Hacker News Reader

Comment by omnicognate | Hacker News Reader

Read the screenshot: "... humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence", "if you donate... Wikipedia could keep thriving for years".

The question as to whether this is manipulative isn't "is there are any clear statement of fact that is unambiguously a lie even in the most charitable possible interpretation?", it's "will this make ill-informed readers think their donations are necessary for Wikipedia's survival, and is this impression created deliberately?"

I think that's a very obvious "yes and yes".

View on HN

I mean, it's basic English. "Independence" doesn't mean "just enough for server maintenance" and "thriving" doesn't mean "barely surviving".

They have enough money to fund wikipedia in perpetuity several times over. Wikipedia's independence and thrivingness aren't at any risk whatsoever, even if donations were to completely stop immediately.

The donations are used for side projects almost all donors are completely unaware of, whose existence and nature are not hinted at in the ads soliciting donations.

Again, problems with basic communication, it seems. Perpetuity means "forever". Because they have a finite amount of money and they are not generating money, they can't "fund wikipedia in perpetuity several times over".

They way they DO stay online for a resilient amount of time is by generating money, i.e. through donations.

In fact, they used to say exactly how many months they have left. Now they don't say that, because they feel they can allow themselves that. Does that mean that it makes sense to stop fundraising? No. Because the minute the public doesn't feel that there's an urgency in donating to your cause, then it's someone else's problem, meaning it's nobody's problem and that's how you kill NPOs.

I suggest reading up about endowments. [1]

Money generates money. To fund something in perpetuity you need enough that the returns from investing it (taking into account tax, costs, inflation, etc) exceed the annual payment needed. This is not an infinite amount.

I haven't checked the figures but the article claims the foundation has $400 million cash and Wikipedia costs under $2 million per annum. There's no easy way of calculating the maximum annual sum that can be taken out in perpetuity from a well managed endowment but it's certainly a lot more than 0.5%.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment

Well the risk is they'd invest too much into saving the side projects in the event of a downturn that they would put wikipedia at risk, which is why even people like me who don't have ideological squabbles with the content of the side projects are concerned by the bundling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com