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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.
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.
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...
$78.5 million of the $92 million of net assets are cash and short-term financial investments.
2016 Donations & Revenue (gross inflows)
$ 82 million
2016 Expenses (selected):
$ 32 million - Salaries
$ 11 million - Awards & Grants
$ 6 million - Professional Services
$ 4.8 million - Other Operating Expenses
$ 3.6 million - Donation Processing Expenses
$ 2.6 million - Travel, Conferences & Special Events
$ 2.0 million - Internet Hosting
2016 "Net Income" (increase in unrestricted net assets)
$ 15 million
See for yourself: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
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!!!!
About ten years ago, Jimmy Wales said about Wikipedia (time code 4:35):
... We actually hired Brion [Vibber] because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.”
“So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that’s essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee
In 2008, when Wikipedia was already the world's number 8 website, the Wikimedia Foundation survived on $5 million (vs. $82 million last year). So, yes, you can have a top-ten website – written entirely by unpaid volunteers – for a fraction of the current cost.