Business The next time Wikipedia asks for a donation, ignore it - The online encyclopaedia is not short on cash and funds are used to fund activists

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No one wants to be a bad person, and you probably felt pretty bad when you saw the heart-breaking appeal and just carried on clicking. Wikipedia is midway through a six-week fund-raising drive in Anglophone regions including the United States, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. The banner ads beg for “just £2”, which doesn’t sound like much, for all that free information. But before you start feeling too guilty, it’s worth considering some facts.

These banner ads have become very lucrative for the NGO that collects the money — the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco. Every year the NGO responsible for the fundraising adds tens of millions of dollars to its war chest. After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March. It created an endowment, managed by the Tides Foundation, which now holds well over $100 million of that. The Foundation wanted to hit that figure in ten years, but found it had sailed past it in just five. In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase. Yet the running costs of Wikipedia are a tiny fraction of the amount raised each year.

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Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap.

“WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,” acknowledged the Foundation’s then VP of engineering, Erik Möller, in 2013. He put the running costs at $10 million a year. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years. So where does the money go?

Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course. Wikipedia’s Administrators and maintainers, who tweak the entries and correct the perpetual vandalism, don’t get paid a penny — they’re all volunteers. What has happened is that the formerly ramshackle Foundation, which not so long ago consisted of fewer than a dozen staff run out of a back room, has professionalised itself. It has followed the now well-trodden NGO path to respectability and riches. The Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising.

The NGO world of which the Wikimedia Foundation is now part uncannily follows Marx’s prediction that the middle class would devise an infinite number of ways of enriching themselves, while ensuring the proletariat, the volunteers at the Wiki-face, don’t share the riches. Understandably, the relationship between the unruly Wikipedia workers and their bourgeoisie betters at the Foundation is strained. When the Wikimedia Foundation proposed changing its name to the Wikipedia Foundation, many of them decided it was a slur and the attempt faltered. For the first time this year, dissent is evident: many recently condemned the Foundation for continuing to run misleading and aggressive appeals.

Without many people realising, Wikipedia has become the world’s most aggressive online chugger. It’s okay to say no.

https://unherd.com/thepost/the-next-time-wikipedia-asks-for-a-donation-ignore-it/ (Archive)
 
> donating to Wikipedia, ever

Fucking lol.

You're supposed to be an encyclopedia, yet fucking Encyclopedia Dramatic has more honest information (this is sadly not much of an exaggeration). You ain't ever getting a cent from me you fuckin' propagandists.
 
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They've got $229 million of net assets without donor restrictions they can use for anything and everything they could want and basically zero liabilities. They also have 86.8 million of cash.

I think it's funny they no doubt paid KPMG a massive amount of money for a small NFP audit. The entire statement is only 18 pages long. Not very prudent use of contributed funds.
 
Remember when people were at war with career wikipedia editors that kept trying to change Garfield's gender to female or nonbinary? Remember how when the fucking Ugandan Knuckles thing happened they fucking changed Knuckles' wikipedia page to have a whole textwall chunk about how the meme was racist? I remember both of those and it's still funny to me a few years after the fact.
Mods are so fucking ridiculously anal and power-hungry that Every time I've seen a friend actually add something to a wikipedia article thats missing from it some editor has gone in and redacts it once it catches their eye. I'm not talking shitpost edits, I'm talking factual small but important bits of info like the fact "George Clinton and the Goombas" was an alias thing for George Clinton's group when doing the cover of walk the dinosaur for the Mario Bros. movie. You are probably more likely to have a shitpost edit be treated as serious by mods if it includes a claim about someone being gay or trans or something being racist than leaving a serious bit of helpful info. I never bothered editing anything even back before they went deep into servants of the eternal current year.

This article writer apperently hates them because they're "middle class". I didn't know a massively profitable Tech company counted as middle class!
 
I'm not giving a penny to an organization that declares "consensus is more important than countervailing evidence".
Wikipedia has a reputation of teachers banning it on research papers. Stop and think about why that is.

Damn I wish I could find the original quote from Wikipedia or Wales or whoever. It was something like "GamerGate has a reputation of harassing women. Stop and think about why that is."
 
Wikipedia has become a haven for faggots, it is lost.

No one thought to protect a wiki page from men who cut their dicks off cause no one thought men who cut their dicks off were ever going to be a threat and not more than a joke.

Now a main source of information that people rely on is edited, changed, and ran by faggots.

This why I tell everyone don't give them a cent, put your money anywhere else and it will be used better.
 
Mods are so fucking ridiculously anal and power-hungry that Every time I've seen a friend actually add something to a wikipedia article thats missing from it some editor has gone in and redacts it once it catches their eye.

This article writer apperently hates them because they're "middle class". I didn't know a massively profitable Tech company counted as middle class!
In times past I used to work on Wikipedia articles, I liked sharing knowledge with people around the world and contributing to a useful project. Stopped around 2011 or so when I had to fight a god damned battle to fix a flat-out incorrect statement. It wasn't even something controversial, it had to do with the way Italy was administered under the Roman Empire. I guess whoever didn't like being told they were wrong.

I'll still fix typos and poor grammar when I see them, however. I believe in the idea of Wikipedia, it just desperately needs to be reformed and course-corrected.
 
It takes awhile before people go through the denial stage of realizing the charity they've been donating to was a scam all along,
Story time, I once knew a lesbian who worked for some "charity" panhandling on the streets.

Me: Oh cool, you have the power to write receipts and give people tax write-offs?
Lesbian: Actually no, we don't qualify for that.
Me: :thunkful:

Lesbian, months later: I QUIT This place has inhumane quotas and shit tier working conditions and they abuse the LGBT's sense of duty to their community to milk them for all they're worth, no sane person would do this job for the compensation alone!

Same Lesbian: But the mission is still important and the charity is doing good work.

This why I tell everyone don't give them a cent, put your money anywhere else and it will be used better.
Seriously. Feed the penny to a drooling retard and at least someone out there will get a moment of schadenfreude out of it.

It wasn't even something controversial, it had to do with the way Italy was administered under the Roman Empire. I guess whoever didn't like being told they were wrong.
I remember once reading a tale of how it was impossible to edit Wikipedia to say the portmanteau "Buddy" + "Android" = "Buddyroid" (as opposed to "Buddyloid") because some autist was camping the article. When the autist was finally banned for other reasons, people thought they could finally edit that L into an R, but they soon found themselves banned by the autist's friends for "baiting the dragon".

Wikipedia nobility get really overinvested in the tiniest changes.
 
One thing I found interesting in their statement of functional expenses is that they pay donation processing fees equal to about 4% of contributions. That seems very high to me and cost them over $6m. Is money being wired or something? Not sure if they disclosed it in the notes.

Only $0.72 of each dollar is allocated to program expenses (i.e. running Wikipedia). That's on the low end for a NFP. It's not terrible but it's also not very efficient. I think those fundraising costs drag it down a ton, management and general looks reasonable.
 
KF is the better Wikipedia.

Information doesn't get censored, KF cares about sources and everybody can contribute. And you can say niggerfaggot here.
Ho Ho Holocaust.

Ironically, you're saying that in a registration-walled quarantine subforum, which is the closest we're getting to censored information on site. I think there's also a prohibition on anime loli vampires, but that doesn't count as information.

We're better than Wikipedia but we aren't perfect. Appearently some guy called Atlantid managed to get their thread deleted somehow. And to read everything you need to register, but registration is frequently disabled.
 
I remember once reading a tale of how it was impossible to edit Wikipedia to say the portmanteau "Buddy" + "Android" = "Buddyroid" (as opposed to "Buddyloid") because some autist was camping the article. When the autist was finally banned for other reasons, people thought they could finally edit that L into an R, but they soon found themselves banned by the autist's friends for "baiting the dragon".
Sounds like Ryulong, I remember him being obsessed with the Japanese R to L mixup.
 
Wikipedia has a reputation of teachers banning it on research papers. Stop and think about why that is.

Damn I wish I could find the original quote from Wikipedia or Wales or whoever. It was something like "GamerGate has a reputation of harassing women. Stop and think about why that is."

If I ever tried to cite it as a valid source in any historical documentation I'd get laughed at by a tutor, the only thing they came close to allowing is Wikimedia commons use of photographs etc because it was a photograph or scan of a document.

This why I tell everyone don't give them a cent, put your money anywhere else and it will be used better.

Encyclopedia Britanica is online and free for personal use and is fact checked.

In times past I used to work on Wikipedia articles, I liked sharing knowledge with people around the world and contributing to a useful project. Stopped around 2011 or so when I had to fight a god damned battle to fix a flat-out incorrect statement. It wasn't even something controversial, it had to do with the way Italy was administered under the Roman Empire. I guess whoever didn't like being told they were wrong.

I'll still fix typos and poor grammar when I see them, however. I believe in the idea of Wikipedia, it just desperately needs to be reformed and course-corrected.

I love the idea of the sum total of human knowledge on every topic known to man made freely available but wikipedia isn't the group to do it, maybe once but the editorialising is now so embedded into the moderation culture and people who are in no way shape or form educated formally or informally on a subject treating articals as their own personal feifdoms it's ruined it.

Lesbian, months later: I QUIT This place has inhumane quotas and shit tier working conditions and they abuse the LGBT's sense of duty to their community to milk them for all they're worth, no sane person would do this job for the compensation alone!

In the UK we have a lot of Charity donation collectors that work door to door, I've long advised people to ask if they are directly volunteering for the charity they are collecting funds for and if they are not to not donate, companies who hire professional "chuggers" often work on stupidly high margins i.e. you sign up to give a Charity £10 a month only about £4.50 ends up going to them the rest goes to the collections company who then donate the rest to them.

One thing I found interesting in their statement of functional expenses is that they pay donation processing fees equal to about 4% of contributions. That seems very high to me and cost them over $6m. Is money being wired or something? Not sure if they disclosed it in the notes.

Only $0.72 of each dollar is allocated to program expenses (i.e. running Wikipedia). That's on the low end for a NFP. It's not terrible but it's also not very efficient. I think those fundraising costs drag it down a ton, management and general looks reasonable.

Even if that was a legitimate % of a card transaction fee that's still way to high, banks have special rates for organisations like wikipedia even if that includes a international card transaction fee that's way way wayyyyyyyyyyy too high, my local region wide Animal Welfare Society publishes a break down and I think they pay 1.2% in banking fee's and they use a local credit union type org for there banking needs and I think most of that fee is stuff they can't get away from like Visa / Mastercard transaction fees they need for card processor access and that's a £2m turn over.
 
Sounds like Ryulong, I remember him being obsessed with the Japanese R to L mixup.
Seems likely, it would make sense with the baiting the dragon thing. His name is basically dragon dragon.

E: Yup definitely him, Buddyroid is a term from a Toku show.

Even if that was a legitimate % of a card transaction fee that's still way to high, banks have special rates for organisations like wikipedia even if that includes a international card transaction fee that's way way wayyyyyyyyyyy to high, my local region wide Animal Welfare Society publishes a break down and I think they pay 1.2% in banking fee's and they use a local credit union type org for there banking needs and I think most of that fee is stuff they can't get away from like Visa / Mastercard transaction fees they need for card processor access and that's a £2m turn over.
Do you think they can make the fees stack somehow? Like if they launder it through a few layers of handling before it goes to some special offshore bank account.
 
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Do you think they can make the fees stack somehow? Like if they launder it through a few layers of handling before it goes to some special offshore bank account.

Anything's possible but I doubt it, if you look at other big Charity / Non Profits they pay there exec's a staggeringly high salary for a minimal amount of work and handing out well paid non jobs to friends and family and also giving support contract work to companies they own for 3 or 4 times the normal market rate (the Red Cross is a perfect example of this, and Gretta / Trans Life Line was trying this but got caught).

One thing I am wondering is why they are paying so much in banking fee's, some of the Wikipedia foundation directors could work for there banking service partners or the banking fee's cover some absurd custom service (I doubt that but possible) I mean look at this - https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

Paypal is the worlds number 1 payment processor, they charge 1.2% plus a fixed fee for domestic transactions, 1.3% for EAA and 1.99% for non EEA + a non domestic currency conversion rate 4% is way to high and the Wikipedia org WILL have a lower rate just from volume, even if they didn't negotiate a special rate and that's something they will have done.

There are other fee's that could be applied, but the number is still really really high.
 
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