I have donated in the past, but then there were wild accusations, people saying it’s not needed, it’s to fund other things, and so on and so forth.
Yesterday I got the popup begging for a couple of euros, so what’s the status? Should I donate or is it a waste of time and money?
Cheers
Edit: Thanks for all the insightful posts! I’m jobless at the moment so just ten bucks this time:
I give small monthly donations to three things:
- Wikipedia
- EFF
- Internet Archive
Usually its the far right or tankies that hate wikipedia, it seems pretty neutral for the most part.
they hate it, because it has all the info of everything bad that a republican/conservative, far right government did, and its very hard to deflect/ or deny the amount of evidence from it.
I was hearing that Wikipedia makes more than enough money from things outside of donations that it seems scammy to ask for donations the way they do from leftists before Trump’s first term.
I was hearing that Wikipedia makes more than enough money from things outside of donations
dumb question but how does wikipedia make money outside donations? is there merch somewhere?
Grants and they also have a for-profit venture in Wikimedia Enterprises.
TY!
Nope
I don’t know if they “needed” donations in the past, but the America right wing fascists have just taken aim at it. So they are going to need money to defend themselves.
If the fachos and the tankies hate it, it’s a good sign 😁
I do not have the means to donate to things that I care about. Most weeks, the difference between overdrafting my bank account or not is literally a few cents. I donate the $3.10 every time the pop up shows up on Wikipedia. I’m sure there are other organizations that need the money more, but I think Wikipedia is SO important, and so far has remained earnest in their behavior. Proud of you for donating what you could, glad I could help a little bit too.
Be well, friend
Hey, I remember a time when if I lost a 5€ bill, that meant I’d eat for 5 euros less that month.
We’ve got your back, take care of yourself and consider donating when you’ve come around and can do it without second thoughts.
Cheers and hang in there, it’s worth it!
I find it valuable and worth supporting, so I donate a dollar a month. It’s not much, but I want to contribute (monetarily, in addition to editing)
I’m another monthly donor. I use Wikipedia nearly every day and appreciate the effort that goes into maintaining it.
Which effort? 99% of it is volunteer work by people not at the wikimedia foundation
Making a monthly contribution. Who knows where the money goes but I’ve never heard of a wiki project I disapproved of and there is a lot to like about what they do.
The website itself needs a really small amount of money. Most of the money goes for other stuff which might not seem useful to you.
They make it seem like they don’t have money but it’s quite the opposite: they increase their spendings based on their revenue. They have enough for many years.
Don’t donate to them. There are far better ways to spend your money than a foundation that doesn’t really do anything on Wikipedia and that still actively blocks anonymous proxies.
What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.
Then you have to accept Wikipedia is not free. I’m personally not willing to give them my IP, and I’ve been actively prevented from editing, fixing and adding information on the website.
The sole knowledge that they don’t use the money to fund Wikipedia should be enough to understand that your donation is not needed. When you donate, you think you donate for the great content, and maintaining Wikipedia, but that money isn’t used for that, or at least in a very small proportion.
Wikimedia foundation doesn’t write articles and do very few moderation. Iirc there are less than 100 employees working on the site. They’re financially profiting from the volunteer work people do. Just like Reddit.
Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
The whole point of Wikipedia is that the “IP” is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn’t exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.
In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I’ve never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That’s why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.
Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That’s humanity for you. We fuck things up. It’s up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that’s a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn’t that, and it’s old enough to have proven it won’t be captured in that way.
I think maybe you’re confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.
Free as in beer?
Free as in freedom, where everyone is welcome to access, contribute.
so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn’t exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse
This is false. While facts are facts and no one owns them (except for patents), it’s the formulation that you own. Plagiarism is about this. I didn’t want to focus on the legal aspect anyways, the license behind contributions is well known and I have no issues with it.
Your entire comment is not on the subject that I was talking about. I’m saying that the Wikimedia Foundation profits from volunteer work while they do very little, and I don’t believe that’s fair. I would much rather donate to contributors than to the foundation.
You should also know that non profits are really often abused and a way to pay less taxes. Many of them act like for profits.
Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.
On the subject of “Free as in Freedom” - I don’t agree that a site is ‘not free’ if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that’s not the main thrust of your argument so let’s set that aside.
Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation “doing very little,” and concerns about fairness, doesn’t seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia’s scale impractical to produce in-house, it’s also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I’d still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.
Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don’t need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you’re wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.
Lastly, I’m very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you’d be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.
Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:
I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that’s marketing, not politics.
Remember that there is a lot of anti-Wikipedia propaganda going around these days. Most “outrage” against Wikipedia is created and pushed artificially.
It’s just that one dude here
Ia it the.dude that’s downvoting everything here?
In the current day and age of misinformation I think donating is more important than ever. It doesn’t need to be much.
Reddit users and now lemmy users seem to have a riotous distaste for non-profits generally.
Wikipedia is one of the last, good parts of the internet, and it’s under increasing threat.
Nope
Wikimedia the tool is great, the foundation behind it, not so much
mind giving us some reasons for this position? not a critique, genuinely curious
Thanks for asking! The subject has been coming up for quite some time. I might edit this comment with more sources later on, because I’ve learned about this a few years ago and don’t keep a full list of my sources on me.
I have a few reasons for this:
- The Wikimedia Foundation (the entity that receives your donations) only uses a really small fraction of your donations for the Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. The rest goes into various non-essential spendings. [1]
- They’re not efficient about spendings. Each year they receive more, and each year they spend more, way more than they should compared to Wikipedia’s growth.
- The WMF doesn’t really do much on Wikipedia. All the writing and nearly all the moderation is done by volunteers.
- They block anonymous proxies, VPNs, Tor exit nodes from editing, even if you create an account. No exceptions for regular people.
This comment is still being modified, please wait 👷
TYVM
Wikipedia is being actively attacked by fascists who dont want it to exist or be well maintained. More important than ever. Criticism can be safely ignored.
“Fascists criticize Wikipedia, therefore all criticism is done by fascists”
I criticize them and I do not share the ideas you’re saying I do.
No I’m saying even if it’s imperfect–they really don’t want it to exist, so it’s probably important that it does.
Obviously, preserving Wikipedia is important. Donating is not the way to do it though
If Elon doesn’t like it then you know Wikipedia is good.
I’ve increased the amount I donate since the campaign to discredit them has been in effect.
Maybe they aren’t perfect, but I don’t like the idea of a world without such a wonderful resource being freely available to everyone no matter their background or financial status.
I used it a lot as a student but couldn’t afford to donate then. I don’t use it directly a lot these days, but I’m sure indirectly it contributes to articles I read, & I can afford to donate now, so I try to pay it back & some.
Information is power, & those in/with power seem to currently be trying their best to bring everyone else down. Any small thing I can do to help prevent that is a win in my book.
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Wikipedia, being a free source of information, is an incredibly important resource and a net good for humanity. But since Wikipedia is free for all they rely on donations to keep the lights on.
There are groups who would prefer it if that free access to information did not exist, or could be more easily be controlled and/or manipulated. It is in their interest to convince people not to donate to Wikipedia
I’m convinced that this “don’t donate to Wikipedia” messaging that has cropped up in recent years is a psyop, set up by these groups with the goal to starve Wikipedia of income.
Don’t fall for it. Support one of the last truly good places on the internet.
I never donated. Until the fascists told me not to donate. Now I donate regularly.
