The banners lies (or to be precise, misleads): they say they "depend on donations" but they don't say what they are trying to do.. they don't need donation to keep wikipedia.org alive, they need donations so they can do outreach and grants and travel and community programs.
> they don't need donation to keep wikipedia.org alive, they need donations so they can do outreach and grants and travel and community programs.
Keeping Wikipedia alive isn't difficult on the tech side. Like, the software needs a bit of maintenance and the occasional rebrush, but that's it.
The problem is the community. Wikipedia's survival depends on editors and administrators, both of which are in short supply - which has been an issue for way too long. I remember it from back when I was still at school, so way over a decade ago, that there was a huge issue with the Croatian Wikipedia basically having been taken over by far-right nationalist ideology on everything related to history, and other Balkan Wikipedias suffering from the same fate of nationalism, not made easier by people argumenting that there shouldn't be a distinct Wikipedia as it is a widespread belief that Croatian and Serbian are the same language - but no Croat will ever learn to read and write Cyrillic unless he has to (vice versa is a bit better because most Serbs will learn English and with it the Latin alphabet).
Therefore, Wikimedia has no alternative but to (massively) invest in outreach, because the less active editors there are the higher the chance of entire communities being lost to ethnic squabbles or plain fraud (IIRC there used to be a case of someone making up entire articles in a faked Germanic? dialect).
Minor nitpick: all Serbs will learn the Latin alphabet not because they’ll eventually learn English, but because the Latin alphabet is being taught in elementary schools alongside Cyrillic.
Latin and Cyryllic alphabets are completely equal in theory and practice. All Serbs know both. You can find books, newspapers, logos, restaurant menus in both alphabets.
Some prefer cyrillic as more traditional and "more Serbian", some prefer latin as a more practical when using computers.
Wikipedia is totally overfunded [edit: this was true in previous years but maybe now the bloat is finally winning] and couldn't spend all their money if they wanted to. I guess giving some away is more interesting than letting the money accumulate.
They definitely could spend all their money. If it becomes national news that your Wikipedia donations aren't really spent on Wikipedia then people might stop donating.
They spend $145m/year and raise about $155m/year, so they're basically spending everything they get.
For me the proposition of donating to the actual Wikipedia project is attractive, and the idea of donating to whoever Wikimedia cares to donate to, excepting Wikipedia, is unattractive, regardless of beneficiary. I used to donate occasionally but the fundraising banner lost all power over me when I learned about this policy. I wish them well but will be sending my limited donation dollars to projects that aren't already flush with funds.
Wikipedia as an encyclopedia project is a complete failure. It fails to deliver a consistent representatiuon of reality. The basic premise that if there is an open discussion, inconsistencies can eventually be resolved, is false. Not to mention it's openness gives all sorts of attackers an easy target.
I don't think eliminating contradictions matters that much. Wikipedia is a good starting point for reading up on topics that matter to you and then doing your own research, and a nice website to kill a few hours reading about topics that don't. Even with contradictions it works fine for both use cases.
It isn't a good encyclopedia, I agree – but what is?
The "historical Jesus" one is the funniest entry to me, it conveniently ommits who his "historical father" is, and pretends multiple sources are talking about the same person even if they don't agree in the most basic details, imagine that with any other Wikipedia bigraphic entry: "The Hitler I'm talking about commited no genocide and didn't believe in eugenics, but let's all pretend we are still talking about the same person, for the sake of peace among the discussers".
I'm quite puzzled by this comment. A quick glance through the article and there seem to be several references to what appear to be serious academic work.
So is the issue with the work of the academics? Or the way Wikipedia has put together the article? I'm not a historian by any definition of the word and in quite curious about this.
It doesn't matter. It's highly reproachable that they decided to use the money that people donated to help keep Wikipedia's lights on, on a political endeavour. It sends a clear signal to me to never, ever, give money to them again. It is infuriating to see your resources being employed on political causes that you fiercely oppose.
I live in a third world country, so the level of my donations may not compare to the average HN user, but I used to pledge around 5 dollars per year. In the last couple of years to tell you the truth I hadn't donated since I started getting sick of those stupid banners, and now I think it's good that I did not participated in their shennanigans.
Well, if you donate to a charity that is supposed to do X, and along the way said charity tells the whole world that "by the way, out of every 100 dollars that you donate to us, we'll give 5, maybe 10 dollars, to causes that you absolutely can't stand", you'll only continue donating to this charity if you are a self hating imbecile.
I am not sure it does - wikipedia famously does not pay contributors (except for that one guy). The majority of their spending is on wages though, for their 700 employees. I'm sure some of them are doing worthwhile development on MediaWiki etc but I suspect the majority are not. Like Mozilla, the organisation could charitably be described as bloated.
Only 42% of donations go to Wikipedia and related websites. There is no breakdown for this, and there are likely some vanity projects that are not needed (they mention data analytics)
Reading some comments, there appears to have been a move a few years ago where they moved 10mil to some sort of "equity knowledge fund". The rabbit hole just got deeper and I'm seriously disappointed I didn't stop donating sooner.
I'm just gonna stop going down this rabbit hole before it depresses me even more.
>the vast majority of your donation does go to maintaining wikipedia.
Who knows? Is there any good investigative breakdown of exactly what Wikimedia Foundation spends most of its income on? Does it have a huge admin parasitical attachment sucking the money away? I'm not accusing, just wondering myself. Perhaps someone knows about this.
100% of the work of actually maintaining Wikipedia is is done by unpaid volunteers, and much of the tooling they use also appears to be developed on a volunteer basis.
I think the 42% is over inflated. Of course it takes more than just hosting Wikipedia, but the 42% likely includes a lot of vanity projects that are not needed to keep the website operational longterm.
Their financials are public [1]. See page 4 of the document (6th page of the pdf) for their expenditure breakdown.
Some quick highlights: of their >$150M of usable donations, they spent about 57% of it on "salaries," 10% of it on "awards and grants," 4% of it just on processing donations, and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs.
There's not a good public breakdown of how much of those salaries are on people developing Wikipedia/mediawiki/moderation tools, and how much are on special projects. It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget.
Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow.
Visual Editor is generally pretty popular with a significant portion of users (especially newer users) using it. If that's a failure WMF should have more failures.
I don't understand this kind of critique. 2% on pure hosting cost. The horror! And they spend things on salaries, like web admins, accountants, lawyers to defend against all the different legal threats the face, people to handle takedowns, spam attacks, botfarms, PR, write the obligatory reports like the one you quote from, etc etc ...
For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.
Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)
> I just thought my money went to maintaining Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, it's purpose and intent is...
"to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal." - Jimmy Wales, 2008
The grants work to serve that goal. Of ensuring that everyone has access to that information and can use it.
So, my question is simple, if they didn't send the money to these organizations, but instead, used it instead to improve only, let's say, the machines it's hosted on, but you and whatever country you were in couldn't access it, would you still give them money? Wikipedia still exists for everyone else, but you and your fellow countrymen can't access it.
The page we are discussing lists specific grants.. which ones of those help with that goal?
There is nothing wrong with "matching racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications", but that work is clearly not required to "create and distribute a free encyclopedia".
People get so upset that charities do things with money that they don't agree with, but that's like the entire point of charity? That the money is no longer yours? The only people who DO put such limits on their charity are extremely rich people pretending to "donate" for PR reasons while still controlling the money through their own charity or whatever.
If you don't like what a charity does, don't donate to it?
The point of charity is to help the charity you want to help. Having it turn around and misuse your money by spending it on a completely unrelated cause defies the point and is downright fraud.
I donate because I want to advance human knowledge and access for all. I don't want my money spent on downright anti-white propaganda that discriminates against innocent white people.
> If you don't like what a charity does, don't donate to it?
I mean, that's the point of this, right? If you donate to a charity thinking it's going to do A but it does B then you may want to stop donating to it. The only way you can do that is if you know they're doing B and not A.
So what's happening here is some people are doing exactly what you're saying but you're saying they should do that? They're already doing that.
So, usually when I hear these stories, it's complaining about a charity that isn't spending directly on their mission, but is spending on things vaguely related to their mission. i.e. a charity for scientific research into a disease spending some of their money on care for the sufferers of that disease is technically charity overhead, but nobody would object to it.
My question with these donations are, do they have anything related to do with the core mission of Wikimedia? Stuff like Black Cultural Archives absolutely would count, as they're paying for preservation of knowledge and culture that could then be added into Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons[0]. Same goes for the Filipino American National Historical Society.
On the other hand, the human rights, equity, & advocacy organizations don't quite match what Wikimedia is doing. We can at least argue however that human rights is necessary for Wikimedia to continue operating. i.e. when horrific regimes want to control information Wikipedia is the first to get blocked. Likewise, Create Caribbean Research Institute is going to be promoting digital literacy in the Caribbean, which means more people over there using and editing Wikipedia. Also aligned with the mission, so I can't complain even if it isn't directly related to a Wikimedia project.
Data for Black Lives is the one thing that is genuinely confusing to me. It smells like a Silicon Valley fever dream: if we melt black people down into data we can use the data to make black people's lives better! No, this is just the flipside of the same artificial intelligence snake oil that the "predictive policing" people try to sell. Predictive policing tells you to keep policing the same areas you already police, based on the fact that there's more crime where cops are already looking. If you follow its recommendations, you'll wind up just intensifying enforcement and racial tensions. I see no reason why a "data driven racial justice" system wouldn't have the same problems, and I don't get why Wikimedia donated to this charity.
[0] Wikipedia has had significant systemic bias problems basically since its inception. When you have a bunch of primarily-white tech enthusiasts write an encyclopedia you get an encyclopedia with lots of information about what primarily-white tech enthusiasts want to talk about.
The money you donate is not going to support Wikipedia as you know it. The people writing the wikipedia articles you read will not see a cent of the money you donate, as Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced community effort by volunteers. The server costs, the techie employees hired to manage the servers, develop the wiki software, mobile applications, etc, are less than 3% of their current expenses.
Your donations are going to Big Nonprofit, a type of industry that attaches itself to any community it can get its hands on, and then focuses on 2 goals only: 1) survive at all costs, and 2) grow forever. There will never be a day where Big Nonprofit will say "we have enough money". Or "mission accomplished, we can close this department". Never.
Big Nonprofit attaches itself to a host (core mission, core product, community, whatever you want to call it), and slowly takes it over, while still presenting as the original host. It uses deception, and intentional blurring of the line between host and parasite, to use people's support of the host to the benefit of the parasite. More and more responsibilities are put under the rug of the initial mission goals, and these responsibilities grow to infinity.
And one day, if/when money gets tight, what do you think happens? Will Big Nonprofit trim its fat a little bit? Laughable! No, the host is sacrificed so the parasite can live. This is how companies like Mozilla end up sacking actual engineers like the Rust team, while still keeping hundreds of non-techie trustfund kids doing "activism" from lavish Bay Area offices.
You cannot get around this. Maybe you wisened up, saw the blurred lines, and figured "I'll just donate directly to the project I support". You cannot donate directly to Wikipedia the website, or to Firefox the web browser, or to Rust (when it was a Mozilla project). Big Nonprofit made sure to cut off those avenues for you. Your money can only be spent the way Big Nonprofit wants, i.e. on itself.
Here's (https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/08/wikimedia-fo...) where your donations end up going. Regardless of whether you support these groups or not (I think they're race grifters), they have nothing to do with Wikipedia, encyclopedias, or even off-topic-but-still-sorta-relevant goals like wanting more poor people to use Wikipedia. You'll notice one thing they all have in common: they have no truly measurable metrics for success. Because Big Nonprofit can't grow if the question "what benefits are we getting by spending donation money this way?" can be answered. Bezos and Musk could gift them their entire fortunes overnight, and the only change at the end of the year will be more Big Nonprofit employees hired, and more fund-raisers campaigns.
You can see some people who raised the issue of where all this money is going here (https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...), including mysterious multi-million donations to outside nonprofits, a huge ballooning in operating expenses, etc. The people raising these issues are rebuked by Wikimedia employees whose signatures and blogs show they spend a lot of time at various conferences around the world and virtue signaling for diversity. I wouldn't want my gravy train of free trips to Bangkok to end either.
This is so depressingly right-on. And bringing it up just gets you motte-and-baileyed. "How could you possibly be against a repository of human knowledge? Gasp!"
See also American Red Cross, Susan G. Komen Foundation, Wounded Warrior Project, and Black Lives Matter for other great examples of big non-profit charities that behave similarly.
How can you possibly be against any of those causes? Don't look behind the curtain to see how we're actually using the money you give us.
Of all the things people can be angry about Wikipedia's small contributions to other non-profits is the one they choose do protest. Amazing.
Wikipedia has been one of the most beautiful creations of the Internet and they continue to be trustworthy. I don't really see anything worthy of bad faith assumptions about Wikipedia's $70K donation Filipino American National Historical Society. Seriously people find better causes. Protest real issues.
Wikipedia is very untrustworthy on controversial topics. They often ignore the controversy and just state one side's opinions as facts, i am not talking about vaccination or global warming something that is obviously fact based, i'm talking about social controversies things that cite entirely opinion pieces.
My donations to the Wikipedia foundation should solely be used to support the Wikipedia platform.
I make donations to many different charities, but I do my own due diligence, in particular how much money actually goes to the cause in question, rather gets used to pay an expensive C-suite.
"The couple traveled around the world in early 2022 and moved to New York that June. ... On July 22, Erica Kochi, a friend of the couple who became a one-day deputy marriage commissioner in San Francisco, officiated the wedding before 140 guests on the lawn of Willow Camp in Stinson Beach, Calif. The day before, the groom rode in on a white horse for a Hindu ceremony.
“It was two days of cross-cultural celebration and community,” Ms. Maher said, “and a really big dance party.”"
I guess the donations helped pay for that as well.
People are sensitive to questions involving money. Personally I disagree with the idea of re-donating the money I donated. Just this practice in principle is questionable.
I won't go into discussing the photos of sad looking Jimmy Wales that pop up in my inbox twice a year: you have probably read plenty on this topic already. The only argument I have is I donate money to sustain the project I value, not the Filipino American National Historical Society. I would, perhaps, donate to this Society directly, but don't make this decision for me. It feels deceptive.
Their endowment has been growing for years, and that has earned them quite a lot of criticism. Now they aim to shrink it somewhat, by supporting archives (which Wikipedia articles often depend on). Perhaps they simply don't know how to efficiently spend your donations!
I would definitely express more support for any investment that directly supports Wikipedia. For examle, creating a fund to improve the quality, the scope, the number of translated articles about Filipino people and their history. Yes please. Any donations to vague causes like "growing advocacy" will forever be questonable in my view.
They could have just as easily put a redirect or post donation page in and said, "Thank you for your support, here are some other worthwhile charitable causes you can invest in!" and have gotten $1,000,000 in further donations for them over the last year.
That would have been upright and trustworthy, if a bit annoying. Finding out that they are re-donating my donations irks me. I don't like it. I like the stated missions statements of the charities they donated to, but I don't know anything about them. Are they good charities? What were the grants used for? Who's going to put the effort in to let me know that this wasn't a greedy soulless con job and some of the money I spent to protect a huge trove of human knowledge actually went to some greedy dickhead in Brazil and there's not a dang thing I can do about it?
I'm not donating to Wikipedia & co again until those questions are answered, and I'm not putting any more effort into finding the answer than spitting this rant out.
There's too much shifty questionable things going on to blindly trust any longer.
I'm not a big fan of re-donating donations in general. At the very least I'd want a good explanation of why this furthers the organization's objective.
Eg, if they donate to MariaDB because they use the database, or to the EFF because they offered legal assistance, that makes perfect sense to me.
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.
FWIW the current set of donations seems at least mostly aligned with Wikipedia's mission. The only thing I'm suspicious about[0] is "Data for Black Lives", which sounds like AI snake oil.
>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?
It is the layman's understanding that donations to Wikipedia are directly for the operations of this obviously great resource.
If they had a separate foundation for data gathering and social justice, or if they said in their pledge drives "5% of your donation will be redistributed to causes for equity in journalism and encyclopedic knowledge" this wouldn't be a story.
HN is the same group that wants Mozilla to only work on Firefox.
These non profits have missions that go beyond their most visible projects. This is almost always the case with any non profit. It's not called "the Wikipedia server foundation" or "the Firefox browser foundation" for a reason.
> As of December 31, 2021, the Endowment held $105.4 million. There is currently $99.33 million in the investment account and $6.07 million in cash. An additional $8 million raised in December will be transferred to the Endowment in January 2022.
Damn. Regardless of their questionable politically-motivated donations, I feel like they're being disingenuous when they plaster the "PLEASE DON'T IGNORE THIS" donation banners all over Wikipedia. Seems like they have tons and tons of cash.
I'm not the judge of who "actually needs" money, but surely there are tons of people in the world (maybe in my neighborhood) who are struggling and would be helped by having some of my money. None of those people are asking me for change on the street or sending me donation letters. Disjoint sets.
Frankly, wikipedia’s gotten significantly worse as a source of knowledge over the last few years as well.
Tons and tons of astroturfing & bias with articles.
There’s obviously tons of politicial bias but there’s also lots of individuals writing their own bias as a “uninterested third party” when in reality they’re emphasizing the narrative most favorable to them.
You see it a ton with wikipedia pages of entrepreneurs, journalists & obviously politicians.
I see this happening a lot more than it used to, though. Even if the edits are "I changed this quote because it's a fringe theory that misleads readers about what [article topic theory] represents", the edit will be reverted so that the misleading text remains, to serve a point.
As a casual bystander, I don't understand why there isn't 100% transparency of a non-profit entirely funded by donations. I'm icked out by the repeat stories I keep reading about them, and if they're not willing to come out and just share the numbers, then I don't think I can continue trusting them as an organization.
There is transparency—ignorant people lie and make claims to cause controversy. A lot of this comes down to people thinking Wikipedia shouldn't continue to follow their original vision[1] and instead just limit themselves to just hosting a wiki site and that's it. Again, a lot of ignorance and lies.
So, when people talk about Wikipedia being completely funded and not needing more money, they are lying. Flat out lying. Rather, they are saying "Wikipedia has enough money to serve me, everyone else doesn't matter."
Wikipedia's goals (which have been well-published and posted for a long, long time now) aren't just about a website. It's about giving everyone free access the sum of all human knowledge.
In 2008, Jimmy Wales said this: "'to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal."
It's not just to "Host a wiki, which for the majority of people here, they think that's the purpose."
When they fundraise, it's for the entire mission. And until everyone has access to the sum of all human knowledge, they are still running short.
As for these groups, they all fit with that goal, of getting people access to this information, of providing information, of achieving that goal.
Feel free to disagree with their goal, but stop lying and pretending it has enough money. It doesn't, since it hasn't achieved its mission yet. The only thing you are saying when you say they are lying is that you got yours, everyone else can suffer.
$100,000 USD to Data for Black Lives, United States
Data for Black Lives is a movement of activists, organizers, and scientists committed to the mission of using data to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people. They will use the grant in part to launch a Movement Scientists Fellowship matching racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications to drive change in the areas of climate, genetics, and economic justice.
Yeah right, that does not sound janky at all. "It's all about knowledge." I think you have internalized too much of their PR recently.
I feel that the article implies that the situation is unusual and alarming, but the reality is that this a normal, if suboptimal, set of circumstances in third-sector (non-profit) organisations.
> "One concern was the lack of community input into the process that led to the fund's creation".
For the steward of a project like Wikipedia, it's true that a consensus-based governance structure would be appropriate. However, these are notoriously difficult to maintain in practice, frequently becoming split into partisan groups that obstruct decisions from being made. The Wikimedia Foundation currently has a self-selecting board of limited size, and so it is their responsibility to make decisions on their own in what they feel is in the best interests of the stakeholders. This does not preclude them from asking what the community of Wikipedia users want, but these are not the Foundation's only valid stakeholders.
> "Another was the use of money which was generally solicited on the grounds of being necessary to fund Wikimedia projects, meaning that many donors likely did not know or intend for their funds to be given to unrelated organizations."
This is indeed frustrating, but it is absolutely not uncommon for such organisations to use rhetoric in their fundraising. If the Wikimedia Foundation employ typical marketing individuals, they are most likely to run typical marketing campaigns for their fundraising. I am not defending the misleading advertisements, but I would point out that there is nothing shockingly unusual about this specific case.
> "Two of the grant recipients from the first round seem to have not shared financial reports detailing how the money was spent."
The Wikimedia Foundation will have done what they thought was due diligence; it feels too early to me (it is less than a year after the grant was announced) to claim that A. the beneficiaries are fraudulent, and B. that the Wikimedia Foundation could have reasonably determined this. I will admit that my alarm bells are ringing at the haphazard nature of the website of one of the two beneficiaries lacking a financial statement at the moment (https://iipsj.org).
> "This is a strange comment, as it would seem entirely within the power of the board to determine what information the minutes of its own meetings should contain."
This aspect is unsurprising to me, as it is generally not the board's responsibility to produce the minutes of their meetings. This is technically the responsibility of the Executive Director. The ED (sometimes called the CEO, or as an anachronism the General Secretary), is typically the most senior remunerated executive and does not sit on the board, but usually attends the board meetings in order to represent the staff. The actual writing of the minutes is usually delegated by the ED to the Secretary, who may be a board member or staff member depending on the organisation. The Board certainly have the power to refuse approval of the minutes, but it sounds from Jimbo Wale's quote that no one believed that the minutes were actually incorrect in this case, and therefore didn't want to upset the apple cart by withholding their approval.
---
In conclusion, I would like to express the opinion that there are multiple valid concerns raised in this article, but from the perspective of someone generally involved in third-sector/non-profit organisations, the Wikimedia Foundation does not appear to be a train-wreck by any stretch of the imagination, and is in fact about average! The stakeholders of Wikimedia are entitled to desire more, and I personally hope the Wikimedia Foundation take every opportunity to improve. Similarly, donations are of course voluntary and maybe being more cautious with your cash is the right way to communicate discontent to the Board. However, I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation are being irresponsible in their management of their grant...
Would you say it is trustworthy for a charity funded by readers' donations to have a $120 million Endowment that has never, in 7.5 years of existence, published its revenue and expenses? (The latter seem to have run at about $2 million p.a. recently.)
Can't you just ask for their revenue and expenses? I've never had to do so myself, but I believe you can simply ask for a copy of their 'form 990', which you're entitled to for any 501(с)(3) charity such as the Wikimedia Endowment.
I'm actually rather curious now. Let me know if you write, because I'd like to avoid the airmail fee from the UK if at all possible :)
There is no Form 990. The Endowment was set up as a Collective Action Fund with The Tides Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation promised many times that it would convert the Endowment into a standalone 501(c)(3) filing an annual Form 990 but then delayed and delayed. (Even now, one year after IRS approval for the 501(c)(3), the Endowment website still says it is with Tides.)
I have asked for revenue and expenses information (many times in fact), so far without success. Feel free to join the ongoing discussion on Jimmy Wales' talk page on Wikipedia:
Thank you for explaining this. Looking through the Tides Foundation's own financial reports, I can find only aggregated reports, except for Tide's own Form 990 which says that they gave $3M back to the Wikimedia Foundation in their 2021 financial year (this disclosure I imagine is for tax rebate purposes?).
In any case, thank you for saving £2.20 of my own expenses and the IRS a letter asking about a non-existent 501(c)(3) ;)
Yes, in the Tides Form 990 nothing is broken down, so you can't see what the revenue and spending was. Jimmy Wales actually acknowledged that in this discussion:
I think it's fair to be upset when Wikimedia begs for donations to fund Wikipedia and then takes those donations and doesn't fund the continued operations of Wikipedia and instead gives these donations to completely different charitable organizations. All the while continuing to ask visitors for donations constantly, despite clearly having more money than they actually need.
125 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadKeeping Wikipedia alive isn't difficult on the tech side. Like, the software needs a bit of maintenance and the occasional rebrush, but that's it.
The problem is the community. Wikipedia's survival depends on editors and administrators, both of which are in short supply - which has been an issue for way too long. I remember it from back when I was still at school, so way over a decade ago, that there was a huge issue with the Croatian Wikipedia basically having been taken over by far-right nationalist ideology on everything related to history, and other Balkan Wikipedias suffering from the same fate of nationalism, not made easier by people argumenting that there shouldn't be a distinct Wikipedia as it is a widespread belief that Croatian and Serbian are the same language - but no Croat will ever learn to read and write Cyrillic unless he has to (vice versa is a bit better because most Serbs will learn English and with it the Latin alphabet).
Therefore, Wikimedia has no alternative but to (massively) invest in outreach, because the less active editors there are the higher the chance of entire communities being lost to ethnic squabbles or plain fraud (IIRC there used to be a case of someone making up entire articles in a faked Germanic? dialect).
[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/scots-wikipedia-languag...
They spend $145m/year and raise about $155m/year, so they're basically spending everything they get.
Even if you ignore the fact that size matters, 93% isn't basically everything either.
I'm curious by what precisely you mean by this. Last I checked, reality itself has problems consistently representing itself.
> reality itself has problems consistently representing itself
In this case neutral statements could be used.
It isn't a good encyclopedia, I agree – but what is?
So is the issue with the work of the academics? Or the way Wikipedia has put together the article? I'm not a historian by any definition of the word and in quite curious about this.
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
I'm just gonna stop going down this rabbit hole before it depresses me even more.
Who knows? Is there any good investigative breakdown of exactly what Wikimedia Foundation spends most of its income on? Does it have a huge admin parasitical attachment sucking the money away? I'm not accusing, just wondering myself. Perhaps someone knows about this.
How do you square that with this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180736) that says only they only spend "2% on actual hosting costs."
100% of the work of actually maintaining Wikipedia is is done by unpaid volunteers, and much of the tooling they use also appears to be developed on a volunteer basis.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annu...
Some quick highlights: of their >$150M of usable donations, they spent about 57% of it on "salaries," 10% of it on "awards and grants," 4% of it just on processing donations, and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has....
This needs to be taken with the thought that not all projects necessarily end up good.
For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.
That's a good sign, isn't it? It means they are efficient and don't waste their budget on overpriced cloud services.
I'd be more pissed if a significant junk of the donations went straight to AWS.
Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)
Wikipedia, it's purpose and intent is...
"to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal." - Jimmy Wales, 2008
The grants work to serve that goal. Of ensuring that everyone has access to that information and can use it.
So, my question is simple, if they didn't send the money to these organizations, but instead, used it instead to improve only, let's say, the machines it's hosted on, but you and whatever country you were in couldn't access it, would you still give them money? Wikipedia still exists for everyone else, but you and your fellow countrymen can't access it.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
There is nothing wrong with "matching racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications", but that work is clearly not required to "create and distribute a free encyclopedia".
Trust broken. I'm out forever.
https://help.archive.org/help/category/donations-2/donating-...
If you don't like what a charity does, don't donate to it?
The point of charity is to help the charity you want to help. Having it turn around and misuse your money by spending it on a completely unrelated cause defies the point and is downright fraud.
I donate because I want to advance human knowledge and access for all. I don't want my money spent on downright anti-white propaganda that discriminates against innocent white people.
Why do you claim this to be anti-white propaganda?
I mean, that's the point of this, right? If you donate to a charity thinking it's going to do A but it does B then you may want to stop donating to it. The only way you can do that is if you know they're doing B and not A.
So what's happening here is some people are doing exactly what you're saying but you're saying they should do that? They're already doing that.
My question with these donations are, do they have anything related to do with the core mission of Wikimedia? Stuff like Black Cultural Archives absolutely would count, as they're paying for preservation of knowledge and culture that could then be added into Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons[0]. Same goes for the Filipino American National Historical Society.
On the other hand, the human rights, equity, & advocacy organizations don't quite match what Wikimedia is doing. We can at least argue however that human rights is necessary for Wikimedia to continue operating. i.e. when horrific regimes want to control information Wikipedia is the first to get blocked. Likewise, Create Caribbean Research Institute is going to be promoting digital literacy in the Caribbean, which means more people over there using and editing Wikipedia. Also aligned with the mission, so I can't complain even if it isn't directly related to a Wikimedia project.
Data for Black Lives is the one thing that is genuinely confusing to me. It smells like a Silicon Valley fever dream: if we melt black people down into data we can use the data to make black people's lives better! No, this is just the flipside of the same artificial intelligence snake oil that the "predictive policing" people try to sell. Predictive policing tells you to keep policing the same areas you already police, based on the fact that there's more crime where cops are already looking. If you follow its recommendations, you'll wind up just intensifying enforcement and racial tensions. I see no reason why a "data driven racial justice" system wouldn't have the same problems, and I don't get why Wikimedia donated to this charity.
[0] Wikipedia has had significant systemic bias problems basically since its inception. When you have a bunch of primarily-white tech enthusiasts write an encyclopedia you get an encyclopedia with lots of information about what primarily-white tech enthusiasts want to talk about.
The money you donate is not going to support Wikipedia as you know it. The people writing the wikipedia articles you read will not see a cent of the money you donate, as Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced community effort by volunteers. The server costs, the techie employees hired to manage the servers, develop the wiki software, mobile applications, etc, are less than 3% of their current expenses.
Your donations are going to Big Nonprofit, a type of industry that attaches itself to any community it can get its hands on, and then focuses on 2 goals only: 1) survive at all costs, and 2) grow forever. There will never be a day where Big Nonprofit will say "we have enough money". Or "mission accomplished, we can close this department". Never.
Big Nonprofit attaches itself to a host (core mission, core product, community, whatever you want to call it), and slowly takes it over, while still presenting as the original host. It uses deception, and intentional blurring of the line between host and parasite, to use people's support of the host to the benefit of the parasite. More and more responsibilities are put under the rug of the initial mission goals, and these responsibilities grow to infinity.
And one day, if/when money gets tight, what do you think happens? Will Big Nonprofit trim its fat a little bit? Laughable! No, the host is sacrificed so the parasite can live. This is how companies like Mozilla end up sacking actual engineers like the Rust team, while still keeping hundreds of non-techie trustfund kids doing "activism" from lavish Bay Area offices.
You cannot get around this. Maybe you wisened up, saw the blurred lines, and figured "I'll just donate directly to the project I support". You cannot donate directly to Wikipedia the website, or to Firefox the web browser, or to Rust (when it was a Mozilla project). Big Nonprofit made sure to cut off those avenues for you. Your money can only be spent the way Big Nonprofit wants, i.e. on itself.
Here's (https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/08/wikimedia-fo...) where your donations end up going. Regardless of whether you support these groups or not (I think they're race grifters), they have nothing to do with Wikipedia, encyclopedias, or even off-topic-but-still-sorta-relevant goals like wanting more poor people to use Wikipedia. You'll notice one thing they all have in common: they have no truly measurable metrics for success. Because Big Nonprofit can't grow if the question "what benefits are we getting by spending donation money this way?" can be answered. Bezos and Musk could gift them their entire fortunes overnight, and the only change at the end of the year will be more Big Nonprofit employees hired, and more fund-raisers campaigns.
You can see some people who raised the issue of where all this money is going here (https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...), including mysterious multi-million donations to outside nonprofits, a huge ballooning in operating expenses, etc. The people raising these issues are rebuked by Wikimedia employees whose signatures and blogs show they spend a lot of time at various conferences around the world and virtue signaling for diversity. I wouldn't want my gravy train of free trips to Bangkok to end either.
It's a great grift, though.
How can you possibly be against any of those causes? Don't look behind the curtain to see how we're actually using the money you give us.
When not one, but two, effective vaccines against polio appeared, did the March of Dimes throw a big celebratory party and wrap up its operations?
It did not.
Wikipedia has been one of the most beautiful creations of the Internet and they continue to be trustworthy. I don't really see anything worthy of bad faith assumptions about Wikipedia's $70K donation Filipino American National Historical Society. Seriously people find better causes. Protest real issues.
I make donations to many different charities, but I do my own due diligence, in particular how much money actually goes to the cause in question, rather gets used to pay an expensive C-suite.
Signpost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029115
And for a laugh, see the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/style/katherine-maher-ash...
"The couple traveled around the world in early 2022 and moved to New York that June. ... On July 22, Erica Kochi, a friend of the couple who became a one-day deputy marriage commissioner in San Francisco, officiated the wedding before 140 guests on the lawn of Willow Camp in Stinson Beach, Calif. The day before, the groom rode in on a white horse for a Hindu ceremony.
“It was two days of cross-cultural celebration and community,” Ms. Maher said, “and a really big dance party.”"
I guess the donations helped pay for that as well.
I won't go into discussing the photos of sad looking Jimmy Wales that pop up in my inbox twice a year: you have probably read plenty on this topic already. The only argument I have is I donate money to sustain the project I value, not the Filipino American National Historical Society. I would, perhaps, donate to this Society directly, but don't make this decision for me. It feels deceptive.
That would have been upright and trustworthy, if a bit annoying. Finding out that they are re-donating my donations irks me. I don't like it. I like the stated missions statements of the charities they donated to, but I don't know anything about them. Are they good charities? What were the grants used for? Who's going to put the effort in to let me know that this wasn't a greedy soulless con job and some of the money I spent to protect a huge trove of human knowledge actually went to some greedy dickhead in Brazil and there's not a dang thing I can do about it?
I'm not donating to Wikipedia & co again until those questions are answered, and I'm not putting any more effort into finding the answer than spitting this rant out.
There's too much shifty questionable things going on to blindly trust any longer.
Eg, if they donate to MariaDB because they use the database, or to the EFF because they offered legal assistance, that makes perfect sense to me.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180695
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?
It is the layman's understanding that donations to Wikipedia are directly for the operations of this obviously great resource.
If they had a separate foundation for data gathering and social justice, or if they said in their pledge drives "5% of your donation will be redistributed to causes for equity in journalism and encyclopedic knowledge" this wouldn't be a story.
It doesn't strike me as coincidental that people are complaining about money going to be people who aren't considered white.
These non profits have missions that go beyond their most visible projects. This is almost always the case with any non profit. It's not called "the Wikipedia server foundation" or "the Firefox browser foundation" for a reason.
> As of December 31, 2021, the Endowment held $105.4 million. There is currently $99.33 million in the investment account and $6.07 million in cash. An additional $8 million raised in December will be transferred to the Endowment in January 2022.
Damn. Regardless of their questionable politically-motivated donations, I feel like they're being disingenuous when they plaster the "PLEASE DON'T IGNORE THIS" donation banners all over Wikipedia. Seems like they have tons and tons of cash.
It’s the equivalent of individual people who never feel financially secure, even with millions in the bank.
I'm not the judge of who "actually needs" money, but surely there are tons of people in the world (maybe in my neighborhood) who are struggling and would be helped by having some of my money. None of those people are asking me for change on the street or sending me donation letters. Disjoint sets.
Tons and tons of astroturfing & bias with articles.
There’s obviously tons of politicial bias but there’s also lots of individuals writing their own bias as a “uninterested third party” when in reality they’re emphasizing the narrative most favorable to them.
You see it a ton with wikipedia pages of entrepreneurs, journalists & obviously politicians.
and 3 letter agencies. Whenever a subject is a bit sensitive, you can feel their influence.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
Regular announcements of specific grants: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/04/13/first-grants...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_W...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
So, when people talk about Wikipedia being completely funded and not needing more money, they are lying. Flat out lying. Rather, they are saying "Wikipedia has enough money to serve me, everyone else doesn't matter."
Wikipedia's goals (which have been well-published and posted for a long, long time now) aren't just about a website. It's about giving everyone free access the sum of all human knowledge.
In 2008, Jimmy Wales said this: "'to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal."
It's not just to "Host a wiki, which for the majority of people here, they think that's the purpose."
When they fundraise, it's for the entire mission. And until everyone has access to the sum of all human knowledge, they are still running short.
As for these groups, they all fit with that goal, of getting people access to this information, of providing information, of achieving that goal.
Feel free to disagree with their goal, but stop lying and pretending it has enough money. It doesn't, since it hasn't achieved its mission yet. The only thing you are saying when you say they are lying is that you got yours, everyone else can suffer.
Yeah right, that does not sound janky at all. "It's all about knowledge." I think you have internalized too much of their PR recently.
> "One concern was the lack of community input into the process that led to the fund's creation".
For the steward of a project like Wikipedia, it's true that a consensus-based governance structure would be appropriate. However, these are notoriously difficult to maintain in practice, frequently becoming split into partisan groups that obstruct decisions from being made. The Wikimedia Foundation currently has a self-selecting board of limited size, and so it is their responsibility to make decisions on their own in what they feel is in the best interests of the stakeholders. This does not preclude them from asking what the community of Wikipedia users want, but these are not the Foundation's only valid stakeholders.
> "Another was the use of money which was generally solicited on the grounds of being necessary to fund Wikimedia projects, meaning that many donors likely did not know or intend for their funds to be given to unrelated organizations."
This is indeed frustrating, but it is absolutely not uncommon for such organisations to use rhetoric in their fundraising. If the Wikimedia Foundation employ typical marketing individuals, they are most likely to run typical marketing campaigns for their fundraising. I am not defending the misleading advertisements, but I would point out that there is nothing shockingly unusual about this specific case.
> "Two of the grant recipients from the first round seem to have not shared financial reports detailing how the money was spent."
The Wikimedia Foundation will have done what they thought was due diligence; it feels too early to me (it is less than a year after the grant was announced) to claim that A. the beneficiaries are fraudulent, and B. that the Wikimedia Foundation could have reasonably determined this. I will admit that my alarm bells are ringing at the haphazard nature of the website of one of the two beneficiaries lacking a financial statement at the moment (https://iipsj.org).
> "This is a strange comment, as it would seem entirely within the power of the board to determine what information the minutes of its own meetings should contain."
This aspect is unsurprising to me, as it is generally not the board's responsibility to produce the minutes of their meetings. This is technically the responsibility of the Executive Director. The ED (sometimes called the CEO, or as an anachronism the General Secretary), is typically the most senior remunerated executive and does not sit on the board, but usually attends the board meetings in order to represent the staff. The actual writing of the minutes is usually delegated by the ED to the Secretary, who may be a board member or staff member depending on the organisation. The Board certainly have the power to refuse approval of the minutes, but it sounds from Jimbo Wale's quote that no one believed that the minutes were actually incorrect in this case, and therefore didn't want to upset the apple cart by withholding their approval.
--- In conclusion, I would like to express the opinion that there are multiple valid concerns raised in this article, but from the perspective of someone generally involved in third-sector/non-profit organisations, the Wikimedia Foundation does not appear to be a train-wreck by any stretch of the imagination, and is in fact about average! The stakeholders of Wikimedia are entitled to desire more, and I personally hope the Wikimedia Foundation take every opportunity to improve. Similarly, donations are of course voluntary and maybe being more cautious with your cash is the right way to communicate discontent to the Board. However, I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation are being irresponsible in their management of their grant...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_W...
I must say I am fairly disillusioned with the nonprofit world.
I'm actually rather curious now. Let me know if you write, because I'd like to avoid the airmail fee from the UK if at all possible :)
https://wikimediaendowment.org/
I have asked for revenue and expenses information (many times in fact), so far without success. Feel free to join the ongoing discussion on Jimmy Wales' talk page on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Endowmen...
(The above link will decay once the discussion on Wales' talk page is archived. Here is a permalink: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_W... )
In any case, thank you for saving £2.20 of my own expenses and the IRS a letter asking about a non-existent 501(c)(3) ;)
Yes, in the Tides Form 990 nothing is broken down, so you can't see what the revenue and spending was. Jimmy Wales actually acknowledged that in this discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_W...
But that is all he said ... we're still waiting for proper disclosure of over 7 years of financial records ...
But don't take donations for a service and then use them for a charity: that's lying to donors.
- https://archive.org/donate/
- https://supporters.eff.org/donate/
- or some open source project you use maybe