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What are your issues with Wikimedia? The (somewhat annoying) donation banners?
by jtl999 7y ago
What are your issues with Wikimedia? The (somewhat annoying) donation banners?
- shp0ngle 7y agoThe budgets are rising exponentially each year, apparently
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoAnd still not even a spec on the chart compared to the other websites of their size.
- xvector 7y agoBut they blatantly lie to the public when they say they need donations to continue Wikipedia. If you look at the expense report, they absolutely don't; Wikipedia is a mote of dust compared to the amount that is fundraised every year. It's just pure greed. These sort of disinformation campaigns by nonprofits should be illegal.
- TheFiend7 7y agoWow I had no idea those ads on wikipedia were blatant lies. I've never donated but I've definitely thought about it a few times whenever I saw those ads. This is somewhat eye-opening.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoThey aren't lies, the money is entirely used on the wikimedia foundation. The big "scandal" is that wikimedia has other projects outside of wikipedia like wikidata which the funds also get used on. Wikimedia has plenty of money to keep wikipedia running as it is, they need extra money to expand other fields of open data.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- killjoywashere 7y agoAnd if you've ever led anything, you understand the value of "buffer states". Having those satellite projects, R&D investments, etc that you nurture in the good times, because you've seen hard times, and don't care to return to them. Donations follow the same axiom as pricing: ask for what the market will bear.
- jessriedel 7y agoThat would all be fine if the donors understood what was happening. Instead, the ads give the impression that Wikipedia is in dire need of funds. Most donors don't even know that the Wikimedia foundation does anything besides Wikipedia.
- anewvillager 7y agoWikidata is actually used by Wikipedia though.
- jessriedel 7y agoYes, I agree, that use of the money is more defensible, although it still doesn't excuse the general urgency of the fundraising pitch, which suggests (but does not say) money is needed to keep the lights on.
- tripzilch 7y ago> Instead, the ads give the impression that Wikipedia is in dire need of funds. while "dire" might be a bit of an overstatement, I agree with this impression because it is in part why I donated once or twice.
- xvector 7y ago> because you've seen hard times, and don't care to return to them. This is a reasonable stance to take, except when your donations are enough to cover the core product for decades.
- IggleSniggle 7y agoI had no idea. That's horrible. Are they trying to raise an endowment or something so that they can run on interest? If so that would be reasonable, but they should still be honest about it.
- xvector 7y agoThey have projects they want to fund other than Wikipedia. This in itself is not bad, but the misleading nature of it all definitely is.
- samcrawford 7y agoI don't mean to nitpick, but exponentially? Really?
- wongarsu 7y agoSo I just typed the "Total Expenses" line from page 3 of each of their financial reports [0] into Excel, this is the result: https://imgur.com/lIL79IK https://imgur.com/lIL79IK It looks like quadratic growth until around 2011, after that it becomes linear. This still seems like a lot of growth, considering the number of pageviews per article seems to be roughly constant over the last 5 years [1] 0: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ 1: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2015-07&end=2020-01&pages=Dog|Chair https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or... Edit: this is how last year's expenses break down: Salaries and wages: 46,146,897 Awards and grants: 12,653,284 Internet hosting: 2,335,918 In-kind service expenses: 1,361,958 Donation processing expenses: 4,977,583 Professional service expenses: 8,998,261 Other operating expenses: 9,005,744 Travel and conferences: 2,867,774 Depreciation and amortization: 2,856,901 Special event expense, net: 209,690 ------------------------------------------ Total expenses: 91,414,010 (sorry if that's unreadable on mobile)
- ajphdiv 7y agoExcuse my ignorance. Does wikimedia pay content writers?
- wongarsu 7y agoNo. All the writing and most of the moderation is done by volunteers. The closest to that on the Foundation's payroll are the about three community managers. The Foundation does employ the engineers writing the software, the sysadmins keeping everything running, a UX team of 14 people, a lot of people related to fundraising, as well as outreach and public relations, some legal staff and various administrative staff. There's a full list of employees and contractors at https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
- papreclip 7y agoit's a nice jobs program :)
- dave_sid 7y agoYes. An the smugness of it all.
- bhelkey 7y agoThe issue that is occasionally brought up is that Wikimedia's expenses are growing exponentially[1]. This is a somewhat old graph but the trend appears to continue. Their total expenses in 2019 was 91.4MM[2]. [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-budget-of-Wikipedia https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-budget-of-Wikipedia [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY18-19.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
- j88439h84 7y agolooks linear to me
- jussij 7y agoOnly when the first four years are ignored.
- anewvillager 7y agoThen it means that growth has slowed down, right? Exponential growth has ever-increasing slope.
- jussij 7y agoI'm not sure what conclusion you are drawing from my reply as I'm not claiming the growth is exponential. I'm was just referring to the op's observation that the growth is linear. My point was you can only achieve that linear result if the first few data points are ignored.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- knolax 7y agoWhat about their userbase? If it's also been increasing exponentially then it doesn't seem that unreasonable for their expenses to grow exponentially.
- casefields 7y agoWikipedia has Cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...