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:
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 😁
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!
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 beer?
Free as in freedom, where everyone is welcome to access, contribute.
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
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.
Usually its the far right or tankies that hate wikipedia, it seems pretty neutral for the most part.
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.
I was hearing that Wikipedia makes more than enough money from things outside of donations
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.
Nope
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.
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?
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.
It literally answers both the main questions of the post you dumbass.
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.
I love Wikipedia and have donated a lot of time and money, but damn is their foundation wasteful
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
Every organisation appears wasteful. Whether it’s a non-profit, local club, or government organisation.
In the current day and age of misinformation I think donating is more important than ever. It doesn’t need to be much.
If Elon doesn’t like it then you know Wikipedia is good.
I simultaneously believe that Wikipedia is valuable and that it’s not clear that WMF they 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.
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.
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 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.
Also, make sure to get a copy from 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
Also donate to Kiwix
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?
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
I think it is a waste of time and money, honestly.
First off, I can’t ever be sure some of the time that what I’m reading on some Wikipedia articles, are infact as true as they are written. I have stumbled upon articles that weren’t fleshed out. People getting into editing wars about what information are on some articles and there is no universally accepted standard format to use on some things like band articles and listing their discographies and band history.
I just cannot in good will, donate to that kind of system.
