Every so often I give a few bucks(far less than the worth of knowledge I got from it)
Absolutely not. They have way more money than they can sensibly spend, keep begging for more as if they could barely keep the lights on (they could probably easily keep the core mission going with about 10% of the money they’re getting), and then expand their spending to match the donations they collected.
They then created an endowment (i.e. a pile of wealth that generates enough interest to sustain them indefinitely), using both additional donations and some of the money given to Wikimedia (which reduces the apparent amount of money they spend and is not listed as money Wikipedia/Wikimedia has, as it is accounted for separately). The $100M endowment was planned to take 10 years to build, got completed in 2021, five years before schedule. Wikimedia also has a separate cash hoard of almost a quarter billion dollars.
It’s actually all in their article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances
Wow I didn’t know about this, thanks for the reading! I always feel morally in debt for using Wikipedia without giving back much and assume they were struggling a bit to operate, but wow they have received millions of dollars already!
edit: I’m still willing to donate though, and I just did, like I’m happy to pay for what I’ve learned from it, even if it doesn’t mean much to them.
They make it sound like they’re just about to close down, I’ve been sending them a few bucks every month for like a year and I feel a little bit slighted tbh
Very similar feelings here.
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This is the most interesting thing I realize(thanks to you) this week so far
Nope, I’ve donated to the internet archive because I have infinity more respect for them and they actually need more funding.
Wikipedia has more than they know what to do with, the money just falls out of their pockets
Came here to say the same thing. The Internet Archive needs the money a lot more and are constantly battling legal threats. I donate to them every now and then. Librarians and archivists rule.
They need it more since all these lawsuits they are facing
Yes, sporadically but usually once I year I give them a donation.
Wikipedia is an insanely valuable resource we as a society just take for granted, especially those that grew up with it. Instant access to nearly infinite information is an absurd luxury we have, and it’s a resource I want to see continue without being tied to corporate interests or abusive government regulation.
It’s never much mind you, but I try to contribute a little around Christmas time if I can.
Yes, and I even have it as an automatic scheduled payment so I don’t forget. Even with its flaws, it remains one of the shining gems of the Internet, and a resource I use frequently in both my professional life and my personal one. I remember how it was to suddenly want to learn more about a random topic before Wikipedia and I don’t want to go back.
I also donate to The Internet Archive.
No because I already donate to the EFF and Internet Archive and I figure that’s enough. And apparently Wikipedia already has enough money according to the comments here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics
they could run an extra year on $0 of donations. Whether one considers that enough or not might be down to personal viewpoint.
I used to do a regular donation ($5 a month or something) but then I found out Jimmy Wales (who was a figurehead of the site at that point) was a weird Ayn Rand libertarian and stopped.
Unless he’s personally being enriched (as opposed to making a living), that wouldn’t bother me. I have never felt the need to check. I donate because it’s useful to me.
I didn’t buy a Tesla because that fucker is enriched af and I hate him and I can get other cars that serve me just as well. There’s no (real) replacement or substitute for Wikipedia.
That sounds like an incredibly shallow reason to stop contributing
Even if 99 percent of Ayn Rand followers are fuckheads, Jimmy Wales’s actions separate him of them.
So yet another example of an objectivist being ultra productively generous and benefitting society, and again it’s simply rejected by someone whose opinion of objectivism was formed by its opponents.
People always talk about how it’s all about “I got mine” and yet every single one of her protagonists makes enormous self sacrifice for people they love.
Contrary to popular misinformation, objectivism isn’t about “I serve only myself”; it’s about “I decide my own ideals”.
And very frequently, the ideals of her hero characters include giving enormous gifts to others.
Wikipedia is a great example of that same drive manifesting in reality: 100% contrary to the BS greed-only perception of what Rand was trying to point to, Wikipedia is a totally free resource for everybody, sustained entirely by voluntary funding.
The way it’s in line with Rand’s thinking has nothing to do with selfishness and everything to do with the fact that the Wikimedia foundation doesn’t ask for permission it just creates and gives.
I’m no objectivist but I find it funny you are just downvoted but no one has the effort to make a counter-argument 🤣
I did once. Then I don’t because Wikipedia is currently in a stable financial situation so I can donate to another entity that needs resources.
No, because I’m very poor.
What if poor were defined by whether or not you give? What if you could become rich by giving some portion of your tiny amount of money away?
what if instead of eyeballs we had cupcakes?
Gee, wouldn’t that be nice. To be clear I’m living below the poverty line right now.
I’ve donated while living below the poverty line. And it made me feel pretty good, as a matter of fact. I funded the development of four organic gardens in central america, and I helped support Doctors Without Borders missions all over the globe. Felt damn good to know I could still help others way further below the poverty line than me.
How did you do that and, you know, still afford basic necessities? I already lean on donations from others to survive. Or was that your situation too, you just “re-donated” a bit.
I was not in the extremely unlikely scenario where the basic necessities cost exactly as much as my income.
A person is either ahead or behind. The probability their income and their expenses actually match, down to the last dollar, is vanishingly small.
Whenever you find in your life that you have no options, you can be sure you are hallucinating that state of affairs.
Read Elie Wiesel’s Night for an exploration of just how deep freedom goes.
Well, I’m behind. Book recommendation noted, I wonder if my public library could track down a copy.
Do you want a pat on the back?
Edit: also fuck off. How about you donate to Canada plus while you’re at it.
I don’t need a pat on the back because I have other far more valuable forms of satisfaction in my life, which I can provide myself.
Pats on the back are for adult children who think all the good in life comes from others’ recognition.
If you really want to make me feel grand, you could say something like “You know what? I’ll try donating $5 despite being poor, and I’ll let you know how it goes”.
It has an abominable political slant, so absolutely not. If there was a way to split the science/math/etc. segment from the rest of it, that one would totally be worth donating to.
Could you elaborate? I’ve never heard of that. Although I don’t donate to Wikipedia now.
That can be a touchy subject because the slant of Wikipedia and the slant of Reddit are very similar, but with Reddit leaning more towards chasing frivolous headlines and Wikipedia leaning more towards, like, rehabilitating Nazis and the like. The short version is that Wikipedia is far to the right of consensus among even neoliberal historians on many subjects and you will see things treated as plain there that are relatively fringe views academically.
Organizationally it’s had leadership with abominable politics. Jimmy Wales is a self-proclaimed libertarian. Katherine Maher was CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, then joined The Atlantic Council, and currently serves on the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. [edit: apostrophe’s]
I used to use it for free when I was broke. Now I give a little extra per month to hopefully offset that. It’s invaluable to me. That and public radio.
Absolutely. What a ridiculous amount of information for free, if you use it at all, it deserves $2-3 every now and then to keep it free. If someone buys it, they will fuck it up.
Do you donate to Wikipedia? Why or why not?
I did and ever since have been rewarded with an endless barrage of “you gave once before so do it aga–a-a–aa-a-a-a-a-a-a-in” banners. Given the ecomonics of fundraising I wouldn’t be surprised if donors were badgered more than non-donors.
I did once or twice. I also donated to Signal and couple smaller projects I used. I always plan to donate more but a man has to eat and fly on vacations to Canary Islands…
I used to, but then they removed crypto because of propaganda efforts by reactionary idiots masquerading as progressives. Now, I have no way to donate to them.
This exactly. But also because of my self interest. When they accepted crypto I was donating crypto, to encourage people to use crypto. Specifically monero, which they never accepted, but I used a transactional exchange to give them money from monero.
Since they got political about how they accept money, I can in relationship be political about not giving them money. I support their mission. I just wish they’d make it easier to give them money
My dudes, the fact that cryptos are fundamentally fucked and unusable by design is nothing to do with politics, it’s to do with technology. You don’t get to brush it off as “oh they’re just being woke”, it’s a business decision necessitated by the fact that it’s really annoying to get paid in crypto.
There’s a lot to say about this, but in this case specifically, the value of all major coins fluctuates massively, so if you accept them as payment then you have to look at it as getting paid with a speculative asset. It’s like getting paid with a barrel of oil hoping that the price will go up. I guess some businesses would be willing to make that bet, but maybe not a 501c like Wikimedia.
And the reason the prices fluctuate is because miners validators and holders straight up want it to, they want the price to fluctuate because they want to speculate and get rich, not actually use it as a currency. Even if normies were to require payment in stablecoins, enthusiasts don’t tend to use those because the price fluctuation is part of the point.
We could have a thread about it
I respect your position. I’m just telling you why I used to donate to Wikipedia and I don’t now.
It doesn’t need to be held. Once you’ve received the decentralized currency, the tech has done its job. You exchange it to dollars
Again, price volatility had nothing to with Wikipedia stopping crypto donations.
You can hate all you want, crypto is the only way I have to pay for a lot of things and it has definitely helped me more than reactionary moralists from the West living large in their oppression funded country.
I didn’t call them woke. Hell, people would probably call me woke if they asked about my political preferences. Being woke and being a reactionary pawn are two different things.
Quoting from the article:
the majority voted to do away with crypto contributions 234 to 94. Some of the main arguments concerned the environmental implications of Bitcoin, the risk of scams, as well as the fact that the WMF gets such a low amount of donations in cryptocurrency compared to other forms of payment
The environmental part is arguably mitigated by other cryptos than Bitcoin, but the others are true for pretty much all of crypto. The low volume of donations in particular is notable to me: people buy cryptocurrencies to hold as a speculative asset, and not to use as a currency.
I do see the mention that Mozilla stopped accepting crypto after backlash, but i don’t think you’re going to be able to pain that backlash as reactionary. And they would have run into the same issues as Wikipedia did regardless of backlash of any kind.
I don’t understand why it’s upvoted. It doesn’t even make sense. The reason crypto is bad for donations is the enormous transaction fees. They prefer giving up on your very peculiar situation because you are not worth it. Accepting bitcoin for you brings new fees for hundreds of normal people who do have access to the regular banking system but are enthusiastic about crypto so they will use it if available, thus giving less and overall losing money.
I definitely agree with your stance that we should exclude people from things because it’s inconvenient. This is why I don’t support accessibility measures in any domain.
I don’t even understand what your point is? Wikipedia doesn’t have to pay fees to accept crypto? They could keep other payment options too, no one said credit cards should not be allowed. They could just provide the address for the centralised exchange and sell it for cash with minimal problems.
What I’m finding out is that people have a bad case of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to crypto and it’s usually privileged Westerners who don’t care if other people are included or not. Just straight up racists.
True, i should have mentioned transaction fees maybe even as the main point, and transaction time too while we’re at it. In the moment when i was writing that comment all i was thinking of is trying to not write an essay, which you easily fall into when writing about crypto, so i omitted some pretty crucial points.
Speaking of points, i’m surprised it’s upvoted too, that kind of contrarian rant doesn’t usually garner sympathy
Your rant is not contrarian for Western imperialists who don’t want another financial system competing with their current hegemony.
That’s why crypto is hated by Westerners while most others have neutral to positive opinions of it generally.
And the transaction fees argument and time needed for confirmation doesn’t even make sense? Wikipedia doesn’t need to pay any fees to accept crypto and it’s not like they’re a business which needs the money a second after the transaction. Even if they did need it that quickly, there are plenty of choices in crypto that settle much faster than Bitcoin, which they used.
What enormous transaction fees?
Stablecoin transfers on an Ethereum L2 like Arbitrum is a few cents and about to get even cheaper in the future. It’s 1/10000 of a cent on Solana.
Monero payments are 1-3 cents.
Bitcoin has the highest one I paid, something like 12-15 cents. This can go higher like $10 if the chain is busy but you have plenty of options in the crypto space to choose the appropriate chain for payments.
I mean, it’s very clear you just listen to mainstream news and actually believe their agenda.
They do make it easy to give them money.
They just don’t want unstable scam bullshit where they have to go through the slog of going to an exchange, selling the coin, and cashing out… hoping all the while it doesnt crash in the mean time. Everyone tried to cash in on it when it was hot, before the vast majority knew or realized that crypto was nothing but a pump and dump scam, and they all dropped it due to instability and the fact that its a scam.
Except it was complaints from reactionaries which made them delete the option to donate through crypto after accepting it for years!
So, they were worried that an asset that has consistently gone up in the long term was too unstable to receive payments in? Your arguments make no sense.
I wanna dig into this point: i find it really weird how you tie rejection of crypto into politics at all, let alone reactionary politics. I always saw it as just the fact that the product doesn’t fit most people’s needs as a currency.
It’s reactionary politics? I’m not sure what else led to the rejection. It doesn’t actively hurt them to accept crypto. They just capitulated to reactionaries in their rejection, what else would I call it?
I’m not even claiming that crypto in its current form can handle global transactional needs, but Wikipedia and Mozilla realised that it could just be an additional avenue for payments. It wasn’t hurting anyone and allowed people like me to contribute. How would you like it if you couldn’t pay for things because it upset other people’s views of what the world should be like? Because that’s what happened to me.
Wikipedia caved to white Western imperialists’ demands which have no basis in reality and excluded large portions of the world, most of which are marginalised communities who don’t have access to the same financial systems that Westerners do.
I’m just glad that SciHub isn’t headed by a reactionary but an actual person who cares about our rights to free and fair access to all things. And SciHub proves the need for an alternate financial system that isn’t dominated, or at least, directly controllable by vested interests of the Western financial system.
Ah, i see, so it’s conspiracy theories.
You know, the tech just being fundamentally flawed is a lot simpler an explanation than this, and it has the distinct advantage of actually having any evidence to back it up.
At this point, I’m not sure you understand what reactionary means?
The tech being fundamentally flawed has nothing to do with payments being stopped. Show me one reason where they said it was because they weren’t receiving the payments as shown by the blockchain.
I’ll be happy to donate on your behalf while taking 10% for the service.
Honestly, they are pretty well funded and don’t need the money. I just redirected my money to SciHub and Lemmy now.
You can still send me money whenever you want
No. I did donate once and then they illegally spammed my email for a year. I had to threaten them with a lawyer to stop. It was senseless.
This happened to me as well. I just didn’t go as far as the lawyer bit. I just sent all of their emails to spam for auto deletion.
I donate to them sometimes depending on how money is, but yeah holy hell do they spam you once you donate. Just a non-stop stream of increasingly passive-aggressive emails.
