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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.
n/t
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.
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.
Hosting is not Wikipedia's largest expense. Salaries are. They spent $32 million on salaries. Total expenses were $67 million.
Even considering all of the expenses, their net income was positive $16 million last year.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
. . . . .where, if you're lucky, 10-15% of proceeds actually go to the cause. . . .
or vice-versa
"We already make millions auctioning off your default search engine, can you please donate some money?"
During the year ended June 30, 2016, the Foundation entered into an agreement with the Tides Foundation to establish the Wikimedia Endowment as a Collective Action Fund to act as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to ensure a base level of support for the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. The Endowment is independent from the Foundation. On June 29, 2016, the Foundation provided an irrevocable grant in the amount of $5 million to the Tides Foundation for the purpose of the Wikimedia Endowment. The amount is recorded in awards and grants expense.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
I'd prefer not getting the pop-ups now that the goal has been met - but if the money is still flowing in it's dumb of them to not capitalize (heh) on the desire to give to build up a larger buffer (and have fewer fund-raisers in the future).
A professional admin team would largely eliminate many of the problems Wikipedia has with its various cabals.
Yes it would. But a professional admin team would use up most of the money that is currently going to other people.
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.
Which is exactly why you should never give money to them.
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.
No worries, it is just Jimmy Jo Bob and his inner circle trying to pull in a few more bucks. Those Scientology membership fees are steep.
Perhaps Jill Stein is their new fundraising director
People writing articles - Unpaid.
People writing scientific papers - Unpaid.
People doing product reviews and testing - Unpaid.
Fan groups of products and software, modding stuff - Unpaid.
One day, everything is UNPAID. Why pay money to you if you're willing to do it for free?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
" Dear readers in Canada, time is running out in 2016 to help Wikipedia. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We're sustained by donations averaging about $15. Only a tiny portion of our readers give. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, we wouldn’t need to fundraise for years to come. That's right, the price of a cup of coffee is all we need. If Wikipedia is useful to you, please take one minute to keep it online and growing. Thank you. "
Devil bunnies! I snort the nose! Lucifer! Banana! Banana!
I don't know what medications you're on, but I think you forgot to take them.
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.
I think Wikipedia just invented a new form of in app payment: pay us money and we'll stop nagging you for money.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Just add this line to the block list of your favorite ad blocker (uBlock origin, ABP, ...)
wikipedia.org###centralNotice
It is not included by default because EasyList doesn't consider self-promotion to be advertisement. I do.
If you don't like Wikipedia or how it raises money, you don't have to use it. How some people are so critical of a free service that no one is forced to use or pay for seems odd when you think about it. Come up with something better.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Hey, super sport cars aren't cheap, and Jimmy Wales likes to buy a new one every week.
Wikimedia have posted an update on the Wikimedia mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pi...
"This year, we are happy to report we’ve reached our goal of US$25 million in record time. This is a testament to the importance of Wikimedia and how much support we have from people all over the world. Given this momentum, we believe that it would be wise and worthwhile to continue to fundraise more in the month of December, for the following reasons: [...]
Here is what we will do: We intend to continue with the banners for a few more days. We would then take them down over the Christmas holiday, before making an end-of-year push in the final couple days of the year. (Many people choose to give at the very end of the year, and they are expecting to hear from us as usual -- so it is an opportunity to give people who plan to give the easiest means to participate)."
(Follow link for full text of the WMF statement, including their spending rationale.)
Well, when i enter the url of wikipedia it works. Dispite all the hackers, trolls, law trolls, dictators contantly attacking it. Some times my windows does not work, but wikipedia works. That has to have some value.
Disclaimer: I work at the WMF.
Most of the employees (especially the technical staff, which is the bulk of it) work remotely from home in lower cost-of-living areas. They're mostly underpaid by industry standards.
The technical employees do a wide range of useful things; operating a site at vast scale for a non-profit is non-trivial. The wikipedia project servers average 100,000 HTTP transactions per second globally (from the public, not counting internal stuff). They're also dealing with routine upgrades, software feature improvement, ever-evolving browser/device/application compatibility, DDoS prevention when some script kiddie gets mad at the contents of a controversial article, security and privacy threats to the userbase, network outages, hardware failures on over 1000 servers in 6 geographic locations, etc. Stepping outside of the technical staff, there's also a Legal department dealing with copyright issues and lawsuits (including an ongoing legal battle with the NSA!) and all of the usual trappings of any organization at this scale (executives, HR, Finance, Travel, etc). The foundation also organizes multiple annual conferences for the community of editors and readers, and yes they fund research grants on Wikipedia-related topics. I'm not going to claim everything is perfect, but overall the foundation runs a pretty tight ship, and does a lot with relatively-little funding given the tasks at hand.
Christ! I've donated the price of a semi decent bottle wine for access to the greatest coherent body of knowledge ever assembled. The value of this information is truly priceless and yet available to the whole population of the planet. I feel that this is a bit of a bargain and would urge people to think what a poorer place the world would be without this service.
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.
Even if they are reliable at serving up content, it's still content that is highly suspect in terms of accuracy. One systematic survey of vandalism showed the thoughtfully-formatted vandalism will last at least for weeks, over 60% of the time: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
I'm one of the comparatively few editors of Wikipedia who gets paid for my editing work. It only makes sense that as a "thank you", I should send a token of financial appreciation at fundraising time. Yet, when I try to send the Wikimedia Foundation a donation, they return it to me within the hour.
I wonder if you do anything of value ?
I mean other than making unsubstantiated claims as to how others do nothing of value.
oh wait, that doesn't have any value...
Absolute statements are never true