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

Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. They have hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia itself, and many related "sister" projects, with perhaps the most clearly impacting being Wikimedia Commons (a huge repository of free-content media with a focus on educational use - including much media in the public domain) and Wikidata (a project that has now emerged as the closest thing to a 'hub' in the still-developing Semantic Web ecosystem). Quite a bit of their funding also enables growth in least-developed countries, where access to high-quality educational content in local languages is going to be especially impactful wrt. broader development goals.

People like to focus on the excess growth of management roles within the foundation and call it "cancer", but all large organizations have some possible waste within them. It might just be one of the many costs of doing business and pursuing what are in reality some very ambitious and perhaps worthwhile goals. And building a long-term endowment only looks like the prudent thing to do, since the results of fundraising can be quite volatile and uncertain.

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

>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors

Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits.

Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important.

Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.

The alternative is search engines and bots hammering on the doors of Wikipedia and costing huge infrastructure dollars. Their Enterprise API AFAICT is a value-add, and does not prevent scraping.

What a ridiculous criticism of a valid article with a lot of facts.

I have donated to Wikipedia several times and feel violated now. They might have not lied outright but acting as if you’re a poor Non profit when you are most definitely not poor is outrageous. I don’t know if Jimmy Wales is part of this entire charade but this is exactly what you expect to happen when you employ a CEO who charges north of half a mill to run a non profit - their intention is to just increase their coffers with no clear plan on WHAT they are going to use it.

There might have been a time when the banner was genuine and a donation from the user was needed to plan their budget a year in the future, but if they’re showing the same banner now after making hundreds of millions (and if this article is accurate, willfully hiding it as much as legally possible) they’re disgusting. I feel less disgust interacting with entities like apple and google, at the least their intentions seem far more honest than this bs.