Which means that the hosting costs for the site will drop even lower. So why is Wikipedia still begging for money? http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/
Personally, I actually went and donated to Wikipedia after reading this article because I had no idea that they ran the site with so little funding.
Go hock your clickbait somewhere else.
The WMF fundraising efforts should be defensible without resorting to viewpoint-based censorship. Note also that a number of involved Wikipedians have reservations about fundraising appeals optimized for revenue rather than truthfulness, as collected by another active Wikipedia critic here:
https://www.quora.com/How-well-is-Wikipedias-fundraising-pro...
That said, you do not seem to have a good understanding of the word "clickbait" and seem to be using it as an insult against content you do not like. A primary feature of clickbait is that the headline does not directly say what the article is about. Example: "You won't believe what this huge website is doing with your donations!" or "These do-nothing programmers get paid with this one weird trick!" The objective is to incite the reader's curiosity so that they will click on something they normally wouldn't. As you can plainly see, the link to my article tells readers exactly what to expect before clicking.
FYI there are quite a few other recent articles about this topic on the web: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/01/penniless_and_desper...
Personally, I don't care on how many millions the directors of Wikimedia sit on, because Wikipedia is possibly the most useful online service we have. And not only that, but all the content in it is licensed under open licenses that allow for reuse [1], which is very relevant in a climate in which copyright extensions keep being granted. I also prefer to see them asking for donations instead of serving ads, because ad companies are selling my data to the highest bidder and I don't necessarily want other parties to find out the topics I'm interested in.
Do you care about the internal expenses or about the revenue of each company you're interacting with? If Wikimedia would introduce a subscription model, they'd earn much more than they are doing right now. They don't have a subscription model, they don't serve ads, they aren't locking-in content, they don't sell my traffic - all they are doing is asking nicely for donations about once a year, which is totally optional, it's not like you have to pay up. I really don't get what's wrong with that.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_con...
And there have been germane questions asked about that, even by Wikimedia's own outgoing director:
http://www.dailydot.com/business/sue-gardner-log-rolling-cor...
The reason most of the Wikimedia Foundation's expenditure goes on salaries these days is that they have vastly expanded their staff. Staff expansion isn't bad, but it shouldn't be an end in itself, and the staff hired should be qualified and deliver value for money. And here even Jimmy Wales admitted that their cost/benefit ratio needs a lot of improvement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_W...
The main thing to bear in mind is that donations are not needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free, as the fundraising banners say. There is more than enough money for that; it's a very small part of the Foundation's expenditure today.
It used to be different:
I don't understand why you find this surprising. I think the people who work on the site deserve to be well paid for their work, just like anybody else. I think the outreach efforts are interesting as well.
> and even less will go the people who actually created the content
This argument makes little sense to me: nobody who contributes content to Wikipedia has any expectation of ever being paid for it.
> That said, you do not seem to have a good understanding of the word "clickbait"
Your definition of clickbait is far too narrow IMO. Your article takes some facts about Wikipedia's finances and presents them with very little context in a way that is intended to elicit an emotional response from people who aren't familiar with the scale on which they operate.
Most egregiously, you present $50MM as though it were some huge amount of money, when in reality that's pocket change compared to the financial resources of most entities that host and maintain websites like Wikipedia.
And if you think "Stop donating to Wikipedia" isn't an inflammatory headline, you're deluding yourself. You wrote this article to piss a bunch of people off and get publicity for your new site: that's textbook clickbait.
He wrote the article, and that's his site.
First of all, it's for like 1 or 2 weeks a year or whatever their fundraising period is. The donation request is not up there all the time. It is similar to how NPR raises money.
Second of all, Wikipedia is not a "serious for-profit site". I have no idea why you are making this comparison. Lets take a look at a "serious for-profit site" like nytimes.com or cnn.com. Oh look, there are ads everywhere, taking up a huge portion of the page. And they are there every single time you visit the site.
Stop trying to push your inferior competing site (newslines.org) with trash like this.
"We're really proud we burn books because we only burn the ones we feel are bad" isn't a philosophy I can stomach funding.
I didn't realise that you were the founder of Newslines. I'll tell you what – someone at Wikipedia must have pissed you off something fierce, for you to have such as weirdly twisted and poisonous view of it, quite aside from the laughable idea that Newslines is "Wikipedia's only direct competitor".
You are of course free to stop using wikipedia if you can't handle the fact that they ask for donations every now and then.
From the SCFs on Page 3 of your link, staff costs in FY2013 were $15.98M and staff costs in FY2014 were $19.98M. This is only an increase of 25%. I'll take your word on the traffic stats but your assertion that staff cost has more than doubled is easily disproven.
They're static?
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProje...
Sept 2014 - 23.1B views
Sept 2013 - 17.9B
Sept 2012 - 19.1B
Sept 2011 - 15.8B
Sept 2010 - 14.5B
Sept 2009 - 11.8B
Sept 2008 - 10.6B
Two incorrect things right here:
a) there are lots of sites that run ads on community content, some even charge membership fees on top of that
b) only content is created by unpaid contributors. Hardware, bandwidth, admin team, software team, etc. all cost money. The fact that the content is free doesn't mean running Wikipedia is free - it's far from it. That's like saying making a talk show is free if it doesn't pay for the interviews.
>>> Money is not an issue of survival for Wikipedia
It's incorrect again - the fact that Wikipedia has money doesn't mean it doesn't need it. Just as the fact that you have enough air to breathe right now doesn't mean you won't die very quickly if the air flow stops. Wikipedia would die too if the money flow stops. Fortunately, it does not, and it's the great thing, and it in no way means money flow is not vital - just as the abundance of air doesn't mean it's not vital for you.
>>> is in “survival” mode.
Here you engage in distortion, making it sound like Wikipedia claims it's "in survival mode". The claim is the donations are necessary for continued survival, not that there's already a financial crisis now. In fact, since the kind contributors continue to contribute, there is no crisis. This is a good thing.
Moreover, the only reason this is the case is that people in the past mostly were not listening to people like you. So you build your case on the fact that almost nobody would join your cause.
>>> Wikipedia’s core software is essentially unchanged since 2001
This is wildly untrue, to the point that betrays complete unfamiliarity with the platform and it's development. Which is much more puzzling given that most of the information about it is not that hard to find if desired.
>>> Yet all of the money spent on programmer salaries has produced no measurable change to the site’s quality.
This again is false. The very article you're reading belies this claim, but there are many more improvements (including whole mobile platform, which of course did not exist in 2001).
>>> These grants have been described as “corrupt” by the WMF’s ex-director Sue Gardner. who said,
This is an obvious lie, Sure Gardner said that the process doesn't provide enough protection against corrupt practices, not that the grants are corrupt. The difference as between "this lock is not strong enough" and "you are a thief". It is bewildering that you distort the quote in the same phrase as you provide it and expect the reader to miss it.
>>> Your donations are going to golden chairs.
This is false. Ask somebody who has been in Wikimedia office if there are any golden chairs there.
>>> I guess parks and libraries would be a lot less popular if you had panhandlers at the doors.
You would prefer wikipedia to tax you and have corrupt politicians distribute the budgets instead of direct voluntary donations? That's s strange mindset that prefers to be forced to do something instead of having a choice to do it at their own free will - or not do it and write an article full of distortions and inaccuracies if so inclined.
I could spend more time to point more incorrect statements and fallacies in the text but I think this is enough.
>What is the point of a site saying they don’t want to show ads, then covering up 50% of the screen with a request for money?
This is an article you seriously recommend reading?
No, the content-to-ad ratio on the screen of a commercial site would never be 50%.
The former is annoying. The latter is annoying and invasive.
ABP users can kill that banner by toggling on the "Fanboy's Annoyances" list.
It is physically impossible for Wikipedia to factually report on something that is being misrepresented by the mass media, because mass media consensus is taken as the only thing that matters in establishing verifiability per their policies. This means that if the media is misrepresenting something, so will Wikipedia, and any attempts to correct the record will be seen as "original research" and deleted.
Say what you want about that particular controversy, but the problem is real either way.