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Wikimedia Foundation Nabs $3 Million Grant To Improve Accessibility of Free Commons' Content (venturebeat.com)
As with other Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimedia Commons (a repository of free-to-use media assets, including photos, audio clips, and videos) is funded through donations, and the organization has now received $3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic body set up in 1934 by the former president and CEO of General Motors. From a report on VentureBeat: With $3 million in the coffers, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will embark on a three-year mission to link assets on Wikimedia Commons with Wikidata, the organization's crowdsourced knowledge base. The upshot of this endeavor will mean that photos, videos, and all the rest will be much easier to find and, crucially, it will be "machine-readable" which opens up a wealth of opportunities to automate the process of integrating content into third-party services, such as apps and services operated by museums, galleries, and libraries. On the flip-side, this will also make it easier for third-party bodies to donate content to Wikimedia Commons while automatically including existing metadata, bypassing the need to manually label media.
The Internet Archive will became the backup of all the knowledge in the world. I think it is also important to donate to that project / library. https://archive.org/donate/
There have been allegations that Jimmy Wales misused Wikimedia's funds. In fact, Wales' own Wikipedia page mentions these allegations. Wikimedia does have massive assets, most recently valued over $91 million dollars. Furthermore, as per Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue has exceeded its expenses in every year of operation, dramatically so in recent years, by around $20 per year. It certainly does call into question the constant nagging for money and how that money gets spent -- including the over $65 million in expenses for 2015-2016. But, as usual, you just want to get angry and yell at people.
"It certainly does call into question the constant nagging for money"
No it doesn't. Jimmy Wales has been honest about this. Yes, they are currently financially very stable, but it's a platform completely reliant on donations. If ever the donations stop coming, they need this store of money to keep the site operational. It's called hoping for the best, but being prepared for the worst.
Why not pull up their financials and look? I'm not their treasurer. And things to consider, if they are misappropriating funds, they're going to be in trouble with the IRS. They're a registered non-profit, they do have to file taxes. Put up or shut up.