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Wikipedia is not short on cash

unherd.com

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Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#21

Post by rippercushions »

Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely useful.

For what it's worth, Charity Navigator gives them 4 out of 4 stars with a 98.33/100 rating: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas, but nobody cares.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#24

Post by onion2k »

akolbe wrote: post #6

Note that the fundraising banners are currently only shown to a small percentage of readers – these are the October pre-tests : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W... The actual fundraiser will come at the end of the year, when the banners will follow everyone visiting Wikipedia around for over a month (29th of November – 31st of December). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising#Current_…

It seems odd to me that an organization would try to fund raise around the same time that lots of people have increased fuel bills from heating, and expensive festivals like Thanks Giving and Christmas to pay for. No doubt there's some reasoning behind it but I'd definitely have thought that fund raising at almost any other time would be more successful.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#25

Post by puttycat »

Wikipedia is far too important as a dataset and knowledge base for companies such as Google. They will never let it fail, and are already funding it. Your donations can make a bigger difference elsewhere.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#26

Post by threatofrain »

rippercushions wrote: post #21

Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely usef…

I'd also add that while arguments that Wikipedia is bloated beyond their mission is worthy of discussion, saying that Wikipedia should only be funding their current site is too narrow. I think Wikipedia should be able to pursue projects such as their wiki textbooks idea (which was ultimately a failure, but still worth trying).

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#27

Post by nmcela »

Sebb767 wrote: post #12

> Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap. To be fair to Wikipedia here, quoting a nearly ten year old figure and comparing it to current earnings in order to prove that their required expenses are low is not that honest.

Your comment is quite dishonest and not considering the whole context.

> After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March

> “WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,”

> He put the running costs at $10 million a year. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years.

> So where does the money go? Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course.

> Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising

etc.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#28

Post by akolbe »

rippercushions wrote: post #21

Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely usef…

The issue is that they make it sound like they are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia running when they are actually wealthier than ever before.

The whole premise of Wikipedia (or aspiration, at least, and yes, not always fulfilled ...) is that people should have information so they can't be manipulated.

It kind of sucks to see the very organisation hosting the site do the opposite, don't you think?

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#29

Post by Proglift »

whoooooo123 wrote: post #20
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #3

Instead of ignoring it, I installed Privacy Redirect and set it to redirect all Wikipedia links to wikiless.org. This also got rid of the annoying "preview" feature.

Is that a JS-free Wikipedia? Looks fantastic; thanks for sharing. While we're on the subject, I'm a fan of Nitter[0] as a JS-free Twitter UI. Can anyone recommend any other JS-free frontends to popular apps? [0] nitter.net, and it's mirrored on many other URLS: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

Libreddit for Reddit is fantastic: https://libredd.it

Here is a more exhaustive list: https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#30

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

account42 wrote: post #18
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #11

they should diversify their donation warchest by helping out archive.org and mozilla, in the interest of helping build and maintain a open and freer internet

Mozilla isn't even using the donations they collect themselve for browser development.

its a fucked up situation but do you have any alternatives? wikipedia keeping amasing all that money while mozilla sinks deeper and deeper into being dependent on google ad money, reducing costs which means laying off developers?
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