Wikipedia is particularly insulting because they make enough money to cover the actual costs of running Wikipedia (the site) in days if not hours, and could operate for years without any additional donations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32840097
It's personally insulting that they lie and make it seem like they need the money to keep running, and that your donation will go towards helping Wikipedia itself, when they do not and it does not.
There's a difference between "donate if you appreciate this website" and "donate if you appreciate this website because we will have to shut down otherwise (not really though)"
Wikipedia is... nuanced. Keep in mind that the entity doing the fundraising is the Wikimedia Foundation. They pay the hosting costs, but return nothing to the actual Wikipedians (editors, admins.) Instead, what's left is used to pay the salaries for hundreds of administrative employees, fund third-party charities, and so on. You can love Wikipedia but have misgivings about the Foundation.
It includes staff, but not new stuff. The new stuff seems to be mostly things not directly related to Wikipedia, like funding third-party projects or causes. I'm trying to be politic here: many people don't like the projects they are funding with donation money, and others just don't like that they give money to any projects, and other people don't like that they keep the banner up after they've paid for salaries and keeping the lights on.
The point of Wikipedia is not to have some servers ticking over. The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
I agree it's not ok for them to lie, and am bothered enough by their dubious fundraising tactics that I stopped donating. But that's a totally separate concern than whether Wikipedia's mission is complete.
What is the mission for Wikipedia beyond doing what they already do, which is just hosting the largest internet encyclopedia? Purely curious because I thought Wikipedia was pretty much at its end game for what it wants to accomplish that is the job of the organization rather than the job of all of its volunteers.
> The Wikimedia Foundation's mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Its mission is not just "hosting" - actually creating an encyclopedia is much more than paying for the server costs.
Wikimedia produced many very useful projects which often integrate into Wikipedia, but work well standalone as well, and work towards the stated mission - projects like Commons, WikiData, WikiSource. Some projects are more useful than others, but that's just normal.
Wikipedia is the marketing face of Wikimedia. People donate to the first, but the money gets used by the second, and Wikimedia grows to use all of the money it receives. Wikimedia has no solvable mission, its just a mechanism to turn donations for a project people like into donations for arbitrary causes.
> The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
That's not their vision. Not only do they require entries to be notable, they'll remove information from articles that are, in their editorial judgment, too long. Neither action is compatible with the goal of sharing the sum of all knowledge.
It is, because removing this barrier to entry and editorial power would lead to spam and SEO bullshit, which arguably already exists. Knowledge does not equal amount of content.
Seems almost mundane, as if they’re running a very effective foundation that’s actively achieving their goals. See the recent Cambridge study that explored how their governance has been effective at promoting moderate discourse while suppressing misinformation and hateful content: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
Uh, the opening paragraph of that second leads reads to me like wikipedia effectively got ideologically captured and got rid of all editors who didn't agree.
Seems off. They have 250 million in net asset and hosting costs 2 million a year while they spend 88 million on salaries and still beg for money each year?
