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Wikipedia Exceeds Fundraising Target, But Continues Asking For More Money (theregister.co.uk)
Reader Andreas Kolbe writes: The fundraising banners on Wikipedia this year are so effective that halfway through its December fundraising campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation has already exceeded its $25 million donations target for the entire month, reports The Register. A few weeks ago, Jimmy Wales promised that the Wikimedia Foundation would "stop the fundraiser if enough money were raised in shorter than the planned time". But there's no sign of the Foundation doing that. When asked about this more recently, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson remained non-committal on ending the campaign early. The most recent audited accounts of the Wikimedia Foundation showed net assets of $92 million and revenue of $82 million. None of this money, incidentally, pays for writing or checking Wikipedia content – that's the job of unpaid volunteers – and only $2 million are spent on internet hosting every year.
It isn't as if the people who create anything of value, i.e. the article writers, are paid. Can't Jimmy Wales pay for his own three martini lunches?
A professional admin team would largely eliminate many of the problems Wikipedia has with its various cabals.
is to have a buffer, and not live "paycheck to paycheck" so to speak. I don't understand why people find it so hard to understand.
For the amount of good that this foundation does for the public, making information and truth more accessible, and policing the content in an open and rigorous way, I say let them collect as much donations as people willingly donate. It's hard enough to get people to donate -- who would refuse if the donations kept coming in.
Sure, be transparent and honest about when you've exceeded the goal for the month (or set the goal higher), but frankly, I don't understand why you would criticize when one of the most valuable services on the internet today attempts to build more of a financial cushion for itself (and not through lying or deception or serving up users / others' content for cash, how refreshing).
Learn to understand who are your friends and who are your enemies in this world, people.
Salaries doing what? Engineers sure, but where is the rest of that going.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
. . . . .where, if you're lucky, 10-15% of proceeds actually go to the cause. . . .
"We already make millions auctioning off your default search engine, can you please donate some money?"
Hiring fundraisers... IIRC the person in charge was making 300-400k
For the most part yes. The WMF stack isn't all that complex.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Wikipedia's fundraising activities seem to get more obnoxious every year. This year I got a nasty-gram from "Jimmy Wales" asking why I haven't given my annual donation yet.
I already did, dumb ass, but I submitted it from a different e-mail address this year. But, hey... if you're going to give me an attitude about it, I certainly won't bother donating next year.
Thanks for citing their marketing material. Every nonprofit-for-profit has "reasons" why they need all the money the solicit. But you need to peek behind the curtain to see if "reasons" are supported by actual data. It isn't hard.
We can look at the exploding spending at Wikimedia.
And there are very serious questions about all that money being rushed out the door, who it is going to and why. There is a high level of self-dealing in passing out grants, and creating and filling the ballooning list of paid positions. It is very lucrative to be a "friend-of-Jimmy".
A glance at the financials shows that "building an endowment" is NOT the reason for the incessant fund-raising. First, the endowment was only launched this year , and their stated plan is to use only 10-20% of their fundraising revenue for that endowment. Currently they seem to be at the low end of that number (or below it) but we will need to see a report on 2016 to see the actual break-out. The goal of the endowment is to reach $100 million, but in their last annual foundation report (a 28 page advertising pamphlet with only one page of actual information) they state having $78 million in net assets as of 18 months ago, which is an increase of $25 million from the previous year report (almost all of it unrestricted).
If we assume that the net assets are only accumulating at the same rate as from June 2014 to June 2015 (by all data it is probably higher, much higher), then right now they have about $115 million in assets, more than enough to fully fund their foundation with soliciting a penny (they received at least $6 million in designated donations to the foundation when they set it up, so they no more than $94 million to make up to reach their stated goal.
So no. The foundation has nothing to do with their aggressive, relentless fund-raising.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
These comments are so full of ignorance it's not even funny—I thought I had wandered into /r/the_donald or something. The few sensible people posting have pointed out that there seems to be an extreme lack of transparency, and no one is quite sure where all the money is going. This is a fair point and needs to be addressed by the Wikimedia Foundation. This does *not* automatically mean that they are somehow wasting this money, giving its employees lavish salaries, or anything of the sort. It means we do not know. No amount of ridiculous theorising will change that. We need to be able to trust our non-profit organizations in general, and such a great, important organization like Wikimedia in particular. Just because we don't know something doesn't make them this evil villain. If we uncover some impropriety, *then* we can demonize them. Until then, I'm making a (small) donation and also demanding more transparency. I encourage others to do the same.