclusion, I would like to express the opinion that there are multiple valid concerns raised in this article, but from the perspective of someone generally involved in third-sector/non-profit organisations, the Wikimedia Foundation does not appear to be a train-wreck by any stretch of the imagination, and is in fact about average! The stakeholders of Wikimedia are entitled to desire more, and I personally hope the Wikimedia Foundation take every opportunity to improve. Similarly, donations are of course voluntary and maybe being more cautious with your cash is the right way to communicate discontent to the Board. However, I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation are being irresponsible in their management of their grant fund, and unless you object to their running of one at all, I would suggest that ceasing donations is an extreme response.

If you don't like what a charity does, don't donate to it?