35 ms·

Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

623 points by tech-historian 5y ago

mch82 5y ago
> So what does the WMF do with all the money? It has used the funds to hire hundreds of additional staff and put money aside for a rainy day. Putting money aside for a rainy day, rather than living paycheck to paycheck, sounds like a smart long-term plan. It’s the model used by universities like Harvard.
fazelesswhite 5y ago
Wow, I saw the banner last year and wouldn't have donated if I had read this article sooner.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  I'm not American so I'm not familiar with donations in general - I always felt it was better for society to build self-sustainable systems via tax and votes or companies to build self-sustainable products via investments and profits, rather than have some shady in between - useful enough for us to want to pay but useless enough for us not to want to pay for real. It would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I think this needs to die for something more profitable and sustainable to rise in its place, organized by people who make their money input not dependent on charity but a recognized social utility.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    That's nice and all, but short of a communist revolution, how do we do that?
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      StackOverflow seems to handle the fine line well, Reddit as well. They both provide volunteer-heavy knowledge sharing while not appealing to charitable emotions that are disingenuous (if wiki is dying, fine: say it, but if it's not then their only way of growing budget is to pretend it is - it's the sign of an issue for me) Communist revolutions are just anger and frustration making heads roll all around for a big reset, but the phoenix rising in the ashes of the revolution surprisingly often has the same face as it had before. I live in China, my friends always tell me "we've always had an emperor in Beijing, this is the same thing with another name, why make such a fuss about it", proving that not only did the revolution change nothing for them, but worst: they don't even see there was some sort of point to it. So a communist revolution will change nothing to Wikipedia's governance. I don't think Wikipedia can be state-sponsored, or even UN-sponsored: it doesn't matter enough. But a corporate entity with a product vision and a clear statement of profit would reduce the tearful aspect of their marketing campaign, appeal to its utility rather than our sobbing hearts and maybe shed a bit (a lot?) of the volunteering to welcome people like me who edit wiki for stuff they need rather than to "offer the world a knowledge sharing platform" in itself ?
      - bawolff 5y ago
        They both rely on advertisements (And reddit gold, which is kind of like a donation). That's generally been very unpalatable to the people who write wikipedia. Even the mere rumour of something like that being considered resulted in a fork of the spanish wikipedia into Enciclopedia Libre back in 2002.
    - corin_ 5y ago
      Why would that require communism or a revolution? The American state already gives tax breaks and/or funding to charities, research organisations, public messaging initiatives, school systems, public services etc... there's a huge range of options that involve tweaking the rules of current systems before even getting anywhere near needing to change the entire political system.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        I mean the parent suggested not relying on charity. School systems are essentially an arm of the government. I just don't see what the options are for something like wikipedia (Or even say something like a critical open source project like openssl) that doesn't involve relying on charity or advertisments, short of a major change to how our society is structured.
        corin_ 5y ago
        Well for example, and I'm not advocating for these ideas other than pointing out that they'd be much simpler than changing the structure of society: the Government could either buy, or forcefully take control of, Wikipedia, or they could create a competitor with enough funding to take over. They could do it creating a gov department to run it, or they could set it up as an organisation fully owned by the state. They wouldn't even have to go that far, they could just pass a bill that would send however much money from taxpayers to Wikipedia every year, or as a one-off to create a new taxpayer-funded endowment. There's lots of changes to society that I think would be good, but "ability for government to decide to spend taxpayer money on a charity like Wikipedia, or to create their own version in-house" isn't exactly lacking from the current system.
        drdeca 5y ago
        Man, I do not trust any government to run Wikipedia.
        corin_ 5y ago
whym 5y ago
Related threads: Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011 Wikipedia doesn't need your money (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946912
teruakohatu 5y ago
I think why it needs to start selling data services should also be asked. At the very least everyone should have equal access to Wikipedia. Using "Big Tech" as an excuse to charge is not relevant in my humble opinion. https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tech-to-pay-up/ https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec... Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams of edit data to financial organisations.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  I'm concerned by WMF's cancerous growth, but this particular initiative makes sense to me. Wikipedia already provides free APIs for everybody to use, and they work fine for typical users who want to grab a page or a hundred, but the Googles of the world are essentially scraping the entire site multiple times a day. This imposes a real cost on WMF, and it's a win-win for both sides if companies pay for support and get better service in return.
- geenew 5y ago
  “ the WMF is launching a for-profit company named Wikimedia, LLC. This will sell API services to big tech companies, making it easier for them to process Wikimedia content, which powers voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as well as Google’s infoboxes.” “ The WMF emphasizes time and again that Wikipedia never tries to sell the public anything.” Those can’t both be true. Selling to google is just indirectly selling to the general public.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    The alternative is search engines and bots hammering on the doors of Wikipedia and costing huge infrastructure dollars. Their Enterprise API AFAICT is a value-add, and does not prevent scraping.
- mnouquet 5y ago
  > At the very least everyone should have equal access to Wikipedia Google & co are very clearly monetizing (either directly or indirectly) their integration, WMF might as well get something out of it. Though, this discussion might be going the "BSD vs GPL" direction...
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ddingus 5y ago
Are all the volunteers good with their efforts starting a for profit entity with arguably superior access? I would not be.
olivermarks 5y ago
The other great mystery is that despite Clay Shirkey's romantic web 2.0 book 'Here Comes Everybody' nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors. It's becoming hard to know who and what Wikipedia actually is https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  >nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits. Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important. Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.
  - olivermarks 5y ago
    @thrdbndndn Encyclopedia Britannica was peer reviewed and written by accredited experts for decades. For all I know spooks are writing Wikipedia's more sensitive articles
- furi 5y ago
  >nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
Wow. $300 million and still the need to beg. I have edited Wikipedia in the past, sometimes it felt like the troll army was too powerful because in a "poll" they quickly Mount an offensive and your words dont mean much it seems. Havent edited in like a year, that includes osm. Maybe they should share their funds with volunteers who are essentially working for the benefit of "managers".... like you would get funding based on number of edits, age of accounts, quality of edits, if any reversals you had, on and on. Would that not convince people to contribute and also keep leeches out because the funding would be manually given out, not automated.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  If by OSM you mean OpenStreetMaps, it's run by its own foundation and completely unrelated to Wikipedia. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    i didn't indicate that. i am aware of the same
- bawolff 5y ago
  > that includes osm OpenStreetMap is a separate org and not part of the Wikimedia family
ok_ok 5y ago
Download speeds for the data dumps are abysmal in the smaller country where I live. Machine readability, especially of Wiktionary, seems that it will never be improved.
jonahbenton 5y ago
Ridiculous question and even more ridiculous factoids. The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please. Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in the US and often around the world.
- bongoman37 5y ago
  I've donated to Wikipedia and contributed content as well but now I've decided not to anymore for the time being. Any kind of controversial article is decided more by the amount of time which side has to push their agenda rather than any kind of objective Neutral Point of View. There is a lot of astroturfing as well.
  - jonahbenton 5y ago
    With respect, think about what you are saying. You are not going to contribute with good intentions to a public service because there are people with bad intentions contributing to it...
    - 5560675260 5y ago
      The problem is that there is nothing done about people with bad intentions on organisational level.
      - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
        Wikipedia folks are aware of the problem and there have been many changes over the years to better protect neutrality. I agree the situation is still far from perfect but Wikipedia is still one of the bastions of free information out there. They could have commercialized it but it became a non-profit relying on donations from users (as opposed to corporations) for a good reason. What will happen when Wikimedia is gone? There's a reason there's such a relentless smear campaign against it. Instead of turning our backs we have to think of ways we can support Wikipedia and protect it from shills with deep pockets. If you have any ideas on how this can be done more effectively try bringing them up! Anyone can sign up and participate. That's Wikipedia's strength and weakness.
bawolff 5y ago
This seems to be about the endowment - That's not the same as normal donations, and they can't just "use it", they can basically only use the interest of that money, from what i understand. Disclaimer: Used to work for wikimedia, once upon a time, don't anymore.
- mnouquet 5y ago
  > they can basically only use the interest of that money That's even more of a problem if you do not support such scheme to extort money from the working classes.
- dannyw 5y ago
  The article mentions both the endowment ($100M) and also WMF's funds on hand ($300M?). So the main point is still valid. Wikipedia's fundraising strongly implies that they need your $3 to keep the site online. WMF has $400M which would be enough to keep the site online for up to 40 years with no further donations. Thus, their fundraising is misleading and deceptive. I bet 9 in 10 donators won't donate if they knew WMF has $400 million in the bank -- isn't it morally wrong if you paint a deceptive picture of your finances?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I think you have those numbers reversed. According to the article (I presume its accurate), the endowment total is $300M [including funds from multiple years], and the fundraising total so far this fiscal year is $142M (I assume that's gross, fundraising has costs). The majority of Wikimedia's money goes to software development, not keeping the lights on. I think there are definitely reasonable criticisms that could be made about WMF's priorities and efficiencies (Not to mention how its situation is conveyed in the fundraising campaign), but I struggle to see a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success. Disclaimer: used to work there, don't anymore.
    - MagnumOpus 5y ago
kristopolous 5y ago
For the same reason Harvard does.
checkerscaptian 5y ago
i think that this was very interesting, i think that if wikipedia had that sort of funding then it could surely hire more editors/moderators to make sure the info is reliable. i also found it quite ironic that the first thing that popped up was 'please subscribe to daily dot'
- bawolff 5y ago
  They currently don't hire any moderators. According to the article, they got 142 million in donations so far this fiscal year. Assuming they spent that entirely on hiring editors, had no other expenses (including no other fundraising expenses), had no server costs, etc they could hire 4500 people at min wage. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/active-editors/normal|line|2-year|(page_type)~content*non-content|monthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/... there's been 39 thousand editors who have made 5+ edits last month to just english wikipedia [not counting other languages] (Unfortunately I could not find any stats for overall active editors from all languages, nor could I find any stats for "very" active editors). That stat isn't very good for the argument I'm trying to make, but I suspect there's in the neighbourhood of 4500 existing editors/moderators who treat it as effectively a full time job, once you combine all the languages. Thus I doubt this budget would be sufficient to hire the existing editors, let alone hire more.
  - saurik 5y ago
    Right: because you shifted the argument to editors from moderators; what they need are not people to edit articles, but instead to do community management that reduces the toxicity of the current de facto bureaucracy that is designed to prevent arguments but instead seems to cause them.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      The parent literally used the phrase "editors/moderators". The current bureaucracy is not designed to prevent arguments, its designed to make sure such arguments are productive. Whether it succedes is debatable. Its certainly not without issue.
guard0g 5y ago
Going the same way as many other non-profits (like colleges and universities), which pursue for-profit incentives while building bloat. After all, what could go wrong with spending $50 million to build out marketing that can increase revenue by $55 million?
zozbot234 5y ago
Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. They have hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia itself, and many related "sister" projects, with perhaps the most clearly impacting being Wikimedia Commons (a huge repository of free-content media with a focus on educational use - including much media in the public domain) and Wikidata (a project that has now emerged as the closest thing to a 'hub' in the still-developing Semantic Web ecosystem). Quite a bit of their funding also enables growth in least-developed countries, where access to high-quality educational content in local languages is going to be especially impactful wrt. broader development goals. People like to focus on the excess growth of management roles within the foundation and call it "cancer", but all large organizations have some possible waste within them. It might just be one of the many costs of doing business and pursuing what are in reality some very ambitious and perhaps worthwhile goals. And building a long-term endowment only looks like the prudent thing to do, since the results of fundraising can be quite volatile and uncertain.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just about hosting a bunch of articles.
    - neolog 5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
This notion that non-profits should be run on fumes by people who are paid less than market is ridiculous.
- mnouquet 5y ago
  So is the notion that non-profit should pay their execs millions.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Whose getting paid millions? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    A company of the size, stature, and importance of Wikimedia probably should. Currently they pay them what a middle manager would make in FAANG.
- busymom0 5y ago
  > run on fumes That's not what I got from the article or even the headline. It's talking about why they are using "tearful-sounding messages like: “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”" "really needs you"? Really? That too in India during COVID? With millions in the bank and salaries of everyone over $130k?
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  They shouldn't pay less than market. But they shouldn't locate themselves in the most expensive market that exists.
RedComet 5y ago
ITT: The author learns that wealthy multi-millionaire elite squeeze money out of the unsuspecting working class by whatever means necessary.
op03 5y ago
So the gist seems to be when people are willing to donate to you dont raise cash. Instead wait for god knows what situation in this unpredictable world to strike and then start your fund raising. The only reason Fuckerberg or Ellison or Murdoch or Google dont already own Wikipedia is Wikipedia has enough cash to tell them to fuck off. Not to mention dealing with all kinds of orgs, govt beauracrats, politicans all over the globe exerting pressures. In this world if you dont have Financial Independence what path you chart out will never be under your control. This article would have been useful if there were suggestions about how to go about fund raising better.
- Asymmetryk 5y ago
  Exactly. Then the Wikipedia Foundation should calibrate their appeals accordingly and the problem is solved.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  If their run rate is a few mill a year and they already have an endowment for hundreds of millions more why do they need to ask for more?
  - lostinquebec 5y ago
    By that logic, if the run rate > earnings on endowment... fundraise?
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      With zero sarcasm, yes?
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labster 5y ago
If everyone who reads this donates $3, we can pay off dang so we don’t have to read more stories critical of Wikipedia.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I'd be more interesting in knowing why Wikipedia is cutting off so many "<1%" users like narrow desktop screens, older browsers, no-JS users, mobile users with unsteady connections.
- bawolff 5y ago
  How are no-js users cut off? At least the desktop site should definitely work fine (I never use the mobile so i don't know). Hell, last i checked, wikipedia even worked if cookies were disabled (and you weren't logged in). I'm also not sure what the unsteady connections thing is about? Wikipedia doesn't modify the TCP stack.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    By "unsteady connections", I meant inconsistent or unreliable connections, where you may not be able to stay online reliably. On mobile, there is a new "feature" where each section is lazy-loaded, so if you do not expand them while you are online, you cannot read them once you're offline. Also, if the browser reloads the page from cache while offline, sections are also inaccessible. The desktop site is inaccessible to mobile because the left column stays visible and floats over or squeezes the actual text.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Fair enough. I'm personally not a fan of the mobile site, even on mobile. https://en.wikipedia.org/?useskin=timeless https://en.wikipedia.org/?useskin=timeless is another option (for that link to work on mobile, you have to first click the use desktop button to have desktop cookies)
      - forgotmypw17 5y ago
        Thanks, I like the idea of Gemini, but haven't found the time to try any of the clients yet. In my eyes it has a few shortcomings straight out of the gates by requiring TLS and also by being relatively new tech, so there's not much established knowledge base, and the "early problems" are still being solved. It's much less accessible than Web in many different scenarios, such as when I can't install software on my device, when I'm using an older device, etc.
EvanDotPro 5y ago
After reading the article and the comments here so far, I'm legitimately struggling to decide how I should feel about this as a long-time WMF donor. I can understand the upset and deceit people are feeling, but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind, their endowment fund usage is strictly controlled from what I understand, and as a business owner, I also deeply sympathize with the idea of having "rainy day" money but continuing to behave as if you don't. Is there some middle ground here?
- abbe98 5y ago
  You could donate to a local Wikimedia chapter or a thematic organization, they are doing a lot of great work in various areas and many of them are small enough for one to have an impact. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizat...
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- saurik 5y ago
  > but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind It is unethical to use the money people are giving to Wikimedia in response to a banner on Wikipedia--the only "initiative" Wikimedia runs that they know exists--which claims Wikipedia is going to fail without more money to fund any of their other "many initiatives". If they want to fund other things, the banner should say "don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but we want to do other things similar to it, and need money from people like you to accomplish those new goals!"... I can't imagine, however, that this honest banner would raise anywhere near as much money.
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andai 5y ago
Required reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
koreanguy 5y ago
wiki profits are all time high. what a impressive business model, the entire planet can be added to Wikipedia and the best part about all this, its user generated content that Wikipedia uses to get millions around the world.
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paxys 5y ago
> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email (https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March/124621.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade ago. Wikimedia's finances are audited and published every year. Here's the latest one from 2019-2020 - https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annual-report/financials/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu.... They had $120M in donations and $9M in other revenue for the year. Expenses were $112M. That isn't even close to the buffer that the article implies. The foundation's total current assets (~$160M) would keep their sites running for <2 years, and maybe a few more with major operational cuts. Why on earth shouldn't they fundraise more?
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    10 years ago would've been 2011 or so. I'd say it's very much in the ballpark wrt. global impact, considering everything that Wikimedia does and the way the projects have grown. Of course, much of it has to be credited to growth in Internet and Web access since then.
    - sharken 5y ago
      I think it's fair to say that server costs and global reach of Wikipedia is up, and factor in some ambitious goals the current expenditure is not too unreasonable. Money is a funny thing, in Denmark about $320 million is spent on Covid testing a month. So from January to July that would be the equivalent of Wikipedia funding for 20 years.
barelyusable 5y ago
The author linked the report: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200049703/202031349349303803/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200... I know it's from 2018 and maybe something changed, but: they took $115M. They paid $90M in costs, including $38M in salaries and <$1.7M to officers. Look at Part IX. You have all expenses listed. If you run any company ever, you know it adds up pretty quickly. Like other benefits to employees are $5M, pension plan is $1M, and payroll tax is $2M. They had $138M in assets, but only $64M invested in public stocks, and they took $2M from it, which is like 0.03% indicating they held some treasury bonds. So in absolute numbers, it seems big, but when you analyze it, it looks normal. Imagine you just hire a techy support staff. Let's assume you only need 50 people, each making $100k to operate a global website in all timezones. That's probably like $140k total costs per employee (healthcare, benefits, payroll, all sorts of taxes). You need 50*140k=$7M/yr. Assume you buy AT&T stock with 6% dividend. You need $120M of assets to get $7M. There is no safety here, and also my calculation doesn't include maybe like 5% increase in costs per year. I often wonder how could I create a fully self-sustainable non-profit: the one, that doesn't require begging for money and wasting time every year. Instead, the one that could operate independently. To make this happen, you pretty much have to invest the money very, very well, and diversify to the point where the yield is low, yet high enough to hire staff etc. (an example of sustainable donation is present in the Thorp's "A man of all markets" wrt. his endowment to UCI math department) For this you must have a pile of money, if you do the math, and it'd make perfect sense for Wikipedia. Unless they shrink, lay people off and optimize, they'll need $2B to be fully self-sufficient and sustainable. Otherwise, the fundraiser will need to bring $100M/yr at least.
- vasco 5y ago
  A non profit shouldn't be setup forever. It should have a cushion and other than that it should keep providing enough value to society that people keep contributing. Creating an endowment is saying that even if in the future nobody thinks what they do is valuable and stops donating, they'll still be able to keep going. Why?
dools 5y ago
Apple is swimming in money, why do I have to pay for a new iPhone? Google is swimming in money, why can’t I post my ads on YouTube for free? My employees have plenty of money saved up, why won’t they work for free?
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IshKebab 5y ago
I think this is a really valid point. If you look at their list of staff (salaries are their main expense) there are clearly a lot of people that aren't necessary to run Wikipedia. But I think it's weird to complain about the endowment. That's exactly what they should be doing. If I ran Wikipedia I would have kept it to a core team of engineers - they could have built up a $1bn endowment by now if they had done that, and then they could run it indefinitely without asking for donations again.
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
Outrage where there is no reason for it. Wikipedia is using the University Endowment model to fund its work. They are creating a permanent source of funds that will finance its work for the long run(forever?) and are using special fund raising for special projects. There is nothing wrong with that. It's a form of non-profit funding that will ensure it continues to function. Management should be congratulated for following a non-profit model that will keep it going for many years and not have to deal with the never ending danger of not getting enough money for the following year's budget. A hand to mouth existence is not the best way to run an organization. Yes, there's danger of money getting wasted but all non-profits get a high level of scrutiny from people looking for waste and eventually the waste goes away. There's no such thing as a large organization where there is no waste. Even very lean for profit organizations have to deal with the problem. The best you can do is to keep an eye out for cases where there is waste and fix it as soon as possible. Bottom line, if you don't like it then don't give. Period!
- dkarras 5y ago
  >Wikipedia is using the University Endowment model to fund its work. They are creating a permanent source of funds that will finance its work for the long run(forever?) and are using special fund raising for special projects. I think people wouldn't feel off about this if the fundraisers presented themselves as such. When you see them asking for donations, it is typically worded in a way it says "no one donates! if you don't we are on the brink of going bankrupt and shutting down the site! stop, don't scroll away!" and I think if they are sitting on a pile of cash (however noble their intentions are) some people might feel off about how they are being manipulated. Because that is not what they are asking the money for, at this moment. It is disingenuous to make it seem like they are asking for donations for covering the immediate day to day operations. Yes, it probably allows them to gather more donations that way but some people are not comfortable with being a target of manipulative ads. Immediate gains vs. poisoning the well situation here.
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- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
leipert 5y ago
Reading through the comments I think one point wasn’t really touched on. I think everyone has a limited amount of funds available for charity. Certain non-profits are more well funded than others _and_ there are more efficient charities around. One should look at the labels with what they are buying, and articles like these (maybe it is a little disingenuous) might help people to steer their funds where they think they can do more. If you are upset by the way WMF asks for donations, here might be some alternatives: - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ - https://eff.org/ https://eff.org/ Or if you are a fellow German(-Speaker): - https://www.fiff.de/ https://www.fiff.de/ - https://fragdenstaat.de/ https://fragdenstaat.de/ - https://digitalcourage.de/ https://digitalcourage.de/
markvdb 5y ago
Who is entitled to a say on Wikimedia's business organisation? Not me. The Wikimedia foundation can organise itself as it sees fit. If anything, they've proven to be rather good at it, with lots and lots of value added to the commons, and a healthy financial state of affairs.
mola 5y ago
I want Wikipedia to be "swimming in money" preferably from personal small donations so they won't be pressured to monetize and sacrifice integrity.
yholio 5y ago
> The WMF also has high-flying, global plans to “become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge” by 2030. It says it wants to create “knowledge equity”—a world where people everywhere will have as much access to information in their own language as a first-world citizen—and that this will require continuous budget increases. Godspeed to them in this endeavor. I think this is not the time to become absolute purists in the choice of tech overlords. The tech world is being controlled by less than a handful of trillion-dollar monopolists that crush anything that stands in their way. A few hundred million in this war is a drop in the ocean. Yes, power corrupts, and money is power. Yes, left to their own devices, people in NGOs will maximize revenues and expand their employee empires - just like those in the for-profit sector. What matters is the strategic goals and their execution by the leadership, and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - to indicate that WMF went astray from its stated mission. I cannot but feel this is another pissing contest like the open source world experienced, where everybody and their brother started their own distributions/forks to virtue signal their true commitment to the open source goals. This led to a massive fragmentation of the scene, the few companies that tried to use the model, like Redhat and Ubuntu, were exposed as deviationists from the party line; meanwhile big tech ate the world and put every man, woman and child on the planet in invisible jails.
brigandish 5y ago
I would rather give my money to Britannica, which is of a much higher standard and doesn't seem to be infected by tribalism.
aseerdbnarng 5y ago
I dont mind donating to WMF to ensure they have an endowment large enough they never need to cave to market pressures. But I do however have a major problem with them hiring teams of managers that earn $400k per annum. That is taking the piss
elenaturner 5y ago
Because they need money to keep running it free!
speedgoose 5y ago
I never understood why the Wikimedia foundation needs so much money. I never donated because of that.
0wis 5y ago
I don’t understand the hate here. Wikipedia clearly states that the point of donations is to create an endowment. They need to get enough money for their principal to generate enough money to ensure the project can live even in case of black swan events. [1] They are still a long way from being independent from donors given their growth in projects, paid contributors (employees) and therefore expenses. If you don’t agree with their governance or even specific ways they spend their money, stop donating, it is not like they are forcing you. You can even write an article an share it but don’t try to take shortcut like I feel it is done here. Money is a necessary ressource to survive, and if an entity have a lot of capital or spend plenty on projects or useful human ressources doesn’t imply evilness. [1] : https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/endowment.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/endowment.asp
- okdjnfweonfe 5y ago
  They would have an overfunded endowment if they didn't match their spending to their fundraising
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  > Wikipedia clearly states Where? This thread is the first time I remember reading about this, and I've seen a lot of Wikipedia beg-nags. They moved from outrageously deceptive messages that strongly implied that the lights would go out without my donation and that the donations were used to keep Wikipedia alive "for another year" [1], to slightly more vague "keep Wikipedia online and growing" [2] banners. Never did I see those banners mention an endowment. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/2012v2013factsbanners.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/2012v201... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Mob-lg-start-of-FY1718.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Mob-lg-s...
wolfretcrap 5y ago
My question is why most companies which focus heavily on research and future are not established as non profit entities? It seems many lifestyle startups can benefit if they become non profit entities?
ideamotor 5y ago
Oh fuck off, Wikipedia is one of the very few ethical resources promoting factual information on our planet at this point. Seriously, fuck this “news report.”
- Jyaif 5y ago
  I personally don't find 400k salaries in a non-profit to be ethical.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    You mean what a middle manager earns in a similar type of tech company? Wikipedia is already paying well below market.
dalbasal 5y ago
I daresay Facebook could manage on <$1bn... Is Twitter's current product so much more complicated than it was circa 2012, that it needs 100X as many employees, resources and such? If Wikipedia had been founded later, it probably would have been a startup. A unicorn, considering how popular it is. It would be burning through far more resources. Comparing it to any commercial site of comparable size, it is orders of magnitude more efficient. Meanwhile, it makes its money by asking. It doesn't snoop, sell your data, or participate in creepy ad-tech. So... when a person like me, who gets tremendous value and enjoyment from wikipedia is asked to kick in, we do. I do it gladly. They have, in my estimation, every right to ask me. The donation banners that seem to upset people are far less annoying than any commercial site's cookie/privacy popups. Tangentially, think of all the truth wars of the last few years. Notice that wikipedia, even though it deals directly with the hard part of this problem, has fared much better than most other websites/organisations. This is not a coincidence. Can wikipedia operate on $10m? Maybe, plausibly. Why should they have to? Wikipedia is a shining beacon, in many ways, including resource efficiency. They successfully bridged the gap between OSS, and non distributed organisational elements... allowing them to own servers and such. Few have.
tomcooks 5y ago
This article smell like something, which can be identified by using the "cui bono?" magic words. I just donated more money to Wikipedia just because.
uselesstech 5y ago
So far this doesn’t seem egregious but there are examples of non-profits cough Red Cross cough where their operational costs outweigh the good that they are able to provide. Definitely something to continue to watch to see if Wikipedia continues to serve the public good.
- kaba0 5y ago
  What do you mean outweigh? Based on what metrics?
  - uselesstech 5y ago
    I think the metric would be percentage of donations spent on the cause vs operations.
    - nraynaud 5y ago
      literally nobody else can enter a war zone and provide health care and get mail to the war prisoners, I don't know the monetary value of that, but it must be quite high.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Why does Wikipedia not do more where it would matter? Get rid of all the jargon and hostile environment to get the world engaged in exchanging knowledge.
andruby 5y ago
I love Wikipedia and gladly donate every year. I would say that Wikipedia is tremendously valuable to the human population. I find it to be money very well spent, even at $120M per year. I'd argue that the majority (90% ?) of tax money and other donations are spent on much less valuable endeavours. Seriously, that's 2 dollar cents per year per human.
ramshorst 5y ago
"Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, Wikipedia's community newspaper." Source: https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/ https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/
ramshorst 5y ago
Reading this made things more clear for me: "Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, Wikipedia's community newspaper." Source: https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/ https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/
chalst 5y ago
> It’s noteworthy that money donated to the endowment is not included in the WMF’s reported net assets That'd be because the WMF doesn't own the endowment. https://wikimediaendowment.org/wmf-endowment-hero1/ https://wikimediaendowment.org/wmf-endowment-hero1/
qwerty456127 5y ago
And still deletes insignificant information as if storing it was an unbearably heavy burden.
stkdump 5y ago
I am happy that the donation model is working out for them, and I would like to see it applied in more areas, at least if we can't secure government funding. Most prominently for mozilla, but also other important projects which currently rely on ads in a roundabout way or plainly neglected due to a lack of funding.
jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago
I find it curious none of the comments touch on the subject of wikipedia's edit wars, propaganda and dubious decisions related to any information that is not scientific consensus. It is not the free information space assumed. There is lots of politics and misinformation going on. Big funding comes from sources creating direct conflicts of interest.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
This is one of the most important project for humanity. Of course they want to secure it.
FranchuFranchu 5y ago
I'm from Argentina, a few days ago I was seeing these intrusive donation banners on top of each page. Now they're not there, maybe it's because of 20 years of Wikipedia?
etempleton 5y ago
Non-profits are all prioritizing growing their endowments to ensure their future capital and not rely on one time donations. I don’t have a problem with this. I do think as organizations grow they become increasingly inefficient and competing priorities are introduced. It must be carefully managed, but is difficult.
jmull 5y ago
This rather dumb hit piece doesn’t impress me. The main questions for the foundation are: is its mission worthy, and is it spending money well in service to that mission? This piece barely considers this, and instead just presumes there’s something wrong with Wikipedia successfully growing. There are so many poor points in the article… let’s see: * the $10M/year number was a base number for 2013. Running Wikipedia at that level assumes nothing costs more and services will revert to 2013 levels. If that’s what you think they would do, you need to explain why that is a good idea or even possible. * the fact that fundraising from end-users is working is a good thing, not a bad thing. If end-users aren’t paying the bills then someone else will be - in which case you have to balance their needs against the users’ - or no one will be and Wikipedia will stop existing. * implying WMF financial reporting is “disguising” the amount of money and characterizing it as “funneling” money is misleading and unfair. It’s all transparently there, in straightforward form. * Non-profits need to raise funds so they need staff to do so. Large organizations need a CEO and some managers. It’s OK that they pay people normal amounts to do these jobs. * The idea that it’s offensive or wrong to ask end-users for donations is bizarre. Who else do you think should be paying for Wikipedia? The only legit point I see (buried among the vacuous ones) is that Wikipedia should stay far away from any for-profit business. Yes, they are leaving a clear revenue stream on the table, but I think it will make their primary mission harder. Content flows freely into Wikipedia because it is given freely to everyone else. Once you start charging for the information in some forms, that all begins to change.
gego 5y ago
Fork it on the internet archive :)
bongoman37 5y ago
Isn't the answer in the question? It is begging people to donate which is why it is swimming in money.
hamilyon2 5y ago
Like, wharever it takes to keep ads off the site.
wombat-man 5y ago
I use Wikipedia literally every day and I’m happy to donate some money annually just to show appreciation.
NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
Basically half of the Wikimedia Foundations expenses ($55M out of $110M) are spent on staff salaries and wages. I was surprised to discover the staff is over 350 people, including over 250 employees (the rest are contractors). You can get some idea of the scope looking at this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_staff_and_contractors https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_staff_a...
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
This is the third time I see this on the front page in a year and it suggests there is something rotten with the culture on HN. Wikipedia has given more to the world than facebook or twitter or most webshits pistaking here (including me) ever could. It could have become another ad funded monstrosity, but they have chose to create a charity. To attack them with such demonstrably poor grasp of their finances, projects and public outreach shows a degree of arrogance and hypocracy that is trully something to behold.
andrepd 5y ago
I still don't get why wikipedia doesn't do a very simple thing with some of its funds: pay editors full-time. I realise the potential for conflicts of interest, but simply either (i) disburse grants to already prolific editors, to support their efforts, or (ii) pay recognized experts to improve articles which are lacking (e.g. pay historians, philosophers, biologists, etc).
collyw 5y ago
Wikipedia has gone from being a decent resource to a horrendous politically biased site in the last few years. Like Reddit its only worth using for subjects that don't have a political angle. The far left have ruined something that was good.
eezing 5y ago
Sounds like they’re making good financial decisions. Isn’t this what we want?
dtrain2017 5y ago
If you rely on volunteers, then you are a non-profit. But, if you are selling that work to corporations, then you are no longer a non-profit. However, if you are translating knowledge so everyone can read, then you are back to being a non-profit. It's a classic public-private partnership.
elect_engineer 5y ago
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:CANCER https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:CANCER ]. I'm just saying.
zikohh 5y ago
Would just like to say most of this site's content is quite clickbait-y and surprising content it's as if you're reading a tabloid. Not sure how credible it all is.
kayxspre 5y ago
When I first saw the title (I use HN Digest to send Hot Topics to my mail), I thought this was the same as the story I've read several years ago. I have attached some of them here, from 2012 [1], 2014 [2] and 2015 [3]. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_c... [2] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/ [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
- akolbe 5y ago
  Yes, and they have four times as much money in the bank today as they did in 2015. Go figure! :)
Cypher 5y ago
Wikipedia is the source of all truth -wikipedia
threshold 5y ago
This article is unreadable the advertising is so so offensive.

> So what does the WMF do with all the money? It has used the funds to hire hundreds of additional staff and put money aside for a rainy day. Putting money aside for a rainy day, rather than living paycheck to paycheck, sounds like a smart long-term plan. It’s the model used by universities like Harvard.

fazelesswhite 5y ago

Wow, I saw the banner last year and wouldn't have donated if I had read this article sooner.

xwolfi 5y ago
I'm not American so I'm not familiar with donations in general - I always felt it was better for society to build self-sustainable systems via tax and votes or companies to build self-sustainable products via investments and profits, rather than have some shady in between - useful enough for us to want to pay but useless enough for us not to want to pay for real. It would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I think this needs to die for something more profitable and sustainable to rise in its place, organized by people who make their money input not dependent on charity but a recognized social utility.
- bawolff 5y ago
  That's nice and all, but short of a communist revolution, how do we do that?
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    StackOverflow seems to handle the fine line well, Reddit as well. They both provide volunteer-heavy knowledge sharing while not appealing to charitable emotions that are disingenuous (if wiki is dying, fine: say it, but if it's not then their only way of growing budget is to pretend it is - it's the sign of an issue for me) Communist revolutions are just anger and frustration making heads roll all around for a big reset, but the phoenix rising in the ashes of the revolution surprisingly often has the same face as it had before. I live in China, my friends always tell me "we've always had an emperor in Beijing, this is the same thing with another name, why make such a fuss about it", proving that not only did the revolution change nothing for them, but worst: they don't even see there was some sort of point to it. So a communist revolution will change nothing to Wikipedia's governance. I don't think Wikipedia can be state-sponsored, or even UN-sponsored: it doesn't matter enough. But a corporate entity with a product vision and a clear statement of profit would reduce the tearful aspect of their marketing campaign, appeal to its utility rather than our sobbing hearts and maybe shed a bit (a lot?) of the volunteering to welcome people like me who edit wiki for stuff they need rather than to "offer the world a knowledge sharing platform" in itself ?
    - bawolff 5y ago
      They both rely on advertisements (And reddit gold, which is kind of like a donation). That's generally been very unpalatable to the people who write wikipedia. Even the mere rumour of something like that being considered resulted in a fork of the spanish wikipedia into Enciclopedia Libre back in 2002.
  - corin_ 5y ago
    Why would that require communism or a revolution? The American state already gives tax breaks and/or funding to charities, research organisations, public messaging initiatives, school systems, public services etc... there's a huge range of options that involve tweaking the rules of current systems before even getting anywhere near needing to change the entire political system.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      I mean the parent suggested not relying on charity. School systems are essentially an arm of the government. I just don't see what the options are for something like wikipedia (Or even say something like a critical open source project like openssl) that doesn't involve relying on charity or advertisments, short of a major change to how our society is structured.
      - corin_ 5y ago
        Well for example, and I'm not advocating for these ideas other than pointing out that they'd be much simpler than changing the structure of society: the Government could either buy, or forcefully take control of, Wikipedia, or they could create a competitor with enough funding to take over. They could do it creating a gov department to run it, or they could set it up as an organisation fully owned by the state. They wouldn't even have to go that far, they could just pass a bill that would send however much money from taxpayers to Wikipedia every year, or as a one-off to create a new taxpayer-funded endowment. There's lots of changes to society that I think would be good, but "ability for government to decide to spend taxpayer money on a charity like Wikipedia, or to create their own version in-house" isn't exactly lacking from the current system.
        drdeca 5y ago
        Man, I do not trust any government to run Wikipedia.
        corin_ 5y ago

whym 5y ago

Related threads: Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011 Wikipedia doesn't need your money (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946912

teruakohatu 5y ago

I think why it needs to start selling data services should also be asked. At the very least everyone should have equal access to Wikipedia. Using "Big Tech" as an excuse to charge is not relevant in my humble opinion. https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tech-to-pay-up/ https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec... Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams of edit data to financial organisations.

Clewza313 5y ago
I'm concerned by WMF's cancerous growth, but this particular initiative makes sense to me. Wikipedia already provides free APIs for everybody to use, and they work fine for typical users who want to grab a page or a hundred, but the Googles of the world are essentially scraping the entire site multiple times a day. This imposes a real cost on WMF, and it's a win-win for both sides if companies pay for support and get better service in return.
geenew 5y ago
“ the WMF is launching a for-profit company named Wikimedia, LLC. This will sell API services to big tech companies, making it easier for them to process Wikimedia content, which powers voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as well as Google’s infoboxes.” “ The WMF emphasizes time and again that Wikipedia never tries to sell the public anything.” Those can’t both be true. Selling to google is just indirectly selling to the general public.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  The alternative is search engines and bots hammering on the doors of Wikipedia and costing huge infrastructure dollars. Their Enterprise API AFAICT is a value-add, and does not prevent scraping.
mnouquet 5y ago
> At the very least everyone should have equal access to Wikipedia Google & co are very clearly monetizing (either directly or indirectly) their integration, WMF might as well get something out of it. Though, this discussion might be going the "BSD vs GPL" direction...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ddingus 5y ago

Are all the volunteers good with their efforts starting a for profit entity with arguably superior access? I would not be.

olivermarks 5y ago

The other great mystery is that despite Clay Shirkey's romantic web 2.0 book 'Here Comes Everybody' nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors. It's becoming hard to know who and what Wikipedia actually is https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody

thrdbndndn 5y ago
>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits. Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important. Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.
- olivermarks 5y ago
  @thrdbndndn Encyclopedia Britannica was peer reviewed and written by accredited experts for decades. For all I know spooks are writing Wikipedia's more sensitive articles
furi 5y ago
>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

Wow. $300 million and still the need to beg. I have edited Wikipedia in the past, sometimes it felt like the troll army was too powerful because in a "poll" they quickly Mount an offensive and your words dont mean much it seems. Havent edited in like a year, that includes osm. Maybe they should share their funds with volunteers who are essentially working for the benefit of "managers".... like you would get funding based on number of edits, age of accounts, quality of edits, if any reversals you had, on and on. Would that not convince people to contribute and also keep leeches out because the funding would be manually given out, not automated.

Clewza313 5y ago
If by OSM you mean OpenStreetMaps, it's run by its own foundation and completely unrelated to Wikipedia. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  i didn't indicate that. i am aware of the same
bawolff 5y ago
> that includes osm OpenStreetMap is a separate org and not part of the Wikimedia family

ok_ok 5y ago

Download speeds for the data dumps are abysmal in the smaller country where I live. Machine readability, especially of Wiktionary, seems that it will never be improved.

jonahbenton 5y ago

Ridiculous question and even more ridiculous factoids. The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please. Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in the US and often around the world.

bongoman37 5y ago
I've donated to Wikipedia and contributed content as well but now I've decided not to anymore for the time being. Any kind of controversial article is decided more by the amount of time which side has to push their agenda rather than any kind of objective Neutral Point of View. There is a lot of astroturfing as well.
- jonahbenton 5y ago
  With respect, think about what you are saying. You are not going to contribute with good intentions to a public service because there are people with bad intentions contributing to it...
  - 5560675260 5y ago
    The problem is that there is nothing done about people with bad intentions on organisational level.
    - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      Wikipedia folks are aware of the problem and there have been many changes over the years to better protect neutrality. I agree the situation is still far from perfect but Wikipedia is still one of the bastions of free information out there. They could have commercialized it but it became a non-profit relying on donations from users (as opposed to corporations) for a good reason. What will happen when Wikimedia is gone? There's a reason there's such a relentless smear campaign against it. Instead of turning our backs we have to think of ways we can support Wikipedia and protect it from shills with deep pockets. If you have any ideas on how this can be done more effectively try bringing them up! Anyone can sign up and participate. That's Wikipedia's strength and weakness.

bawolff 5y ago

This seems to be about the endowment - That's not the same as normal donations, and they can't just "use it", they can basically only use the interest of that money, from what i understand. Disclaimer: Used to work for wikimedia, once upon a time, don't anymore.

mnouquet 5y ago
> they can basically only use the interest of that money That's even more of a problem if you do not support such scheme to extort money from the working classes.
dannyw 5y ago
The article mentions both the endowment ($100M) and also WMF's funds on hand ($300M?). So the main point is still valid. Wikipedia's fundraising strongly implies that they need your $3 to keep the site online. WMF has $400M which would be enough to keep the site online for up to 40 years with no further donations. Thus, their fundraising is misleading and deceptive. I bet 9 in 10 donators won't donate if they knew WMF has $400 million in the bank -- isn't it morally wrong if you paint a deceptive picture of your finances?
- bawolff 5y ago
  I think you have those numbers reversed. According to the article (I presume its accurate), the endowment total is $300M [including funds from multiple years], and the fundraising total so far this fiscal year is $142M (I assume that's gross, fundraising has costs). The majority of Wikimedia's money goes to software development, not keeping the lights on. I think there are definitely reasonable criticisms that could be made about WMF's priorities and efficiencies (Not to mention how its situation is conveyed in the fundraising campaign), but I struggle to see a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success. Disclaimer: used to work there, don't anymore.
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago

kristopolous 5y ago

For the same reason Harvard does.

checkerscaptian 5y ago

i think that this was very interesting, i think that if wikipedia had that sort of funding then it could surely hire more editors/moderators to make sure the info is reliable. i also found it quite ironic that the first thing that popped up was 'please subscribe to daily dot'

bawolff 5y ago
They currently don't hire any moderators. According to the article, they got 142 million in donations so far this fiscal year. Assuming they spent that entirely on hiring editors, had no other expenses (including no other fundraising expenses), had no server costs, etc they could hire 4500 people at min wage. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/active-editors/normal|line|2-year|(page_type)~content*non-content|monthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/... there's been 39 thousand editors who have made 5+ edits last month to just english wikipedia [not counting other languages] (Unfortunately I could not find any stats for overall active editors from all languages, nor could I find any stats for "very" active editors). That stat isn't very good for the argument I'm trying to make, but I suspect there's in the neighbourhood of 4500 existing editors/moderators who treat it as effectively a full time job, once you combine all the languages. Thus I doubt this budget would be sufficient to hire the existing editors, let alone hire more.
- saurik 5y ago
  Right: because you shifted the argument to editors from moderators; what they need are not people to edit articles, but instead to do community management that reduces the toxicity of the current de facto bureaucracy that is designed to prevent arguments but instead seems to cause them.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    The parent literally used the phrase "editors/moderators". The current bureaucracy is not designed to prevent arguments, its designed to make sure such arguments are productive. Whether it succedes is debatable. Its certainly not without issue.

guard0g 5y ago

Going the same way as many other non-profits (like colleges and universities), which pursue for-profit incentives while building bloat. After all, what could go wrong with spending $50 million to build out marketing that can increase revenue by $55 million?

zozbot234 5y ago

Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. They have hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia itself, and many related "sister" projects, with perhaps the most clearly impacting being Wikimedia Commons (a huge repository of free-content media with a focus on educational use - including much media in the public domain) and Wikidata (a project that has now emerged as the closest thing to a 'hub' in the still-developing Semantic Web ecosystem). Quite a bit of their funding also enables growth in least-developed countries, where access to high-quality educational content in local languages is going to be especially impactful wrt. broader development goals. People like to focus on the excess growth of management roles within the foundation and call it "cancer", but all large organizations have some possible waste within them. It might just be one of the many costs of doing business and pursuing what are in reality some very ambitious and perhaps worthwhile goals. And building a long-term endowment only looks like the prudent thing to do, since the results of fundraising can be quite volatile and uncertain.

ramraj07 5y ago
Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just about hosting a bunch of articles.
  - neolog 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

This notion that non-profits should be run on fumes by people who are paid less than market is ridiculous.

mnouquet 5y ago
So is the notion that non-profit should pay their execs millions.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Whose getting paid millions? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  A company of the size, stature, and importance of Wikimedia probably should. Currently they pay them what a middle manager would make in FAANG.
busymom0 5y ago
> run on fumes That's not what I got from the article or even the headline. It's talking about why they are using "tearful-sounding messages like: “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”" "really needs you"? Really? That too in India during COVID? With millions in the bank and salaries of everyone over $130k?
benhurmarcel 5y ago
They shouldn't pay less than market. But they shouldn't locate themselves in the most expensive market that exists.

RedComet 5y ago

ITT: The author learns that wealthy multi-millionaire elite squeeze money out of the unsuspecting working class by whatever means necessary.

op03 5y ago

So the gist seems to be when people are willing to donate to you dont raise cash. Instead wait for god knows what situation in this unpredictable world to strike and then start your fund raising. The only reason Fuckerberg or Ellison or Murdoch or Google dont already own Wikipedia is Wikipedia has enough cash to tell them to fuck off. Not to mention dealing with all kinds of orgs, govt beauracrats, politicans all over the globe exerting pressures. In this world if you dont have Financial Independence what path you chart out will never be under your control. This article would have been useful if there were suggestions about how to go about fund raising better.

Asymmetryk 5y ago
Exactly. Then the Wikipedia Foundation should calibrate their appeals accordingly and the problem is solved.
ramraj07 5y ago
If their run rate is a few mill a year and they already have an endowment for hundreds of millions more why do they need to ask for more?
- lostinquebec 5y ago
  By that logic, if the run rate > earnings on endowment... fundraise?
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    With zero sarcasm, yes?

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labster 5y ago

If everyone who reads this donates $3, we can pay off dang so we don’t have to read more stories critical of Wikipedia.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I'd be more interesting in knowing why Wikipedia is cutting off so many "<1%" users like narrow desktop screens, older browsers, no-JS users, mobile users with unsteady connections.

bawolff 5y ago
How are no-js users cut off? At least the desktop site should definitely work fine (I never use the mobile so i don't know). Hell, last i checked, wikipedia even worked if cookies were disabled (and you weren't logged in). I'm also not sure what the unsteady connections thing is about? Wikipedia doesn't modify the TCP stack.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  By "unsteady connections", I meant inconsistent or unreliable connections, where you may not be able to stay online reliably. On mobile, there is a new "feature" where each section is lazy-loaded, so if you do not expand them while you are online, you cannot read them once you're offline. Also, if the browser reloads the page from cache while offline, sections are also inaccessible. The desktop site is inaccessible to mobile because the left column stays visible and floats over or squeezes the actual text.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Fair enough. I'm personally not a fan of the mobile site, even on mobile. https://en.wikipedia.org/?useskin=timeless https://en.wikipedia.org/?useskin=timeless is another option (for that link to work on mobile, you have to first click the use desktop button to have desktop cookies)
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      Thanks, I like the idea of Gemini, but haven't found the time to try any of the clients yet. In my eyes it has a few shortcomings straight out of the gates by requiring TLS and also by being relatively new tech, so there's not much established knowledge base, and the "early problems" are still being solved. It's much less accessible than Web in many different scenarios, such as when I can't install software on my device, when I'm using an older device, etc.

EvanDotPro 5y ago

After reading the article and the comments here so far, I'm legitimately struggling to decide how I should feel about this as a long-time WMF donor. I can understand the upset and deceit people are feeling, but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind, their endowment fund usage is strictly controlled from what I understand, and as a business owner, I also deeply sympathize with the idea of having "rainy day" money but continuing to behave as if you don't. Is there some middle ground here?

abbe98 5y ago
You could donate to a local Wikimedia chapter or a thematic organization, they are doing a lot of great work in various areas and many of them are small enough for one to have an impact. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizat...
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saurik 5y ago
> but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind It is unethical to use the money people are giving to Wikimedia in response to a banner on Wikipedia--the only "initiative" Wikimedia runs that they know exists--which claims Wikipedia is going to fail without more money to fund any of their other "many initiatives". If they want to fund other things, the banner should say "don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but we want to do other things similar to it, and need money from people like you to accomplish those new goals!"... I can't imagine, however, that this honest banner would raise anywhere near as much money.

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andai 5y ago

Required reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

koreanguy 5y ago

wiki profits are all time high. what a impressive business model, the entire planet can be added to Wikipedia and the best part about all this, its user generated content that Wikipedia uses to get millions around the world.

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paxys 5y ago

> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email (https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March/124621.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade ago. Wikimedia's finances are audited and published every year. Here's the latest one from 2019-2020 - https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annual-report/financials/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu.... They had $120M in donations and $9M in other revenue for the year. Expenses were $112M. That isn't even close to the buffer that the article implies. The foundation's total current assets (~$160M) would keep their sites running for <2 years, and maybe a few more with major operational cuts. Why on earth shouldn't they fundraise more?

Clewza313 5y ago
Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  10 years ago would've been 2011 or so. I'd say it's very much in the ballpark wrt. global impact, considering everything that Wikimedia does and the way the projects have grown. Of course, much of it has to be credited to growth in Internet and Web access since then.
  - sharken 5y ago
    I think it's fair to say that server costs and global reach of Wikipedia is up, and factor in some ambitious goals the current expenditure is not too unreasonable. Money is a funny thing, in Denmark about $320 million is spent on Covid testing a month. So from January to July that would be the equivalent of Wikipedia funding for 20 years.

barelyusable 5y ago

The author linked the report: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200049703/202031349349303803/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200... I know it's from 2018 and maybe something changed, but: they took $115M. They paid $90M in costs, including $38M in salaries and <$1.7M to officers. Look at Part IX. You have all expenses listed. If you run any company ever, you know it adds up pretty quickly. Like other benefits to employees are $5M, pension plan is $1M, and payroll tax is $2M. They had $138M in assets, but only $64M invested in public stocks, and they took $2M from it, which is like 0.03% indicating they held some treasury bonds. So in absolute numbers, it seems big, but when you analyze it, it looks normal. Imagine you just hire a techy support staff. Let's assume you only need 50 people, each making $100k to operate a global website in all timezones. That's probably like $140k total costs per employee (healthcare, benefits, payroll, all sorts of taxes). You need 50*140k=$7M/yr. Assume you buy AT&T stock with 6% dividend. You need $120M of assets to get $7M. There is no safety here, and also my calculation doesn't include maybe like 5% increase in costs per year. I often wonder how could I create a fully self-sustainable non-profit: the one, that doesn't require begging for money and wasting time every year. Instead, the one that could operate independently. To make this happen, you pretty much have to invest the money very, very well, and diversify to the point where the yield is low, yet high enough to hire staff etc. (an example of sustainable donation is present in the Thorp's "A man of all markets" wrt. his endowment to UCI math department) For this you must have a pile of money, if you do the math, and it'd make perfect sense for Wikipedia. Unless they shrink, lay people off and optimize, they'll need $2B to be fully self-sufficient and sustainable. Otherwise, the fundraiser will need to bring $100M/yr at least.

vasco 5y ago
A non profit shouldn't be setup forever. It should have a cushion and other than that it should keep providing enough value to society that people keep contributing. Creating an endowment is saying that even if in the future nobody thinks what they do is valuable and stops donating, they'll still be able to keep going. Why?

dools 5y ago

Apple is swimming in money, why do I have to pay for a new iPhone? Google is swimming in money, why can’t I post my ads on YouTube for free? My employees have plenty of money saved up, why won’t they work for free?

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IshKebab 5y ago

I think this is a really valid point. If you look at their list of staff (salaries are their main expense) there are clearly a lot of people that aren't necessary to run Wikipedia. But I think it's weird to complain about the endowment. That's exactly what they should be doing. If I ran Wikipedia I would have kept it to a core team of engineers - they could have built up a $1bn endowment by now if they had done that, and then they could run it indefinitely without asking for donations again.

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

Outrage where there is no reason for it. Wikipedia is using the University Endowment model to fund its work. They are creating a permanent source of funds that will finance its work for the long run(forever?) and are using special fund raising for special projects. There is nothing wrong with that. It's a form of non-profit funding that will ensure it continues to function. Management should be congratulated for following a non-profit model that will keep it going for many years and not have to deal with the never ending danger of not getting enough money for the following year's budget. A hand to mouth existence is not the best way to run an organization. Yes, there's danger of money getting wasted but all non-profits get a high level of scrutiny from people looking for waste and eventually the waste goes away. There's no such thing as a large organization where there is no waste. Even very lean for profit organizations have to deal with the problem. The best you can do is to keep an eye out for cases where there is waste and fix it as soon as possible. Bottom line, if you don't like it then don't give. Period!

dkarras 5y ago
>Wikipedia is using the University Endowment model to fund its work. They are creating a permanent source of funds that will finance its work for the long run(forever?) and are using special fund raising for special projects. I think people wouldn't feel off about this if the fundraisers presented themselves as such. When you see them asking for donations, it is typically worded in a way it says "no one donates! if you don't we are on the brink of going bankrupt and shutting down the site! stop, don't scroll away!" and I think if they are sitting on a pile of cash (however noble their intentions are) some people might feel off about how they are being manipulated. Because that is not what they are asking the money for, at this moment. It is disingenuous to make it seem like they are asking for donations for covering the immediate day to day operations. Yes, it probably allows them to gather more donations that way but some people are not comfortable with being a target of manipulative ads. Immediate gains vs. poisoning the well situation here.
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tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

leipert 5y ago

Reading through the comments I think one point wasn’t really touched on. I think everyone has a limited amount of funds available for charity. Certain non-profits are more well funded than others _and_ there are more efficient charities around. One should look at the labels with what they are buying, and articles like these (maybe it is a little disingenuous) might help people to steer their funds where they think they can do more. If you are upset by the way WMF asks for donations, here might be some alternatives: - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ - https://eff.org/ https://eff.org/ Or if you are a fellow German(-Speaker): - https://www.fiff.de/ https://www.fiff.de/ - https://fragdenstaat.de/ https://fragdenstaat.de/ - https://digitalcourage.de/ https://digitalcourage.de/

markvdb 5y ago

Who is entitled to a say on Wikimedia's business organisation? Not me. The Wikimedia foundation can organise itself as it sees fit. If anything, they've proven to be rather good at it, with lots and lots of value added to the commons, and a healthy financial state of affairs.

mola 5y ago

I want Wikipedia to be "swimming in money" preferably from personal small donations so they won't be pressured to monetize and sacrifice integrity.

yholio 5y ago

> The WMF also has high-flying, global plans to “become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge” by 2030. It says it wants to create “knowledge equity”—a world where people everywhere will have as much access to information in their own language as a first-world citizen—and that this will require continuous budget increases. Godspeed to them in this endeavor. I think this is not the time to become absolute purists in the choice of tech overlords. The tech world is being controlled by less than a handful of trillion-dollar monopolists that crush anything that stands in their way. A few hundred million in this war is a drop in the ocean. Yes, power corrupts, and money is power. Yes, left to their own devices, people in NGOs will maximize revenues and expand their employee empires - just like those in the for-profit sector. What matters is the strategic goals and their execution by the leadership, and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - to indicate that WMF went astray from its stated mission. I cannot but feel this is another pissing contest like the open source world experienced, where everybody and their brother started their own distributions/forks to virtue signal their true commitment to the open source goals. This led to a massive fragmentation of the scene, the few companies that tried to use the model, like Redhat and Ubuntu, were exposed as deviationists from the party line; meanwhile big tech ate the world and put every man, woman and child on the planet in invisible jails.

brigandish 5y ago

I would rather give my money to Britannica, which is of a much higher standard and doesn't seem to be infected by tribalism.

aseerdbnarng 5y ago

I dont mind donating to WMF to ensure they have an endowment large enough they never need to cave to market pressures. But I do however have a major problem with them hiring teams of managers that earn $400k per annum. That is taking the piss

elenaturner 5y ago

Because they need money to keep running it free!

speedgoose 5y ago

I never understood why the Wikimedia foundation needs so much money. I never donated because of that.

0wis 5y ago

I don’t understand the hate here. Wikipedia clearly states that the point of donations is to create an endowment. They need to get enough money for their principal to generate enough money to ensure the project can live even in case of black swan events. [1] They are still a long way from being independent from donors given their growth in projects, paid contributors (employees) and therefore expenses. If you don’t agree with their governance or even specific ways they spend their money, stop donating, it is not like they are forcing you. You can even write an article an share it but don’t try to take shortcut like I feel it is done here. Money is a necessary ressource to survive, and if an entity have a lot of capital or spend plenty on projects or useful human ressources doesn’t imply evilness. [1] : https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/endowment.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/endowment.asp

okdjnfweonfe 5y ago
They would have an overfunded endowment if they didn't match their spending to their fundraising
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> Wikipedia clearly states Where? This thread is the first time I remember reading about this, and I've seen a lot of Wikipedia beg-nags. They moved from outrageously deceptive messages that strongly implied that the lights would go out without my donation and that the donations were used to keep Wikipedia alive "for another year" [1], to slightly more vague "keep Wikipedia online and growing" [2] banners. Never did I see those banners mention an endowment. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/2012v2013factsbanners.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/2012v201... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Mob-lg-start-of-FY1718.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Mob-lg-s...

wolfretcrap 5y ago

My question is why most companies which focus heavily on research and future are not established as non profit entities? It seems many lifestyle startups can benefit if they become non profit entities?

ideamotor 5y ago

Oh fuck off, Wikipedia is one of the very few ethical resources promoting factual information on our planet at this point. Seriously, fuck this “news report.”

Jyaif 5y ago
I personally don't find 400k salaries in a non-profit to be ethical.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  You mean what a middle manager earns in a similar type of tech company? Wikipedia is already paying well below market.

dalbasal 5y ago

I daresay Facebook could manage on <$1bn... Is Twitter's current product so much more complicated than it was circa 2012, that it needs 100X as many employees, resources and such? If Wikipedia had been founded later, it probably would have been a startup. A unicorn, considering how popular it is. It would be burning through far more resources. Comparing it to any commercial site of comparable size, it is orders of magnitude more efficient. Meanwhile, it makes its money by asking. It doesn't snoop, sell your data, or participate in creepy ad-tech. So... when a person like me, who gets tremendous value and enjoyment from wikipedia is asked to kick in, we do. I do it gladly. They have, in my estimation, every right to ask me. The donation banners that seem to upset people are far less annoying than any commercial site's cookie/privacy popups. Tangentially, think of all the truth wars of the last few years. Notice that wikipedia, even though it deals directly with the hard part of this problem, has fared much better than most other websites/organisations. This is not a coincidence. Can wikipedia operate on $10m? Maybe, plausibly. Why should they have to? Wikipedia is a shining beacon, in many ways, including resource efficiency. They successfully bridged the gap between OSS, and non distributed organisational elements... allowing them to own servers and such. Few have.

tomcooks 5y ago

This article smell like something, which can be identified by using the "cui bono?" magic words. I just donated more money to Wikipedia just because.

uselesstech 5y ago

So far this doesn’t seem egregious but there are examples of non-profits cough Red Cross cough where their operational costs outweigh the good that they are able to provide. Definitely something to continue to watch to see if Wikipedia continues to serve the public good.

kaba0 5y ago
What do you mean outweigh? Based on what metrics?
- uselesstech 5y ago
  I think the metric would be percentage of donations spent on the cause vs operations.
  - nraynaud 5y ago
    literally nobody else can enter a war zone and provide health care and get mail to the war prisoners, I don't know the monetary value of that, but it must be quite high.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Why does Wikipedia not do more where it would matter? Get rid of all the jargon and hostile environment to get the world engaged in exchanging knowledge.

andruby 5y ago

I love Wikipedia and gladly donate every year. I would say that Wikipedia is tremendously valuable to the human population. I find it to be money very well spent, even at $120M per year. I'd argue that the majority (90% ?) of tax money and other donations are spent on much less valuable endeavours. Seriously, that's 2 dollar cents per year per human.

ramshorst 5y ago

"Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, Wikipedia's community newspaper." Source: https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/ https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/

ramshorst 5y ago

Reading this made things more clear for me: "Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, Wikipedia's community newspaper." Source: https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/ https://www.dailydot.com/author/andreas-kolbe/

chalst 5y ago

> It’s noteworthy that money donated to the endowment is not included in the WMF’s reported net assets That'd be because the WMF doesn't own the endowment. https://wikimediaendowment.org/wmf-endowment-hero1/ https://wikimediaendowment.org/wmf-endowment-hero1/

qwerty456127 5y ago

And still deletes insignificant information as if storing it was an unbearably heavy burden.

stkdump 5y ago

I am happy that the donation model is working out for them, and I would like to see it applied in more areas, at least if we can't secure government funding. Most prominently for mozilla, but also other important projects which currently rely on ads in a roundabout way or plainly neglected due to a lack of funding.

jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago

I find it curious none of the comments touch on the subject of wikipedia's edit wars, propaganda and dubious decisions related to any information that is not scientific consensus. It is not the free information space assumed. There is lots of politics and misinformation going on. Big funding comes from sources creating direct conflicts of interest.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

This is one of the most important project for humanity. Of course they want to secure it.

FranchuFranchu 5y ago

I'm from Argentina, a few days ago I was seeing these intrusive donation banners on top of each page. Now they're not there, maybe it's because of 20 years of Wikipedia?

etempleton 5y ago

Non-profits are all prioritizing growing their endowments to ensure their future capital and not rely on one time donations. I don’t have a problem with this. I do think as organizations grow they become increasingly inefficient and competing priorities are introduced. It must be carefully managed, but is difficult.

jmull 5y ago

This rather dumb hit piece doesn’t impress me. The main questions for the foundation are: is its mission worthy, and is it spending money well in service to that mission? This piece barely considers this, and instead just presumes there’s something wrong with Wikipedia successfully growing. There are so many poor points in the article… let’s see: * the $10M/year number was a base number for 2013. Running Wikipedia at that level assumes nothing costs more and services will revert to 2013 levels. If that’s what you think they would do, you need to explain why that is a good idea or even possible. * the fact that fundraising from end-users is working is a good thing, not a bad thing. If end-users aren’t paying the bills then someone else will be - in which case you have to balance their needs against the users’ - or no one will be and Wikipedia will stop existing. * implying WMF financial reporting is “disguising” the amount of money and characterizing it as “funneling” money is misleading and unfair. It’s all transparently there, in straightforward form. * Non-profits need to raise funds so they need staff to do so. Large organizations need a CEO and some managers. It’s OK that they pay people normal amounts to do these jobs. * The idea that it’s offensive or wrong to ask end-users for donations is bizarre. Who else do you think should be paying for Wikipedia? The only legit point I see (buried among the vacuous ones) is that Wikipedia should stay far away from any for-profit business. Yes, they are leaving a clear revenue stream on the table, but I think it will make their primary mission harder. Content flows freely into Wikipedia because it is given freely to everyone else. Once you start charging for the information in some forms, that all begins to change.

gego 5y ago

Fork it on the internet archive :)

bongoman37 5y ago

Isn't the answer in the question? It is begging people to donate which is why it is swimming in money.

hamilyon2 5y ago

Like, wharever it takes to keep ads off the site.

wombat-man 5y ago

I use Wikipedia literally every day and I’m happy to donate some money annually just to show appreciation.

NovemberWhiskey 5y ago

Basically half of the Wikimedia Foundations expenses ($55M out of $110M) are spent on staff salaries and wages. I was surprised to discover the staff is over 350 people, including over 250 employees (the rest are contractors). You can get some idea of the scope looking at this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_staff_and_contractors https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_staff_a...

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

This is the third time I see this on the front page in a year and it suggests there is something rotten with the culture on HN. Wikipedia has given more to the world than facebook or twitter or most webshits pistaking here (including me) ever could. It could have become another ad funded monstrosity, but they have chose to create a charity. To attack them with such demonstrably poor grasp of their finances, projects and public outreach shows a degree of arrogance and hypocracy that is trully something to behold.

andrepd 5y ago

I still don't get why wikipedia doesn't do a very simple thing with some of its funds: pay editors full-time. I realise the potential for conflicts of interest, but simply either (i) disburse grants to already prolific editors, to support their efforts, or (ii) pay recognized experts to improve articles which are lacking (e.g. pay historians, philosophers, biologists, etc).

collyw 5y ago

Wikipedia has gone from being a decent resource to a horrendous politically biased site in the last few years. Like Reddit its only worth using for subjects that don't have a political angle. The far left have ruined something that was good.

eezing 5y ago

Sounds like they’re making good financial decisions. Isn’t this what we want?

dtrain2017 5y ago

If you rely on volunteers, then you are a non-profit. But, if you are selling that work to corporations, then you are no longer a non-profit. However, if you are translating knowledge so everyone can read, then you are back to being a non-profit. It's a classic public-private partnership.

elect_engineer 5y ago

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:CANCER https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:CANCER ]. I'm just saying.

zikohh 5y ago

Would just like to say most of this site's content is quite clickbait-y and surprising content it's as if you're reading a tabloid. Not sure how credible it all is.

kayxspre 5y ago

When I first saw the title (I use HN Digest to send Hot Topics to my mail), I thought this was the same as the story I've read several years ago. I have attached some of them here, from 2012 [1], 2014 [2] and 2015 [3]. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_c... [2] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/ [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

akolbe 5y ago
Yes, and they have four times as much money in the bank today as they did in 2015. Go figure! :)

Cypher 5y ago

Wikipedia is the source of all truth -wikipedia

threshold 5y ago

This article is unreadable the advertising is so so offensive.