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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?

#11

Post by Clewza313 »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #8

Wow. $300 million and still the need to beg. I have edited Wikipedia in the past, sometimes it felt like the troll army was too powerful because in a "poll" they quickly Mount an offensive and your words dont mean much it seems. Havent edited in like a year, that includes osm. Maybe they should share their funds with volunteers who are essentially working for the benefit of "managers".... like you would get funding b…

If by OSM you mean OpenStreetMaps, it's run by its own foundation and completely unrelated to Wikipedia.

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page

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

#12

Post by bawolff »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #8

Wow. $300 million and still the need to beg. I have edited Wikipedia in the past, sometimes it felt like the troll army was too powerful because in a "poll" they quickly Mount an offensive and your words dont mean much it seems. Havent edited in like a year, that includes osm. Maybe they should share their funds with volunteers who are essentially working for the benefit of "managers".... like you would get funding b…

> that includes osm

OpenStreetMap is a separate org and not part of the Wikimedia family

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

#13

Post by xwolfi »

fazelesswhite wrote: post #2

Wow, I saw the banner last year and wouldn't have donated if I had read this article sooner.

I'm not American so I'm not familiar with donations in general - I always felt it was better for society to build self-sustainable systems via tax and votes or companies to build self-sustainable products via investments and profits, rather than have some shady in between - useful enough for us to want to pay but useless enough for us not to want to pay for real.

It would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I think this needs to die for something more profitable and sustainable to rise in its place, organized by people who make their money input not dependent on charity but a recognized social utility.

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

#14

Post by jonahbenton »

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 the US and often around the world.

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

#15

Post by bawolff »

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.

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

#17

Post by checkerscaptian »

i think that this was very interesting, i think that if wikipedia had that sort of funding then it could surely hire more editors/moderators to make sure the info is reliable. i also found it quite ironic that the first thing that popped up was 'please subscribe to daily dot'

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

#18

Post by geenew »

teruakohatu wrote: post #4

I think why it needs to start selling data services should also be asked. At the very least everyone should have equal access to Wikipedia. Using "Big Tech" as an excuse to charge is not relevant in my humble opinion. https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec... Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams…

“ the WMF is launching a for-profit company named Wikimedia, LLC. This will sell API services to big tech companies, making it easier for them to process Wikimedia content, which powers voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as well as Google’s infoboxes.”

“ The WMF emphasizes time and again that Wikipedia never tries to sell the public anything.”

Those can’t both be true. Selling to google is just indirectly selling to the general public.

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

#19

Post by guard0g »

Going the same way as many other non-profits (like colleges and universities), which pursue for-profit incentives while building bloat. After all, what could go wrong with spending $50 million to build out marketing that can increase revenue by $55 million?

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

#20

Post by bawolff »

xwolfi wrote: post #13
fazelesswhite wrote: post #2

Wow, I saw the banner last year and wouldn't have donated if I had read this article sooner.

I'm not American so I'm not familiar with donations in general - I always felt it was better for society to build self-sustainable systems via tax and votes or companies to build self-sustainable products via investments and profits, rather than have some shady in between - useful enough for us to want to pay but useless enough for us not to want to pay for real. It would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I…

That's nice and all, but short of a communist revolution, how do we do that?
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