What's the status on Wikipedia donations?
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:
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Remember that there is a lot of anti-Wikipedia propaganda going around these days. Most "outrage" against Wikipedia is created and pushed artificially.
It’s just that one dude here
Ia it the.dude that's downvoting everything here?
In the current day and age of misinformation I think donating is more important than ever. It doesn't need to be much.
Reddit users and now lemmy users seem to have a riotous distaste for non-profits generally.
Wikipedia is one of the last, good parts of the internet, and it's under increasing threat.
Nope
Wikimedia the tool is great, the foundation behind it, not so much
mind giving us some reasons for this position? not a critique, genuinely curious
Thanks for asking! The subject has been coming up for quite some time. I might edit this comment with more sources later on, because I’ve learned about this a few years ago and don’t keep a full list of my sources on me.
I have a few reasons for this:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#RfC_on_the_banners_for_the_December_2022_fundraising_campaign
This comment is still being modified, please wait 👷
TYVM
Wikipedia is being actively attacked by fascists who dont want it to exist or be well maintained. More important than ever. Criticism can be safely ignored.
"Fascists criticize Wikipedia, therefore all criticism is done by fascists"
I criticize them and I do not share the ideas you’re saying I do.
No I'm saying even if it's imperfect–they really don't want it to exist, so it's probably important that it does.
Obviously, preserving Wikipedia is important. Donating is not the way to do it though
If Elon doesn’t like it then you know Wikipedia is good.
I’ve increased the amount I donate since the campaign to discredit them has been in effect.
Maybe they aren’t perfect, but I don’t like the idea of a world without such a wonderful resource being freely available to everyone no matter their background or financial status.
I used it a lot as a student but couldn’t afford to donate then. I don’t use it directly a lot these days, but I’m sure indirectly it contributes to articles I read, & I can afford to donate now, so I try to pay it back & some.
Information is power, & those in/with power seem to currently be trying their best to bring everyone else down. Any small thing I can do to help prevent that is a win in my book.
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.
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.
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.
Also, make sure to get a copy from Kiwix:
https://library.kiwix.org/
Also donate to Kiwix
Ideally one pre-LLM. They have a snapshot from 2022.
I noticed an initial bump in LLM-generated text when ChatGPT first came out, but I think Wikipedia is starting to get a better handle on counteracting it. Better than a lot of other places on the internet, that’s for sure
I give small monthly donations to three things:
Always fund Wikipedia if you have the ability to
It may not need a donation at any given time, but given how volatile things are in the USA right now, there's every chance they might find themselves needing to suddenly spend a lot on lawyers
It's arguably one of the most important resources we have as humanity. It's imperative we protect it.
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 wonder if I could get my employer to match donations, be it Wikipedia or other projects or foss, with or without work use 🤔
It's good to see Fediverse people actually supporting paying for something. Sometimes I think they want everything for free.
I don't think people here mind paying for stuff I think it's more that enshittification and subscription based business models should not be supported.
Exactly. We don't just flatly refuse to spend money on anything. We expect a certain level of service and value for money. Wikipedia, though not perfect, is probably one of the most useful tools on the internet.
There are multiple factions. Some of us are happy to pay the people who produce the stuff we enjoy.
It's not that I want everything for free, it's that I want money to no longer be a factor in life. Like in The Orville.
(Star Trek too, I assume, but I'm not a Trekkie so I can't confirm whether or not money exists in that universe.)
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.
If the only non-profit you care about is the Wikimedia Foundation, then yeah donate.
But otherwise, go donate to other non-profits as Wikimedia is the least needy of the foundations (they are one of the most "well off" of the non-profits in the world afterall
Internet Archive definitely needs money
I love Wikipedia and have donated a lot of time and money, but damn is their foundation wasteful
Every organisation appears wasteful. Whether it's a non-profit, local club, or government organisation.
Source?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
This fails to convey how painfully tedious the communication is between the foundation and the community. At this point it feels like the tension between high executives and an union, with the executives having the deep conviction that they are good and that the union will magically recognize it, if only they could perpetually delay every one of their demands.
The tension has decreased a ton with the CEO-ship of Iskander, with many long-requested features being delivered
Do you use it?
Donate. I donate $5/mo. Gonna bump it up to $10/month soon.
Usually its the far right or tankies that hate wikipedia, it seems pretty neutral for the most part.
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.
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.
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!
Nope
I'm also curious about this. If there are any transparency reports, I'd love to read through that.
The Wikimedia Foundation are trying to implement some AI solutions (for helping humans, not write articles/information), which is likely quite costly, unless someone donates it. However, I imagine many others' scrapers for AI are constantly demanding a lot from the Wikipedia servers since some years ago, probably resulting in increased costs. Hopefully the AI builders use a local copy of the torrent instead, but I fear they don't...
I'm still happily donating though, as I think the Wikipedia Foundation are still doing a solid job, despite me not always agreeing with their decisions.
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?
It literally answers both the main questions of the post you dumbass.
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.
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)
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!
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
I'm not giving money to Wikipedia anymore until they move out of the United States personally.
There is the concern of the us government getting your information through donations.
That is one of the reasons. The other reason for me is, Wikipedia's stated values are incompatible with staying in the US. So as long as they're there, they don't meet my expectations.
Yeah I wonder why they don't go anywhere else, as a non-profit, what incentives do they have to stay in the US?
I was giving Wikipedia 5 bux occasionally and stopped.
I decided the same for archive.org. I'm amazed they got an extension at all under the Orange but I seriously doubt they're long for this world and it's probably not realistic they even could move unlike Wikipedia.
I don't know if they "needed" donations in the past, but the America right wing fascists have just taken aim at it. So they are going to need money to defend themselves.
If the fachos and the tankies hate it, it's a good sign 😁
Next time you think about donating to a foundation, look at their CEO‘s salary, then think again.
513k seems pretty low compared to most private sector CEOs
That sort of remuneration isn’t compatible with their yearly donation pleadings… and that’s not even looking into the benevolent work of all authors which actually drives the value of that supposedly non profit. Other private sector CEO at least aren’t pretending…
If you don’t have good leadership then it doesn’t matter what the fundraisers do. It seems like the metric to look at here should be the average and median 501(c)3 CEO total compensation for similarly sized orgs and for whatever city they are headquartered in
How would you assess its size given that the bulk of the work is crowdsourced ? As for the city that’s awfully arbitrary… especially in these times where remote working is available and talents can be sourced from anywhere. Maybe it’s different in American companies but in Europe the leadership is generally shared across a number of executives. Or even broader. All in all I find it quite funny too see all the shielding when discussing Wikipedia’s ceo when any other ceo related discussion would have them hanged by popular demand.
No. The WMF does not work on Wikipedia’s content. They focus on fundraising, hosting, software, legal, and the rare cross-wiki initiative.
And pretty high compared to what most donors have.
WhAtAbOuT!
Sorry, what is the actual thinking here? Anyone who earns more than you shouldn't exist?
Without a highly paid CEO, wikipedia wouldn't exist.
Without donations, wikipedia wouldn't exist.
Therefore, if you want wikipedia to exist, you should donate.
My argument is that nobody needs 500k to do their job right and there is no justification for paying a manager five to ten times as much as an engineer, especially not on donation money.
I‘d rather give to a smaller project where the money actually ends up with the people who do most of the work.
Then go do that and stop loudly aligning with fascist goals of tearing down the last good part of the internet, weirdo
Criticizing top-down organizations where money flows up toward the least useful people being equated to fascism is fucking wild, bro. That's like the most standard left take.
Tearing down Wikipedia is in direct alignment with Fascists’s stated goals, I’m not equating anything.
If you are against Wikipedia you’re with Trump and Elon.
Make good choices
No one in this comment section is against Wikipedia. You're making that shit up. We're saying they don't need your money, they can trim the fat off the top. They're also one of the most well funded orgs in the world. It doesn't take that much to host wikipedia.
If you think “hosting” is what it takes to run Wikipedia, we’re done here. Best of luck to you
Oh yeah, the guy who fights for fair wages, universal basic income, free healthcare and equal rights for everyone criticizes that your favorite „non-profit“ organization looks more and more like a for-profit corporation every year and comes begging while wearing a gold watch. He must be a fascist.
As an editor, based on the difference she made in community–WMF dynamics, I would say that Iskander is really useful.
The justification is, the market is competitive. If you want someone with the right skills, you need to provide them similar benefits to what they could receive elsewhere.
Suppose you only paid CEO's and other management the same rate as engineers. Do you think wikipedia's performance would be equal to what it presently is ?
I think the thinking is that half a million is a disgusting amount for anyone to earn annually and I tend to agree with that.
For perspective, 500k is effectively the same as zero compared to what the likes of Musk, Bezos and Ellison make from their assets.
You and this CEO are basically equivalent in wealth to those guys.
You can take issue with the remuneration here, sure, but this person doesn't have anything close to the economy breaking amount of wealth held by the actually wealthy
They are the ones we should be focusing our energy on.
Be angry at wealth, not income. That's what's fucking everything up right now.
I can think that both are gross beyond a certain point.
Does she really need the donations I've been giving to top her up to that level? Or is 300K more than enough for anyone? It would certainly be more palatable to those giving donations.
I think that utterly ridiculous wages at C level generally have become normalised and the amount of people in this thread defending a half a million salary is clear evidence of that to me.
Both can be gross sure, but even the biggest CEO income is not causing systemic economic problems because it's generally taxed somewhat properly and is ultimately tied to some amount of time and effort being spent (however little)
Wealth? Basically not taxed at all. Requires zero time and effort to make income.
What do people who make millions a year from assets do with that money?
Buy more assets, beyond a point everything they could possibly have as a living expense is covered.
What does someone with a lot of money do when bidding against people with less for an asset?
Drive the price up
This is why houses are expensive and will keep getting more so
This is why food is expensive and will keep getting more so
This is why energy is expensive and will keep getting more so
This is why everything is expensive and will keep getting more so
What happens then? Housing, food and energy is increasing something the non wealthy can afford.
Keep it up and the 99.9% won't be able own a thing and will ultimately have no power to change that.
Concentrated wealth is an existential issue
Oh I agree that gross levels of wealth are the bigger problem by a country mile. We're in total agreement there.
People earning half a million a year are still raking in money from earned wealth from excess money. I suppose my objections are twofold; that it's a donations based organisation and that wages just shouldn't be that high (and I grant you hers are at the lower level of many large companies C level packages).
If someone offered you half a million a year you'd take it.
If other people with similar skills, experience, and attributes to yours were making more than you, you would want more.
It's not really that much money. Your local family doctor can make that much. Surgeons and medical specialists certainly can.
That's super tame, though. A competent CEO is essential to an organization as important and as hated by powerful people as Wikipedia, and those cost a a pretty penny.
You gotta remember this is a massive website that doesn’t run on donations alone. It needs qualified people that have experience with websites of this scale.
Those people aren’t cheap.
Then pay the people who actually keep the website running. I bet they don’t earn half a million per year.
Who hires those people? Who gives them direction? CEOs don’t do nothing. They are overpaid in for profit companies, but this is probably what they should be making.
If you believe that CEO are doing that in vacuum you’re being very naive. They are for sure taking decisions but they take them most of the time based on shareholders constraints, external guidance or internal influences.
They don't pay the people who do the actual work anything, though..
Did you think they run their servers using volunteers?
No I don't but I think the articles are slightly more important, yet the writers get nothing.
The articles don't get written without the servers running, and the writers are not forced to write them. Wikipedia is a free service to share information, so writers are using it as a service, not as an employee. They could have easily not used wikipedia.
Saying they should be paid is like saying developers should be paid for sharing their code on Github. What you actually want is to follow the FOSS model and donate to the Wikipedia writers directly, not expect the foundation to pay people who use their service for free.
I can download wikipedia to a usb drive and distribute via torrenting. The content is objectively more valuable than the website.
Where did that download come from? Who compiled all those written information into something that can be downloaded by you?
Try making a compilation of information directly through torrents from scratch and tell me how far you get with that. I'm sure you'll find that most people do not want to go through that hassle.
You're severely underestimating the value of making it easy to compile the information in the first place. And again, those information do not need to be compiled to wikipedia by the writers. They do so because of the value provided by the service.
The question is, do you think the writers will get paid any better by you sharing their work through torrents than through wikipedia? I don't think so. If you actually cared about this, go and donate to the writers instead of devaluing the contribution of wikipedia in compiling these information.
Have you a nice dark mode plugin going on that I should have?
Dark Reader!
It's great. In some rare cases it breaks a website though, then you need to deactivate it.
Nice one. Will check it out.
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 freedom, where everyone is welcome to access, contribute.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#Comment_by_Selena_Deckelmann,_Wikimedia_Foundation
I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that's marketing, not politics.