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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.
So the internet's cesspit of ill researched unfounded disinformation is pissed that one of the most successful projects of the last decade in advancing human knowledge has a healthy monetary buffer?
I sense jealousy.
But fair play to The Register, I frankly thought it was dead already, they've done well to keep such a useless publication going even this long.
Probably because people are afraid of Wikipedia going away and they don't check their accounting first.
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A site like Wikipedia will also need a bunch of lawyers to fight all sorts of trolls, from copyright trolls, to people who don't like what articles say about them.
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If wikipedia becomes a money sink it may compromise its mission. Overfunding is as bad as underfunding since it leads to inefficiency and waste. If they get more donations than their current organizational structure can make use of they should consider re-donating excess to other charities.
So where does all of the money go??
200+ employees, who do nothing of value.
Expensive office space in San Francisco.
Giving away money in the form of "grants" which produce nothing of value.
I agree. Everyone knows that there is no such thing as free content on the internet. Wikimedia needs to stop with this charade, add advertisements, and block people using ad-blockers like any other respectable site. That is the only way that so-called "free" websites can exist on the internet.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It's already been established that hosting only costs them about $2M/year. A few administrators are not adding much to that. They're not spending tons of money on new development here; the Wiki software hasn't changed significantly in ages. Running the site in lots of languages doesn't cost anything except hosting space (again, accounted for in the $2M/year figure). They're not paying anyone to actually do good translations, as they rely on unpaid volunteers to do that kind of stuff.
Honestly, if they did employ a dozen or so people to do really good translations between articles in major languages, I'd be all for that. But they're not.
What they're doing is outsourcing almost all the really important work (writing/tending articles, preventing it from being hijacked by "morontards" through bad edits, etc.) to unpaid volunteers instead of paid professionals, and then hiring a bunch of people to do bullshit work for their "foundation". Wikipedia's original, core mission is good and worthy: provide a website to act as an online encyclopaedia so that people can freely learn about just about any topic imaginable, with the goal of the information being as unbiased as possible as well as being properly cited. This is truly a great thing. But these donations, by and large, aren't paying for this mission. The organization has suffered a colossal amount of "mission creep", and worse, the core functions are handled by unpaid volunteers, who frequently have their own agendas or egotistical reasons for doing the jobs they do (leading to less than biased results in the articles because someone in a position of power wants to maintain control instead of simply doing an unbiased job of editing).
$32M in SALARIES? to who?
It's the Jimmy Wales Junket Fund. Compare the cost structure for an Adam Sandler movie - quite similar.
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$32M in SALARIES? to who?
Last time I heard, Wikipedia had about 200 employees (over 100 technical positions), and that figure may or may not have included people working for the wikimedia foundation. If not, that averages to about $160k each.
John
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.
I'm curious, would you call this known scandal to be "ridiculous theorising"?
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...