this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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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 theyβre just about to close down, Iβve been sending them a few bucks every month for like a year and I feel a little bit slighted tbh
Very similar feelings here.
For people looking for some further reading on this subject, there is a well known wikipedia user's article about this with some history of this problem of unchecked spending:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
some other internet knowledge repository's you should consider donating to:
https://archive.org/about/
https://www.eff.org/about
https://www.law.cornell.edu/lii/about/about_lii
This is the most interesting thing I realize(thanks to you) this week so far
Yes. People won't understand the value of something until they lose it.