The original thread emphasized too much on a few grants, which I feel is a minor issue considering how small part of the annual revenue they were. Not surprised Wikipedia is able to defend it easily.
> "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5 million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for actual grants made to the community – a figure dwarfed by the Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020–2021. There was no lack of money for grants.
The actual problem is that the Foundation reached its endowment goal, five years before the the deadline it set [1], and yet, they keep guilt-tripping and pretending as if they are running out of money. How's it not profiteering? They could be honest and add, "We have already reached our goal. But raising more could help us find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge," and they would be completely in the right. I bet fewer people would donate if they realized that they are not funding running expenses, at all.
Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive. The complexity of their project and running expenses is way more than Wikipedia, and yet, they just received 12% of the amount that Wikipedia got in 2020 [2]. They just have $4M in net assets, and yet, I have never seen them guilt-tripping regular users.
> find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge
No. People who visit and donate, only wants it to go to the site they are using and for its development. Not to some other things that they don't know.
If Wikimedia wants money for all these things, they should mention what are these exactly without hiding.
You're right, but that is what the post you are replying to was proposing: they should say what they are raising the money for.
Then people can decide, instead of being panicked into donating because they are made to think there is an urgent need for money "to defend Wikipedia's independence" or "to keep Wikipedia online".
But the post also said misappropriating the funds “is a minor issue”.
It’s not a minor issue to say you’re raising funds for X and to then give those funds to Y just because it only amount to Z% of your budget. And in this case Z% is actually pretty high.
Most of these grants are not even that bad - they're explicitly trying to foster the creation and sharing of knowledge about highly under-represented populations, which is clearly within the remit of Wikipedia as a broad community. But then you do get truly weird stuff like the $250k grant to SeRCH, an organization that purportedly aims to support minority folks in STEM pursuits. Unfortunately, that "support" seemingly involves posting obscure YouTube videos featuring bizarre rants about "hyperspace" and their "intersectional scientific method", whatever that is. It's highly dubious that this stuff can actually help minorities succeed in science, to say the least.
The point is not that they're bad/good - the point is that Wikipedia is presenting us with heartfelt pleas to keep the servers running, while also running a massive budget surplus and donating our money to other people who we've never heard of.
And the lack of transparency makes corruption incredibly likely. How much of the donated money has been siphoned off to the bank accounts of Wikimedia executives? How many grants have been awarded because of kickbacks, bribes, etc? I have no evidence that any of this has happened, but there is no evidence it didn't, either.
There are basic, simple, good governance practices that are being ignored here. Which is very suggestive that the people involved are actually corrupt and resisting the implementation of good governance practices.
Also, the ongoing pleas for donations when those donations are clearly not required is very suggestive. Why are Wikimedia executives asking for this money when they don't need it, if they're not siphoning off into their own accounts?
The Wikimedia Endowment has amassed $100 million in five years, half the time anticipated, and there has never been a single audited financial statement or Form 990 disclosure, because the money is stashed away with the completely opaque Tides Foundation:
The public has no way of knowing how much Tides is paid to host the fund (and the Wikimedia Foundation refuses to say when asked), nor is there any way of knowing whether and to whom any money from this fund has been paid out. Even if there is no abuse, this sort of set-up is so clearly vulnerable to abuse that one wonders why anyone would choose it.
Not only vulnerable - if you were going to siphon away money into your bank account, this is exactly how you'd set that up. This looks like it was designed to be abused.
Yeah the fact that the large transfer to Tides happened at the same time that the Tides CEO became General Counsel for Wikimedia seems pretty gross (and I say this as someone that in general would agree with Tides' mission otherwise)
To quote the page this HN submission links to:
"Concerns expressed then focused on the secrecy of the grant, the break with the participatory grantmaking principles the Foundation had until then embraced, and the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation"
"Keeping the servers running" is useless if the project itself is not flourishing. Nobody wants a dead, out of date Wikipedia. So broad support for the project and community is what really matters.
Which is fine, but tell us that. The impression I get from the donations plea is that the money goes directly to support Wikipedia because it needs it to keep the servers running.
And they need to be clear about the grants made, how much was given to whom, for what purpose, what was the rationale for this grant to support Wikipedia? and did the grant achieve its objective?
But it doesn't really help Wikipedia, at least not in a measurable way. From the original article opinion of long time wikipedian Steven Walling
> Given that this is a pilot and there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects, I would encourage you to stop
Moreover, most of the money to date has gone to U.S. organisations.
This is truly bizarre if you consider that the Wikimedia Foundation raises funds in places like India, South Africa and South America – with heart-wrenching messages about donations being needed to keep Wikipedia online, independent, subscription-free and so on:
Okay, I get your point. Speaks to the organisation's basic lack of honesty, which is arguably the real problem here. That's come up before – a recent poll among Wikipedians judged the WMF's fundraising emails "unethical and misleading":
That's exactly why I am not going to donate this year, and I donated annually for almost a decade now. I love Wikipedia, will support it if it gets in trouble. But I am not rich enough to donate to some random causes, especially if I find them wasteful and even ethically questionable.
No at least I find out quite appropriate of they spend less then 5% to support projects with similar goals as long as they have a surplus. I mean you are donating to the organization not the website and at least for me that had always been clear.
That the banners where misleading is IMHO they main issue with the secondary issue being the not so grate transparency for this external usages.
That was my thought too on reading; those grants are a pretty small portion of budget (not even a big portion of surplus) so don't seem like a big deal.
But if I understand it right, they have a $50 million surplus on a ~$150 million budget? Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a situation? (Under some circumstances, such a huge surplus leftover can even make the IRS suspicious of a charitable organization's tax status, although this may not apply legally to the particular kind of organization Wikimedia is).
Though in fact, the real surplus was nearly $90 million, because in addition, their Endowment, held at the Tides Foundation (and therefore not included in Wikimedia Foundation assets) increased from $62.9 million:
Note also that each year the Wikimedia Foundation pays at least $5 million into its Endowment. These payments are included in the Foundation's expenses:
I'm definitely going to stop giving any money to wikimedia as a result of their on-screen fund drives. And I actually support that expenditure to fund that "Knolwedge Equity Fund", and don't find anything unethical about wikimedia supporting such a fund with a small portion of their budget, especially when they have extra. (I think it would be appropriate to send some to the Internet Archive too). But they clearly don't need my money.
9.8M divided by $25 (my best guess on what an average person might donate) is 392,000 people being duped into giving $25 to something they did not intend to give money to.
> Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a situation?
They've got many millions of users and billions of page views, so if all it takes is a little banner to bring in millions of dollars, and a little, slightly deceptive tweak to the language to bring in millions more...do you really expect them to decline that opportunity? What real, measurable incentives do they have to not fundraise? You can hardly blame those grant applicants when they ask their really, really rich friend for some support or a day or two of fundraising to achieve that support.
There aren't financial or legal consequences, especially for the smaller group doing the asking.
It's really hard, especially in 2022, at the level of a global multi-million dollar, multi-billion page view organization to make decisions on vague, difficult to measure concepts like ethics and reputation.
> They've got many millions of users and billions of page views, so if all it takes is a little banner to bring in millions of dollars, and a little, slightly deceptive tweak to the language to bring in millions more...do you really expect them to decline that opportunity?
Yes, because destroying your credibility risks destroying future fund raising potential.
I think most people "really expect" Wikipedia/Wikimedia to act ethically and responsibly, yeah -- which is why their fund-raising is so successful. If they lose that reputation, it will be less so.
Certainly I don't donate money to organizations I don't "really expect" to act ethically and responsibly. Do you?
"When being unethical brings in so much money, how can you expect them to act ethically?"
How is this materially different than if I started a GoFundMe saying I needed money for my mortgage and other bills, but actually using it to take a huge vacation? You see, if I didn't take that vacation, I would have burned out from my job, lost it, and then been unable to pay my bills (after my savings ran out).
Do I expect a non-profit organization with a charitable mission to decline opportunities to aggressively browbeat the public for money it doesn't need? Yes, yes I absolutely do.
> But if I understand it right, they have a $50 million surplus on a ~$150 million budget? Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a situation?
If there is one thing that the COVID pandemic has shown us, it is that resilience is a very good idea - and that grave crises can easily last years at a time or yet another grave crisis comes up like the Ukraine invasion, followed by energy price explosions and insane inflation.
It is a decent idea to have at least five years worth of financial runway these days... you never know what is coming up (or well, we do, climate change, but that still leaves a host of other issues that can go badly wrong).
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was a Wikimedia employee. They told us at the time that in a worst-case scenario of zero fundraising and zero layoffs that the org had a runway of 18 months before they had to start making staffing cutbacks. The worst-case scenario didn't pan out but it was nice to know that my continued employment was fairly secure during that time.
Wikimedia does a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with but I think they do a fairly good job of ensuring the continued existence of Wikipedia.
That said, the Wikimedia foundation has much loftier ideas and sets goals far beyond just keeping the website running. I think almost everyone at the foundation genuinely cares about the org's mission, but that mission probably has different meaning and scope for different people.
Internally, there was a huge push to focus on strategy and expanding beyond just maintaining MediaWiki and some servers. For a taste of what they are aspiring to, at least what is being publicized externally and was getting a lot of focus internally over the last couple of years, see https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/tag/strategy-2/
I mean, they aren't. The amount they are giving to this Information Equity Fund is a small portion of the endownment they are building up; plus it's not "random", it's something they decided was mission-aligned. You disagree with that assessment, but it's not "random"; they've always given other grants too, and continue to, I'm not sure if you and others are opposed to _all_ granting from wikimedia or just disagree with this particular choice. You are allowed to disagree with this particular choice without being required to object to all granting of course -- I feel like people are feeling compelled to argue that wikimedia ought to never give any grants to any third parties, when they really just don't like this particualr choice. There is no reason for such a compulsion. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
But meanwhile... fund-raising to build up a "rainy day" fund of 5x your annual operating budget is... just not something non-profits generally do. It's certainly not standard practice. Of course most organizations wouldn't be able to pull that off even if they decided it's a goal, most orgs don't have the capacity to fund-raise an extra 50%+ beyond their operating budget "just in case". I think it's debatable whether it's a wise or responsible use of funds or a good goal.
There are already many comments saying this but the main objection is asking for money to do one thing and then doing something else with it. A secondary objection, for many, is the nature of the other thing they are doing with the money.
In the context of this particular thread, GP advocated for funding of organizational resilience. While this also isn't what Wikimedia was asking for money for, it would probably be less objectionable to those who disagree with the ultimate destination of their donation.
And yet nobody seems fired up about the other grants wikimedia gives, and has for years, while some are insisting it's just the prinicple of wikimedia giving any grants that they object to, what they are actually focusing on, and their lack of concern with even mentioning those other grants while getting really fired up about this "equity" fund (a topic very likely to fire people up), makes me think that's what's going on must be primarily not secondarily about this particular thing.
It seems silly to argue about whether the people who are making an argument are misrepresenting what their concerns are instead of just believing what they say. But it sounds like you are ready to make some sort of conspiratorial assertion for why that could be.
If Wikimedia has too many donations for their own costs, maybe they should give some to the Internet Archive. It's certainly related to their goal of preserving information.
But more importantly: Wikimedia needs to be honest and transparent, including about what they're raising funds for. If their own costs are thoroughly covered and they're raising funds for others, they need to be honest about that, and not pretend that they still need the money. That's deceptive and completely contrary to their mission.
That's the big problem I have with these fundraisings.
They are using the exact thing that make most of us hate advertising: deceiving claims, annoying banners, and revenue-driven A/B testing. The only thing they don't seem to do (yet) is personal data collection / targeting. When I see them I can't help but think "how did these got through my ad blocker?" [*]
They don't have to do that, they can afford not to use typical advertising tactics and still get enough money for continued operation.
*: The reason I think Wikimedia fundraisers don't appears in most block lists is that as a rule, self-promotion is not considered advertising. Same reason why you can see ads for the latest Microsoft products when you go to microsoft.com.
<<If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive.
I kinda wanted to focus on this portion, because Wikipedia does not seem to face fresh round of lawsuits, while Internet Archive appears to be very much a target in sights of various copyright holders, who are unhappy over its activities[1].
Wikipedia for almost the past decade has reminded me of those televangelists that would beg for donations to keep the lights on and that Uncle Sam was kicking the door down to seize their assets. Then they'd drive home in a brand new Cadillac.
I don't disagree with anything you said. I also think that wikipedia should adopt a much less cringey fundraising style.
However...
I feel like wikipedia tends to attract a highly disproportionate amount of criticism, especially about fundraising, budget inflation and editing/deletionism. In one sense, this is a good thing. Criticism and scrutiny keep organisations honest.
In another sense, there's a nihilism to it. Wikipedia is perhaps 100X more resource efficient than a Facebook. It's far more respectful of its users than any bigtech. It embodies otherwise naive ideals of the early web. It has performed way better than commercial peers in the face of the decade's misinformation and political fact wars... including journalistic ones. It keeps its nose much cleaner than big nonprofits like the Red Cross. All freely available to everyone, highly accessible, supported by optional donations. Wikimedia is a beacon.
FOSS has been tamed. The rivers of the WWW have been dammed. "Don't be evil" got fired. It feels like Wikipedia is subjected to a bigotry of higher expectations specifically because it doesn't suck. There's a crabs-in-a-bucket feel to it that disturbs me.
It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour. The people earning the most money from that volunteer labour aren't even the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Big Tech companies who use Wikipedia and Wikidata content to populate Knowledge Graph panels (Google, Microsoft Bing), have their voice assistants read Wikipedia articles in response to questions (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant), etc.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a partner of all these organisations. Amazon regularly donates a million to the Wikimedia Endowment, there is a little-publicised Google partnership ...
... as did the originator of the Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia projects, and the seed money for Wikidata came from Microsoft founder Paul Allen and Google:
OK... this is the kind of thing I am talking about.
"It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour."
That's one of the reasons, and it's not a bad reason at all. In fact, I would say that wikipedia couldn't buy what it gets for free at any price. It's also for other reasons. Wikipedia serves lightweight websites. It has a lightweight management structure. It has a lightweight content moderation function.
None of these are incidental. They are what efficiency is made of.
In any case, what is your comment demonstrating other that everything can be criticised. By what standard, is wikimedia worthy of your scorn?
Ensuring your charitable donations are actually doing the good you think it is, is difficult enough that there are organizations specifically created to rate them and verify what they say. When a charitable organization does a poor job of it, they rightly earn the scorn they receive, because they are betraying a trust. I donate to a number of charities (including Wikipedia) and if any one of them were found to be operating as it appears Wikipedia is, I would move my money elsewhere, which is what I intend to do in this case.
I hold Wikipedia to the moral standards of the old idealistic internet precisely because it's one of the last bastions of the tech world that I still thought of as 'pure'. I'm not going to judge them by the standards of the rest of the scumbag internet. I'm going to judge them by the standards of an organization i respect. If they want to degrade themselves back into the class of 'organization I wouldn't trust to have my email address' so that I judge them by those standards instead they're well on their way to doing so.
I know the AMerican library system isn't exactly awash in money, but why is Wikimedia not getting a huge amount of donations from the library budgets? It is practically the definition of the base intent of the library system brought into the internet age, and arguably is the internet's greatest achievement.
Sure you could start quoting things about undue influence, but I go into a library and don't exactly see lots of influence from the government on collection content, or censorship of encyclopedias. About the only political hotpotato I've seen about libraries is an occcaisional funding complaint by the ultra-small government wing.
> "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5 million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for actual grants made to the community – a figure dwarfed by the Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020–2021. There was no lack of money for grants.
The actual problem is that the Foundation reached its endowment goal, five years before the the deadline it set [1], and yet, they keep guilt-tripping and pretending as if they are running out of money. How's it not profiteering? They could be honest and add, "We have already reached our goal. But raising more could help us find more avenues to increase the world's knowledge," and they would be completely in the right. I bet fewer people would donate if they realized that they are not funding running expenses, at all.
Addendum: If you're considering donating to Wikipedia, I suggest you look into doing it for Internet Archive. The complexity of their project and running expenses is way more than Wikipedia, and yet, they just received 12% of the amount that Wikipedia got in 2020 [2]. They just have $4M in net assets, and yet, I have never seen them guilt-tripping regular users.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
[2]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...