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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
Also: https://wiki.gg
Use adblockers?
I do, but certain Android browsers don’t support plugins. I have to use a specific browser for compatibility reasons with some work shit (I do on-call stuff). I need that to just work, so I can’t use, say, Firefox for Android. I use multiple browsers on computers, but I just can’t be bothered on my phone. That leaves me with DNS-based ad blockers. Those work almost as well, but only when I’m home or VPNed home. I don’t want to use a hosted service for privacy reasons, and I don’t want to expose a DNS server on the internet. This means that when I can’t VPN or I forget to, I get fandom rage. I’m sure I could do something to address this, but I have bigger fish to fry right now. The nice ad-free fandom frontend sounds like a great compromise to me.
All I can say is don’t access fandom websites on your work phone
Time to see if this comes across properly without escaping:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Impressive
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.
I do give in small streams and I do large annual contributions. I’m entirely not opposed to sharing.
I prefer to keep the small donations to individuals who also prefer a reliable stream of goodwill. Larger organizations also prefer reliable streams, but they also receive millions in donations overall, usually with significant large donors.
If you look long enough, you’ll find enough material to not want to contribute to Wikimedia. If your contribution was only a drop in the pool to begin with, maybe this is one of the expenses that is not for you to carry.
Thanks man. I would much rather give my time than my money for OSS projects, but I have a lot to learn and do not match up the quality of contributions needed in said projects. I’ll do what I can.
You can contribute by doing code reviews on PRs. Even if your contribution is only to ask “What does this do?” it can help locate places where code isn’t easily readable.
Obviously use your judgment, but code review commenting is a nice way to get up to speed on a project, improve your own coding skills, and is valuable to the project too.
I had an apprenticeship once at a dev shop where everybody was leagues above me. As basically the lowest-level coder both in status and in skill, I was surprised to find out my “curriculum” included doing code reviews on very senior people’s code.
Now I swear by the practice. It’s kinda like anyone can be a therapist if they know how to listen. Anyone can provide value with code review if they keep their eyes open and communicate honestly.
I fully agree with not limiting themselves financially whether it’s 1,10,100 etc. Their aim is to bring knowledge in all languages to even the poorest parts of the world. If some Lemmy user’s bank account is one of the poorest parts of the world right now, lol…I mean only “you” know how much money you can stand to give while still living comfortably and being entertained in life.
I have to take small disagreement with the money contribution not making a difference though. It’s the flip side of the same coin that tells people it’s find if they don’t vote cause their one vote won’t make a difference. The hole in the argument is that we don’t vote alone, and we don’t donate alone. The specific attitude “my vote won’t make a difference” actually costs millions of votes every year, just like “my $20 won’t make a difference” could cause millions of dollars of losses.
But anyway, separate argument from the situation here as our Lemmiford here sounds like they’re in saving mode till things look up.
I get that, I really do, and I honestly believe you have exactly the right idea.
But on the other hand, you have to realize that not all of the money purely goes to enabling knowledge sharing with Wikimedia. This is not an election, it’s a company, non-profit or for-profit doesn’t really matter. There are still people paying off business expenses from your donations.
I fully understand the necessity of this, but you might just feel better if your $5 literally bought someone a meal or if it paid for a fraction of a business flight to promote Wikimedia.
Totally agree, the right to choose how best to spend your own charitable donations isn’t something I’d ever infringe on.
How do you see the Wikimedia Foundation’s budget?
https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goes/ might be a good starting point.
https://www.wikimedia.de/2022/en/finances/ has some clear numbers up front, but I’m not sure if these only relate to Germany. I haven’t been following the sources recently.
AFAIK they tend to overdramatize their lack of money.
No, they don’t.
As of December 31, 2023, [Wikimedia has] annual revenues of $180.2 million, […] net assets of $255 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021.
Can I get a tl;dr? Revenue is meaningless without subtracting costs.
Thanks
Wikipedia makes most of its money from donations, with some money coming from other sources like commercial API access. It consistently raises more money than it spends and has been building an endowment. However, that income mainly comes from the fundraising drives.
Wikipedia has an endowment, but it isn’t enough to run the website for more than a few years.
In terms of expenses, the largest expense is in having staff to run the various websites and foundation. Charity auditors rank the foundation highly on expenses, so the foundation is likely not overpaying staff.
Wikipedia needs donations to survive, but it isn’t struggling. If you feel like you have better things to donate to, it is probably ok for now.
They seem to give a lot of cash away to other organisations https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579776106034757633.html (Their response is here for fairness.)
Whatever you think of the tertiary organisations, it seems like you’re better off donating directly to a cause that needs it, rather than funding a bunch of middle managers to give it to someone else.
And how about archive.org ?
I think they need my help
Once the lawsuit about illegally lending out books is completely settled, I may consider donating again if they focus on their core activity, namely archiving of websites.
I want to support their archiving activities, not their misplaced piracy.
I support their appropriately-placed piracy, though!
Boot licker
Random House won’t call you back mate.
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.
As far as i know yeah without the donations they don’t exist
No
They rely on donations, that part is correct. Are they in constant financial need so they are forced to ask users so often to donate? No, they are not.
Also keep in mind that while the server and developing costs of Wikipedia are one area of spending, Wikimedia spends money on a host of projects. Some of them you would probably consider more important than others.
Yeah I need to look at the list and check if there’s something important for me in there
Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.
I need to look up what else they sponsor in case there’s something important for me there
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.
As far as I know, I don’t know.
Socrates would be proud.
They set themselves up that way. They do so saying that if they were properly sponsored, the “sponsors” could influence their bias, as if they didn’t succumb anyways.
