Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
dailydot.com
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People like to focus on the excess growth of management roles within the foundation and call it "cancer", but all large organizations have some possible waste within them. It might just be one of the many costs of doing business and pursuing what are in reality some very ambitious and perhaps worthwhile goals. And building a long-term endowment only looks like the prudent thing to do, since the results of fundraising can be quite volatile and uncertain.
This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.
"Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github.
Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.
Also, I know companies or celebrities who pay for their Wikipedia pages. You can find this service in 5 minutes by googling.
"Profit-seeking and mindless consumption" can be a motto for the current WMF.
For the smaller ones, that is warranted - for example, the Croatian Wikipedia is infamous for its bias towards nationalist positions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia), something that's only made worse by the aftermath of the Balkan wars decades ago... as a half-Croat myself, I can only say: let's keep it at "the situation is complex and sucks all around, Wikipedia is just one symptom of a much deeper problem".
For bigger projects such as English and German Wikipedia, sheer numbers make outright disinformation spreading much more difficult - there the problem is different: what you see is usually factually correct and neutral-ish, but there is a widespread consensus that Wikipedia editors skew towards white, male and somewhat privileged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_a...).
Personally, I trust scientific and pop culture related articles in most if not all versions of Wikipedia - but keep a healthy skepticism for everything political, since there it is the hardest to judge completeness and accuracy of any subject.
They do, particularly in educational contexts - getting students interested in Wiki projects and having them write review articles with good sources as "homework" that can then be posted to Wikipedia. But supporting that takes money as well!
Money won't change that.
Where can I learn about this?
Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now then it was in 2007 so more distractions, community being mean/troll-filled now, everyone using mobile phones which are crap for writing long form content, all the easy to write articles are written, etc (Probably missed some).
People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does.
Those projects would crash and burn though, because frankly, no one cares about them. Stuff like wikidata and SPARQL endpoints are an academic curiosity with no real value.
The semantic web won't happen, articles do and will.
In addition to that, the whole deletion first and no primary information attitude makes sentences like "ecosystem of free knowledge" laughable.
On the contrary, Wikipedia itself has a lot of reliance on the other projects. For example, Wikidata solves the problem of interlinking Wikipedia languages and other projects when they're hosting content about the same real-world entity. In fact, this was Wikidata's MVP - the reason it got funded in the first place. It then took off from there.
Wikimedia Commons is a similar story - in addition to the obvious languages issue, there are a lot of concerns about media (such as licensing. enhancement etc.) that really are best addressed in a dedicated venue, with its own committed contributors. This has been very beneficial to Wikipedia itself.
If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow.
Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides.
If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival.
Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.
It's not that easy to work with, but there aren't any good alternatives in my case. Freebase died. DBpedia doesn't compare. Domain-specific databases don't have the data I'm looking for (or it's woefully incomplete and/or hard to link to external entities) because it straddles multiple domains, not to mention they're usually not free. I for one am very thankful for Wikidata existing and seeing good activity.
Disgusting?!! They ask for money. They don't sell your data, which is what most sites/apps you use do. They don't abuse their position, as an important information source. Disgusting compared to what?
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some of the most accessible financial information of any comparably sized organisation on the planet. This is why the get so much heat. The financials are easily understandable, which means a financially literate journalist or commentator can understand what's going on and take a cheap swipe in under a minute.
You can literally understand wikimedia's finances better in 10 minutes than you could after weeks of studying any other non profit, publicly listed company, NGO or government organisation. There is no attempt to hide any controversial element... Asset accumulation, clearly and deliberately highlighted. Expense growth, ditto.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
Please.
My work on wikipedia articles is for the benefit of my fellow humans, not to allow some organisation to start implying that everyone has a moral obligation to give them money. That was never part of the deal when I contributed my work.
That is a very peculiar attitude to have.
The editors who provided all that value will get $0.
It's like buying an album where $9.92 goes to the label and yet the label still complains about freeloaders depriving the poor musicians of income if they don't pay the $10.
This will make it more financially tenuous, not more.
Added to which, once the insitution is addicted to money it becomes that much easier to corrupt.
This is the very source of the complaint though. People want to donate to fund the thing they actually use, not a bunch of other arbitrary projects they don’t care about.
I mean take a look at the donation page under “Where your donation goes”.
It does technically mention a “wide variety of projects” but the whole thing is written to make you feel like you are donating to the encyclopedia that is barely scraping by. And it certainly doesn’t mention anything about an endowment.
I see this argument often associated with Mozilla as well and I cannot put into words just how much I disagree.
They've both made a product that's immensely useful to me, to the point where I don't even second guess donating to these projects on a semi-regular basis (like once or twice a year, usually in the range of $50-$100 per donation, equivalent to what I pay to certain services for a yearly subscription). What they do with that money is completely not my concern. I've donated money, it's up to them to decide what to do with it. I trust them to make that decision because they've already made a product that I rely on quite frequently.
I couldn't care less if they use it to support an existing successful product (Wikipedia or Firefox), throw it into some other fringe thing that has a tiny chance of turning into another immensely useful product to me, fund advocacy projects, fellowships, CEO salaries... it doesn't matter. I trust the team behind it so I throw money at it.
It was asking for keeping the Wikipedia we use operational for a long time to come. No mention of educating the world or 'broader development goals'.
A Wikipedia that is created by volunteers (including the hundreds of language versions) for free, managed and promoted by sometimes high paid employees with expansion ambitions.
Are they risking the future of the Wikipedia we like and use today by the costly ambitions and the costly organization required to realize the big ambitions?!? Are they overstreching their means?!
The begging for money banners only talk about keeping it operational. Not about 'sister projects' or other ambitions, they do not ask money for those!
(not to mention that some of the banners condemn being commercial, saying 'it would be a great loss', exactly what Wikimedia LLC aspires to do)
"Imagine a world where every single person on the planet can freely share in the sum of human knowledge: this is our commitment." They could hardly be any clearer about it. And even if your goal is to keep Wikipedia thriving, you need these sister projects.
Sharing knowledge is a well understood long lasting profile, education is not.
Also the 'need' for sister projects is an unfunded claim, a mere opinion. Actually the "bring you unlimited access to reliable information" that is explicitly mentioned in fundraisers already thrives for long without sister projects.
So what is educating people, if not sharing knowledge?
> Different things with different requirements, a different (related) activity.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is: Just different words for the same thing.
That said, I think we are all getting tired of 501c3's begging for money when they seem to be doing fantastic on paper.
I once heard that St. Judes Childrens hospital has 20 years of funding in the bank, and that's taking into account of new procedures, and inflation.
Cars for Kids has one house in the Sierra foothills that benefits children. (This was true around 5 years ago when I looked into the nonprofit.)
My point is the charities we all know through endless advertising/begging might not need money.
ISTM that the only viable solution is federation, where multiple, independent, small, tightly-knit organizations cooperate on the shared goal of hosting content, media, etc. on real-world entities and topics. But, ironically enough, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects are the closest thing we have to something that might actually enable this development! (The former in its de-facto role as a semantically-enhanced "web directory" of entity identifiers; the latter via the "right to fork" that's inherent in all free-content licenses.)
And perhaps more to the point, Wikipedia has legal personality in the UK, so one assumes the above applies.
But really it would be pointless: I'm not going to tell Wikipedia what their strategy should be when I donate. So even if you do, they can put my donation to whatever purpose it is that yours precluded.
However, often restricted donations result in people spending money on things that don't matter, because it might be earmarked for something that isn't needed. Even if not, it can distort priorities in ways that people earmarking the donations aren't aware of.
Its the sort of thing, where the bureaucracy of it clearly isn't worth it for small donations.
According to WMF's financial statement, there was about 4 million of such restricted donations in the 2018-2019 year.
Godspeed to them in this endeavor. I think this is not the time to become absolute purists in the choice of tech overlords. The tech world is being controlled by less than a handful of trillion-dollar monopolists that crush anything that stands in their way. A few hundred million in this war is a drop in the ocean.
Yes, power corrupts, and money is power. Yes, left to their own devices, people in NGOs will maximize revenues and expand their employee empires - just like those in the for-profit sector. What matters is the strategic goals and their execution by the leadership, and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - to indicate that WMF went astray from its stated mission.
I cannot but feel this is another pissing contest like the open source world experienced, where everybody and their brother started their own distributions/forks to virtue signal their true commitment to the open source goals. This led to a massive fragmentation of the scene, the few companies that tried to use the model, like Redhat and Ubuntu, were exposed as deviationists from the party line; meanwhile big tech ate the world and put every man, woman and child on the planet in invisible jails.
The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please.
Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in the US and often around the world.
It's less obvious what would cause Wikipedia's money to dry up, but in light of Mozilla's example the only part of this I disagree with is the article's negative angle on the endowment. Creating an endowment like that is exactly what Mozilla should have done.
I think Mozilla did some good or at least had the right intentions with some of their sideprojects and think they should keep trying.
On the other hand I have to contain myself from insulting their current CEO in this context given she made her wage shoot up whilst their marketshare was shrinking so much, laid of so many from the servo team among many others which i think could have been very important for firefox's future whilst at the same time running projects like giving half a million to artists to look into the potential intersection of AI and racism if I understood it well. I wonder it's a project by one their new board members the addition of which i don't exactly see the point of either.
I don't think they should keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff but if they do fine... If they keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff they should try to make an impact but if they want to analyse and highlight fine. If they want to analyse and highlight i feel like they should give this money to researchers or a study or so. But then they give the money to some bloody artists. If it works i'd like em to fix world hunger with a painting next. And what's worse.... They do it whilst they're laying of the staff of the ship they're sinking.
Hi, let me introduce you to this weird newfangled language called Rust... /s
More importantly though, we have other Rusts. Rust has half a dozen competitors and essentially nobody thinks that making a robust new systems programming language is an unachievable goal. Firefox is the only non-profit browser engine we have and most people consider it an impossible undertaking to develop a new one from scratch at this stage. Indeed, Microsoft recently tried before conceding defeat and switching Edge over to Chromium's Blink.
We got some of it: the Rust language and Quantum. I would say the only two good things that Mozilla did in the last 10 years.
Finally, in 2020, the Servo and Rust team got the recognition they deserved, they got laid off...
It is almost like the old joke with the rower, where on a boat race, a team of eight people rowing and one steering beats a team with one person rowing and 8 steering. The losing team change its structure, now with a complex hierarchy but still a single rower, who eventually gets fired.
I have donated to Wikipedia several times and feel violated now. They might have not lied outright but acting as if you’re a poor Non profit when you are most definitely not poor is outrageous. I don’t know if Jimmy Wales is part of this entire charade but this is exactly what you expect to happen when you employ a CEO who charges north of half a mill to run a non profit - their intention is to just increase their coffers with no clear plan on WHAT they are going to use it.
There might have been a time when the banner was genuine and a donation from the user was needed to plan their budget a year in the future, but if they’re showing the same banner now after making hundreds of millions (and if this article is accurate, willfully hiding it as much as legally possible) they’re disgusting. I feel less disgust interacting with entities like apple and google, at the least their intentions seem far more honest than this bs.
I don't think its fair to call this willful hiding. I mean, they've written blog posts about this subject - https://diff.wikimedia.org/2016/01/14/wikipedia-15-foundatio... you don't write blog posts about things you're trying to hide.
Disclaimer: used to work for them, don't anymore.
The banner IS genuine.
Non-profit funding IS scarce.
Funding streams are fickle and Wikipedia has none of the monopolistic advantages that keep Apple and Google and FB and MSFT owners vastly vastly richer than any Wikipedia staff will ever be.
By volunteering you ARE doing something so much more valuable than any post to any for profit social media platform, INCLUDING this one.
The reason you think "intentions" are "honest"? Advertising.
Please revisit your assumptions.
Best wishes, sincerely. Cheers.
> “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”
You think "really needs you" IS genuine?
And what does "volunteering" have to do with the question being raised in the article or by the OP you are responding to?
Sadly, the banner has only gotten bigger and more dire over the years.
To inform this conversation a bit, the biggest driver of salaries is the market cost of domain expertise and leadership. Wikimedia's salaries are pegged to a basket average of leading US non-profits, but (particularly for more experienced staff) dramatically below market rates for technology organizations.
You cannot run something at the technical and social scale and complexity of Wikimedia without exceptionally talented people, and you can't compete for talent without some degree of competitive salary. Although Wikimedia employees leave a lot on the table in order to work for a mission-driven non-profit (comparative compensation but zero upside equity), it isn't sustainable (or arguably ethical) to ask people to work for significantly less than the value of their labor.
IMHO, the Wikimedia ecosystem organizations could (and perhaps should) be significantly better resourced than they currently are in order to serve the mission of the organization. Currently most of the funding goes into servicing the existing infrastructure, much of which is dominated by the scale of the largest, largely European-language, Wikipedias.
To truly serve the world free knowledge, and serve it well, Wikimedia would need to continue to invest in increasing its global competences, often in regions/languages/markets where operations are more challenging, with commensurate cost. That would mean scaling up that expertise, whether language engineering or legal. All that costs money, which is why so much of the world is so poorly served by businesses with ROI models.
Fortunately, that's not Wikimedia, and will never be. And hopefully, it will also never be the case that some loud people on the internet dissuade the projects, movement, and organization from investing in the necessary capacity to sustain the remarkable good it does for so many hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions yet to come.
What is not ethical is to create the impression that you struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running, when in fact you are three or four times richer than just five years ago, and are building a $100M endowment in half the time anticipated.
What is not ethical is not to correct that mistaken impression – that you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running – when you are asked directly, on TV, whether it is true that you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdn1s9Sjfo&t=270s
Global plans for knowledge equity are well and good. But then you (or now, your successors) should TELL readers about these plans when asking them for money. Instead, under your watch the WMF has scared people – including millions in third-world countries like India, where it takes 200,000 people donating the recommended $2 to pay just one year of your annual compensation – into thinking that Wikipedia is about to go under, or may have to raise a paywall.
https://www.freepressjournal.in/technology/is-wikipedia-dyin...
Telling prospective donors about your plans for global expansion, including the plans for machine-translated Wikidata-based articles in hundreds of languages via the new Wikifunctions project, the building of regional hubs, etc., has several objective advantages, over and above just being a simple question of honesty.
Among these advantages are:
1. People can decide whether or not you are the right organization for the job, and the best organization to support for this.
2. People can compare actual progress made to the rhetoric, and demand to see results for their money. How much money is stockpiled, used to fund WMF salaries rising to even greater levels, and how much actually finds its way to Africa, India, etc.? How much free content is created? Is the work cost-effective?
Raising funds by pretending you are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running relieves you of that scrutiny and accountability – because then the mere continued existence of Wikipedia will appear to have justified the money demands, and the money donations.
Avoiding scrutiny and accountability is a slippery slope. It is not good for an organization. You don't just want cheerleaders.
Moreover, consistently pretending to be poor also makes you vulnerable (deservedly so!) to backlashes like this one:
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1399236909495328771
This Twitter thread, with 1.6K Likes and nearing 1K re-tweets at the time of writing, describes your banners as "deceitful", "manipulative", designed to "guilt people into donating money they would've otherwise spent elsewhere." The author goes on to describe your fundraising practices as "predatory, misleading, malicious and downright evil," saying you've been "preying on poorer folks from less well-off countries" to give you money you absolutely didn't need.
When people learn about the actual state of WMF finances they feel fooled, had. You can see this from the comments of past donors here on this very page. Why do that to them? The German fundraising banners (the only ones authored by a local chapter rather than the WMF, I believe) don't pretend there is an emergency. Germans still donate millions each year, because people love Wikipedia. Why overegg the WMF banners in this way, when volunteers have told you, year after year, that they feel disgusted and ashamed by them?
This is my view of the ethics of the situation. I have a question about transparency, too. As mentioned in the article, last year the WMF had an underspend because of the pandemic and put $8.7M of this unspent money into a Tides Advocacy fund: the "Knowledge Equity Fund".
Last December, a volunteer expressed disbelief that such a substantial amount of donors' money had been secretly transferred to an unaffiliated outside organization ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... ).
The WMF had promised in its 2019/2020 financials FAQ to provide further information on this fund by the end of 2020. Then it promised the information would be made available in early 2021 ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... ). Then it promised it would share details in May 2021 ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikimedia_... ). These repeated promises have all remained unfulfilled.
It is now June. Almost a year has passed since this money disappeared from the WMF accounts. As far as I am aware, still no one outside of the WMF and the Tides Foundation knows what has happened to those $8.7M.
Whatever this is – even if there is nothing whatsoever improper about the fund, and full details describing exactly what has happened with donors' money will in due course appear – it falls short of the standards of transparency the WMF and its spokespersons have often claimed to uphold.
I agree that there were some problems with the fundraising messaging in India. It's an example of where the initial message testing worked, but when it went to a full campaign, the press ran with stories that were misleading and alarmist. In fact, WMF staff then worked extensively with the communities in India and did a significant amount of press, including television interviews, to clarify the purpose of the fundraiser and dispel concerns.
You continue to push for messaging that you personally believe to be more truthful to your belief about how fundraising works. Okay. That's fair, and you are entirely welcome to continue to do that. However, years of research and focus groups and testing has continuously demonstrated that the primary reason people donate to Wikipedia isn't a fear it will go away, nor is it a strategic interest in the future. The overwhelming reason is gratitude that it exists, and the opportunity to have contribute in their own way.
Would I personally respond to a message about mission and strategy? Yes, I would. But most people do not. Instead, millions of people find the donation banners acceptable and even inspirational -- far more so than messages about product and feature improvements. So despite the loyal opposition of you and others, I'm fairly certain that the WMF will continue to fundraise with messages that work on the level of what people care the most about, which is what Wikipedia means to them in their own lives.
Moving on, the WMF has been entirely clear that $4.2m of that $8.7m is going to affiliates for this year's APG funding. I would have wanted to get information about the $4.5m set aside for knowledge equity out the door faster, but I am no longer at the organization, so cannot speak to your concerns.
You need some perspective.
Is that wrong ? Far from reality? Help them (and readers like me) get a clear understanding.
OKAY, it is an ugly accusation considering "don’t know what it takes to run a globally available top site", but why? How much does it cost to run a Wiki like site on that high traffic using some modified form of mediawiki platform?
I am just trying to get a clearer understanding than attacking / siding anyone
Or hosting all the images? Or paying developers, devops, managers? Like sure, some middle manager may be unnecessary but a big company will have inefficiencies. Also, it is a good decision to not stop accepting funds once a monthly quota is reached since donations are fickle. An article like this may suddenly cause an outage in donations, they have to have reserves for such cases.
I think this article rubs me the wrong way because it leans a little heavily on vagueness to take you from the facts to how you should feel about them. Some volunteers are not amused? How many? A majority? A vocal few? "Wikipedians who have made hundreds of thousands of edits may well feel someone else is enjoying the fruit of their labor." Well, do they or don't they? Did you ask them?
I'll even admit that my initial reaction to this article was why do they need more of my money? But I gave $10 last year (basically nothing for my current income), and I'll do the same this year. Don't give so much money that you get bent out of shape about where it goes. If everyone gave an amount that meant relatively little to them, they would be in great shape. That's also basically what the donation banners say, too, but the article doesn't mention that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
You'll note that (eg) Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, The Economist and Al Jazeera are all considered "reliable" (green), while Fox News is yellow (OK except for politics).
My opinion is that basically no-one needs to have an income above a couple of times median in the country they're in [it's hard to normalise across countries]. Just because CEOs, etc., think they're worth $millions doesn't mean that charitable organisations should adopt that model.
You're panhandling effectively, you beg people to give money but you already have it, you're only distributing it to wealthy people instead of favouring the aims of your charity.
Sure, pay your staff for a median income in your/their country; much higher in a poor or developing country is fine. But I don't donate to any charity that thinks one person needs to be paid >£120k (that's >4x median graduate wage in UK). Some people are awesome at what they do, but they're using the same proportion of their lives to do it as the people who are awesome and getting paid a pittance, it's wrong to beg people and then fritter it away on luxuries for a limited set of staff.
If a person wants to beg for money for themselves then they can, "I have an income of >$500,000 per year and work $days a week for $charity, please pay me money", sure, but don't hide that support of someone's ludicrously income (compared to ordinary people, not SV programmers) by fronting it through a charity.
Better than any other site where the pov is decided by who has the most money
What will happen when Wikimedia is gone?
There's a reason there's such a relentless smear campaign against it. Instead of turning our backs we have to think of ways we can support Wikipedia and protect it from shills with deep pockets. If you have any ideas on how this can be done more effectively try bringing them up! Anyone can sign up and participate. That's Wikipedia's strength and weakness.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
[2] And the rent for the swanky office is another million and a half per year, because it's not their money after all...
There's no such thing as a large organization where there is no waste. Even very lean for profit organizations have to deal with the problem. The best you can do is to keep an eye out for cases where there is waste and fix it as soon as possible.
Bottom line, if you don't like it then don't give. Period!
I think people wouldn't feel off about this if the fundraisers presented themselves as such. When you see them asking for donations, it is typically worded in a way it says "no one donates! if you don't we are on the brink of going bankrupt and shutting down the site! stop, don't scroll away!" and I think if they are sitting on a pile of cash (however noble their intentions are) some people might feel off about how they are being manipulated. Because that is not what they are asking the money for, at this moment. It is disingenuous to make it seem like they are asking for donations for covering the immediate day to day operations. Yes, it probably allows them to gather more donations that way but some people are not comfortable with being a target of manipulative ads. Immediate gains vs. poisoning the well situation here.
The wrong part is that this is not disclosed anywhere discoverable. While they toned down how blatant their claims were, as the article shows, their banners still create the impression that they're struggling to just barely stay alive, not building an endowment.
I've looked into Wikimedia's finances before and completely missed the endowment.
Take a look at https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu... - I see no mention of money going from Wikimedia to the Endowment. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim... mentions it in passing among other examples of their project work.
They are still a long way from being independent from donors given their growth in projects, paid contributors (employees) and therefore expenses.
If you don’t agree with their governance or even specific ways they spend their money, stop donating, it is not like they are forcing you. You can even write an article an share it but don’t try to take shortcut like I feel it is done here. Money is a necessary ressource to survive, and if an entity have a lot of capital or spend plenty on projects or useful human ressources doesn’t imply evilness.
Where? This thread is the first time I remember reading about this, and I've seen a lot of Wikipedia beg-nags. They moved from outrageously deceptive messages that strongly implied that the lights would go out without my donation and that the donations were used to keep Wikipedia alive "for another year" [1], to slightly more vague "keep Wikipedia online and growing" [2] banners.
Never did I see those banners mention an endowment.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/2012v201...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Mob-lg-s...
Disclaimer: Used to work for wikimedia, once upon a time, don't anymore.
Wikipedia's fundraising strongly implies that they need your $3 to keep the site online.
WMF has $400M which would be enough to keep the site online for up to 40 years with no further donations.
Thus, their fundraising is misleading and deceptive. I bet 9 in 10 donators won't donate if they knew WMF has $400 million in the bank -- isn't it morally wrong if you paint a deceptive picture of your finances?
The majority of Wikimedia's money goes to software development, not keeping the lights on. I think there are definitely reasonable criticisms that could be made about WMF's priorities and efficiencies (Not to mention how its situation is conveyed in the fundraising campaign), but I struggle to see a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success.
Disclaimer: used to work there, don't anymore.
The majority of the money goes to grants (because they don't even know what to do with it internally), followed by fundraising and brand building ("advancement" and "communications") which has the largest staff numbers. Then lawyers, and technology staff and contractors are a distant fourth...
> a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success
I 'member back in 2005-2008 that was the state of the world. WMF paid Brion Vibber and the bandwidth bills and Brion kept the lights on. It was the most successful time for Wikipedia with massive growth and recognition.
2005-2008 was extraordinary from this standpoint, no question. A reminder of what a small group can accomplish with a vision that brings together a community ready to rewrite the world, from the ground up if need be.
Users have tried asking for clarification. Multiple times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Which isn't to say nobody has ever asked, im sure someone has at some point, just that's not supported by your link.
The page itself is a starting point. If you want the meat of the community discussion, here's direct links:
* The original "Signpost" op-ed, a curated meta newspaper of which the user-page is merely a constantly-updated copy of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
* Requests to the WMF for clarifcation:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_n...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_n...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment#How...?
etc, etc, etc. You get the point.
This is a huge rabbit hole and I didn't want to be accused of "Gish galloping" by linking all this at the top.
That's even more of a problem if you do not support such scheme to extort money from the working classes.
I know it's from 2018 and maybe something changed, but: they took $115M. They paid $90M in costs, including $38M in salaries and <$1.7M to officers. Look at Part IX. You have all expenses listed. If you run any company ever, you know it adds up pretty quickly. Like other benefits to employees are $5M, pension plan is $1M, and payroll tax is $2M. They had $138M in assets, but only $64M invested in public stocks, and they took $2M from it, which is like 0.03% indicating they held some treasury bonds. So in absolute numbers, it seems big, but when you analyze it, it looks normal.
Imagine you just hire a techy support staff. Let's assume you only need 50 people, each making $100k to operate a global website in all timezones. That's probably like $140k total costs per employee (healthcare, benefits, payroll, all sorts of taxes). You need 50*140k=$7M/yr. Assume you buy AT&T stock with 6% dividend. You need $120M of assets to get $7M. There is no safety here, and also my calculation doesn't include maybe like 5% increase in costs per year.
I often wonder how could I create a fully self-sustainable non-profit: the one, that doesn't require begging for money and wasting time every year. Instead, the one that could operate independently. To make this happen, you pretty much have to invest the money very, very well, and diversify to the point where the yield is low, yet high enough to hire staff etc. (an example of sustainable donation is present in the Thorp's "A man of all markets" wrt. his endowment to UCI math department) For this you must have a pile of money, if you do the math, and it'd make perfect sense for Wikipedia.
Unless they shrink, lay people off and optimize, they'll need $2B to be fully self-sufficient and sustainable. Otherwise, the fundraiser will need to bring $100M/yr at least.
Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011
Wikipedia doesn't need your money (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946912
This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email (https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade ago.
Wikimedia's finances are audited and published every year. Here's the latest one from 2019-2020 - https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu.... They had $120M in donations and $9M in other revenue for the year. Expenses were $112M. That isn't even close to the buffer that the article implies. The foundation's total current assets (~$160M) would keep their sites running for <2 years, and maybe a few more with major operational cuts. Why on earth shouldn't they fundraise more?
I stopped donating because of this - definitely want to contribute to keeping Wikipedia online, I don’t necessarily want to give my money to a larger foundation running all kinds of other projects and wielding that cash as a political tool.
I guess there's a chance that executive compensation went up significantly after 2018, but nothing I saw looks out of place for an organization as large as Wikipedia. ~300k for a San Fransisco-based CEO and an average salary of ~120k for all employees employees seems fairly reasonable to me.
After looking, I realized that I made more than them at my previous job just being an engineer.
90%+ of the cash goes to fund the other foundations’ programmes, that’s the core of the issue.
I trust the founders. I don't trust new leadership. That's not specific to Wikimedia.
If people feel that they were somehow tricked into their donation, they have instructions on how to request a refund.
It's an interesting thought experiment to consider if Wikipedia didn't exist what would change in the way we learn about and discuss things, especially in these days of fake news etc. Britannica is 75$ per year.
(Some of) the execs are manipulating people to donate, many of the donors wouldn't have donated, had they known that there was enough money already for Wikipedia.
> If people feel that they were somehow tricked into their donation
Problem is, they are unaware about having been tricked.
They generally don't know about this discussion at HN.
They're not raising money on their vision for the future though. Their fundraising ads imply that if you don't donate then Wikipedia.org will go offline
Instead of complaining when a top shelf global organization get paid a reasonable wage in California for the scope of their work maybe focus on how we can redistribute incomes more appropriately.
Also - I am obviously against wasted resources or overly bloated organization or corruption but nothing in this report seems to point anything of that nature. /end mini-rant
Not at all would have my vote. I would donate for that.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
What exactly are you basing this on?
https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Mediu...
They budgeted $5M for "data centre expenses". We cannot know for sure how much it would really cost if WMF only focused on running their website. But $10M doesn't sound implausible to me.
PS: I work for cloud computing company and have insight on how much costs increase with scale.
edit: fixed typos.
It does not significantly use cloud services, and as you can see by the picture of their racks, they use standard 1 RU pizzaboxes. Their workload is highly scalable horizontally, and doesn't even need much in the way of expensive "enterprise" hardware such a SAN arrays: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Wi...
If you buy beige box rackmount hardware with basic compute and CPU, it's pretty easy to spend less than $250K per rack, and the hardware can be kept for 5+ years. That's about 50K per rack per year. Double that for opex, and assume twenty racks distributed across a a handful of sites for capacity and availability. That's just $2M per annum.
Keep in mind they're a high-profile charity, so they get discounts and tax breaks.
(I'm not saying that's all there is to Wikipedia! There's software development, management, finance, etc... I'm just saying that the infrastructure alone is probably less than you think.)
PS: English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! There have been comments along these lines made in other forums, and the response was that it would cost more to rewrite the software than the maintain the hardware required for PHP. I don't remember the numbers, but I vaguely remember tens of millions for a rewrite, a high risk of breaking issues, and a significantly lower hardware cost.
They do host their own private "cloud", mostly used for research and project development.
> English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server!
Nitpicking, page views from outside users are not supposed to hit PHP at all - those requests should be served by their caching layer. But yes, you're correct that they're relying on quite a bit of legacy tech from their early days, not just PHP but MariaDB as well even though many enterprises would now rely on Postgres wrt. these use cases. I suppose that they could rewrite the stuff piecemeal, and recent developments in PHP itself would make it easier. (Some things have been rewritten already, notably the wikitext parser. That's clearly one thing where you would want to avoid breakage at all costs, but they did get it done.)
This type of comment betrays a complete lack of knowledge about how large scale internet systems operate (which is something I've worked on for the last 10+ years) and comes across as incredibly naive. I can immediately point out huge flaws in your thinking:
* You're assuming that traffic is constant through the day (that you can divide daily traffic rate to get a sense of daily peak; or, in other words, you provision for mean usage, not peak)
* You're ignoring the problems of unpredictable hotspots (single articles suddenly becoming orders of magnitude more popular than the median in relatively unpredictable and spikey ways; think World Cup final or major earthquake)
* You're not reserving any safety margins for unexpected traffic growth, so you'd likely run into cascading failures
* You're assuming that the entirety of Wikipedia can be held in ram. Including all the history and such. Or, if not, that a single server has enough drives that spindle capacity won't be a problem.
* You're not even considering networking/bandwidth costs. How many network cards would your server need?
* You're ignoring any problems with replication/redundancy (e.g., no backups?) so your site would be a nightmare in reliability terms. Of course, once you do that, you'll need to reason about consistency problems.
I think your logical fallacy is that you're thinking that because your can't understand something (that running Wikipedia could cost so much), it must mean that the thing you can't understand isn't true. Instead, I'd suggest that you'd get further by focusing on discovering the limits of your understanding and genuinely asking yourself: "How could it be that it costs so much? What may I be missing?"
MediaWiki repository size is about 1.4 GB and according to phploc it has closer to a million lines of PHP code. Sounds like fools errand to rewrite it.
Hm, since Wikipedia dumps are public, has anybody tried? Moving wikipedia itself might be a large endeavor, but seeing some submissions on HN I think a very dedicated dev or two could possibly manage a rewrite to have a proof of concept.
Otoh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Ceramic%20a...
Whether or not its 10x better service, I don't know, but they are definitely doing more now then back then. There's been lots of software development since 2011 (Some good, some not so much). Even just site speed and stability has improved significantly since 2011.
And it's probably questionable if all side ventures are needed or if they could/should have sticked to the core project and developt it with little money.
As mentioned further down: Do you really need 40 fundraiser positions?
It seems they currently (2019-2020) are responsible for 12% of the expenses [1], but I can't find any information as to which percentage of the donations they're responsible for. I wonder if there's a more transparent report for that.
Looking at their donor numbers [2], it suggests that most of the fundraising is still coming from the long tail, from regular people donating online. They only seem to have 17 "major benefactors" and even if we multiply the smallest amount for that tier (50k) by 10x, that still only accounts for 7% of the donations.
According to their 2019 data, the average donation seems to be $15, which suggests Jimbo banner is way more important than the fundraisers.
Of course my assumption might be completely incorrect.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
EN Wikipedia has always been where the lion share of attention was focused on (With wikidata and commons coming in second. The other projects get very little love).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
On big thing that changes as a site grows, and as it reaches more places internationally, is that it attracts more attacks. Stopping that costs lot.
Money is a funny thing, in Denmark about $320 million is spent on Covid testing a month. So from January to July that would be the equivalent of Wikipedia funding for 20 years.
I'd definitely want an analysis on the server costs. Compared to ten years ago you can get vastly better servers per dollar and about ten times the bandwidth per dollar.
Here's the OG version by Jimmy Wales: "The sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world."
Here's what it currently looks like: "Empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/
Which one is more inspiring on all counts?
The management probably don't see themselves as caretakers of incredibly valuable resource that needs to be preserved. Which is probably what 90% of the rest of humanity want them to be.
The first version is about centralizing all informations so it can be consumed. It's the traditional view of knowledge dissemination, scaled to the whole world instantaneously. The second version is about giving people the tool to produce knowledge so it can be shared with the whole world. Just like the printing press spread authoring power from a select few people who bothered to write everything, to anyone with enough money to buy a machine, Wikipedia is giving the power to share knowledge from those who had the right curriculum to anyone with a bit of motivation.
This is the revolution that Internet and the Web promised (not just allow everyone to watch and listen, but give everyone a voice), and I'm glad Wikipedia is doing it. If it takes more money to fulfill that mission then it's totally worth it.
The 2nd is mature, focused, grounded in reality and is actually what wikimedia does. So yeah #2 100%. But then again I'm not 12.
Please do not bring disingenuous arguments in 'exposing' suspected disingenuity, it is counterproductive.
1/ Ŕunnign a website requires constant change just to stay still. Technologies change, usage changes and user needs change. There is need for experimenting, dealing with drama, and getting funded.
2/ WMF cost per user is very reasonable for the amount of usage. If WMF would run as a subscriber based service, it would cost just $0.5 per month/per user (rough estimate). Total expenses:$112M, 330,000 active users editing site. >800 million monthly unique devices (en-wiki alone).
> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email (https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...)
He has editorialized the word "comfortably" and he should have discussed how the estimate might have changed since 2013, but overall I don't see why you think it's a disingenuous relating of the original email. I don't see any relevant nuance in the email that would significantly change my view of the estimate. However, I haven't gone through the preceding emails at all
> 43% Direct support to communities
> The Wikimedia projects exist thanks to volunteer communities around the world that create and maintain them. We strengthen these communities through grants, programs, events, trainings, partnerships, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors.
My wife's friend just came to stay with us. He worked for the Wikimedia foundation for a long time and we were just talking about this. From what he said, after engineering expenses, legal expenses are the highest category. What he said happens is, say, the government of India finds editors with IP addresses in India, contributing to a page with a map not showing Kashmir as a part of India, and either arrests or sues those people, and Wikimedia Foundation tries to do all they can to provide legal defense for these people.
Ironically, this guy's biggest complaint and the reason he left Wikimedia is they don't pay enough for engineering. They're still fighting a propaganda war with all of the world's governments to provide accurate information, and that is a labor-intensive war being waged by true believers and volunteers. For instance, they block all IP blocks allocated to US legislative offices from editing any pages because of how consistently Congressional staffers were vandalizing pages and posting misinformation, but surely these people have learned of the existence of VPNs and working remotely. They clearly need better automated detection and moderation system, but to develop and deploy such systems, now they're competing with Facebook and Google for labor, but paying 1/3 of what Facebook and Google pay.
Apparently, people think the answer is they should just move to Vietnam or wherever labor rates are lowest.
Look, I don't doubt overseas developers are just as talented as anyone else, but history has inertia. There's a reason Silicon Valley firms are located in a place with university professors and professional mentors who invented much of the modern OS and Internet. I also don't doubt athletic talent is evenly spread around the world, but nonetheless South America and Europe dominate football, the US dominates baseball and basketball, Kenya dominates distance running. If you want to put together the best basketball team you possibly can, you go to Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. You don't look around the world for the cheapest labor rates and go there.
This kind of nonsense is exactly why I left the nonprofit world so long ago. The public all believe labor should subsist at the bare minimum living wage of the cheapest possible place to live, and no money whatsoever should be spent on fundraising.
Just understand when you take this position, if the nonprofit is involved in anything that governments and for-profits might also be interested, say, influencing how and what information gets disseminated to the entire world and for what purpose, the non-profit trying to minimize cost at all cost is going to lose to the governments and for-profits every single time.
This is disingenuous, moving to pretty much any European city would be enough. Asking people to donate to an organization that pays people 10x of what you make while pretending that they are in dire need of money is just gross.
There are thousands of editors who deal with vandalism. WM doesn't need to develop new vandalism-detection software.
That's not what I got from the article or even the headline. It's talking about why they are using "tearful-sounding messages like: “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”"
"really needs you"? Really? That too in India during COVID? With millions in the bank and salaries of everyone over $130k?
Is Twitter's current product so much more complicated than it was circa 2012, that it needs 100X as many employees, resources and such?
If Wikipedia had been founded later, it probably would have been a startup. A unicorn, considering how popular it is. It would be burning through far more resources. Comparing it to any commercial site of comparable size, it is orders of magnitude more efficient. Meanwhile, it makes its money by asking. It doesn't snoop, sell your data, or participate in creepy ad-tech.
So... when a person like me, who gets tremendous value and enjoyment from wikipedia is asked to kick in, we do. I do it gladly. They have, in my estimation, every right to ask me.
The donation banners that seem to upset people are far less annoying than any commercial site's cookie/privacy popups.
Tangentially, think of all the truth wars of the last few years. Notice that wikipedia, even though it deals directly with the hard part of this problem, has fared much better than most other websites/organisations. This is not a coincidence.
Can wikipedia operate on $10m? Maybe, plausibly. Why should they have to?
Wikipedia is a shining beacon, in many ways, including resource efficiency. They successfully bridged the gap between OSS, and non distributed organisational elements... allowing them to own servers and such. Few have.
It's becoming hard to know who and what Wikipedia actually is
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...
Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits.
Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important.
Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.
Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...
Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams of edit data to financial organisations.
Google & co are very clearly monetizing (either directly or indirectly) their integration, WMF might as well get something out of it.
Though, this discussion might be going the "BSD vs GPL" direction...
“ The WMF emphasizes time and again that Wikipedia never tries to sell the public anything.”
Those can’t both be true. Selling to google is just indirectly selling to the general public.
One should look at the labels with what they are buying, and articles like these (maybe it is a little disingenuous) might help people to steer their funds where they think they can do more.
If you are upset by the way WMF asks for donations, here might be some alternatives:
- https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
Or if you are a fellow German(-Speaker):
The only reason Fuckerberg or Ellison or Murdoch or Google dont already own Wikipedia is Wikipedia has enough cash to tell them to fuck off. Not to mention dealing with all kinds of orgs, govt beauracrats, politicans all over the globe exerting pressures.
In this world if you dont have Financial Independence what path you chart out will never be under your control.
This article would have been useful if there were suggestions about how to go about fund raising better.
Then the Wikipedia Foundation should calibrate their appeals accordingly and the problem is solved.
Google is swimming in money, why can’t I post my ads on YouTube for free?
My employees have plenty of money saved up, why won’t they work for free?
If anything, they've proven to be rather good at it, with lots and lots of value added to the commons, and a healthy financial state of affairs.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_c...
[2] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
Is there some middle ground here?
It is unethical to use the money people are giving to Wikimedia in response to a banner on Wikipedia--the only "initiative" Wikimedia runs that they know exists--which claims Wikipedia is going to fail without more money to fund any of their other "many initiatives". If they want to fund other things, the banner should say "don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but we want to do other things similar to it, and need money from people like you to accomplish those new goals!"... I can't imagine, however, that this honest banner would raise anywhere near as much money.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizat...
Wikipedia has given more to the world than facebook or twitter or most webshits pistaking here (including me) ever could. It could have become another ad funded monstrosity, but they have chose to create a charity.
To attack them with such demonstrably poor grasp of their finances, projects and public outreach shows a degree of arrogance and hypocracy that is trully something to behold.
I was surprised to discover the staff is over 350 people, including over 250 employees (the rest are contractors).
You can get some idea of the scope looking at this:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_staff_a...
The main questions for the foundation are: is its mission worthy, and is it spending money well in service to that mission?
This piece barely considers this, and instead just presumes there’s something wrong with Wikipedia successfully growing.
There are so many poor points in the article… let’s see:
* the $10M/year number was a base number for 2013. Running Wikipedia at that level assumes nothing costs more and services will revert to 2013 levels. If that’s what you think they would do, you need to explain why that is a good idea or even possible.
* the fact that fundraising from end-users is working is a good thing, not a bad thing. If end-users aren’t paying the bills then someone else will be - in which case you have to balance their needs against the users’ - or no one will be and Wikipedia will stop existing.
* implying WMF financial reporting is “disguising” the amount of money and characterizing it as “funneling” money is misleading and unfair. It’s all transparently there, in straightforward form.
* Non-profits need to raise funds so they need staff to do so. Large organizations need a CEO and some managers. It’s OK that they pay people normal amounts to do these jobs.
* The idea that it’s offensive or wrong to ask end-users for donations is bizarre. Who else do you think should be paying for Wikipedia?
The only legit point I see (buried among the vacuous ones) is that Wikipedia should stay far away from any for-profit business. Yes, they are leaving a clear revenue stream on the table, but I think it will make their primary mission harder. Content flows freely into Wikipedia because it is given freely to everyone else. Once you start charging for the information in some forms, that all begins to change.
I would not be.
But I think it's weird to complain about the endowment. That's exactly what they should be doing. If I ran Wikipedia I would have kept it to a core team of engineers - they could have built up a $1bn endowment by now if they had done that, and then they could run it indefinitely without asking for donations again.
I just donated more money to Wikipedia just because.
I realise the potential for conflicts of interest, but simply either (i) disburse grants to already prolific editors, to support their efforts, or (ii) pay recognized experts to improve articles which are lacking (e.g. pay historians, philosophers, biologists, etc).
I would say that Wikipedia is tremendously valuable to the human population. I find it to be money very well spent, even at $120M per year. I'd argue that the majority (90% ?) of tax money and other donations are spent on much less valuable endeavours.
Seriously, that's 2 dollar cents per year per human.
It is not the free information space assumed. There is lots of politics and misinformation going on.
Big funding comes from sources creating direct conflicts of interest.
That'd be because the WMF doesn't own the endowment.
I do think as organizations grow they become increasingly inefficient and competing priorities are introduced. It must be carefully managed, but is difficult.
According to the article, they got 142 million in donations so far this fiscal year. Assuming they spent that entirely on hiring editors, had no other expenses (including no other fundraising expenses), had no server costs, etc they could hire 4500 people at min wage. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/... there's been 39 thousand editors who have made 5+ edits last month to just english wikipedia [not counting other languages] (Unfortunately I could not find any stats for overall active editors from all languages, nor could I find any stats for "very" active editors). That stat isn't very good for the argument I'm trying to make, but I suspect there's in the neighbourhood of 4500 existing editors/moderators who treat it as effectively a full time job, once you combine all the languages. Thus I doubt this budget would be sufficient to hire the existing editors, let alone hire more.
The current bureaucracy is not designed to prevent arguments, its designed to make sure such arguments are productive. Whether it succedes is debatable. Its certainly not without issue.
Putting money aside for a rainy day, rather than living paycheck to paycheck, sounds like a smart long-term plan. It’s the model used by universities like Harvard.
It's a classic public-private partnership.
Definitely something to continue to watch to see if Wikipedia continues to serve the public good.
Hell, last i checked, wikipedia even worked if cookies were disabled (and you weren't logged in).
I'm also not sure what the unsteady connections thing is about? Wikipedia doesn't modify the TCP stack.
On mobile, there is a new "feature" where each section is lazy-loaded, so if you do not expand them while you are online, you cannot read them once you're offline. Also, if the browser reloads the page from cache while offline, sections are also inaccessible.
The desktop site is inaccessible to mobile because the left column stays visible and floats over or squeezes the actual text.
In my eyes it has a few shortcomings straight out of the gates by requiring TLS and also by being relatively new tech, so there's not much established knowledge base, and the "early problems" are still being solved.
It's much less accessible than Web in many different scenarios, such as when I can't install software on my device, when I'm using an older device, etc.
I'm just saying.
It seems many lifestyle startups can benefit if they become non profit entities?
It would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I think this needs to die for something more profitable and sustainable to rise in its place, organized by people who make their money input not dependent on charity but a recognized social utility.
Communist revolutions are just anger and frustration making heads roll all around for a big reset, but the phoenix rising in the ashes of the revolution surprisingly often has the same face as it had before. I live in China, my friends always tell me "we've always had an emperor in Beijing, this is the same thing with another name, why make such a fuss about it", proving that not only did the revolution change nothing for them, but worst: they don't even see there was some sort of point to it. So a communist revolution will change nothing to Wikipedia's governance.
I don't think Wikipedia can be state-sponsored, or even UN-sponsored: it doesn't matter enough. But a corporate entity with a product vision and a clear statement of profit would reduce the tearful aspect of their marketing campaign, appeal to its utility rather than our sobbing hearts and maybe shed a bit (a lot?) of the volunteering to welcome people like me who edit wiki for stuff they need rather than to "offer the world a knowledge sharing platform" in itself ?
That's generally been very unpalatable to the people who write wikipedia. Even the mere rumour of something like that being considered resulted in a fork of the spanish wikipedia into Enciclopedia Libre back in 2002.
Havent edited in like a year, that includes osm.
Maybe they should share their funds with volunteers who are essentially working for the benefit of "managers".... like you would get funding based on number of edits, age of accounts, quality of edits, if any reversals you had, on and on. Would that not convince people to contribute and also keep leeches out because the funding would be manually given out, not automated.
OpenStreetMap is a separate org and not part of the Wikimedia family