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Comment by akolbe | Hacker News Reader

You're right, but that is what the post you are replying to was proposing: they should say what they are raising the money for.

Then people can decide, instead of being panicked into donating because they are made to think there is an urgent need for money "to defend Wikipedia's independence" or "to keep Wikipedia online".

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But the post also said misappropriating the funds “is a minor issue”.

It’s not a minor issue to say you’re raising funds for X and to then give those funds to Y just because it only amount to Z% of your budget. And in this case Z% is actually pretty high.

Okay, I get your point. Speaks to the organisation's basic lack of honesty, which is arguably the real problem here. That's come up before – a recent poll among Wikipedians judged the WMF's fundraising emails "unethical and misleading":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978

Most of these grants are not even that bad - they're explicitly trying to foster the creation and sharing of knowledge about highly under-represented populations, which is clearly within the remit of Wikipedia as a broad community. But then you do get truly weird stuff like the $250k grant to SeRCH, an organization that purportedly aims to support minority folks in STEM pursuits. Unfortunately, that "support" seemingly involves posting obscure YouTube videos featuring bizarre rants about "hyperspace" and their "intersectional scientific method", whatever that is. It's highly dubious that this stuff can actually help minorities succeed in science, to say the least.

Moreover, most of the money to date has gone to U.S. organisations.

This is truly bizarre if you consider that the Wikimedia Foundation raises funds in places like India, South Africa and South America – with heart-wrenching messages about donations being needed to keep Wikipedia online, independent, subscription-free and so on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

The point is not that they're bad/good - the point is that Wikipedia is presenting us with heartfelt pleas to keep the servers running, while also running a massive budget surplus and donating our money to other people who we've never heard of.

And the lack of transparency makes corruption incredibly likely. How much of the donated money has been siphoned off to the bank accounts of Wikimedia executives? How many grants have been awarded because of kickbacks, bribes, etc? I have no evidence that any of this has happened, but there is no evidence it didn't, either.

There are basic, simple, good governance practices that are being ignored here. Which is very suggestive that the people involved are actually corrupt and resisting the implementation of good governance practices.

Also, the ongoing pleas for donations when those donations are clearly not required is very suggestive. Why are Wikimedia executives asking for this money when they don't need it, if they're not siphoning off into their own accounts?

"Keeping the servers running" is useless if the project itself is not flourishing. Nobody wants a dead, out of date Wikipedia. So broad support for the project and community is what really matters.

Which is fine, but tell us that. The impression I get from the donations plea is that the money goes directly to support Wikipedia because it needs it to keep the servers running.

And they need to be clear about the grants made, how much was given to whom, for what purpose, what was the rationale for this grant to support Wikipedia? and did the grant achieve its objective?

But it doesn't really help Wikipedia, at least not in a measurable way. From the original article opinion of long time wikipedian Steven Walling

> Given that this is a pilot and there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects, I would encourage you to stop

The Wikimedia Endowment has amassed $100 million in five years, half the time anticipated, and there has never been a single audited financial statement or Form 990 disclosure, because the money is stashed away with the completely opaque Tides Foundation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

The public has no way of knowing how much Tides is paid to host the fund (and the Wikimedia Foundation refuses to say when asked), nor is there any way of knowing whether and to whom any money from this fund has been paid out. Even if there is no abuse, this sort of set-up is so clearly vulnerable to abuse that one wonders why anyone would choose it.

Not only vulnerable - if you were going to siphon away money into your bank account, this is exactly how you'd set that up. This looks like it was designed to be abused.

Yeah the fact that the large transfer to Tides happened at the same time that the Tides CEO became General Counsel for Wikimedia seems pretty gross (and I say this as someone that in general would agree with Tides' mission otherwise)

To quote the page this HN submission links to: "Concerns expressed then focused on the secrecy of the grant, the break with the participatory grantmaking principles the Foundation had until then embraced, and the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation"

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