Its cool that people are donating, but they are doing it without knowing that the wikimedia foundation is actually receiving like 100 times the amount in donations that it needs to run Wikipedia. All the while the banners say something like “Wikipedia is fucking dying we need more donations NOW”. Yes lots of the other projects of the foundation are probably good and they have more legal and quality control costs now than 20 years ago, but its not thaaat much and its just not what is being communicated to the users. And as this guy has pointed out, there is no such thing as infinite growth, so the question is what happens when that juicy donation income starts dropping? Or what if all the people working at the foundation want to unionize? And now we know…
On the other hand it’s legitimately one of the wonders of the digital world. A communally edited source of knowledge free for all to access. While it’s good to scrutinise foundations and how they are run I’ve not seen anyone propose a better solution so far. The data is freely licensed so forking is possible but it’s not really the technical details that make Wikipedia the resource it is today.
Its not about them hoarding money, its about the seemingly unstoppable growth in expenses. Why are they not trying to stabilize their expenses as a donation dependent foundation? The server costs arent growing and will realistically still be at most a couple million dollars annualy, so why are they spending exponentiall increasing amounts of money on other stuff. Shouldnt they try to build up 10+ years of reserves to ensure wikipedia survives when the money dries up? Because if people stopped donating right now, they would run out of money next year.
“Modest increase” lmao. Literally like ~10% year over year for 20 years.
The graph is very much exponential. If it had grown linear since 2006, they would have annual expenses of less than 5 million dollars. Recently it has started increasing slightly less fast, but its still increasing at an insane rate.
The yearly expenses for 2025 were ~190 million dollars. The assets were 300 million. So they have assets to cover expenses for 1.5 years IF their expenses stopped growing.
Large amounts of money breeds greed. The whole unionbusting thing is obviously a result of the upper management getting a little too comfortable with their reliable income stream.
For people interested in some numbers have this user post that has been getting updated every year called “Wikipedia has Cancer”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
Its cool that people are donating, but they are doing it without knowing that the wikimedia foundation is actually receiving like 100 times the amount in donations that it needs to run Wikipedia. All the while the banners say something like “Wikipedia is fucking dying we need more donations NOW”. Yes lots of the other projects of the foundation are probably good and they have more legal and quality control costs now than 20 years ago, but its not thaaat much and its just not what is being communicated to the users. And as this guy has pointed out, there is no such thing as infinite growth, so the question is what happens when that juicy donation income starts dropping? Or what if all the people working at the foundation want to unionize? And now we know…
On the other hand it’s legitimately one of the wonders of the digital world. A communally edited source of knowledge free for all to access. While it’s good to scrutinise foundations and how they are run I’ve not seen anyone propose a better solution so far. The data is freely licensed so forking is possible but it’s not really the technical details that make Wikipedia the resource it is today.
Download it forever, then.
https://kiwix.org/en/
Its not about them hoarding money, its about the seemingly unstoppable growth in expenses. Why are they not trying to stabilize their expenses as a donation dependent foundation? The server costs arent growing and will realistically still be at most a couple million dollars annualy, so why are they spending exponentiall increasing amounts of money on other stuff. Shouldnt they try to build up 10+ years of reserves to ensure wikipedia survives when the money dries up? Because if people stopped donating right now, they would run out of money next year.
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“Modest increase” lmao. Literally like ~10% year over year for 20 years.
The graph is very much exponential. If it had grown linear since 2006, they would have annual expenses of less than 5 million dollars. Recently it has started increasing slightly less fast, but its still increasing at an insane rate.
The yearly expenses for 2025 were ~190 million dollars. The assets were 300 million. So they have assets to cover expenses for 1.5 years IF their expenses stopped growing.
Large amounts of money breeds greed. The whole unionbusting thing is obviously a result of the upper management getting a little too comfortable with their reliable income stream.
deleted by creator