> if Wikipedia, ever in our lifetimes, goes under, it won't be because they weren't given enough money
I agree, I think it will be because they'll accept more money from commercial actors on the terms of whoever these actors are – Google currently does not seem to force any conditions on WP, as far as I can tell.
> If you want to do a good deed donate to the Internet Archive.
I agree with this as well but I consider both Wikimedia and the Internet Archive as extremely important.
Charitable causes always are at risk of "wasting" money. But the reason for that is that in a purely capitalistic sense the cause itself is not profitable.
> You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by.
Not at all. The only reason Wikimedia do not have enough money to run Wikipedia in perpetuity is because of Wikimedia's exponential spending growth in non-"Pedia" projects.
I would love for them to spin off a Wikipedia-only endowment that funds Wikipedia forever. It would (likely) not need to take any future donations. The level of money Wikimedia take in is far, far in excess of "just what [Wikipedia] need[s] to get by."
The problem I have with Wikimedia's fundraising is that it is disingenuous.
Wikimedia's gross mismanagement of the donation revenue threatens Wikipedia's long-term viability, which is something donors should probably care about.
> The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible"
No, it's not, but it should go without saying that accomplishing the mission includes keeping Wikipedia alive and functioning. It would hardly be accomplished if Wikemedia goes under, leaving Google, Bing, DDG, and other search engines to either use out-of-date information, or worse: update that information through questionable practices.
I understand that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization. But that doesn't mean that they don't have costs that need to be paid, nor does it mean that they will celebrate shutting down and handing responsibility for their mission over to a for-profit company that has no concern for that mission.
Wikipedia has costs and needs to raise money to cover those costs. Caching results on Google search pages may reduce some hosting expenses, but that's only a gain so long as the money saved in server costs is more than the money lost from disappearing donations.
And an organization without consistent revenue (such as from selling a product or service) needs much more runway than an organization that can depend on sales to regularly replenish the bank account. Because when the Google and other search engines eliminate the last of Wikipedia's donations, the only factor in Wikipedia's lifespan is how much cash they have in their coffers. And the more donations they collect now, the longer the runway they will have.
>But donating to an organization that doesn't directly benefit Wikipedia in any way, that's where I'm much more doubtful. I'd much prefer they just advertised them in some way instead, like during their donation drives.
The biggest donation is going to a charity managing an archive. A place that has important documents that can be cited by, oh I don't know, an encyclopedia maybe?
> Nobody would donate to Wikipedia if they knew it could survive on a few million dollars each year and it had hundreds of millions of dollars handy, and no new work was being done to add services and improve existing services.
I mean, I would. I'd rather they fulfill their core mission on ROI alone than waste it on stuff that evidently adds no value.
I'd donate for that. I won't donate to see it wasted.
>I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade.
Why? The thing of value in wikipedia is the encyclopedia that was Built off of FREE LABOR by VOLUNTEERS. The increases in spending seem to be going to white collar office jobs that aren't actually necessary for The Wiki to exist and thrive. All wiki needs is servers. It shouldn't need to grow.
Wiki isn't a capitalist entity. It doesn't need to play by the rules of capital. And that it is mirroring the pattern of capitalist companies is tremendously worrying for the future of the project.
> I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.
I'm sure TVTropers resent that remark ;)
> Also, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and doesn't really make more money by having more people use the site.
Sure it does. You can't possibly tell me that you haven't noticed all the popups begging for money every year around the holidays. The more eyes on the site - and therefore the more eyes on those donation boxes - the more potential donations, and therefore the more money.
Being a non-profit doesn't mean there isn't competition involved.
> I cannot fathom the reason for the focus on the Wikimedia Foundation.
for me what those wikipedia pleas are a bit fraudulent.
they’re asking for money using the founder’s name and face, almost always in a very dramatic fashion, but the money won’t actually be spent on wikipedia.
No, but they often ask for donations when you visit the site, which people won't see if they just see the in-line blurb from Wikipedia on the Google results page.
> In 2019 - Google donated $2M [1]. In 2010, Google also donated $2m [2].
$2M is a pittance compared to what I expect Google believes is the value of their Wikipedia blurbs. If Wikipedia could charge for use of this data (which another commenter claims they are working on doing), they could easily make orders of magnitude more money from Google.
Of course, my expectation is that Google would rather drop the Wikipedia blurbs entirely, or source the data elsewhere, than pay significantly more.
Have you? Wikipedia doesn't accept money. Wikimedia does, though.
> I do not feel outraged that they use whatever persuasive tactics that they use - this is necessary in the modern world.
Necessary how? For what?
I donate to Wikipedia—as a Wikipedian. I've contributed a bunch of time editing content and doing lots of gnomish things to create value so that Wikipedia is a "great service". Millions of others have, too. But neither I nor any of the other people have anything to do with your donations.
Don't misunderstand: this is not a call-to-action for revenue sharing in the vein of the articles constantly appearing about the sustainability of FOSS; I'm not saying "give us a cut". What I am saying is that the Wikimedia fundraising tactics are thoroughly unnecessary to the actual production costs of Wikipedia that Wikimedia is responsible for.
Am I outraged? No. Do I recognize what WMF is doing as borderline slimy? Yes.
> not giving money to one of the few online that provide free access to billions of people without ads
So what would you give your money to? inb4 typical homeless/war/refugee charity. People give money to way greater evil than Wikimedia. For example I myself bought expensive as shit coffee (not even worth the price) twice for the past 2 months. It's an overpriced garbage that I regret buying every time, but I never donated to Wikimedia either. I am sure you and many others share the same experience.
With regards to money, they can put all that to an investment company or something and continue to make more money. Why not? So far they have much better track record than any other organizations/companies that I can think of.
> whereas if they had an endowment or some other investment account backing them, they'd be able to survive in perpetuity
There's a strong argument that entities like Wikipedia having to constantly go back to the community trough to survive, assists in keeping them well behaved. I prefer to keep Wikipedia begging and slightly desperate, rather than obese, detached, entitled, crusty and overly bureaucratic.
The user community that funds them can kill them off through funding deprivation in a short amount of time if Wikipedia decided to become a scumbag. Their annual cost to operate has perpetually increased, it's closing in on $100 million now (three or four more fiscal years at the rate they've been increasing it). They wouldn't survive long without the donations flowing in every year. They could plausibly make a large deal with eg Google on advertising if the user funding dried up due to bad behavior, however that would just be more likely to accelerate their implosion.
It's dangerous to the mission of a charity / non-profit to hand it a position of certain financial perpetuity. All organizations are very much susceptible to bureaucratic creep and wandering off mission in such situations. It's why many of the great philanthropists (Buffett, Gates and Carnegie to name a few) have sought to expend their fortunes relatively rapidly in charity rather than have the charitable trove exist in perpetuity via a perma-institution for parasites to attach to over many decades.
>Really? how does wikipedia function then, why do lots of people create meaningful content in web for free?
I get the impression that sometimes it's barely getting by; very few months I see a banner at the top of its webpage suggesting that it's close to running out of money and pleading for donations.
>>> They can’t very well make money on a site that was created through the free labor of its contributors
Two incorrect things right here:
a) there are lots of sites that run ads on community content, some even charge membership fees on top of that
b) only content is created by unpaid contributors. Hardware, bandwidth, admin team, software team, etc. all cost money. The fact that the content is free doesn't mean running Wikipedia is free - it's far from it. That's like saying making a talk show is free if it doesn't pay for the interviews.
>>> Money is not an issue of survival for Wikipedia
It's incorrect again - the fact that Wikipedia has money doesn't mean it doesn't need it. Just as the fact that you have enough air to breathe right now doesn't mean you won't die very quickly if the air flow stops. Wikipedia would die too if the money flow stops. Fortunately, it does not, and it's the great thing, and it in no way means money flow is not vital - just as the abundance of air doesn't mean it's not vital for you.
>>> is in “survival” mode.
Here you engage in distortion, making it sound like Wikipedia claims it's "in survival mode". The claim is the donations are necessary for continued survival, not that there's already a financial crisis now. In fact, since the kind contributors continue to contribute, there is no crisis. This is a good thing.
Moreover, the only reason this is the case is that people in the past mostly were not listening to people like you. So you build your case on the fact that almost nobody would join your cause.
>>> Wikipedia’s core software is essentially unchanged since 2001
This is wildly untrue, to the point that betrays complete unfamiliarity with the platform and it's development. Which is much more puzzling given that most of the information about it is not that hard to find if desired.
>>> Yet all of the money spent on programmer salaries has produced no measurable change to the site’s quality.
This again is false. The very article you're reading belies this claim, but there are many more improvements (including whole mobile platform, which of course did not exist in 2001).
>>> These grants have been described as “corrupt” by the WMF’s ex-director Sue Gardner. who said,
This is an obvious lie, Sure Gardner said that the process doesn't provide enough protection against corrupt practices, not that the grants are corrupt. The difference as between "this lock is not strong enough" and "you are a thief". It is bewildering that you distort the quote in the same phrase as you provide it and expect the reader to miss it.
>>> Your donations are going to golden chairs.
This is false. Ask somebody who has been in Wikimedia office if there are any golden chairs there.
>>> I guess parks and libraries would be a lot less popular if you had panhandlers at the doors.
You would prefer wikipedia to tax you and have corrupt politicians distribute the budgets instead of direct voluntary donations? That's s strange mindset that prefers to be forced to do something instead of having a choice to do it at their own free will - or not do it and write an article full of distortions and inaccuracies if so inclined.
I could spend more time to point more incorrect statements and fallacies in the text but I think this is enough.
> Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it???
It’s not profitable.
Nowhere near as many people would donate money/time/edits/content to Wikipedia if it wasn’t a registered non-profit - nor would they receive donated/subsidised hosting services from their providers - and if it’s for-profit they would need to run ads - and there’s no money in generic ads so they have to be either content-based ads (which immediately creates a perverse incentive for articles to be edited or biased in favour of the advertiser, which devalues the content of the encyclopaedia - or behavioural/tracking ads, which won’t be here for long due to expected incoming changes in browser handling of cookies and cross-site content) - which leaves behind only paywalling the encyclopaedia - and we saw how well that worked-out for Britannica, Collier’s, and Encarta.
Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.
> Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works.
It's still shitty, even if it's a shitty "standard practice" and not a shitty thing being done to me particularly.
Honestly, it seems like Wikipedia's goodwill is seen as an exploitable resource, that people in Wikimedia are using to do other, unnecessary things (probably building little personal fiefdoms).
Sort of like Mozilla, actually. IIRC, they literally won't let you give them money to fund Firefox development, and any donations you give them go to fiefdoms almost certainty entirely unrelated to why you gave them money.
Wikimedia. They do a lot more than just the encyclopædia.
> For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs.
Server costs are not the only thing they need to spend money on. Consider their budget for 2015-2016:
40% of that is spent on engineering. Someone needs to maintain MediaWiki.
~6% is spent on legal - they're a large site that has to deal with copyright issues, they need lawyers. ~15% is spent on administrative costs, as if you employ lots of people, you need to manage them.
> They ask for way more money than they actually need.
They could run on a leaner budget, yes, but it's not as if the other money they get is wasted. More money means they can hire more engineers to work on the site and improve it, for example.
> More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site.
Looking at that budget, they spend more on Engineering than on Community Engagement, Grants, Advancement, and Communications combined.
> Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from.
Could you provide evidence, or at least a credible source?
> > that WMF's primary contribution is Wikipedia, and almost everything else is secondary
> Not so for some time. Also, Wikipedia as a project is way bigger than just software.
well my donation certainly is aimed that way and the insistent nagscreen certainly made me think "yeah I don't want this resource to go away"
and that is Wikipedia. I occasionally use some of the other wikimedia projects, but they should be secondary, it's definitely specifically that one great body of knowledge that got me to donate.
wiktionary is the project I use second most. if they were to beg for donations or else it may go away, I'd be like "eh"
it's Wikipedia only that got me "no wait this is super important, take my money" every year.
Wikipedia has far more money then they know what to do with, their entire foundation is very affluent and there is no risk of them facing any hardship. Your donations have exactly zero influence on Wikipedia staying up or even staying independent. Your money goes into a web of charities (undisclosed which exactly), at best some poor people might profit of a few percentage points of your money, why not just donate to some real charity instead.
> I'm sure this is not what people thought they were funding when they donated to Wikipedia
I do not think your argument follows. Wikipedia as a whole is untrustworthy because at one point they donated 1 million bucks divided between 5 NGOs through their fundation?
It would be like arguing that Exxon has strayed far far far away from their mission because they donated 20 million to the Amazon conservation. Exxon is still extracting oil and maximising profit for its shareholders, and wikipedia is still a free open encyclopedia. I don't think miniscule donations (related to revenue) mark a departure from the mission worthy of betraying their core intention.
I agree, I think it will be because they'll accept more money from commercial actors on the terms of whoever these actors are – Google currently does not seem to force any conditions on WP, as far as I can tell.
> If you want to do a good deed donate to the Internet Archive.
I agree with this as well but I consider both Wikimedia and the Internet Archive as extremely important.
Charitable causes always are at risk of "wasting" money. But the reason for that is that in a purely capitalistic sense the cause itself is not profitable.
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