I have donated in the past, but then there were wild accusations, people saying it’s not needed, it’s to fund other things, and so on and so forth.
Yesterday I got the popup begging for a couple of euros, so what’s the status? Should I donate or is it a waste of time and money?
Cheers
Edit: Thanks for all the insightful posts! I’m jobless at the moment so just ten bucks this time:
Making a monthly contribution. Who knows where the money goes but I’ve never heard of a wiki project I disapproved of and there is a lot to like about what they do.
I do not have the means to donate to things that I care about. Most weeks, the difference between overdrafting my bank account or not is literally a few cents. I donate the $3.10 every time the pop up shows up on Wikipedia. I’m sure there are other organizations that need the money more, but I think Wikipedia is SO important, and so far has remained earnest in their behavior. Proud of you for donating what you could, glad I could help a little bit too.
Be well, friend
Hey, I remember a time when if I lost a 5€ bill, that meant I’d eat for 5 euros less that month.
We’ve got your back, take care of yourself and consider donating when you’ve come around and can do it without second thoughts.
Cheers and hang in there, it’s worth it!
The website itself needs a really small amount of money. Most of the money goes for other stuff which might not seem useful to you.
They make it seem like they don’t have money but it’s quite the opposite: they increase their spendings based on their revenue. They have enough for many years.
Don’t donate to them. There are far better ways to spend your money than a foundation that doesn’t really do anything on Wikipedia and that still actively blocks anonymous proxies.
What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.
Then you have to accept Wikipedia is not free. I’m personally not willing to give them my IP, and I’ve been actively prevented from editing, fixing and adding information on the website.
The sole knowledge that they don’t use the money to fund Wikipedia should be enough to understand that your donation is not needed. When you donate, you think you donate for the great content, and maintaining Wikipedia, but that money isn’t used for that, or at least in a very small proportion.
Wikimedia foundation doesn’t write articles and do very few moderation. Iirc there are less than 100 employees working on the site. They’re financially profiting from the volunteer work people do. Just like Reddit.
Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
The whole point of Wikipedia is that the “IP” is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn’t exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.
In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I’ve never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That’s why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.
Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That’s humanity for you. We fuck things up. It’s up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that’s a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn’t that, and it’s old enough to have proven it won’t be captured in that way.
I think maybe you’re confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.
Free as in beer?
Free as in freedom, where everyone is welcome to access, contribute.
so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn’t exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse
This is false. While facts are facts and no one owns them (except for patents), it’s the formulation that you own. Plagiarism is about this. I didn’t want to focus on the legal aspect anyways, the license behind contributions is well known and I have no issues with it.
Your entire comment is not on the subject that I was talking about. I’m saying that the Wikimedia Foundation profits from volunteer work while they do very little, and I don’t believe that’s fair. I would much rather donate to contributors than to the foundation.
You should also know that non profits are really often abused and a way to pay less taxes. Many of them act like for profits.
Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.
On the subject of “Free as in Freedom” - I don’t agree that a site is ‘not free’ if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that’s not the main thrust of your argument so let’s set that aside.
Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation “doing very little,” and concerns about fairness, doesn’t seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia’s scale impractical to produce in-house, it’s also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I’d still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.
Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don’t need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you’re wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.
Lastly, I’m very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you’d be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.
Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:
I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that’s marketing, not politics.
I give small monthly donations to three things:
- Wikipedia
- EFF
- Internet Archive
I find it valuable and worth supporting, so I donate a dollar a month. It’s not much, but I want to contribute (monetarily, in addition to editing)
I’m another monthly donor. I use Wikipedia nearly every day and appreciate the effort that goes into maintaining it.
Which effort? 99% of it is volunteer work by people not at the wikimedia foundation
Usually its the far right or tankies that hate wikipedia, it seems pretty neutral for the most part.
I was hearing that Wikipedia makes more than enough money from things outside of donations that it seems scammy to ask for donations the way they do from leftists before Trump’s first term.
I was hearing that Wikipedia makes more than enough money from things outside of donations
dumb question but how does wikipedia make money outside donations? is there merch somewhere?
Grants and they also have a for-profit venture in Wikimedia Enterprises.
TY!
they hate it, because it has all the info of everything bad that a republican/conservative, far right government did, and its very hard to deflect/ or deny the amount of evidence from it.
Nope
I give through my employer which matches donations. You should look into whether that’s available since it’ll double the amount.
Decentralized truth is essential to human freedom. It’s not enough to just run wikipedia as a bare bones site, they need to be able to adapt to the times and maybe even fund new projects with the same goals. For people who actually care about the future, it’s hard to think of a better use of the money.
I donate $5 each month! ❤
People who down vote real dislikes Wikipedia!
I give them a little every year, and do not consider it a waste at all. I give $ each month to the community radio station with local news on it too.
Those free nonprofit media companies are important. They are the voice of the people.
This question got asked a couple years ago and I said what I found in their reported finances. Unless something changed over the last couple years, they likely still need the money.
Your analysis only addresses the income vs. expenditure being relatively balanced. It doesn’t address the criticisms OP was hearing about. The primary criticism is that the foundation only needs a fraction of their current expenditure if all they did was run Wikipedia.
deleted by creator
I simultaneously believe that Wikipedia is valuable and that it’s not clear that WMF needed $185 million dollars.
As far as I can tell the situation has not significantly changed since “the last time(s)” this was discussed. Wikipedia remains a valuable resource, and WMF continues to aggressively increase both spending and fundraising revenue. Whether you think that means you should donate or not is probably the same answer as it was several years ago for most individuals based on personal preferences.
edit: typo
I think the answer has changed a bit since they got a much better CEO who’s doing a lot more communication and engagement with the community, which dictates what Wikipedia looks like
Before posting I read the recent annual reports which she advertises having a hand in as part a push for greater transparency, but was still left very unsatisfied personally (half the budget – over $90 mil – just hand-waved away as “infrastructure” spending? Really?). So despite being an improvement, I didn’t feel that the CEO change has had much effect on the scales of “donate vs not”. Perhaps for others it might, but my comment still reflects my best judgement.
Wikipedia, being a free source of information, is an incredibly important resource and a net good for humanity. But since Wikipedia is free for all they rely on donations to keep the lights on.
There are groups who would prefer it if that free access to information did not exist, or could be more easily be controlled and/or manipulated. It is in their interest to convince people not to donate to Wikipedia
I’m convinced that this “don’t donate to Wikipedia” messaging that has cropped up in recent years is a psyop, set up by these groups with the goal to starve Wikipedia of income.
Don’t fall for it. Support one of the last truly good places on the internet.
I never donated. Until the fascists told me not to donate. Now I donate regularly.
Lets say they are being very stupid in how they handle their money. They spend as much as they get every year. If they get more money, they spend more money. From the graph you can see that donation growth is slowing down, because of course it does, it cant just grow forever. The questions is whether they can lower their expenses when the donations inevitably shrink, or if they will sacrifice Wikipedia (the thing that people actually donate for) in favor of all the other things they are spending money on.
A completely different perspective on this is that you should ask yourself whether the Wikimedia Foundation really is the organization/charity that needs your money the most. Or more bluntly, i am 100% certain that there are better things to donate to than the Wikimedia Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics
Black: Net assets / Green: Revenue (Donations) / Red: Expenses
And? How is this answering the question?
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, it doesn’t.
This doesn’t say if wikimedia foundation is using it’s money well, just that it is using its money (which is sorta what a non-profit has to do).
Also, if we boil all donations down to “who needs it most” then most non-profits and charities wouldn’t exist.
It literally answers both the main questions of the post you dumbass.
