141–150 of 202 posts
I’ve worked a lot with nonprofits. Having a pool of static funds available is not indicative of sustainability. If you are asking for funds only when you are running out, it is far too late for you.
Their spending grows commensurately with their fundraising. The cost of maintaining wikipedia is more or less constant. It's a cancerous growth pattern.
Just to clarify, there's no Wikipedia Foundation, there's Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia Foundation. You can't donate to Wikipedia, the banners on Wikipedia lead to Wikimedia donations. It is quite unethical: 1. They have enough donations to keep Wikipedia running for decades, yet each year banner gets more and more manipulative, pretending WP is on the brink of collapse. 2. IIRC less than 5% o…
sure, they could "keep it running", except it would get no new features and refinement, and would operate in a static (stagnant, as the world keeps moving on) barebones version. would it also be able to scale with increase in visitor traffic? would it be able to deal with increase in media uploads, or would it have to limit or freeze them? what about inflation and increase in hosting prices, and prices of everything…
Yes.
It's not a social network / advertising machine. Hosting is a tiny fraction of Wikimedia spending: a mere $2.4M in 2021. I was surprised to learn they spend more on awards and grants than on hosting.
The Foundation is my client, but these views are only my own: This is not to say there's no excess, or that resources couldn't be allocated internally more effectively - I'm not going to put up some kind of strawman - but: 1. I took a 20% pay cut so that I could do more work for the Foundation. Worth it. 2. Posts that say "Wikipedia only has [x] more articles but budget has gone up [y]" are beyond stupid. Any idea ho…
> Any idea how many projects besides Wikipedia are run by WMF I use Wikipedia, not any of these other projects. > Any idea how expensive it is to support and facilitate the big "Movement" discussions I don't care about the "movement" > and the User Code of Conduct discussions? I don't care about this either, but how on Earth is that expensive? You are asking me to donate to things I don't use, and don't care about, a…
Managing restricted donations is a pain from an accounting perspective and incurs a lot of overhead. I don't deal with nonprofits at WMF's size, but most that I've been a part of won't manage restrictions unless the donation is very large. The amount of additional fundraising that comes in for even pre-defined restrictions isn't worth the overhead of it.
The Foundation is my client, but these views are only my own: This is not to say there's no excess, or that resources couldn't be allocated internally more effectively - I'm not going to put up some kind of strawman - but: 1. I took a 20% pay cut so that I could do more work for the Foundation. Worth it. 2. Posts that say "Wikipedia only has [x] more articles but budget has gone up [y]" are beyond stupid. Any idea ho…
If they can raise the money, why shouldn't they? Being over-funded is a good problem to have from the perspective of any non-profit.
>why shouldn't they? Because they are doing so under the false pretenses of urgency and desperation, when they are very well off.
All the other top websites [1] either are selling my information (Meta) , exist to show me ads (Google), or I pay monthly for (Netflix). Wikipedia runs one of the busiest websites in the world with a staff much smaller than any of those other sites. Like any company -- there's going to be priorities different than mine and waste. But I'm ok being asked to chip in for what I get. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_…
It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more…
Fundraising is unfortunately something where the commons has been deeply polluted. My Congressmembers regularly send me emails which are outright lies, purporting to be a "membership renewal" or a "special survey" or an "urgent petition" until you click in and see they want money. So when I see something like the Wikipedia banners, which are restricted to their own site and don't explicitly say anything untrue, it's…
What's so great about implicitly saying untrue things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't speak for corruption, but the fact they are fundraising while having >$150m in the bank and begging for donations in their donation banner seems a bit disingenuous to me. https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou... Or you could just do a single google search about "wikimedia funding" and have gotten this article and about 100 others.
If I've read correctly while poking around on this, that means they have about a years worth of operating money in the bank. You might argue that they should restrict their spending ( most of it appears to be salaries for their hundreds of employees ) or even their scope ( they operate a number of wiki resources, not just wikipedia ), but I can't see anything wrong with fundraising when they have 12 months of leeway…
The Foundation is my client, but these views are only my own: This is not to say there's no excess, or that resources couldn't be allocated internally more effectively - I'm not going to put up some kind of strawman - but: 1. I took a 20% pay cut so that I could do more work for the Foundation. Worth it. 2. Posts that say "Wikipedia only has [x] more articles but budget has gone up [y]" are beyond stupid. Any idea ho…
All that but I have yet to get what the foundation spends 155 MILLION dollars on - each year. Even with your arguments that number seems to be wildly inflated. Also, the Wikimedia Foundation explicitly asks for funding for Wikipedia. As far as I know, no one asked the Wikimedia Foundation to perform anything past that. This seems to be comparable to Mozilla‘s situation, who try to grow past Firefox with ideas nobody…