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Why should Wikimedia need a significant nest egg? What do you do with the money, when people have stopped valuing Wikimedia enough that they are no longer payi
by throwaway2245 6y ago
Why should Wikimedia need a significant nest egg?
What do you do with the money, when people have stopped valuing Wikimedia enough that they are no longer paying for it to exist?
- hinkley 6y agoDonations are not a zero sum game but they aren’t terribly elastic either. Try as you might, every dollar you get as a donation is taking some of that money from someone else. There will be times when Wikipedia is not sexy, but taken for granted. That’s when you need the endowment.
- throwaway2245 6y agoIf Wikipedia becomes unfashionable to the extent it is highly dependent on its savings, it will no be longer valued for being Wikipedia (by definition). It might be valued as an institution with modest economic power, which doesn't seem to me to add anything to the world that isn't already there. 2 years of all current spending as a cushion seems like plenty to me (for Wikipedia, which has not faced any unexpected financial shocks, even in 2020). If you can't navigate shocks and downward trends with that cushion, then you probably ought not to exist.
- hinkley 6y agoOnly if you believe that market economies are always efficient. Plenty of things have a huge impact on your life and yet nobody wants to pay for them. They're important, but they're not important. If you have an endowment, you don't have to keep wrestling with keeping the two in sync.
- throwaway2245 6y agoI think our perspectives are different because I'm thinking about what the board of Wikimedia might look like later: when it controls a bunch of money but is essentially dying as a service. I imagine a political mess, of people trying to extract personal benefit from the remaining endowment.