24 ms·

Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet

479 points by akolbe 4y ago

rippercushions 4y ago
Previous HN discussion about Wikimedia squandering money, all of two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533
bacchusracine 4y ago
Isn't this the exact thing they went after Jim Bakker for? Raising too much money for a specific purpose and then taking the excess money and using it for other projects?
gcau 4y ago
I use Wikipedia a lot and will never, ever donate a single dollar unless there's radical changes (that we know we'll never happen). If there was a better alternative to Wikipedia without all it's beaurocratic and managerial BS I would donate to it. Wikipedia is a lost cause now in that regard I think.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  I long stopped using wikipedia for anything that involves the media, is contemporary, is political or otherwise controversial, due to the sheer amount of bias because of the "reliable" sources rules, which simply don't reliably work for any of those. For the "hard" sciences they generally are pretty reliable.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > or otherwise controversial I find that articles about political theories and movements are usually fairly good. Articles about history, especially the history of regions where nationalist movements are active, are another matter entirely. Those are political battlegrounds. They tend to have 10 or more archives of the talk page, indicating that the article is widely disputed or even "owned". Any article about the Middle East, for example, is heavily gatekept; I won't even try to fix punctuation on such articles, I treat them only as a source of links to more-reliable material.
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      Political theories, yeah I can see them having some rigor. For movements? Very much depends on what media sources think of them, because they are the "reliable sources". This gets even more pronounced when they have a conflict of interest, for example "This subset of media sources is engaging in behaviour that indicates a conflict of interest" easily gets you labelled as everything bad in the world by those very same outlets. Which then get cited as reliable sources, and through those citations other outlets start mirroring that and so on. Until the reliable sources are mostly in agreement and you can't do shit about it.
constantcrying 4y ago
Basically the reason why I will not donate to any large organization. Imagine donating to an organization because you think it helps them pay for their servers or devs and then it enters an intangible web of different obscure organizations, all donating to one another in some obscure way. The cause it goes to is "external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge", which is about the most nebulous, meaningless "cause" imaginable. Where does the money go? Unkown. Who benefits? The charities.
- Jickandra14 4y ago
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Just personal cynical opinion here but as soon as large amounts of money are in complex circulation like that, vultures appear. I don't trust for one second that some of that money isn't being siphoned off in various creative ways that most civilians couldn't imagine understanding.
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    You don't even have to be creative. These charities pay friends who work as administrators in those charities and accomplish nothing.
    - Ambolia 4y ago
      Like most things in the current year, most of it amounts to jobs programs for university graduates of dubious usefulness, and patronage systems for political machines.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Stripped of jargon, that sentence is saying "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is basically true if you account for second-order effects. For example, a major reason why Haiti is poor and has few Wikipedia users is centuries of European and American prejudice and straight-up racism against former slaves. Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.
commitpizza 4y ago
Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics? 2021 the hosting costs were $2.4 million and they spend well over $100 million each year. If they were to use their funds to actually drive the site they have enough to fund it for years to come. Most of their funding goes to stuff that has nothing to do with Wikipedia. This is yet another example of an org that has been taken over by political extremists that don't care about the core product and ruins everything. I am a bit upset about it because I used to donate monthly until I learned about how they actually used the donations. I think this is a very important topic and urge that everyone that donates to Wikimedia stop immedietly.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Where are you getting "about 90%" from? The controversy here is about a US$4.5 million fund, which is about 2.7% of Wikimedia's 2021 income.
  - commitpizza 4y ago
    Well, not true. They have employed hundreds of people and pays them ridicolous salaries. Less than half is actually used on actually operating/developing the site. Yes that fund is the most controversial part but it's not the only thing about the topic that is controversial. 2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million - which is less than it did in 2012. Most of the money they recieve by donations goes to something else. As you may see, the site hosting costs are less than what the spend on that controversial fund.
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      Nice ninja edit there, your post previously claimed "about 90% goes to pushing woke politics". As you can see below, enumerated in excruciating detail in the annual reports if you'd like to dig in, the biggest component of Wikimedia's expenditure is simply paying the engineers that keep the site running and roll out improvements like the new UI, visual editing, etc. The actual hosting bill (servers, bandwidth, etc) is only a tiny fraction of that cost. https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goes/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...
zinekeller 4y ago
It blew up now, but a user has pointed out (since 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer&oldid=767378419 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Guy_Macon/Wi...) that Wikimedia Foundation has spiraled out of control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C.... Even though I'm not German, I (still) donate to Wikimedia Deutschland (which is legally separate to Wikimedia Foundation) since that I see them as the "janitors" which actually experiments with new software that could be useful to Wikipedia et al., like for example Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org https://www.wikidata.org).
endisneigh 4y ago
This is why I don’t donate to any organization ever. If it’s organized it’s by definition political and I don’t donate to politicians /s
- Ekaros 4y ago
  This, but without sarcasm.
- bendbro 4y ago
  This, but without sarcasm, and with mostly peaceful violence.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
The wikimedia foundation is a kleptocratic blight upon wikipedia.
trabant00 4y ago
> Wiki Education Foundation Executive Director Frank Schulenburg: "there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects" I think this is the best criticism as it avoids going into politics and addresses the practical issue. From https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund: > Many of the barriers that prevent people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge are rooted in systems of racial oppression. I don't think there would be a scandal if the money would have been used for the fund stated purpose: to help access and contribution to Wikipedia. The money instead has gone to a political lobby group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund
lantry 4y ago
Every time something like this makes the hn frontpage, I increase my monthly recurring donation by 1$. Wikipedia is literally the best thing to come from the modern Internet and I'm not willing to let it die, no matter how "problematic" the Wikimedia foundation becomes.
- pca006132 4y ago
  The hosting cost is just tiny comparing with their other budgets, maybe having less income can make them spend less on something else?
- teraflop 4y ago
  Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all? Do you really mean to say that the content of Wikipedia is so valuable that no matter what else Wikimedia does, it still deserves as much funding as possible? Even though the Wikimedia Foundation did not create that content, and doesn't own it in either a moral or legal sense? Do you not see how that creates some really bad incentives for the health of Wikipedia? (Personally, I don't have huge disagreements with the actual worthiness of most of the causes that Wikimedia chooses to support, but I think the way it fundraises for them is wildly deceptive.)
  - dontbenebby 4y ago
    > Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all? Thanks for highlighting this. I am concerned about architectural decisions like the refusal to add a dot onion service, paired with never navigating the original sin of people who created their own name pages and edited them abusing that social position to deny that others are notable. The fun comes when someone flips that logic around: "I was born in the 80s, who are these pedophiles who met me as a child who keep thinking they can... coerce me? Haven't they read the constitution? I thought they put a crazy catch all in the 9th amendement to avoid some of these retarded takes". For context, I'm on the autistic spectrum, so I can use the word, and I attended an approved private school before eventually graduating from one of the most allegedly prestigous high schools in the... let's say county?... in the mythical "suburbs of Pittsburgh". And to be fair, many of the people I'm angry at are not pedophiles -- they're just totally normal people who keep voting for literal fasciss over and over and then expecting me to smile and wave like it's 1996 still. (It's not gonna happen.) I think we, as a society, need to think about how to handle edge cases where folks purposefully make bad decisions under uncertainty for purely sadistic reasons, and yeah, that's kind of shitty they don't invest that money such so that it's perpetually self sustaining or donate it over to more infrastructure related projects like Mozilla, Tor, or the various projects associated with HTTPS. (Doesn't SSL or something have a bug?) - Greg
vesinisa 4y ago
> The money was transferred to an outside organisation, Tides Advocacy, sometime in the 2019–2020 financial year when the Foundation found it had a large amount of money left over because of an underspend This is the root of the problem. Wikimedia rises too much money, and instead of putting it in a fund they "need" to find projects, programmes and - now apparently - outside organization that are in no way accountable to Wikimedia. Instead of burning all the money they are donated, Wikimedia should first and foremost strive to secure the technical and financial continuity of the project by e.g. investing a lion's share of the donations to a distributing fund that provides perpetual passive income from e.g. stock market dividends. Only once that passive income surpasses the current and foreseeable technical running costs (hosting, bandwidth, project and engineering staff) should they start giving money to external organizations.
- luckylion 4y ago
  I don't know whether they needed to "find projects": > the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation. Sounds like someone got into power at Wikimedia and went ahead and moved a few millions to their project.
  - throwA29B 4y ago
    Looks like saying "where is the fraud there is bound to be embezzling" is on the money again.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      I don't think this would count as fraud or embezzling? businesses donating to charities run by the owners is outrageously normal.
      - mminer237 4y ago
        Wikipedia is supposed to be a non-profit. Non-profits don't have owners.
shubhamjain 4y ago
The original thread emphasized too much on a few grants, which I feel is a minor issue considering how small part of the annual revenue they were. Not surprised Wikipedia is able to defend it easily. > "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5 million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for actual grants made to the community – a figure dwarfed by the Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020–2021. There was no lack of money for grants. The actual problem is that the Foundation reached its endowment goal, five years before the the deadline it set [1], and yet, they keep guilt-tripping and pretending as if they are running out of money. How's it not profiteering? They could be honest and add, "We have already reached our goal. But raising more could help us find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge," and they would be completely in the right. I bet fewer people would donate if they realized that they are not funding running expenses, at all. Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive. The complexity of their project and running expenses is way more than Wikipedia, and yet, they just received 12% of the amount that Wikipedia got in 2020 [2]. They just have $4M in net assets, and yet, I have never seen them guilt-tripping regular users. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti... [2]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943242767/202013219349323056/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
- slim 4y ago
  Also so much money + neutral image + an international network this broad, attracts the wrong kind of people
  - mellosouls 4y ago
    Unfortunately, I suspect it's a long time since wikipedia had a neutral image.
    - mavhc 4y ago
tomashubelbauer 4y ago
I just wish I could donate directly to the devs working on Wikipedia and to the hosting costs. Same goes for Mozilla, actually. I want to support Firefox developers, but not Mozilla. I won't donate to either anymore even though I am a Firefox user and rely on Wikipedia a lot in my daily life as well. Maybe the devs should all set up Patreon or GitHub Sponsors accounts. I'd be happy to support them that way.
- 20after4 4y ago
  Agreed, alternative funding methods and more decentralized organization structures are an area worth exploring further.
throwawayacc2 4y ago
I had a recurring donation set up for wikipedia. I really like it. It’s useful. But I hate woke politics. So, yeah, I no longer have that recurring donation. I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.
- theblazehen 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on what woke politics they have?
  - mellosouls 4y ago
    The advocacy fund is linked in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human rights. While those policy areas are not in themselves necessarily negative, they have a clear political slant which is the ground associated with woke activism. It's not obvious what it has to do with Wikimedia.
    - happymellon 4y ago
      None of those sound bad, but one organisation that tries to focus on all of them? You'll end up trying lots of things but poorly, or find that they cross influence to make things efficient. Why work on labour issues when you can deal with women's labour issues? And especially if they are being funded via manipulation, such as paying for Wikipedia's servers, means they would lack the oversight from donors which is not an effective way.
      - chris_wot 4y ago
        It’s also an American organisation, and yet the WMF has a global remit.
    - 4y ago
aasasd 4y ago
Gotta say, when I read about how Bram Moolenaar, the author and maintainer of Vim, works sometimes to build schools in remote areas of Uganda and encourages users to donate to that cause—not once did I question how that is helpful or what he's doing with people's money.
- return_to_monke 4y ago
  I am not sure if you're supporting, or opposing what Moolenaar does here. But a large difference is, that, although i am not sure if there's any sort of transparent reports available on the project, they don't ask "donate so I can keep working on vim", they specify "Donate to help poor Ugandan children"
  - aasasd 4y ago
    That's what I'm saying, in part. Mr. Moolenaar's reports on his own on-the-grounds activities are quite clear (from what I remember now, a bunch of years later), and the goal of ‘build some schools’ doesn't make me wonder ‘what exactly does that mean’. Moreover, the encouragement to donate to that charity is written into the license of Vim, and still I never went ‘ugh, why does he pollute the software with politics’ or anything like that.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    They absolutely do say "To motivate Bram and others to continue working on Vim please send a donation." It's the second sentence on https://www.vim.org/sponsor/ https://www.vim.org/sponsor/ They GO ON to say that they'll use the money to help kids in Uganda, which is great (both for transparency and the thing itself).
- thepasswordis 4y ago
  There is a difference between: >Hey guys when I’m not working on this thing I’m building homes for some of the poorest and neediest people on earth. If you want to help me here is a link. And >HEY YOU USE WIKIPEDIA RIGHT? GIVE US MONEY TO KEEP IT GOING YA JERK (we will donate the money to orgs completely unrelated to Wikipedia and which exist to try and make people hate each other)
qwery 4y ago
- fleddr 4y ago
  "Where the complaint does succeed is in showing an intense disgust for the social justice movement. So, don't donate to Wikimedia if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people being encouraged to (& see themselves as allowed to) participate in science and journalism. Go buy a copy of Encarta." Thanks for making the debate worse. It's basically "do what I say or you're a racist".
  - feoren 4y ago
    There are two main arguments under debate here. One argument is "Wikipedia is guilt-tripping users into donating without making it clear they don't need the money for hosting, and it's more likely to go to Wikimedia-given grants." That argument is completely fair. Lots of evidence has been given about their finances and it's pretty obvious that this is a completely legitimate criticism of Wikimedia and its fundraising style. The second argument is "YOUR money is going to support GAY and BLACK people!!!!!!! WOKE POLITICS! CULTURE WARS!!!!!!!" That second argument is absolute utter bullshit nonsense supported by some of the worst cherry-picked examples I've ever seen and backed by the same trite get-out-of-racism-free dog-whistle jargon that we've seen over and over again from overtly racist groups. That is the argument GP is criticizing. Yes, the people who get infuriated at the idea of nonprofits supporting black women in STEM are indeed racists. That's what the word means.
    - fleddr 4y ago
      You're doing the exact same thing: reverting to instinctive binary positions and name-calling. Throwing away the baby with the bath water. The thing you accuse the original source of, you're mirroring. Sure enough, there really are people whom dislike minorities altogether for whatever twisted reasons. Awful people, no argument here. Yet you're looking over a sizable group who have no issue with minorities, they have an issue with equity politics, which flies in the face of equality and is racist and sexist by design. People whom find it incredibly patronizing and insulting to call an entire demographic "marginalized". Those people are not conservative nor are they racist. We use to call these people progressive. Center to center-left, classic liberalism. Many aren't on board at all with the postmodernist version of progressive politics. Yet they are lumped in with "racists", this is how you keep a culture war going. Just keep doubling down, and keep losing ever more support.
scioto 4y ago
Seriously, why should I donate when they're moving the "excess" money outside the organization? _They don't need it._ Perhaps if there's some low water mark that they can set for funds under which they can start asking for donations again. I won't be donating to Wikipedia again until I hear they're on the ropes, laid off a third of the staff, and may have to shut down. _Then_ I'll donate.
- airhangerf15 4y ago
  Honestly, why would you donate even then? It would be better to fork it; copy off all of the wiki into a new one and start fixing all the bias (similar to what InfoGalactic does) than try to fix that crumbling mess of a site. If we stop keeping garbage alive, new stuff will emerge. We need the innovation of the 90s back on the web.
RickJWagner 4y ago
Wikipedia has become politicized. It's really a shame, because it could have been (and was, I think) a great source of straight-up information. No more. I trust Wikipedia as much as I trust Fox news or CNN or MSNBC now.
- dhruval 4y ago
  I think it is still a great resource for non controversial subjects. For eg. The math explanations are amazing
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Many even biased sources can be amazing sources, you just have to remember to recall the bias. Is Wikipedia likely to bias a math article? Probably not. Would Fox News incorrectly report a giant spool rolling down the road? Probably not. The nice thing about bias is it's a form of laziness, and as such can often be easily noticed, and subsequently dismissed.
deleted 4y ago
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ThouYS 4y ago
lol, I won't donate to wikipedia this year. Why on earth do they give grants out anyway? The only thing I want is wikipedia.
hunter-2 4y ago
I stopped donating to Wikipedia after I learned that they were the organization behind the "Chimp selfie" lawsuit. I understood that my money was not going towards keeping the servers on, but instead in defending frivolous lawsuits like these. In all frankness, I have no interest in letting Wikipedia die either. I just feel there are enough people who donate today that makes it easy for the foundation to do stuff beyond just keeping a Wikipedia on. Will probably donate again if their contributor pool ever shrinks.
- Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
  Got a source on that just because I’m interested in reading more about that “shitshow”. My understanding of it was the images were put on Wikipedia/Wikimedia because they held the belief that the images were not copyrightable (as the photo was taken by a non legal person), the photographer threatened to sue Wiki over it but I don’t recall that going anywhere. But it was actually PETA who sued the photographer after he published the photos in a book claiming the monkey should have copyright on the images. What im interested in is was Wikimedia actually behind the lawsuit (or was it a different case, as I said that whole incident was a bit of a shitshow) Last I heard it never got a final judgement in court so it was never settled if the monkey should have copyright, my understanding is that the case was settled out of court were the photographer agreed to hand over a share of future earnings from the photos (copyright cases get expensive very quickly, they might have seen it as the cheaper option to exit the case) But that’s just my understanding of what went down, would love to know more. I find it an interesting case esp as we move into the realm of AI creating art.
- blululu 4y ago
  I think Wikipedia funding lawyers to defend fair use interpretations of copyright is actually a very useful function to support the encyclopedia. I know it sounds stupid, but there are a lot of lawyers out there looking to make a buck off a stupid lawsuit, and copyrights on the internet are a pretty wide open field for this kind of nonsense. In order to defend things like fair use that should be obvious someone needs to pay the legal bills. This is a lot of what the EFF does and it generally strikes me as a rather important force in the context of American Civil Rights law.
jasmer 4y ago
Let's consider the good news here: we can have NGOs provide effective, foundational services for reasonable costs. Some issues belong in the 'commons' due to elements of 'public good'. I'm not making a political statement, this is just pragmatic reality. If something like Wikipedia can exist without having to die due to lack of funding, well, maybe we can also do such things for 'search' and 'public messaging' (aka Twitter). In this manner, we can forgo issues of 'total marketing surveillance' and having an excess of irrelevant ads for so many things which might be oriented towards public good and should not have artifacts of commercialization. (And I'm not even against Ads, just their ubiquity and irrelevance). Let's not fret too much about $5M in 'goodwill' money sent out to Tides but contemplate the sliver lining here. Of course, we should keep our eye on these things, Tides is maybe a benevolent actor, but they are also a political actor that sent money to Canada to support issues which were ultimately related to electoral outcomes.
chris_wot 4y ago
I am aware that quite a few years ago the Australian chapter of the WMF had systemic rorting. People were paid to travel overseas and report on conferences. Instead, they disappeared, did not write any reports and used it as an overseas holiday. This has been a problem for a very, very long time. Stop giving money to Wikipedia. They don’t need it, and they don’t publicise what they spend it on.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's amazing to me that people presented with a very simple "travel for free and report on a conference" can't even be bothered to at least provide some simplistic report to maintain the charade.
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    Well, they completely got away with it. Absolutely no consequences whatsoever.
londons_explore 4y ago
I would donate to wikipedia if they would commit to becoming a smaller organisation, with a smaller staff. 10 fulltime staff should be plenty. ~5 developers/devops people to run the site and slowly make changes, and 5 marketing/branding/business/finance people for everything else that needs to be done. Pay those 10 staff well, but cap it at that and don't aim to grow headcount or scope beyond being a great online encyclopaedia. Ironically, they probably wouldn't need my donation if they only had 10 staff.
- karencarits 4y ago
  And perhaps a team to make innovations in the knowledge domain. Another comment mentioned wikidata, which is an interesting project to organize knowledge in a relational database. I would love to see the federated version where you can reference concepts in remote graphs, but the development is very slow. I wish they would prioritize such kind of projects
shp0ngle 4y ago
I have no comment about the main article, but I agree about the other unrelated point below - that Commons is really start to show its age. It’s kind of comical how YouTube and flickr is listed there as the “new boys on the block”, but I agree that there should be more development on making Commons easier to use. Try to upload photos to Commons… they don’t even have phone apps and using the web uploader is really cumbersome. (I also hate wikidata with a passion, but it seems like there is a push for this Semantic Web nonsense from the very top of wikimedia so what am I gonna do)
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  maybe if wikimedia gave more money to development and less to random grants, it would be better. but I don’t know. This community stuff is always hard to pull off.
theknocker 4y ago
dhruval 4y ago
Very interesting read I donate every year as I get tremendous value from Wikipedia. I am still inclined to continue, but will allocate more to other not for profits this year, as the foundation is just wasting money that can be better spent elsewhere.
yakubin 4y ago
The original thread: <https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633 https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633> Just wow. I’ve been hearing about Wikipedia having a surplus of money for a while, it didn’t bother me. But after seeing what sort of nonsense they’re funding I’m cancelling my donations.
DeathArrow 4y ago
I won't donate to Wikipedia ever again until they will give an assurance of some kind that the money aren't going to third parties.
morbidious 4y ago
Wikipedia is known to have funded anti-India riots, and it has connections with an infamous anti-Hindu and anti-India propagandist, George Soros. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-qVpm_CHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-qVpm_CHU
gadders 4y ago
It sounds like donation-laundering to me. "People won't donate to unpopular Cause X, so we'll pretend Wikipedia is running out of money which is a more popular cause and pass on the donations."
Jotra7 4y ago
[dead]
thereddaikon 4y ago
How is this not fraud?
- torstenvl 4y ago
  It is. Soliciting donations under false premises is an extremely common form of fraud. But it almost assuredly won't be treated that way, given Wikipedia's general good citizenship plus a lack of political will to oppose anything in the name of "equity."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dncornholio 4y ago
The way they put up this banner on the website is so beyond me, I was never going to donate anyway. The banner on wikimedia is just disgusting. This big screaming banner is so out of place, It raised all my red flags. If they were true to them selfs, a small (permanent) link saying 'donate' would've been fair and more than enough.
ChoGGi 4y ago
The money I used to give to WMF has been going to Internet Archive instead, hopefully more people will do the same. Edit: akolbe says it better than I could https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403985
- airhangerf15 4y ago
  Why would you give to them?! They actively censor entire websites from their archives under political pressure. They have openly gone against their core values.
koreanguy 4y ago
1970-01-01 4y ago
Time to change my Amazon smile recipient!
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  I've been donating to the EFF for years now. Sadly the ACLU is anti-civil liberties these days.
tiagod 4y ago
I have donated to Wikimedia in the past. I had been a bit annoyed for the last few years at how the money was being used and the declining state of the (volunteer) editor community. A couple months ago I visited the site on an incognito session and got presented with this: https://i.imgur.com/HsjfAsn.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HsjfAsn.jpg Found it really scummy. A family member told me a few days later he donated because he thought the site was in risk, after being presented with the same text. This is someone who makes 600$ a month... Knowing this charity is getting hundreds of millions of USD *in excess* and is convincing people on the other side of the world who don't have much cash hanging around based on shaming and misleading statements, and that it's the charity that's supposed to be representing and taking care of what I consider one of the most important things on the internet... feels wrong.
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  It’s all about the money, great save work place with a really nice salary. They don’t care a Bit about Wikipedia.
  - ryan_lane 4y ago
    - 20after4 4y ago
      In many ways it's like a government job. If you're a good bureaucrat then it's a a really easy job with really great benefits and job security (as long as you play the politics well). Hello from another ex-Wikimedia developer, by the way. We never worked together, I think you left right around the time that I started. Anyway you earned the respect of a lot of folks I worked with so cheers! Hope you're doing well.
kapsi 4y ago
So that Twitter user started talking about Wikipedia funding the "culture war", and I stopped reading. I guess it's my own fault for reading what an anime avatar has to say.
karaterobot 4y ago
> the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation. I wonder what "coincide" means here. I think the most generous inference I can make is that they had a bunch of extra money lying around from all the excess fundraising they do, and Amanda Keton said "I know a worthwhile organization you could give some to." But, you'd assume that as general counsel she would be aware that that looks a little shady. Of course, the even shadier conclusion you could jump to would be that she benefits from that grant, via her connection to the non-profit. The fact that actions like this leave questions in people's minds is why non-profits should strive for transparency, and diligently avoid any possible conflicts of interest, which at the very least didn't happen here.
dandare 4y ago
Given the progressive/woke bias of Wikipedia, I am scared to ask what was that money really used for.
the-printer 4y ago
I mean with Obsidian v1 release who needs Wikipedia, get to blowing on your knowledge cartridges and start linking your thinking; amiright? In all seriousness, I wonder if there’s an unbiased timeline of the organization and when and how things started to get hairy.
fleddr 4y ago
I think there's a neutral technical aspect and a political aspect. The neutral aspect is that if you have so much money (a surplus) that you start giving it away to secondary causes, you're being misleading. The begging messages clearly imply they're about to run out of money to run things, which seems opposite to reality. So they should change the tone of the message, and provide more transparency about where the money goes to. It should be a basic donator's right to understand if the money is needed at all, and where it is used for. No matter from which political angle you're coming from. As for the political angle, to each their own. I'd say most knowledge institutes are progressive and always have been. Importantly, moderately progressive or "classic liberal". Which is quite different from post-modernist, equity, "woke" type of politics. This last category far less embraced, and not just by conservatives. The situation seems comparable to Mozilla. Many people would gladly donate to support the development of the Firefox browser but not neccessarily want to reward incompetent leaders or fund the running of a "indigenous intersectional BLM feminist blog" that does absolutely fuck-all for anybody.
chasd00 4y ago
i never realized how much money they have. I suggest everyone not donate until the page load time increases because they're having to scale back their infrastructure. I've always assumed donations went directly to bandwidth and servers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ShakataGaNai 4y ago
Wikimedia gets a TON of money each year, way way way more than it needs to support "The Projects" (including salaries of developers). Yet the fundraisers still cry out like if you don't give them money, the site might go offline. Also most everyone at the WMF is not getting paid amazingly (seeing is how they are San Francisco based). And I don't know how it is now, but back in the day (about 10 years ago or so) their spending internally was hilariously wasteful. It's been a while, but based on what news keeps coming out about them... I don't think it's gotten any better.
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Wikipedia is not short on cash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 - Oct 2022 (482 comments) The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710 - Oct 2022 (43 comments) Related and less recent: Poll of Wikipedians concludes: Wikimedia fundraising emails are misleading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978 - Sept 2022 (113 comments) Wikipedia fundraising banners paused over weekend in response to complaints - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603858 - Dec 2021 (22 comments) Ask HN: Is Wikipedia running out of money? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29523033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29523033 - Dec 2021 (28 comments) Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402703 - Dec 2021 (251 comments) Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 - May 2021 (595 comments) Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569239 - Sept 2020 (74 comments) Ask HN: Do you donate to Wikipedia? Is their donation request motivating? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135871 - Aug 2020 (17 comments) Wikipedia fundraising strikes again – an open letter to Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509582 - Oct 2017 (23 comments) Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429067 - Oct 2017 (121 comments) Wikimedia Foundation spending - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 - May 2017 (409 comments) Wikimedia Foundation Raises $20 Million From 1 Million+ Donors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416127 - Jan 2012 (22 comments) Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908546 - Nov 2010 (37 comments) Optimizing Wikipedia's Fundraising Banner Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006438 - Dec 2009 (14 comments) Others?
BonoboIO 4y ago
Same as Mozilla Foundation ... they are kept alive by Google money, so Google can say that they have no monopoly on browsers. Their side projects are money sinkholes. Would never give money to Mozilla.
fleddr 4y ago
Required reading: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
renewiltord 4y ago
Thank you. Cancelled.
ryan_lane 4y ago
Note that this post is submitted by the same troll who is constantly posting different variations of this same theme.

479 points by akolbe 4y ago

Previous HN discussion about Wikimedia squandering money, all of two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533

bacchusracine 4y ago

Isn't this the exact thing they went after Jim Bakker for? Raising too much money for a specific purpose and then taking the excess money and using it for other projects?

gcau 4y ago

I use Wikipedia a lot and will never, ever donate a single dollar unless there's radical changes (that we know we'll never happen). If there was a better alternative to Wikipedia without all it's beaurocratic and managerial BS I would donate to it. Wikipedia is a lost cause now in that regard I think.

Akronymus 4y ago
I long stopped using wikipedia for anything that involves the media, is contemporary, is political or otherwise controversial, due to the sheer amount of bias because of the "reliable" sources rules, which simply don't reliably work for any of those. For the "hard" sciences they generally are pretty reliable.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > or otherwise controversial I find that articles about political theories and movements are usually fairly good. Articles about history, especially the history of regions where nationalist movements are active, are another matter entirely. Those are political battlegrounds. They tend to have 10 or more archives of the talk page, indicating that the article is widely disputed or even "owned". Any article about the Middle East, for example, is heavily gatekept; I won't even try to fix punctuation on such articles, I treat them only as a source of links to more-reliable material.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Political theories, yeah I can see them having some rigor. For movements? Very much depends on what media sources think of them, because they are the "reliable sources". This gets even more pronounced when they have a conflict of interest, for example "This subset of media sources is engaging in behaviour that indicates a conflict of interest" easily gets you labelled as everything bad in the world by those very same outlets. Which then get cited as reliable sources, and through those citations other outlets start mirroring that and so on. Until the reliable sources are mostly in agreement and you can't do shit about it.

constantcrying 4y ago

Basically the reason why I will not donate to any large organization. Imagine donating to an organization because you think it helps them pay for their servers or devs and then it enters an intangible web of different obscure organizations, all donating to one another in some obscure way. The cause it goes to is "external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge", which is about the most nebulous, meaningless "cause" imaginable. Where does the money go? Unkown. Who benefits? The charities.

Jickandra14 4y ago
INTPenis 4y ago
Just personal cynical opinion here but as soon as large amounts of money are in complex circulation like that, vultures appear. I don't trust for one second that some of that money isn't being siphoned off in various creative ways that most civilians couldn't imagine understanding.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  You don't even have to be creative. These charities pay friends who work as administrators in those charities and accomplish nothing.
  - Ambolia 4y ago
    Like most things in the current year, most of it amounts to jobs programs for university graduates of dubious usefulness, and patronage systems for political machines.
rippercushions 4y ago
Stripped of jargon, that sentence is saying "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is basically true if you account for second-order effects. For example, a major reason why Haiti is poor and has few Wikipedia users is centuries of European and American prejudice and straight-up racism against former slaves. Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.

commitpizza 4y ago

Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics? 2021 the hosting costs were $2.4 million and they spend well over $100 million each year. If they were to use their funds to actually drive the site they have enough to fund it for years to come. Most of their funding goes to stuff that has nothing to do with Wikipedia. This is yet another example of an org that has been taken over by political extremists that don't care about the core product and ruins everything. I am a bit upset about it because I used to donate monthly until I learned about how they actually used the donations. I think this is a very important topic and urge that everyone that donates to Wikimedia stop immedietly.

rippercushions 4y ago
Where are you getting "about 90%" from? The controversy here is about a US$4.5 million fund, which is about 2.7% of Wikimedia's 2021 income.
- commitpizza 4y ago
  Well, not true. They have employed hundreds of people and pays them ridicolous salaries. Less than half is actually used on actually operating/developing the site. Yes that fund is the most controversial part but it's not the only thing about the topic that is controversial. 2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million - which is less than it did in 2012. Most of the money they recieve by donations goes to something else. As you may see, the site hosting costs are less than what the spend on that controversial fund.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Nice ninja edit there, your post previously claimed "about 90% goes to pushing woke politics". As you can see below, enumerated in excruciating detail in the annual reports if you'd like to dig in, the biggest component of Wikimedia's expenditure is simply paying the engineers that keep the site running and roll out improvements like the new UI, visual editing, etc. The actual hosting bill (servers, bandwidth, etc) is only a tiny fraction of that cost. https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goes/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...

zinekeller 4y ago

It blew up now, but a user has pointed out (since 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer&oldid=767378419 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Guy_Macon/Wi...) that Wikimedia Foundation has spiraled out of control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C.... Even though I'm not German, I (still) donate to Wikimedia Deutschland (which is legally separate to Wikimedia Foundation) since that I see them as the "janitors" which actually experiments with new software that could be useful to Wikipedia et al., like for example Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org https://www.wikidata.org).

endisneigh 4y ago

This is why I don’t donate to any organization ever. If it’s organized it’s by definition political and I don’t donate to politicians /s

Ekaros 4y ago
This, but without sarcasm.
bendbro 4y ago
This, but without sarcasm, and with mostly peaceful violence.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

The wikimedia foundation is a kleptocratic blight upon wikipedia.

trabant00 4y ago

> Wiki Education Foundation Executive Director Frank Schulenburg: "there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects" I think this is the best criticism as it avoids going into politics and addresses the practical issue. From https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund: > Many of the barriers that prevent people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge are rooted in systems of racial oppression. I don't think there would be a scandal if the money would have been used for the fund stated purpose: to help access and contribution to Wikipedia. The money instead has gone to a political lobby group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund

lantry 4y ago

Every time something like this makes the hn frontpage, I increase my monthly recurring donation by 1$. Wikipedia is literally the best thing to come from the modern Internet and I'm not willing to let it die, no matter how "problematic" the Wikimedia foundation becomes.

pca006132 4y ago
The hosting cost is just tiny comparing with their other budgets, maybe having less income can make them spend less on something else?
teraflop 4y ago
Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all? Do you really mean to say that the content of Wikipedia is so valuable that no matter what else Wikimedia does, it still deserves as much funding as possible? Even though the Wikimedia Foundation did not create that content, and doesn't own it in either a moral or legal sense? Do you not see how that creates some really bad incentives for the health of Wikipedia? (Personally, I don't have huge disagreements with the actual worthiness of most of the causes that Wikimedia chooses to support, but I think the way it fundraises for them is wildly deceptive.)
- dontbenebby 4y ago
  > Does the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation already receives way more money than it needs to host Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia is in no danger of dying, enter your calculations at all? Thanks for highlighting this. I am concerned about architectural decisions like the refusal to add a dot onion service, paired with never navigating the original sin of people who created their own name pages and edited them abusing that social position to deny that others are notable. The fun comes when someone flips that logic around: "I was born in the 80s, who are these pedophiles who met me as a child who keep thinking they can... coerce me? Haven't they read the constitution? I thought they put a crazy catch all in the 9th amendement to avoid some of these retarded takes". For context, I'm on the autistic spectrum, so I can use the word, and I attended an approved private school before eventually graduating from one of the most allegedly prestigous high schools in the... let's say county?... in the mythical "suburbs of Pittsburgh". And to be fair, many of the people I'm angry at are not pedophiles -- they're just totally normal people who keep voting for literal fasciss over and over and then expecting me to smile and wave like it's 1996 still. (It's not gonna happen.) I think we, as a society, need to think about how to handle edge cases where folks purposefully make bad decisions under uncertainty for purely sadistic reasons, and yeah, that's kind of shitty they don't invest that money such so that it's perpetually self sustaining or donate it over to more infrastructure related projects like Mozilla, Tor, or the various projects associated with HTTPS. (Doesn't SSL or something have a bug?) - Greg

vesinisa 4y ago

> The money was transferred to an outside organisation, Tides Advocacy, sometime in the 2019–2020 financial year when the Foundation found it had a large amount of money left over because of an underspend This is the root of the problem. Wikimedia rises too much money, and instead of putting it in a fund they "need" to find projects, programmes and - now apparently - outside organization that are in no way accountable to Wikimedia. Instead of burning all the money they are donated, Wikimedia should first and foremost strive to secure the technical and financial continuity of the project by e.g. investing a lion's share of the donations to a distributing fund that provides perpetual passive income from e.g. stock market dividends. Only once that passive income surpasses the current and foreseeable technical running costs (hosting, bandwidth, project and engineering staff) should they start giving money to external organizations.

luckylion 4y ago
I don't know whether they needed to "find projects": > the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation. Sounds like someone got into power at Wikimedia and went ahead and moved a few millions to their project.
- throwA29B 4y ago
  Looks like saying "where is the fraud there is bound to be embezzling" is on the money again.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    I don't think this would count as fraud or embezzling? businesses donating to charities run by the owners is outrageously normal.
    - mminer237 4y ago
      Wikipedia is supposed to be a non-profit. Non-profits don't have owners.

shubhamjain 4y ago

The original thread emphasized too much on a few grants, which I feel is a minor issue considering how small part of the annual revenue they were. Not surprised Wikipedia is able to defend it easily. > "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5 million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for actual grants made to the community – a figure dwarfed by the Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020–2021. There was no lack of money for grants. The actual problem is that the Foundation reached its endowment goal, five years before the the deadline it set [1], and yet, they keep guilt-tripping and pretending as if they are running out of money. How's it not profiteering? They could be honest and add, "We have already reached our goal. But raising more could help us find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge," and they would be completely in the right. I bet fewer people would donate if they realized that they are not funding running expenses, at all. Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive. The complexity of their project and running expenses is way more than Wikipedia, and yet, they just received 12% of the amount that Wikipedia got in 2020 [2]. They just have $4M in net assets, and yet, I have never seen them guilt-tripping regular users. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti... [2]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943242767/202013219349323056/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

slim 4y ago
Also so much money + neutral image + an international network this broad, attracts the wrong kind of people
- mellosouls 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I suspect it's a long time since wikipedia had a neutral image.
  - mavhc 4y ago

tomashubelbauer 4y ago

I just wish I could donate directly to the devs working on Wikipedia and to the hosting costs. Same goes for Mozilla, actually. I want to support Firefox developers, but not Mozilla. I won't donate to either anymore even though I am a Firefox user and rely on Wikipedia a lot in my daily life as well. Maybe the devs should all set up Patreon or GitHub Sponsors accounts. I'd be happy to support them that way.

20after4 4y ago
Agreed, alternative funding methods and more decentralized organization structures are an area worth exploring further.

throwawayacc2 4y ago

I had a recurring donation set up for wikipedia. I really like it. It’s useful. But I hate woke politics. So, yeah, I no longer have that recurring donation. I genuinely don’t understand why people feel the need to shove their ideology down peoples throat every chance they get.

theblazehen 4y ago
Can you elaborate on what woke politics they have?
- mellosouls 4y ago
  The advocacy fund is linked in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation#Advocacy_Fund Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human rights. While those policy areas are not in themselves necessarily negative, they have a clear political slant which is the ground associated with woke activism. It's not obvious what it has to do with Wikimedia.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    None of those sound bad, but one organisation that tries to focus on all of them? You'll end up trying lots of things but poorly, or find that they cross influence to make things efficient. Why work on labour issues when you can deal with women's labour issues? And especially if they are being funded via manipulation, such as paying for Wikipedia's servers, means they would lack the oversight from donors which is not an effective way.
    - chris_wot 4y ago
      It’s also an American organisation, and yet the WMF has a global remit.
  - 4y ago

aasasd 4y ago

Gotta say, when I read about how Bram Moolenaar, the author and maintainer of Vim, works sometimes to build schools in remote areas of Uganda and encourages users to donate to that cause—not once did I question how that is helpful or what he's doing with people's money.

return_to_monke 4y ago
I am not sure if you're supporting, or opposing what Moolenaar does here. But a large difference is, that, although i am not sure if there's any sort of transparent reports available on the project, they don't ask "donate so I can keep working on vim", they specify "Donate to help poor Ugandan children"
- aasasd 4y ago
  That's what I'm saying, in part. Mr. Moolenaar's reports on his own on-the-grounds activities are quite clear (from what I remember now, a bunch of years later), and the goal of ‘build some schools’ doesn't make me wonder ‘what exactly does that mean’. Moreover, the encouragement to donate to that charity is written into the license of Vim, and still I never went ‘ugh, why does he pollute the software with politics’ or anything like that.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  They absolutely do say "To motivate Bram and others to continue working on Vim please send a donation." It's the second sentence on https://www.vim.org/sponsor/ https://www.vim.org/sponsor/ They GO ON to say that they'll use the money to help kids in Uganda, which is great (both for transparency and the thing itself).
thepasswordis 4y ago
There is a difference between: >Hey guys when I’m not working on this thing I’m building homes for some of the poorest and neediest people on earth. If you want to help me here is a link. And >HEY YOU USE WIKIPEDIA RIGHT? GIVE US MONEY TO KEEP IT GOING YA JERK (we will donate the money to orgs completely unrelated to Wikipedia and which exist to try and make people hate each other)

qwery 4y ago

fleddr 4y ago
"Where the complaint does succeed is in showing an intense disgust for the social justice movement. So, don't donate to Wikimedia if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people being encouraged to (& see themselves as allowed to) participate in science and journalism. Go buy a copy of Encarta." Thanks for making the debate worse. It's basically "do what I say or you're a racist".
- feoren 4y ago
  There are two main arguments under debate here. One argument is "Wikipedia is guilt-tripping users into donating without making it clear they don't need the money for hosting, and it's more likely to go to Wikimedia-given grants." That argument is completely fair. Lots of evidence has been given about their finances and it's pretty obvious that this is a completely legitimate criticism of Wikimedia and its fundraising style. The second argument is "YOUR money is going to support GAY and BLACK people!!!!!!! WOKE POLITICS! CULTURE WARS!!!!!!!" That second argument is absolute utter bullshit nonsense supported by some of the worst cherry-picked examples I've ever seen and backed by the same trite get-out-of-racism-free dog-whistle jargon that we've seen over and over again from overtly racist groups. That is the argument GP is criticizing. Yes, the people who get infuriated at the idea of nonprofits supporting black women in STEM are indeed racists. That's what the word means.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    You're doing the exact same thing: reverting to instinctive binary positions and name-calling. Throwing away the baby with the bath water. The thing you accuse the original source of, you're mirroring. Sure enough, there really are people whom dislike minorities altogether for whatever twisted reasons. Awful people, no argument here. Yet you're looking over a sizable group who have no issue with minorities, they have an issue with equity politics, which flies in the face of equality and is racist and sexist by design. People whom find it incredibly patronizing and insulting to call an entire demographic "marginalized". Those people are not conservative nor are they racist. We use to call these people progressive. Center to center-left, classic liberalism. Many aren't on board at all with the postmodernist version of progressive politics. Yet they are lumped in with "racists", this is how you keep a culture war going. Just keep doubling down, and keep losing ever more support.

scioto 4y ago

Seriously, why should I donate when they're moving the "excess" money outside the organization? _They don't need it._ Perhaps if there's some low water mark that they can set for funds under which they can start asking for donations again. I won't be donating to Wikipedia again until I hear they're on the ropes, laid off a third of the staff, and may have to shut down. _Then_ I'll donate.

airhangerf15 4y ago
Honestly, why would you donate even then? It would be better to fork it; copy off all of the wiki into a new one and start fixing all the bias (similar to what InfoGalactic does) than try to fix that crumbling mess of a site. If we stop keeping garbage alive, new stuff will emerge. We need the innovation of the 90s back on the web.

RickJWagner 4y ago

Wikipedia has become politicized. It's really a shame, because it could have been (and was, I think) a great source of straight-up information. No more. I trust Wikipedia as much as I trust Fox news or CNN or MSNBC now.

dhruval 4y ago
I think it is still a great resource for non controversial subjects. For eg. The math explanations are amazing
- bombcar 4y ago
  Many even biased sources can be amazing sources, you just have to remember to recall the bias. Is Wikipedia likely to bias a math article? Probably not. Would Fox News incorrectly report a giant spool rolling down the road? Probably not. The nice thing about bias is it's a form of laziness, and as such can often be easily noticed, and subsequently dismissed.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ThouYS 4y ago

lol, I won't donate to wikipedia this year. Why on earth do they give grants out anyway? The only thing I want is wikipedia.

hunter-2 4y ago

I stopped donating to Wikipedia after I learned that they were the organization behind the "Chimp selfie" lawsuit. I understood that my money was not going towards keeping the servers on, but instead in defending frivolous lawsuits like these. In all frankness, I have no interest in letting Wikipedia die either. I just feel there are enough people who donate today that makes it easy for the foundation to do stuff beyond just keeping a Wikipedia on. Will probably donate again if their contributor pool ever shrinks.

Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
Got a source on that just because I’m interested in reading more about that “shitshow”. My understanding of it was the images were put on Wikipedia/Wikimedia because they held the belief that the images were not copyrightable (as the photo was taken by a non legal person), the photographer threatened to sue Wiki over it but I don’t recall that going anywhere. But it was actually PETA who sued the photographer after he published the photos in a book claiming the monkey should have copyright on the images. What im interested in is was Wikimedia actually behind the lawsuit (or was it a different case, as I said that whole incident was a bit of a shitshow) Last I heard it never got a final judgement in court so it was never settled if the monkey should have copyright, my understanding is that the case was settled out of court were the photographer agreed to hand over a share of future earnings from the photos (copyright cases get expensive very quickly, they might have seen it as the cheaper option to exit the case) But that’s just my understanding of what went down, would love to know more. I find it an interesting case esp as we move into the realm of AI creating art.
blululu 4y ago
I think Wikipedia funding lawyers to defend fair use interpretations of copyright is actually a very useful function to support the encyclopedia. I know it sounds stupid, but there are a lot of lawyers out there looking to make a buck off a stupid lawsuit, and copyrights on the internet are a pretty wide open field for this kind of nonsense. In order to defend things like fair use that should be obvious someone needs to pay the legal bills. This is a lot of what the EFF does and it generally strikes me as a rather important force in the context of American Civil Rights law.

jasmer 4y ago

Let's consider the good news here: we can have NGOs provide effective, foundational services for reasonable costs. Some issues belong in the 'commons' due to elements of 'public good'. I'm not making a political statement, this is just pragmatic reality. If something like Wikipedia can exist without having to die due to lack of funding, well, maybe we can also do such things for 'search' and 'public messaging' (aka Twitter). In this manner, we can forgo issues of 'total marketing surveillance' and having an excess of irrelevant ads for so many things which might be oriented towards public good and should not have artifacts of commercialization. (And I'm not even against Ads, just their ubiquity and irrelevance). Let's not fret too much about $5M in 'goodwill' money sent out to Tides but contemplate the sliver lining here. Of course, we should keep our eye on these things, Tides is maybe a benevolent actor, but they are also a political actor that sent money to Canada to support issues which were ultimately related to electoral outcomes.

chris_wot 4y ago

I am aware that quite a few years ago the Australian chapter of the WMF had systemic rorting. People were paid to travel overseas and report on conferences. Instead, they disappeared, did not write any reports and used it as an overseas holiday. This has been a problem for a very, very long time. Stop giving money to Wikipedia. They don’t need it, and they don’t publicise what they spend it on.

bombcar 4y ago
It's amazing to me that people presented with a very simple "travel for free and report on a conference" can't even be bothered to at least provide some simplistic report to maintain the charade.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  Well, they completely got away with it. Absolutely no consequences whatsoever.

londons_explore 4y ago

I would donate to wikipedia if they would commit to becoming a smaller organisation, with a smaller staff. 10 fulltime staff should be plenty. ~5 developers/devops people to run the site and slowly make changes, and 5 marketing/branding/business/finance people for everything else that needs to be done. Pay those 10 staff well, but cap it at that and don't aim to grow headcount or scope beyond being a great online encyclopaedia. Ironically, they probably wouldn't need my donation if they only had 10 staff.

karencarits 4y ago
And perhaps a team to make innovations in the knowledge domain. Another comment mentioned wikidata, which is an interesting project to organize knowledge in a relational database. I would love to see the federated version where you can reference concepts in remote graphs, but the development is very slow. I wish they would prioritize such kind of projects

shp0ngle 4y ago

I have no comment about the main article, but I agree about the other unrelated point below - that Commons is really start to show its age. It’s kind of comical how YouTube and flickr is listed there as the “new boys on the block”, but I agree that there should be more development on making Commons easier to use. Try to upload photos to Commons… they don’t even have phone apps and using the web uploader is really cumbersome. (I also hate wikidata with a passion, but it seems like there is a push for this Semantic Web nonsense from the very top of wikimedia so what am I gonna do)

shp0ngle 4y ago
maybe if wikimedia gave more money to development and less to random grants, it would be better. but I don’t know. This community stuff is always hard to pull off.

theknocker 4y ago

dhruval 4y ago

Very interesting read I donate every year as I get tremendous value from Wikipedia. I am still inclined to continue, but will allocate more to other not for profits this year, as the foundation is just wasting money that can be better spent elsewhere.

yakubin 4y ago

The original thread: <https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633 https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633> Just wow. I’ve been hearing about Wikipedia having a surplus of money for a while, it didn’t bother me. But after seeing what sort of nonsense they’re funding I’m cancelling my donations.

DeathArrow 4y ago

I won't donate to Wikipedia ever again until they will give an assurance of some kind that the money aren't going to third parties.

morbidious 4y ago

Wikipedia is known to have funded anti-India riots, and it has connections with an infamous anti-Hindu and anti-India propagandist, George Soros. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-qVpm_CHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-qVpm_CHU

gadders 4y ago

It sounds like donation-laundering to me. "People won't donate to unpopular Cause X, so we'll pretend Wikipedia is running out of money which is a more popular cause and pass on the donations."

Jotra7 4y ago

[dead]

thereddaikon 4y ago

How is this not fraud?

torstenvl 4y ago
It is. Soliciting donations under false premises is an extremely common form of fraud. But it almost assuredly won't be treated that way, given Wikipedia's general good citizenship plus a lack of political will to oppose anything in the name of "equity."

deleted 4y ago

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dncornholio 4y ago

The way they put up this banner on the website is so beyond me, I was never going to donate anyway. The banner on wikimedia is just disgusting. This big screaming banner is so out of place, It raised all my red flags. If they were true to them selfs, a small (permanent) link saying 'donate' would've been fair and more than enough.

ChoGGi 4y ago

The money I used to give to WMF has been going to Internet Archive instead, hopefully more people will do the same. Edit: akolbe says it better than I could https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403985

airhangerf15 4y ago
Why would you give to them?! They actively censor entire websites from their archives under political pressure. They have openly gone against their core values.

koreanguy 4y ago

1970-01-01 4y ago

Time to change my Amazon smile recipient!

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
I've been donating to the EFF for years now. Sadly the ACLU is anti-civil liberties these days.

tiagod 4y ago

I have donated to Wikimedia in the past. I had been a bit annoyed for the last few years at how the money was being used and the declining state of the (volunteer) editor community. A couple months ago I visited the site on an incognito session and got presented with this: https://i.imgur.com/HsjfAsn.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HsjfAsn.jpg Found it really scummy. A family member told me a few days later he donated because he thought the site was in risk, after being presented with the same text. This is someone who makes 600$ a month... Knowing this charity is getting hundreds of millions of USD *in excess* and is convincing people on the other side of the world who don't have much cash hanging around based on shaming and misleading statements, and that it's the charity that's supposed to be representing and taking care of what I consider one of the most important things on the internet... feels wrong.

BonoboIO 4y ago
It’s all about the money, great save work place with a really nice salary. They don’t care a Bit about Wikipedia.
- ryan_lane 4y ago
  - 20after4 4y ago
    In many ways it's like a government job. If you're a good bureaucrat then it's a a really easy job with really great benefits and job security (as long as you play the politics well). Hello from another ex-Wikimedia developer, by the way. We never worked together, I think you left right around the time that I started. Anyway you earned the respect of a lot of folks I worked with so cheers! Hope you're doing well.

kapsi 4y ago

So that Twitter user started talking about Wikipedia funding the "culture war", and I stopped reading. I guess it's my own fault for reading what an anime avatar has to say.

karaterobot 4y ago

> the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation. I wonder what "coincide" means here. I think the most generous inference I can make is that they had a bunch of extra money lying around from all the excess fundraising they do, and Amanda Keton said "I know a worthwhile organization you could give some to." But, you'd assume that as general counsel she would be aware that that looks a little shady. Of course, the even shadier conclusion you could jump to would be that she benefits from that grant, via her connection to the non-profit. The fact that actions like this leave questions in people's minds is why non-profits should strive for transparency, and diligently avoid any possible conflicts of interest, which at the very least didn't happen here.

dandare 4y ago

Given the progressive/woke bias of Wikipedia, I am scared to ask what was that money really used for.

the-printer 4y ago

I mean with Obsidian v1 release who needs Wikipedia, get to blowing on your knowledge cartridges and start linking your thinking; amiright? In all seriousness, I wonder if there’s an unbiased timeline of the organization and when and how things started to get hairy.

fleddr 4y ago

I think there's a neutral technical aspect and a political aspect. The neutral aspect is that if you have so much money (a surplus) that you start giving it away to secondary causes, you're being misleading. The begging messages clearly imply they're about to run out of money to run things, which seems opposite to reality. So they should change the tone of the message, and provide more transparency about where the money goes to. It should be a basic donator's right to understand if the money is needed at all, and where it is used for. No matter from which political angle you're coming from. As for the political angle, to each their own. I'd say most knowledge institutes are progressive and always have been. Importantly, moderately progressive or "classic liberal". Which is quite different from post-modernist, equity, "woke" type of politics. This last category far less embraced, and not just by conservatives. The situation seems comparable to Mozilla. Many people would gladly donate to support the development of the Firefox browser but not neccessarily want to reward incompetent leaders or fund the running of a "indigenous intersectional BLM feminist blog" that does absolutely fuck-all for anybody.

chasd00 4y ago

i never realized how much money they have. I suggest everyone not donate until the page load time increases because they're having to scale back their infrastructure. I've always assumed donations went directly to bandwidth and servers.

deleted 4y ago

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ShakataGaNai 4y ago

Wikimedia gets a TON of money each year, way way way more than it needs to support "The Projects" (including salaries of developers). Yet the fundraisers still cry out like if you don't give them money, the site might go offline. Also most everyone at the WMF is not getting paid amazingly (seeing is how they are San Francisco based). And I don't know how it is now, but back in the day (about 10 years ago or so) their spending internally was hilariously wasteful. It's been a while, but based on what news keeps coming out about them... I don't think it's gotten any better.

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Wikipedia is not short on cash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 - Oct 2022 (482 comments) The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710 - Oct 2022 (43 comments) Related and less recent: Poll of Wikipedians concludes: Wikimedia fundraising emails are misleading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713978 - Sept 2022 (113 comments) Wikipedia fundraising banners paused over weekend in response to complaints - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603858 - Dec 2021 (22 comments) Ask HN: Is Wikipedia running out of money? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29523033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29523033 - Dec 2021 (28 comments) Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402703 - Dec 2021 (251 comments) Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887 - May 2021 (595 comments) Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569239 - Sept 2020 (74 comments) Ask HN: Do you donate to Wikipedia? Is their donation request motivating? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135871 - Aug 2020 (17 comments) Wikipedia fundraising strikes again – an open letter to Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509582 - Oct 2017 (23 comments) Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15429067 - Oct 2017 (121 comments) Wikimedia Foundation spending - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 - May 2017 (409 comments) Wikimedia Foundation Raises $20 Million From 1 Million+ Donors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416127 - Jan 2012 (22 comments) Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908546 - Nov 2010 (37 comments) Optimizing Wikipedia's Fundraising Banner Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006438 - Dec 2009 (14 comments) Others?

BonoboIO 4y ago

Same as Mozilla Foundation ... they are kept alive by Google money, so Google can say that they have no monopoly on browsers. Their side projects are money sinkholes. Would never give money to Mozilla.

fleddr 4y ago

Required reading: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

renewiltord 4y ago

Thank you. Cancelled.

ryan_lane 4y ago

Note that this post is submitted by the same troll who is constantly posting different variations of this same theme.