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.

Comments

I am not going to complain

[supernova87a]

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.

Re:I am not going to complain

[LunaticTippy]

Money is like manure, you have to spread it around to do any good.

What a strange expression. Money is like manure, you need to pile it all up in a big heap and leave it there for about a year, turning it occasionally with a pitchfork before you can add it to your soil. Add about 1-2 inches of this aged money and work it into the soil to increase yields.

If you add fresh money, generally referred to as "hot money" you can burn the roots of your plants because it contains too much immediately released nitrogen.

Re:I am not going to complain

[Anonymous Coward]

How about setting up an endowment, then never running fund-raising campaigns again?

Re: Why does anyone donate to Wikipedia?

[joao.cordeiro]

If we are to agree that wikipedia is usefull then we can ask our selfs why?
1 - its free
2 - works well
3 - info there has quality
4 - its huge

Do you realy think you can have a software that handles the bilions on views, edits, comments, in less then a sec, and never trows a error at you, just with good will and servers?
No!!!
You need a team of administradors, looking at logs of errors debuging the system, applying security patches, blocking hackers.
You need a team of developers fixing bugs, upgrading libs, patching security holes, adding features.
You need dev hardware and test hardware and a office for that team.
Then there are all those lawsuits, you need a team to deal with all the law crap trown at them.
And when all that is paid, you start thinking about next year, when ppl dont donate that much.

It works realy well and provides a great service, why the F are you complaing about!!!!