Every now and then I’ll get an email from someone higher up in Wikipedia asking for a donation. I don’t really mind a tenner but I don’t know if it pads the pockets of corporate management or actual contributors. Also, are they really short of money or is this tugging at emotional strings a play at something else? I wish Wikipedia survives but there’s a lot of projects I need to donate to and I have a budget.
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I’ve been a funding member of the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade. I have looked at their finances several times before and during financing them.
As with a lot of similar non-profits, a considerable amount of donations does not go into “running the servers”. You have to judge this by yourself, but they don’t embezzle any money and there is a reasonable bottom line. Wikipedia continuously helps tons of people, and the people who run the operation enable that.
You can download a full dump of Wikipedia any day. Compared to other lying companies, they have been true on their promises for some time.
Of all the $1 I could spend in a year, the one I give to Wikipedia is probably the least wrong invested, and that $1 actually already makes a difference
It definitely makes a difference, and putting money into Wikipedia is a great use of funds. The reason I asked the question is because I’m not well off, but I still like to donate to projects from time to time. This means I have a limited (and strict budget), and was wondering if they need my tenner badly enough to send marketing emails over it. Because I’d like to donate to people who actually really need the money, and Wikipedia will do just fine for some time without my money going to them.
I’m not well off
Do NOT donate. Believe in yourself. Believe you will one day be well off. At that point in time feel free to pay your “backlog” of payments. Write down todays date somewhere and “start a tab”.
Wikipedia will not help you when you need it most. Take care of yourself first… then donate.
Never donate if you don’t have the money. You can put a imaginary bill in an imaginary jar and turn those imaginary bills in real ones once you get better off.
Thanks for caring but care for yourself first.
Makes sense. If you’re contributing less than $1000 monthly to anything, you’re not making a difference. If you want dedicated people to be on the receiving end, who also do a great job, every single person will cost thousands each month. Wikimedia is literally spending millions each year.
Honestly, don’t try to hunt for the “best” spot to contribute your exact amount of spare money to, with the hope of having the largest possible impact. It won’t happen. Treat a good friend to some food instead.
If you really feel like you already got some value out of a service in the past, give what you can, without limiting yourself financially in the process. If you feel like you don’t have the $1 to spend for Wikipedia, don’t spend it. Don’t guilt trip yourself into donations ever. Your donation today will not prevent a service from turning into shit tomorrow. Pay for what you got
I feel that keeping small streams of charity flowing have helped me see abundance in my life.
I’m not financially rich but I’m pretty happy. And I mean I struggle. Bills often late. But a couple bucks a month is worth it to me for the psychological benefit.
How do you see the Wikimedia Foundation’s budget?
No, it doesn’t.
The Wikimedia projects are made by volunteers, almost none of the money goes to actually making the content. Some of it does go into keeping the servers running or into software development.
And some of it goes into expanding an ever-increasing bureaucracy, which is tasked among other things with enforcing intransparent “global bans” or lighter sanctions against contributors the WMF doesn’t like (opinions of the editing community don’t matter at all on these). If they had less money, perhaps they would lay off some of their trust and safety team and not catch some people who are making useful contributions by evading global bans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
There are so many more worthy free knowledge organizations to donate to: OpenStreetMap, FOSS projects (e.g. Software in the Public Interest), even Miraheze.
Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/
I think this is the latest one available.
As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.
On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.
I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.
I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.
If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.
A bit of an aside, but breezewiki.com is a great open sourced way to get away from this (their internal search doesn’t always work, but a search engine search for fandom name + breezewiki should do it)
You’re an absolute hero. I’m easily irritated by ads, and fandom has driven me to genuine rage a couple of times when I’m on mobile and only have DNS-based adblocking some of the time. It’s a wiki, for Christ’s sake, so why does it need so, so many ads‽ It’s just static content most of the time!
edit: to provide more context, this is a frontend for fandom wikis that strips out the bullshit.
Happy to help! The fandom pages are absolute garbage, breezewiki really is a godsend.
I found out about it on here: https://libredirect.github.io/, I’m not sure how up to date it is, but there are definitely some other useful links to explore
I hate fandom so much. Their site is very annoying on mobile.
If you want to hate them more, there were cases of wikis moving off the site and fandom just deciding to restore the content after the maintainers deleted it, claiming everything written on the site is their property. Absolute shithole and I refuse to use it if there are alternatives.
I think NATOpedia gets sufficient funding from NGOs, endowments, and rich people tax breaks.
After reading the first few paragraphs, I can understand why that site was deprecated by Wikipedia as a source. It’s a very opinionated article.
And of course none of the overt state propaganda they do allow is ‘opinionated’ because it’s ‘objective’ 🤡
Something can be objectively correct yet still presented in an opinionated manner.
No
I don’t think they are running inefficiently. I do think they have more than enough money to keep themselves going for many years to come. Also, the lack of inclusiveness in the editing is the reason I don’t donate. Nothing like making an article contribution only to have it quickly reverted by some control freak editor from the inner circle. Wikipedia is not actually what it claims to be. It’s slightly more open than a real encyclopedia, but not much.
no, they are critical to the US propaganda network which means they’ll get funding if they actually ever need it. same w/ stuff like falun gong media or anarchist magazines (cointelpro).
