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Does Wikipedia really need my donations?

Every now and then I’ll get an email from someone higher up in Wikipedia asking for a donation. I don’t really mind a tenner but I don’t know if it pads the pockets of corporate management or actual contributors. Also, are they really short of money or is this tugging at emotional strings a play at something else? I wish Wikipedia survives but there’s a lot of projects I need to donate to and I have a budget.

andrewta ,

As far as i know yeah without the donations they don’t exist

nichtburningturtle ,
@nichtburningturtle@feddit.org avatar

AFAIK they tend to overdramatize their lack of money.

NineMileTower ,

As far as I know, I don’t know.

kubica ,

Socrates would be proud.

immutable ,

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports wikimediafoundation.org/…/2022-2023-annual-report…

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

ShareMySims ,

If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

A bit of an aside, but breezewiki.com is a great open sourced way to get away from this (their internal search doesn’t always work, but a search engine search for fandom name + breezewiki should do it)

Badabinski ,

You're an absolute hero. I'm easily irritated by ads, and fandom has driven me to genuine rage a couple of times when I'm on mobile and only have DNS-based adblocking some of the time. It's a wiki, for Christ's sake, so why does it need so, so many ads‽ It's just static content most of the time!

edit: to provide more context, this is a frontend for fandom wikis that strips out the bullshit.

ShareMySims ,

Happy to help! The fandom pages are absolute garbage, breezewiki really is a godsend.

I found out about it on here: libredirect.github.io, I’m not sure how up to date it is, but there are definitely some other useful links to explore

MigratingtoLemmy ,

Use adblockers?

Badabinski , (edited )

I do, but certain Android browsers don't support plugins. I have to use a specific browser for compatibility reasons with some work shit (I do on-call stuff). I need that to just work, so I can't use, say, Firefox for Android. I use multiple browsers on computers, but I just can't be bothered on my phone. That leaves me with DNS-based ad blockers. Those work almost as well, but only when I'm home or VPNed home. I don't want to use a hosted service for privacy reasons, and I don't want to expose a DNS server on the internet. This means that when I can't VPN or I forget to, I get fandom rage. I'm sure I could do something to address this, but I have bigger fish to fry right now. The nice ad-free fandom frontend sounds like a great compromise to me.

Quik ,

Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.

Findmysec OP ,

I need to look up what else they sponsor in case there’s something important for me there

Dirk ,
@Dirk@lemmy.ml avatar

No, they don’t.

As of December 31, 2023, [Wikimedia has] annual revenues of $180.2 million, […] net assets of $255 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

Findmysec OP ,

Thanks

shalafi ,

Can I get a tl;dr? Revenue is meaningless without subtracting costs.

HobbitFoot ,

Wikipedia makes most of its money from donations, with some money coming from other sources like commercial API access. It consistently raises more money than it spends and has been building an endowment. However, that income mainly comes from the fundraising drives.

Wikipedia has an endowment, but it isn’t enough to run the website for more than a few years.

In terms of expenses, the largest expense is in having staff to run the various websites and foundation. Charity auditors rank the foundation highly on expenses, so the foundation is likely not overpaying staff.

Wikipedia needs donations to survive, but it isn’t struggling. If you feel like you have better things to donate to, it is probably ok for now.

phoneymouse ,

I don’t think they are running inefficiently. I do think they have more than enough money to keep themselves going for many years to come. Also, the lack of inclusiveness in the editing is the reason I don’t donate. Nothing like making an article contribution only to have it quickly reverted by some control freak editor from the inner circle. Wikipedia is not actually what it claims to be. It’s slightly more open than a real encyclopedia, but not much.

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

I think NATOpedia gets sufficient funding from NGOs, endowments, and rich people tax breaks.

MaggiWuerze ,
@MaggiWuerze@feddit.org avatar

Shall we play a game of guess the users instance?

LostXOR ,

After reading the first few paragraphs, I can understand why that site was deprecated by Wikipedia as a source. It's a very opinionated article.

AntiOutsideAktion ,
@AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml avatar

And of course none of the overt state propaganda they do allow is ‘opinionated’ because it’s ‘objective’ 🤡

bandwidthcrisis ,

And how about archive.org ?

Findmysec OP ,

I think they need my help

Pringles ,

Once the lawsuit about illegally lending out books is completely settled, I may consider donating again if they focus on their core activity, namely archiving of websites.

I want to support their archiving activities, not their misplaced piracy.

otp ,

I support their appropriately-placed piracy, though!

AntiOutsideAktion ,
@AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml avatar

Boot licker

Microw ,

They rely on donations, that part is correct. Are they in constant financial need so they are forced to ask users so often to donate? No, they are not.

Also keep in mind that while the server and developing costs of Wikipedia are one area of spending, Wikimedia spends money on a host of projects. Some of them you would probably consider more important than others.

Findmysec OP ,

Yeah I need to look at the list and check if there’s something important for me in there

sag ,

Actually Not really but It will be good if you donate.

RobotToaster ,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

They seem to give a lot of cash away to other organisations threadreaderapp.com/…/1579776106034757633.html (Their response is here for fairness.)

Whatever you think of the tertiary organisations, it seems like you’re better off donating directly to a cause that needs it, rather than funding a bunch of middle managers to give it to someone else.

lattrommi ,
@lattrommi@lemmy.ml avatar

I made an account and did a one time donation for $2.50. This removes the website donation banner. As long as I’m logged in, I do not see those messages. I get an email about donating once a year, possibly twice. Infrequently enough to be unsure of how often it has happened. If I ever see the donation banner on the website, I know I am logged out. So I can’t answer your query about the corporate aspect but I can say that the heartstring tugging can easily be solved with a one time donation for a small amount. You can do a custom amount for a donation so theoretically it could be for $0.01 or your lowest fiat equivalent.

TankieTanuki ,

No

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