26 ms·

Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations?

157 points by akolbe 5y ago

richij 5y ago
Please support the original investigative journalism, rather than TNW's tawdry rehash: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Wikipedians who have made hundreds of thousands of edits may well feel someone else is enjoying the fruit of their labor. JFC. It's literally in the license and everyone who edits Wikipedia should know this. I did when I was active on Wikipedia and I was 14 at the time.
  - akolbe 5y ago
    Yeah, that's not how human psychology works. You didn't have managers earning $400,000K+ at the Wikimedia Foundation then. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
    - pc86 5y ago
      So pay them less, fine whatever. But let's not pretend anybody was duped about anything here. Not one single person has ever been forced to make a Wikipedia edit. That "labor" was given freely under the term of the license, it's at best incredibly disingenuous and naive to pretend you're owed anything for it.
      - akolbe 5y ago
        Who said anyone got duped?
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      If I make edits to Wikipedia, it's because I want to share them with the world. I couldn't care less for the managers (from a purely technical perspective), as long as they do a good job of keeping Wikipedia running.
    - Debug_Overload 5y ago
      This argument would work better if the editors were paid in the first place, and then they see an increase in the executives' salaries and get jelous or feel it's unfair. Clearly not the case, since they already knew it's all volunteer work.
      - Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
        The editors argument would work better if they would say: "we donated (time, work, knowledge) and are not happy with how foundation spends its resources (money)". The whole "pay gap" thing is muddying the water. One comes closer to the truth when abstracting donations and resources. Edit: Looking at the video with the monkeys two posts up: there could still be a point to it, if we look at the total earnings and total work of a person, instead of just looking at wikipedia: an editor who earns 100k with their day job and donates work to wikipedia can still feel it is unfair when wikipedia management earns four times as much.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > It's literally in the license and everyone who edits Wikipedia should know this So I'm betting that you know exactly the license for every single cookie and website you've ever visited then.
    - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
      If you don't read the contract you sign you're still bound by it.
    - afandian 5y ago
      This is more analagous to knowing about the concept of credit when taking out a credit card.
  - atonse 5y ago
    Yes, someone else, (including themselves and billions of us) are enjoying the fruit of their labor. So we are eternally thankful for that. The fact that someone makes 400k at Wikipedia doesn't take away from its impact on the world. Also as I read this article, I get the sense that the person writing it has no clue what an endowment is, and that's driving a lot of the misguided indignation in this article. If you have a $300 million endowment, it doesn't mean you have $300 million to spend. It's the interest/investment gains from that money that fuel the organization. So the interest/investments from $100 mil vs $300 mil doesn't equal that amount. It's much less. The whole point is that the $300 mil will remain "forever." I don't know what the solution is, to be honest. I worry more about articles I read about how very few people actually have an outsized amount of contributions, and who is checking their biases?
    - Clockface12 5y ago
      The endowment is $100 million the other $200 million is foundation assets – including (these are last years June 2020 figures) $71 million cash $95 million short term investments https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_FY2019-2020_Audit_Report.pdf&page=4 https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...
  - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
    That makes me wonder if Wikimedia foundation decides to share their funds with the editors say based on a formula(depending upon the quantity & quality of edits) to send payments to their LiberaPay; How would Wikipedia be perceived at large? I presume there will be a large influx of contributors due to monetary gain, Then again moderation wouldn't be much difficult as there's money in it for that too. Wouldn't be much different for vested interests as they put everything under their arsenal even now.
- evrydayhustling 5y ago
  Flagging for this. It's in the guidelines to target the original source, and TNW doesn't add anything here. PS I don't think it's tawdry for TNW to post this. They are an aggregator, and they actively direct readers to the original. But HN should skip the intermediary.
- pbronez 5y ago
  Originality discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887
thedream 5y ago
Wikipedia, the free memory hole that anyone can pay a team of PR bots to manipulate.
bob332 5y ago
Wikipedia is garbage. No one should ever give them a penny
akolbe 5y ago
The fundraising banners have started again, asking people “to defend Wikipedia’s independence”. This may sound like the Wikimedia Foundation is struggling to keep Wikipedia up and running, but there is no financial emergency – on the contrary. As always, the Foundation is richer than the year before. But it wants to grow, and grow, and grow ... something a Wikipedia volunteer once described as an “infinite loop of ‘we should do more things, because we can raise money’ – ‘we need more money, because we want to do more things’. There have always been discussions in Wikipedia’s volunteer community about this – about how much money to raise, and about the ethics of making readers believe there is an acute financial emergency: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-January/071150.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-Janu... https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-January/071172.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-Janu... Recently, a Wikimedia manager in the “Advancement” (= Fundraising) department mentioned that there would be “nothing intrinsically outrageous” about “an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion dollars”: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/MBLZ5R6SGOWU53CGTEKYOCHVOZ7YY74B/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... The Wikimedia Foundation is arguably well on its way, with revenue and assets regularly increasing by 1,000 percent or so – and more sometimes – over the course of a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti... Here are some of the latest figures: In the 2020/21 financial year, the Wikimedia Foundation exceeded its own original revenue goal for the year by about $47 million dollars, taking over $154 million rather than the $108 million planned at the start of the year: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_fourth_quarter_2020-2021_tuning_session_-_Advancement.pdf&page=12 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimed... The precise figure reported is "$154,763,121 USD from over 7.7 million donors". https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#Key_Stats https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#K... Moreover, the Wikimedia Endowment (which is completely separate from the Foundation, and not included in the Foundation's audited accounts or Form 990 reporting) reached the $100 million mark in June of this year, five years earlier than planned: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#W... In the current July 2021 – June 2022 financial year, the Wikimedia Foundation aims to take $42 million more than the $108 million goal it set itself at the beginning of the previous financial year: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2021-2022#Budget https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-... That is a planned increase of nearly 40%. For an historic overview of Wikimedia revenue, expenses and net assets see this graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... As always, people should know that the Foundation’s paid staff does not write or curate any of the content found on Wikipedia – this is all done by unpaid volunteers. Wikimedia’s medium-term strategy (never spelled out on the fundraising banners) is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strategic_direction:_Service_and_Equity https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/... There’s actually no mention of Wikipedia in that.
jrootabega 5y ago
Honest, naive, somewhat rhetorical question: has any organization ever said "We are good, we can stop growing now.", followed through on it, and then not been thoroughly outcompeted or obsoleted?
- akolbe 5y ago
  There are other ways of asking. You can enthuse people with your plans for the future, rather than creating a completely spurious impression that your financial independence is under threat.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Small colleges and small businesses sprint to mind as examples. You just never hear about them because they’re quietly doing what they do. It’s more rare in publicly traded companies - though it can happen. Often it changes after a founder dies.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Of course, this is extremely frequent and easiest to see with small businesses (which make up a good proportion of all productive organizations) that are often limited by the time the owner puts into them, and yet can remain in operation for many many years. Restaurants, your plumber, a family-famer, a small hotel, a tourist charter / operator, etc. Considering the main productive work of developing wikipedia is done by volunteers, does funding need to grow vastly in order to keep growing that? And if the goal is to create accessible and open knowledge for all and a superior competitor came along that was able to thoroughly outcompete and obsolete wikipedia unless vast amounts of money kept coming in, it doesn't seem like the goal would necessarily be lost. Might even be achieved better and cheaper.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > has any organization ever said "We are good, we can stop growing now.", followed through on it, and then not been thoroughly outcompeted or obsoleted? The question should be rather asked like that: "Has any charity/NGO ever pretended that they would not be able to run another year without donations RIGHT NOW from everyone visiting their site, while they are fully loaded and not being transparent about it?"
faebi 5y ago
I decided to go for as much value they give me. I use it seldom but with pleasure. Therefore I used free national Swiss bank transactions to send them 1$/1CHF per Month.
- akolbe 5y ago
  There's the rub. Who's "they"? The unpaid volunteers who write and curate the articles, or the Wikimedia Foundation who takes the money? People by and large have very little idea of what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing with the money. The WMF is planning to take at least $150M this year ... According to https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-ties-to-big-tech https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-t... "The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget." The spending is not presented very transparently to the ordinary donor. You have to dig, and even then the info is often phrased in ways that make it difficult to understand what value the money actually brings. The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today.
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    On the other hand, worst case they're throwing 1CHF a month away. There's so many other purchases one does where the way the producer's organised is under hardly any scrutiny, yet when it's a non-profit, all of a sudden we have to closely inspect every cent.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today. Exactly. What, are they all working sales and marketing? What marketing and sales does wikipedia need to do? The engineering headcount at companies utterly baffles me sometimes. Mozilla laid off ~350 developers in the last year or two. That's probably well under half their total dev staff. What are all these developers doing? Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird, so they had hundreds of people working full time Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, there's some platform-specific stuff so you've got iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows specific people...but the number still seems wildly high. How about Twitter? What are all the engineers doing at twitter? We're talking about a company whose product hasn't significantly changed in a decade. Instagram was ~40 people when they got bought up. What do you suppose the engineering headcount is now? I recently read that Wayfair has over 2,000 programmers. Two. Thousand. Programmers. What the fluff are they doing? Maintaining an online furniture store, or developing sentient furniture?
DeathArrow 5y ago
I wouldn't donate to Wikipedia since it began to take political stances. It's hard to find articles written from a neutral point of view on English version on Wikipedia.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  The very notion of NPOV is problematic. It reminds me of Rawls' theory of justice: seemingly innocent and sensible under a naive, provincial reading by someone raised in a sheltered Western liberal bubble, but question begging under closer inspection.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > NPOV is problematic This. If you have a point of view, then by definition you are not neutral. I know socialists who favour The Telegraph (right-wing) over The Guardian (left wing, supposedly) because The Telegraph is more open about its biases. I am ailways suspicious of news sources that profess to be neutral. It isn't possible. Wear your affiliation on your sleeve, and then speak freely.
- naz 5y ago
  Just curious, can you give an example?
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Their smearing of independent anti-war media is consistent. MPN, The Greyzone, and others have been disallowed as sources for very flimsy reasons: [0]. They backed up one editor at the highest levels, after people wised up that he edited Wikipedia an average of 30 times per day, every day, over 14 years; almost entirely making edits against left wing and anti-war causes: [1] They've also literally destroyed someone's life, lied about it, and then patted themselves on the back for fixing the problem nearly a year too late: [2] With regard to Irish national politics, I can attest that they leave out serious scandal information regarding the top two parties politicians, while leaving out important good stuff and including all sorts of bs about independent and left wing politicians; from what I've seen they do the same everywhere. [0] - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor... [1] - https://www.mintpressnews.com/phillip-cross-the-mystery-wikipedia-editor-targeting-anti-war-sites/250824/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/phillip-cross-the-mystery-wiki... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-10-31/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
albertopv 5y ago
I stopped donating after what happened with croatian wikipedia, totally controlled by right wing political admins
- mandmandam 5y ago
  They're extremely biased in Ireland too. Our neoliberal politicians have massive confirmed scandals reduced to 1 line vaguenesses, while their tiniest plaudits merit paragraphs. And vice versa for anyone independent, left wing, anti-war, anti-corruption etc.
  - sharikous 5y ago
    Given that you can find allegations of bias going both ways just in this thread, by reading the comments I became convinced Wikipedia is in fact more neutral than I thought. And to you I say Wikipedia is open source, you can edit in stuff yourself. Sure there is some inertia and moderation and some users will engage in edit wars but as long as you add information (e.g. the scandals you mention) there is usually a low resistance to do so. Editing or removing stuff requires more justification but it is feasible too, as long as you have an encyclopedic reason to do so.
- Kbelicius 5y ago
  IIRC those issues were resolved with the involvement of other admin teams. Don't think there are any admins on Croatian wikipeda that were there a year ago, some were removed by the global team (or whatever it is called) and those that remained were removed by the newly voted admins.
  - akolbe 5y ago
    There was a BBC report just a few days ago pointing out climate change denial and related conspiracy theories in Croatian Wikipedia (and other language versions): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128 What is true is that the Wikimedia Foundation finally, after 10 years, grasped the nettle and had someone take a look at the Croatian Wikipedia earlier this year: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinformation_Assessment-2021 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform... Some Croatian Wikipedia admins had their privileges removed, but that in itself doesn't change any of the content. Whether and when the Croatian Wikipedia will become mainstream remains to be seen.
matkoniecz 5y ago
The problem is not cash reserve, the problem is that it is utterly unclear where money is being spend. > Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations? Given lack of transparency my cynical guess is: to fund fundraising department.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Several million dollars disappeared at one point ... only to resurface months later in a Tides Advocacy fund for spending on worthy causes _outside_ the Wikimedia movement. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund
- aezell 5y ago
  There's an entire site dedicated to their financials including entire audited financial reports. [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/]
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    And it is missing any actual info where money was actually spend. "Salaries and wages" without stating which project were funded is useless. Who got paid? Programmers? Board? Fundraising team?
quiffledwerg 5y ago
Because money gets spent? This post should be flagged cause it’s just trolling. Why does any organization continue to need money? It’s a very strange question to ask … isn’t the ongoing need for money self evident even if there’s money in the bank? Serious question: what’s the alternative, stop raising money? Till when? Until they’re desperate? If it makes you mad that Wikipedia has and asks for money, let me tell you about the church….
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  HN guidelines say "don't tell people to read the article", but... did you read the article? Or its source as mentioned by richij? https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
devoutsalsa 5y ago
Even if I were loaded, if people wanted to give me money, I'd make it easier for them to do that :)
RedNifre 5y ago
I won't donate until the deletionists get kicked out of the German language Wikipedia. Most of the time it's not a problem, since not finding the article there trains you to go to the English version first, but if you look up specific German topics that never had an article on the English Wikipedia in the first place, finding the German article deleted is infuriating.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  What is the reason they are deleted? Because controversial? Or something else?
  - RedNifre 5y ago
    The ones I would like to read are usually deleted because they are "not relevant".
- hh3k0 5y ago
  Yeah, I've been preferring the English Wikipedia for years. I usually check en.wikipedia.org first unless it's about something German or something particularly relevant for Germans and Germany. I don't have numbers at hand but it all too often feels as if the German article is just a few months outdated translation of its English equivalent. But perhaps the situation has already changed?
- bombcar 5y ago
  In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Especially when you find that the English one is about ten lines and the foreign language one was hundreds - but now gone. Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Call it "knowledge debt", similar to the concept of "code debt". Every piece of knowledge also has to be maintained (e.g. in the case of a natural person, if they are still alive), and that maintenance costs effort.
busymom0 5y ago
I think this Wikipedia donations thing gets posted every few months on HN. I think, I myself might have shared the same thing earlier this year. One interesting thing I noticed when I last shared it was that their server costs had somehow disproportionately grown as compared to the number of pages served compared to a decade ago.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > One interesting thing I noticed when I last shared it was that their server costs had somehow disproportionately grown as compared to the number of pages served compared to a decade ago. There's probably much more video, photo and audio content nowadays than a decade ago. Not to mention a decade of historical revisions on each page.
  - aezell 5y ago
    Exactly. Number of pages is almost meaningless. The system stores a diff of every edit, forever. That includes diffs between binary objects like images and videos. Increasingly, what's being stored is metadata about the content within those pages. Not to mention projects like Wikidata [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page] which is storing "structured knowledge" about literally everything.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Luc 5y ago
Archive.org is looking for donations: https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate (2-to-1 matched at the moment). I often find books and articles there that I can't find anywhere else. Somewhat surprisingly their content often doesn't show up in Google searches.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Hell yeah, I'd rather donate to archive.org ten folds. I did donate to wikipedia, but the banner design was so intrusive it made me stop...
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I went ahead and made a donation. I had been using the Internet Archive a few weeks ago to update metadata on my MP3 library. It's such a deep and rich source of information.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
This question is loaded. It still should turn a profit so other than growth and or interviewing it also allows it to operate as long as it’s burn rate does not exceed its cash on hand. Let’s say tomorrow the government required websites like Wikipedia to implement an content policy to limit disinformation and they operated with no profits. Then there would be a crazy donation drive while they are going like mad to implement the policy for compliance.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Have a look at this graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Note that this does not include the $100+ million Wikimedia Endowment.
beh9540 5y ago
I interviewed with Wikipedia a year or so ago, and right from the start the recruiter said “since we’re a donation based organization, we have to pay below market” and it was definitely below market. I politely turned them down, because I couldn’t take the pay cut. So they’re asking their employees to donate as well, when they don’t need to.
- aezell 5y ago
  If you got paid market rate, people would be on here complaining about your compensation.
throwmefar32 5y ago
Whatever wikipedia is doing with the money, it's working. For me, it's the most valuable site on the internet. I think it's a great example that you can provide quality content and services and not have to be "ad supported". Open source too. Win, Win, Win.
KronisLV 5y ago
Is it fair to call out Wikipedia for something like this and educate people for how their donations might get used? Most certainly! But will i still be likely to throw a small amount of money Wikipedia's way, given how much utility i've gotten out of it for free otherwise? Probably. Why? Because there isn't anything better out there, similarly to how we're stuck tolerating Mozilla not being excellent recently, about which i wrote in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395206 (with which i'd like to draw parallels) That said, having a local and searchable copy of all of the English Wikipedia can be pretty nice as well. For example, the data is already accessible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En... And then there are local browsers, for example XOWA: http://xowa.org/ http://xowa.org/ or Kiwix: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page Now, the UI could probably use a few improvements, but it's overall not too hard to get up and running, here's an example guide: https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/ https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-f... The space requirements also shouldn't be too much for a modern HDD to handle either, so it's entirely feasible. That way you can benefit from Wikipedia's data, without having to rely on consuming their other content, much like you can use Firefox without opting in to their other initiatives. That said, i still occasionally throw a little bit of money their way.
slightwinder 5y ago
Obviously, because they can. As long as people are giving them money, they will take the money and ask for more money. The business flows, so it continues. The question is whether they invest the money according to their mission, or waste it in corruption. And in that regard one should remember that Wikipedia is not just Wikipedia anymore, it's wikimedia for a long time now, which aims for much more than just maintaining a collection of text. Though, whether this is good or bad, and whether they use the money according to their money, I don't know. It seems more information should be spreaded about this.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Well, there is this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2021-2022 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-... I don't think many donors have ever looked at that. Nor do I think many donors who do can make too much sense of phrases like "The growth in Thriving Movement expenses reflects a large increase in grants to the movement along with additional investments in our Thriving Movement focus areas." Several people got paid for coming up with that sentence, and many others like it ... just saying.
rp1 5y ago
Why is Wikipedia being loaded a bad thing? Should they toil in near-poverty? It’s important to stockpile when times are good to survive when times are bad.
- Veen 5y ago
  But the people who toil are not paid; they are volunteers.
- akolbe 5y ago
  It's just the sheer amount of stockpiling while claiming to be under threat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Wikipedia plays a central role in today's information flows. Wouldn't you want the foundation that stewards such a project to be committed to honesty and transparency?
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago
    It's not the stockpiling - it's the raising ever-bigger piles and then throwing it at people/ventures/pet causes that have nothing to do with running Wikipedia _without_ even building up a sufficient reserve for rainy days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
- rst 5y ago
  Wikipedia being loaded is not a bad thing. But a lot of other worthy orgs aren't, and many donors will prefer to send their limited funds to those. Which makes it problematic for the donors if Wikipedia is being coy about already having all the money it needs.
- garbagetime 5y ago
  I think the issue is the manipulative notices. They were A/B tested into perfection and it's obvious the current ones won out because they mislead the reader into believing that Wikipedia needs his help urgently.
garbagetime 5y ago
It can ask for donations if it wants. It just shouldn't try to emotionally manipulate its readers into giving them money. At that point, just use regular advertisements.
aezell 5y ago
One of the issues here is this funding goes toward some of the more hidden work that folks using and even contributing to Wikipedia don't see. Let's take two examples: 1) Automatically identifying, reporting, and perhaps removing spam, hate speech, advertising, conflict of interest, etc. content. That's done in part by a system called ORES which was designed, built, and is managed by folks working for Wikimedia. Could volunteers have built such a system? Of course. Did they? No. 2) Identifying, blocking, and reporting child pornography. Like any site on the Internet that allows users to upload images, thousands of images of child pornography are uploaded to Wikipedia (and its sibling projects) on a regular basis. There are tools designed to catch most of these. However, humans still have to moderate a lot of this content. Would you volunteer to do that work all day long? I wouldn't. And that's why someone needs to be paid to do it. So, while there is likely bloat in the organization (as in any group of humans endeavoring toward a shared goal), there is a lot of work done that volunteers wouldn't or couldn't or simply shouldn't do.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Wikipedia was a top-10 site in 2007, when the WMF had 11 employees. Child porn got deleted. I'm all in favour of someone being paid for such work, and the WMF taking on child protection responsibilities (after many years of leaving them to volunteers) but it doesn't explain a headcount of 550 when throughout most of Wikipedia's existence the work got done by a fraction of that. ORES was built with substantial volunteer input. ClueBot, an even more important vandal-fighting feature, was created by volunteers. https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kills-trolls-how-wikipedia-robots-snuff-out-vandalism https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kill... But in a way that's immaterial. Nothing wrong with having money and expanding. They just shouldn't tell people money is needed to defend Wikipedia's independence when by any measure they are richer and more secure than ever before. If you want more money, lay out your plans. Enthuse people for the additional things you want to do with the extra funds. Don't pretend you need five or ten times more money to do the same thing you've been doing all along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
syspec 5y ago
I think the OP of article is achieving the inverse of the effect they intended. Instead of posting and allowing the discussion to flow naturally, they are angrily rebutting every point people in favor of donating make with the same argument.
flerchin 5y ago
Article reads like a hit-job. It's a relatively small amount of money. The Facebook outage cost more than the entire Wikipedia endowment.
PBnFlash 5y ago
Boxes like "Other Netflix Shows" at the end of every page for a Netflix show on is an ad imo.
bacchusracine 5y ago
[Deleted]
Cosmin_C 5y ago
The goal was never to establish a human kind repository of knowledge, but to rule the world. Somebody read Asimov's Foundation series, much better than the current TV show creators anyway :-)

157 points by akolbe 5y ago

Please support the original investigative journalism, rather than TNW's tawdry rehash: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

mschuster91 5y ago
> Wikipedians who have made hundreds of thousands of edits may well feel someone else is enjoying the fruit of their labor. JFC. It's literally in the license and everyone who edits Wikipedia should know this. I did when I was active on Wikipedia and I was 14 at the time.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Yeah, that's not how human psychology works. You didn't have managers earning $400,000K+ at the Wikimedia Foundation then. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
  - pc86 5y ago
    So pay them less, fine whatever. But let's not pretend anybody was duped about anything here. Not one single person has ever been forced to make a Wikipedia edit. That "labor" was given freely under the term of the license, it's at best incredibly disingenuous and naive to pretend you're owed anything for it.
    - akolbe 5y ago
      Who said anyone got duped?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    If I make edits to Wikipedia, it's because I want to share them with the world. I couldn't care less for the managers (from a purely technical perspective), as long as they do a good job of keeping Wikipedia running.
  - Debug_Overload 5y ago
    This argument would work better if the editors were paid in the first place, and then they see an increase in the executives' salaries and get jelous or feel it's unfair. Clearly not the case, since they already knew it's all volunteer work.
    - Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
      The editors argument would work better if they would say: "we donated (time, work, knowledge) and are not happy with how foundation spends its resources (money)". The whole "pay gap" thing is muddying the water. One comes closer to the truth when abstracting donations and resources. Edit: Looking at the video with the monkeys two posts up: there could still be a point to it, if we look at the total earnings and total work of a person, instead of just looking at wikipedia: an editor who earns 100k with their day job and donates work to wikipedia can still feel it is unfair when wikipedia management earns four times as much.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > It's literally in the license and everyone who edits Wikipedia should know this So I'm betting that you know exactly the license for every single cookie and website you've ever visited then.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    If you don't read the contract you sign you're still bound by it.
  - afandian 5y ago
    This is more analagous to knowing about the concept of credit when taking out a credit card.
- atonse 5y ago
  Yes, someone else, (including themselves and billions of us) are enjoying the fruit of their labor. So we are eternally thankful for that. The fact that someone makes 400k at Wikipedia doesn't take away from its impact on the world. Also as I read this article, I get the sense that the person writing it has no clue what an endowment is, and that's driving a lot of the misguided indignation in this article. If you have a $300 million endowment, it doesn't mean you have $300 million to spend. It's the interest/investment gains from that money that fuel the organization. So the interest/investments from $100 mil vs $300 mil doesn't equal that amount. It's much less. The whole point is that the $300 mil will remain "forever." I don't know what the solution is, to be honest. I worry more about articles I read about how very few people actually have an outsized amount of contributions, and who is checking their biases?
  - Clockface12 5y ago
    The endowment is $100 million the other $200 million is foundation assets – including (these are last years June 2020 figures) $71 million cash $95 million short term investments https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_FY2019-2020_Audit_Report.pdf&page=4 https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  That makes me wonder if Wikimedia foundation decides to share their funds with the editors say based on a formula(depending upon the quantity & quality of edits) to send payments to their LiberaPay; How would Wikipedia be perceived at large? I presume there will be a large influx of contributors due to monetary gain, Then again moderation wouldn't be much difficult as there's money in it for that too. Wouldn't be much different for vested interests as they put everything under their arsenal even now.
evrydayhustling 5y ago
Flagging for this. It's in the guidelines to target the original source, and TNW doesn't add anything here. PS I don't think it's tawdry for TNW to post this. They are an aggregator, and they actively direct readers to the original. But HN should skip the intermediary.
pbronez 5y ago
Originality discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887

thedream 5y ago

Wikipedia, the free memory hole that anyone can pay a team of PR bots to manipulate.

bob332 5y ago

Wikipedia is garbage. No one should ever give them a penny

akolbe 5y ago

The fundraising banners have started again, asking people “to defend Wikipedia’s independence”. This may sound like the Wikimedia Foundation is struggling to keep Wikipedia up and running, but there is no financial emergency – on the contrary. As always, the Foundation is richer than the year before. But it wants to grow, and grow, and grow ... something a Wikipedia volunteer once described as an “infinite loop of ‘we should do more things, because we can raise money’ – ‘we need more money, because we want to do more things’. There have always been discussions in Wikipedia’s volunteer community about this – about how much money to raise, and about the ethics of making readers believe there is an acute financial emergency: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-January/071150.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-Janu... https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-January/071172.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-Janu... Recently, a Wikimedia manager in the “Advancement” (= Fundraising) department mentioned that there would be “nothing intrinsically outrageous” about “an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion dollars”: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/MBLZ5R6SGOWU53CGTEKYOCHVOZ7YY74B/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... The Wikimedia Foundation is arguably well on its way, with revenue and assets regularly increasing by 1,000 percent or so – and more sometimes – over the course of a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti... Here are some of the latest figures: In the 2020/21 financial year, the Wikimedia Foundation exceeded its own original revenue goal for the year by about $47 million dollars, taking over $154 million rather than the $108 million planned at the start of the year: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_fourth_quarter_2020-2021_tuning_session_-_Advancement.pdf&page=12 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimed... The precise figure reported is "$154,763,121 USD from over 7.7 million donors". https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#Key_Stats https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#K... Moreover, the Wikimedia Endowment (which is completely separate from the Foundation, and not included in the Foundation's audited accounts or Form 990 reporting) reached the $100 million mark in June of this year, five years earlier than planned: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#W... In the current July 2021 – June 2022 financial year, the Wikimedia Foundation aims to take $42 million more than the $108 million goal it set itself at the beginning of the previous financial year: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2021-2022#Budget https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-... That is a planned increase of nearly 40%. For an historic overview of Wikimedia revenue, expenses and net assets see this graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... As always, people should know that the Foundation’s paid staff does not write or curate any of the content found on Wikipedia – this is all done by unpaid volunteers. Wikimedia’s medium-term strategy (never spelled out on the fundraising banners) is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017#Our_strategic_direction:_Service_and_Equity https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/... There’s actually no mention of Wikipedia in that.

jrootabega 5y ago

Honest, naive, somewhat rhetorical question: has any organization ever said "We are good, we can stop growing now.", followed through on it, and then not been thoroughly outcompeted or obsoleted?

akolbe 5y ago
There are other ways of asking. You can enthuse people with your plans for the future, rather than creating a completely spurious impression that your financial independence is under threat.
bombcar 5y ago
Small colleges and small businesses sprint to mind as examples. You just never hear about them because they’re quietly doing what they do. It’s more rare in publicly traded companies - though it can happen. Often it changes after a founder dies.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Of course, this is extremely frequent and easiest to see with small businesses (which make up a good proportion of all productive organizations) that are often limited by the time the owner puts into them, and yet can remain in operation for many many years. Restaurants, your plumber, a family-famer, a small hotel, a tourist charter / operator, etc. Considering the main productive work of developing wikipedia is done by volunteers, does funding need to grow vastly in order to keep growing that? And if the goal is to create accessible and open knowledge for all and a superior competitor came along that was able to thoroughly outcompete and obsolete wikipedia unless vast amounts of money kept coming in, it doesn't seem like the goal would necessarily be lost. Might even be achieved better and cheaper.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 5y ago
> has any organization ever said "We are good, we can stop growing now.", followed through on it, and then not been thoroughly outcompeted or obsoleted? The question should be rather asked like that: "Has any charity/NGO ever pretended that they would not be able to run another year without donations RIGHT NOW from everyone visiting their site, while they are fully loaded and not being transparent about it?"

faebi 5y ago

I decided to go for as much value they give me. I use it seldom but with pleasure. Therefore I used free national Swiss bank transactions to send them 1$/1CHF per Month.

akolbe 5y ago
There's the rub. Who's "they"? The unpaid volunteers who write and curate the articles, or the Wikimedia Foundation who takes the money? People by and large have very little idea of what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing with the money. The WMF is planning to take at least $150M this year ... According to https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-ties-to-big-tech https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-t... "The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget." The spending is not presented very transparently to the ordinary donor. You have to dig, and even then the info is often phrased in ways that make it difficult to understand what value the money actually brings. The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  On the other hand, worst case they're throwing 1CHF a month away. There's so many other purchases one does where the way the producer's organised is under hardly any scrutiny, yet when it's a non-profit, all of a sudden we have to closely inspect every cent.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today. Exactly. What, are they all working sales and marketing? What marketing and sales does wikipedia need to do? The engineering headcount at companies utterly baffles me sometimes. Mozilla laid off ~350 developers in the last year or two. That's probably well under half their total dev staff. What are all these developers doing? Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird, so they had hundreds of people working full time Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, there's some platform-specific stuff so you've got iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows specific people...but the number still seems wildly high. How about Twitter? What are all the engineers doing at twitter? We're talking about a company whose product hasn't significantly changed in a decade. Instagram was ~40 people when they got bought up. What do you suppose the engineering headcount is now? I recently read that Wayfair has over 2,000 programmers. Two. Thousand. Programmers. What the fluff are they doing? Maintaining an online furniture store, or developing sentient furniture?

DeathArrow 5y ago

I wouldn't donate to Wikipedia since it began to take political stances. It's hard to find articles written from a neutral point of view on English version on Wikipedia.

bobthechef 5y ago
The very notion of NPOV is problematic. It reminds me of Rawls' theory of justice: seemingly innocent and sensible under a naive, provincial reading by someone raised in a sheltered Western liberal bubble, but question begging under closer inspection.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > NPOV is problematic This. If you have a point of view, then by definition you are not neutral. I know socialists who favour The Telegraph (right-wing) over The Guardian (left wing, supposedly) because The Telegraph is more open about its biases. I am ailways suspicious of news sources that profess to be neutral. It isn't possible. Wear your affiliation on your sleeve, and then speak freely.
naz 5y ago
Just curious, can you give an example?
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Their smearing of independent anti-war media is consistent. MPN, The Greyzone, and others have been disallowed as sources for very flimsy reasons: [0]. They backed up one editor at the highest levels, after people wised up that he edited Wikipedia an average of 30 times per day, every day, over 14 years; almost entirely making edits against left wing and anti-war causes: [1] They've also literally destroyed someone's life, lied about it, and then patted themselves on the back for fixing the problem nearly a year too late: [2] With regard to Irish national politics, I can attest that they leave out serious scandal information regarding the top two parties politicians, while leaving out important good stuff and including all sorts of bs about independent and left wing politicians; from what I've seen they do the same everywhere. [0] - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor... [1] - https://www.mintpressnews.com/phillip-cross-the-mystery-wikipedia-editor-targeting-anti-war-sites/250824/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/phillip-cross-the-mystery-wiki... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-10-31/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

albertopv 5y ago

I stopped donating after what happened with croatian wikipedia, totally controlled by right wing political admins

mandmandam 5y ago
They're extremely biased in Ireland too. Our neoliberal politicians have massive confirmed scandals reduced to 1 line vaguenesses, while their tiniest plaudits merit paragraphs. And vice versa for anyone independent, left wing, anti-war, anti-corruption etc.
- sharikous 5y ago
  Given that you can find allegations of bias going both ways just in this thread, by reading the comments I became convinced Wikipedia is in fact more neutral than I thought. And to you I say Wikipedia is open source, you can edit in stuff yourself. Sure there is some inertia and moderation and some users will engage in edit wars but as long as you add information (e.g. the scandals you mention) there is usually a low resistance to do so. Editing or removing stuff requires more justification but it is feasible too, as long as you have an encyclopedic reason to do so.
Kbelicius 5y ago
IIRC those issues were resolved with the involvement of other admin teams. Don't think there are any admins on Croatian wikipeda that were there a year ago, some were removed by the global team (or whatever it is called) and those that remained were removed by the newly voted admins.
- akolbe 5y ago
  There was a BBC report just a few days ago pointing out climate change denial and related conspiracy theories in Croatian Wikipedia (and other language versions): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128 What is true is that the Wikimedia Foundation finally, after 10 years, grasped the nettle and had someone take a look at the Croatian Wikipedia earlier this year: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinformation_Assessment-2021 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform... Some Croatian Wikipedia admins had their privileges removed, but that in itself doesn't change any of the content. Whether and when the Croatian Wikipedia will become mainstream remains to be seen.

matkoniecz 5y ago

The problem is not cash reserve, the problem is that it is utterly unclear where money is being spend. > Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations? Given lack of transparency my cynical guess is: to fund fundraising department.

akolbe 5y ago
Several million dollars disappeared at one point ... only to resurface months later in a Tides Advocacy fund for spending on worthy causes _outside_ the Wikimedia movement. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund
aezell 5y ago
There's an entire site dedicated to their financials including entire audited financial reports. [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/]
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  And it is missing any actual info where money was actually spend. "Salaries and wages" without stating which project were funded is useless. Who got paid? Programmers? Board? Fundraising team?

quiffledwerg 5y ago

Because money gets spent? This post should be flagged cause it’s just trolling. Why does any organization continue to need money? It’s a very strange question to ask … isn’t the ongoing need for money self evident even if there’s money in the bank? Serious question: what’s the alternative, stop raising money? Till when? Until they’re desperate? If it makes you mad that Wikipedia has and asks for money, let me tell you about the church….

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
HN guidelines say "don't tell people to read the article", but... did you read the article? Or its source as mentioned by richij? https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

devoutsalsa 5y ago

Even if I were loaded, if people wanted to give me money, I'd make it easier for them to do that :)

RedNifre 5y ago

I won't donate until the deletionists get kicked out of the German language Wikipedia. Most of the time it's not a problem, since not finding the article there trains you to go to the English version first, but if you look up specific German topics that never had an article on the English Wikipedia in the first place, finding the German article deleted is infuriating.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago
What is the reason they are deleted? Because controversial? Or something else?
- RedNifre 5y ago
  The ones I would like to read are usually deleted because they are "not relevant".
hh3k0 5y ago
Yeah, I've been preferring the English Wikipedia for years. I usually check en.wikipedia.org first unless it's about something German or something particularly relevant for Germans and Germany. I don't have numbers at hand but it all too often feels as if the German article is just a few months outdated translation of its English equivalent. But perhaps the situation has already changed?
bombcar 5y ago
In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Especially when you find that the English one is about ten lines and the foreign language one was hundreds - but now gone. Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Call it "knowledge debt", similar to the concept of "code debt". Every piece of knowledge also has to be maintained (e.g. in the case of a natural person, if they are still alive), and that maintenance costs effort.

busymom0 5y ago

I think this Wikipedia donations thing gets posted every few months on HN. I think, I myself might have shared the same thing earlier this year. One interesting thing I noticed when I last shared it was that their server costs had somehow disproportionately grown as compared to the number of pages served compared to a decade ago.

sofixa 5y ago
> One interesting thing I noticed when I last shared it was that their server costs had somehow disproportionately grown as compared to the number of pages served compared to a decade ago. There's probably much more video, photo and audio content nowadays than a decade ago. Not to mention a decade of historical revisions on each page.
- aezell 5y ago
  Exactly. Number of pages is almost meaningless. The system stores a diff of every edit, forever. That includes diffs between binary objects like images and videos. Increasingly, what's being stored is metadata about the content within those pages. Not to mention projects like Wikidata [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page] which is storing "structured knowledge" about literally everything.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Luc 5y ago

Archive.org is looking for donations: https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate (2-to-1 matched at the moment). I often find books and articles there that I can't find anywhere else. Somewhat surprisingly their content often doesn't show up in Google searches.

agumonkey 5y ago
Hell yeah, I'd rather donate to archive.org ten folds. I did donate to wikipedia, but the banner design was so intrusive it made me stop...
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I went ahead and made a donation. I had been using the Internet Archive a few weeks ago to update metadata on my MP3 library. It's such a deep and rich source of information.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

This question is loaded. It still should turn a profit so other than growth and or interviewing it also allows it to operate as long as it’s burn rate does not exceed its cash on hand. Let’s say tomorrow the government required websites like Wikipedia to implement an content policy to limit disinformation and they operated with no profits. Then there would be a crazy donation drive while they are going like mad to implement the policy for compliance.

akolbe 5y ago
Have a look at this graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Note that this does not include the $100+ million Wikimedia Endowment.

beh9540 5y ago

I interviewed with Wikipedia a year or so ago, and right from the start the recruiter said “since we’re a donation based organization, we have to pay below market” and it was definitely below market. I politely turned them down, because I couldn’t take the pay cut. So they’re asking their employees to donate as well, when they don’t need to.

aezell 5y ago
If you got paid market rate, people would be on here complaining about your compensation.

throwmefar32 5y ago

Whatever wikipedia is doing with the money, it's working. For me, it's the most valuable site on the internet. I think it's a great example that you can provide quality content and services and not have to be "ad supported". Open source too. Win, Win, Win.

KronisLV 5y ago

Is it fair to call out Wikipedia for something like this and educate people for how their donations might get used? Most certainly! But will i still be likely to throw a small amount of money Wikipedia's way, given how much utility i've gotten out of it for free otherwise? Probably. Why? Because there isn't anything better out there, similarly to how we're stuck tolerating Mozilla not being excellent recently, about which i wrote in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395206 (with which i'd like to draw parallels) That said, having a local and searchable copy of all of the English Wikipedia can be pretty nice as well. For example, the data is already accessible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En... And then there are local browsers, for example XOWA: http://xowa.org/ http://xowa.org/ or Kiwix: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page Now, the UI could probably use a few improvements, but it's overall not too hard to get up and running, here's an example guide: https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/ https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-f... The space requirements also shouldn't be too much for a modern HDD to handle either, so it's entirely feasible. That way you can benefit from Wikipedia's data, without having to rely on consuming their other content, much like you can use Firefox without opting in to their other initiatives. That said, i still occasionally throw a little bit of money their way.

slightwinder 5y ago

Obviously, because they can. As long as people are giving them money, they will take the money and ask for more money. The business flows, so it continues. The question is whether they invest the money according to their mission, or waste it in corruption. And in that regard one should remember that Wikipedia is not just Wikipedia anymore, it's wikimedia for a long time now, which aims for much more than just maintaining a collection of text. Though, whether this is good or bad, and whether they use the money according to their money, I don't know. It seems more information should be spreaded about this.

akolbe 5y ago
Well, there is this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2021-2022 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-... I don't think many donors have ever looked at that. Nor do I think many donors who do can make too much sense of phrases like "The growth in Thriving Movement expenses reflects a large increase in grants to the movement along with additional investments in our Thriving Movement focus areas." Several people got paid for coming up with that sentence, and many others like it ... just saying.

rp1 5y ago

Why is Wikipedia being loaded a bad thing? Should they toil in near-poverty? It’s important to stockpile when times are good to survive when times are bad.

Veen 5y ago
But the people who toil are not paid; they are volunteers.
akolbe 5y ago
It's just the sheer amount of stockpiling while claiming to be under threat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Wikipedia plays a central role in today's information flows. Wouldn't you want the foundation that stewards such a project to be committed to honesty and transparency?
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  It's not the stockpiling - it's the raising ever-bigger piles and then throwing it at people/ventures/pet causes that have nothing to do with running Wikipedia _without_ even building up a sufficient reserve for rainy days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
rst 5y ago
Wikipedia being loaded is not a bad thing. But a lot of other worthy orgs aren't, and many donors will prefer to send their limited funds to those. Which makes it problematic for the donors if Wikipedia is being coy about already having all the money it needs.
garbagetime 5y ago
I think the issue is the manipulative notices. They were A/B tested into perfection and it's obvious the current ones won out because they mislead the reader into believing that Wikipedia needs his help urgently.

garbagetime 5y ago

It can ask for donations if it wants. It just shouldn't try to emotionally manipulate its readers into giving them money. At that point, just use regular advertisements.

aezell 5y ago

One of the issues here is this funding goes toward some of the more hidden work that folks using and even contributing to Wikipedia don't see. Let's take two examples: 1) Automatically identifying, reporting, and perhaps removing spam, hate speech, advertising, conflict of interest, etc. content. That's done in part by a system called ORES which was designed, built, and is managed by folks working for Wikimedia. Could volunteers have built such a system? Of course. Did they? No. 2) Identifying, blocking, and reporting child pornography. Like any site on the Internet that allows users to upload images, thousands of images of child pornography are uploaded to Wikipedia (and its sibling projects) on a regular basis. There are tools designed to catch most of these. However, humans still have to moderate a lot of this content. Would you volunteer to do that work all day long? I wouldn't. And that's why someone needs to be paid to do it. So, while there is likely bloat in the organization (as in any group of humans endeavoring toward a shared goal), there is a lot of work done that volunteers wouldn't or couldn't or simply shouldn't do.

akolbe 5y ago
Wikipedia was a top-10 site in 2007, when the WMF had 11 employees. Child porn got deleted. I'm all in favour of someone being paid for such work, and the WMF taking on child protection responsibilities (after many years of leaving them to volunteers) but it doesn't explain a headcount of 550 when throughout most of Wikipedia's existence the work got done by a fraction of that. ORES was built with substantial volunteer input. ClueBot, an even more important vandal-fighting feature, was created by volunteers. https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kills-trolls-how-wikipedia-robots-snuff-out-vandalism https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kill... But in a way that's immaterial. Nothing wrong with having money and expanding. They just shouldn't tell people money is needed to defend Wikipedia's independence when by any measure they are richer and more secure than ever before. If you want more money, lay out your plans. Enthuse people for the additional things you want to do with the extra funds. Don't pretend you need five or ten times more money to do the same thing you've been doing all along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:WMF_Support_and_Revenue,_Expenses_and_Net_Assets_at_Year_End.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...

syspec 5y ago

I think the OP of article is achieving the inverse of the effect they intended. Instead of posting and allowing the discussion to flow naturally, they are angrily rebutting every point people in favor of donating make with the same argument.

flerchin 5y ago

Article reads like a hit-job. It's a relatively small amount of money. The Facebook outage cost more than the entire Wikipedia endowment.

PBnFlash 5y ago

Boxes like "Other Netflix Shows" at the end of every page for a Netflix show on is an ad imo.

bacchusracine 5y ago

[Deleted]

Cosmin_C 5y ago

The goal was never to establish a human kind repository of knowledge, but to rule the world. Somebody read Asimov's Foundation series, much better than the current TV show creators anyway :-)