Huh. Guess I will stop donating to Wikimedia. Not that I don’t support those causes. I just thought my money went to maintaining Wikipedia.
https://help.archive.org/help/category/donations-2/donating-...
Trust broken. I'm out forever.
Wikipedia, it's purpose and intent is...
"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." - Jimmy Wales, 2008
The grants work to serve that goal. Of ensuring that everyone has access to that information and can use it.
So, my question is simple, if they didn't send the money to these organizations, but instead, used it instead to improve only, let's say, the machines it's hosted on, but you and whatever country you were in couldn't access it, would you still give them money? Wikipedia still exists for everyone else, but you and your fellow countrymen can't access it.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
There is nothing wrong with "matching racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications", but that work is clearly not required to "create and distribute a free encyclopedia".
I'm just gonna stop going down this rabbit hole before it depresses me even more.
Who knows? Is there any good investigative breakdown of exactly what Wikimedia Foundation spends most of its income on? Does it have a huge admin parasitical attachment sucking the money away? I'm not accusing, just wondering myself. Perhaps someone knows about this.
How do you square that with this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180736) that says only they only spend "2% on actual hosting costs."
100% of the work of actually maintaining Wikipedia is is done by unpaid volunteers, and much of the tooling they use also appears to be developed on a volunteer basis.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annu...
Some quick highlights: of their >$150M of usable donations, they spent about 57% of it on "salaries," 10% of it on "awards and grants," 4% of it just on processing donations, and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has....
This needs to be taken with the thought that not all projects necessarily end up good.
For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.
That's a good sign, isn't it? It means they are efficient and don't waste their budget on overpriced cloud services.
I'd be more pissed if a significant junk of the donations went straight to AWS.
Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.