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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

On a slightly related note, has anyone else noticed an increase in social media attacks on Wikipedia, kind of like this? https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1954276775560966156

Post reads: "Periodic reminder that Wikipedia has a squillion times more money than they need to operate the actual website, and all marginal donations go to the fake paper-shuffling NGO that attached itself to the organization for the purpose of feeding on donations from rubes."

Quoted post reads: "I have no interest in giving Wikipedia money to blow on fake jobs for ovecredentialed paper-pushers, but if the banner said “Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and he’d like to buy a yacht” then I’d pull out my wallet immediately."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Long-time WP contributor and apologist here. I still think Wikipedia does more good than bad (for all its sins), is the greatest collaborative human work of our time, and there is some merit to the idea of having a giant pile of money to be able to fight government-scale battles like this one. But the story of the bureaucrats settling in and leeching donations at scale is basically accurate.

I've contributed content to Wikipedia and broadly agree with the sentiment. Users are guilted into thinking donations go towards the cost of serving the encyclopedia, which is not really where the money goes.

I happened to come across some of this recently and after an independent review, decided to stop donating to them.

There’s just no way to donate to just Wikipedia (to specially only the server costs or upkeep) but ignore whatever else the organization is up to.

Same story with Mozilla, there’s no way to donate to just the development of Firefox.

It’s all good though, there’s loads of other charities that I can donate to.

Donating to your local chapter might still work! (It's what I do at least)

“Wikipedia is one of the best resources humanity has ever produced” and “The Wikimedia Foundation spends money frivolously while soliciting donations with messages that make users think their money is going towards the project they actually care about” are not statements which are incompatible with each other.

Wikimedia does by and large an OK job (the endowment they set up in particular was a great move), but it’s incredibly bloated in ways that should be curtailed before it gets worse. It’s reasonable to want better for a resource as important as Wikipedia.

We don’t want another Mozilla.

This has been a criticism for a decade or more

Correct, it is especially of note given the publicity of Wikimedias funding and balances.

There is a million more greedy companies than Wikimedia, there is also other places that could use your money though, i.e Internet Archive, which is always desperate for donations.

> There is a million more greedy companies than Wikimedia

How many of them are asking for donations under the guise of an open encyclopedia?

For-profit corporations aren't even relevant when discussing badly-behaving non-profits.

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