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$178 million might sound like an extremely large amount of money if you're a member of the general public, but for a global resource kept up to date that serves hundreds of billions of visitors per year this is actually not a huge quantity of money.
They spend only $3mil on internet hosting. They spent almost 6 mil on travel and conferences, and 26 mil on awards and grants.
They could easily run all wikimedia hosting on investment income (endowment) alone so the banner that often pleads for donations to keep wikipedia running is pretty scammy.
Usually non-profit organizations like this get significant corporate funding because they do work for companies and political organizations, which is where the corruption comes from. I don't think there's any doubt Wikipedia is a politically biased organization, all you have to do is look at their URL blacklists to figure that out. The NYT is regarded as a high quality link, meanwhile you're not even allowed to link the epoch times as a reference despite it being the most comparable right-wing competitor to the NYT. Basically every major right-wing paper is banned, while every major left-wing paper is allowed
I think its pretty clear that "support for volunteers" does not mean corporate.
I too would like more detailed budgets, but we do have some info here.
> Usually non-profit organizations like this get significant corporate funding because they do work for companies and political organizations
The list of large donors is public https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu... there are only 27 who gave > $50000. Which ones do you think Wikipedia is giving biased coverage to?
I'd also point out that there is a wall of separation between editors and the foundation.
> all you have to do is look at their URL blacklists to figure that out. The NYT is regarded as a high quality link, meanwhile you're not even allowed to link the epoch times as a reference despite it being the most comparable right-wing competitor to the NYT. Basically every major right-wing paper is banned, while every major left-wing paper is allowed
Discussion about epoch times at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not... my understanding is the concern is around them promoting conspiracy theories without evidence not their political alignment.
That might be their justification but is it actually true?
Specifically: Do you believe that every major right-wing paper promotes conspiracy theories while every major left-wing paper does not?
For example fox news and the Washington Examiner are considered right wing and are not listed as a deprecated source.
Similarly there are left wing sources on the deprecated list like the grayzone or Occupy Democrats. (Arguably those are rather fringe)
Certainly the epoch times has been widely criticized for being factually inaccurate in ways the new york times has not been.
I also don't particularly think the new york times is equivalent to the epoch times in terms of reputation.
I also find it interesting that Al-Manar (essentially Hezbollah's media office) has a slightly better status than, say, Daily Mail.
See also (Wikipedia cofounder) Larry Sanger's critique of Wikipedia' source bias - https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...