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

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

#51

Post by asdff »

ramraj07 wrote: post #29
jonahbenton wrote: post #14

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

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 mil…

What wikipedia does with their banner ads is hardly worse than what NPR does or any other nonprofit for that matter. It doesn't surprise me that they are well funded. Have you ever heard of wikipedia going down?

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

#52

Post by lostinquebec »

olivermarks wrote: post #7

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

The 1% don't WRITE, so much as things like formatting, grammar and spell correction. That is important, but it is not the writing of wikipedia.

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

#53

Post by lostinquebec »

ramraj07 wrote: post #34
op03 wrote: post #30

So the gist seems to be when people are willing to donate to you dont raise cash. Instead wait for god knows what situation in this unpredictable world to strike and then start your fund raising. The only reason Fuckerberg or Ellison or Murdoch or Google dont already own Wikipedia is Wikipedia has enough cash to tell them to fuck off. Not to mention dealing with all kinds of orgs, govt beauracrats, politicans all ove…

If their run rate is a few mill a year and they already have an endowment for hundreds of millions more why do they need to ask for more?

By that logic, if the run rate > earnings on endowment... fundraise?

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

#54

Post by mnouquet »

bawolff wrote: post #15

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

> they can basically only use the interest of that money

That's even more of a problem if you do not support such scheme to extort money from the working classes.

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

#55

Post by furi »

jonahbenton wrote: post #14

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

I feel like we've already seen this pan out once. Mozilla received a large payment from Google for many years for making Google Search the primary search engine in Firefox. They used that money to pay large salaries, launch a dozen side projects (none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox) and aim for lofty goals much like Wikimedia is doing here. Now the money's drying up (because Firefox's market share is dwindling) and Mozilla are having to cut staff, including staff who work on Firefox development, to survive.

It's less obvious what would cause Wikipedia's money to dry up, but in light of Mozilla's example the only part of this I disagree with is the article's negative angle on the endowment. Creating an endowment like that is exactly what Mozilla should have done.

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

#57

Post by dannyw »

bawolff wrote: post #15

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

The article mentions both the endowment ($100M) and also WMF's funds on hand ($300M?). So the main point is still valid.

Wikipedia's fundraising strongly implies that they need your $3 to keep the site online.

WMF has $400M which would be enough to keep the site online for up to 40 years with no further donations.

Thus, their fundraising is misleading and deceptive. I bet 9 in 10 donators won't donate if they knew WMF has $400 million in the bank -- isn't it morally wrong if you paint a deceptive picture of your finances?

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

#59

Post by bawolff »

neolog wrote: post #42
zozbot234 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just…

> Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time Where can I learn about this?

A lot of fuss has been made about this graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Upd...

Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now then it was in 2007 so more distractions, community being mean/troll-filled now, everyone using mobile phones which are crap for writing long form content, all the easy to write articles are written, etc (Probably missed some).

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

#60

Post by zozbot234 »

furi wrote: post #55
jonahbenton wrote: post #14

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

I feel like we've already seen this pan out once. Mozilla received a large payment from Google for many years for making Google Search the primary search engine in Firefox. They used that money to pay large salaries, launch a dozen side projects (none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox) and aim for lofty goals much like Wikimedia is doing here. Now the money's drying up (because Firefox's mar…

> none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox

Hi, let me introduce you to this weird newfangled language called Rust... /s

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