He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:
- Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
- Narrative is fundamentally false
- Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess
I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.
Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.
Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots
Last time I heard about wikipedia’s donation campaign (maybe 2 4 years ago or so), it was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation’s income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight. Did this change? If it didn’t, I wouldn’t particularly advise anyone to donate to them.
I actually took a look at Wikipedia’s accounts last week as I remembered that campaign when I saw the latest campaign and did some due diligence before donating. I didn’t donate, but I’m still glad Wikipedia exists.
What I remembered: That hosting costs were tiny and Wikimedia foundation had enough already saved up to operate for over a hundred years without raising any more.
What I saw: That if that was true, it isn’t any longer. It’s managed growth.
I don’t think they are at any risk of financial collapse, but they are cutting their cloth to suit their income. That’s normal in business, including charities. If you stop raising money, you stagnate. You find things to spend that money on that are within the charity’s existing aims.
Some highlights from 2024: $106million in wages. 26m in awards and grants. 6m in “travel and conferences”. Those last two look like optional spends to me, but may be rewards to the volunteer editors. The first seems high, but this is only a light skim
Net assets at EOY = $271 million. Hosting costs per year are $3million. It’s doing okay.
If you’re curious; https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
Love that everyone on this thread is a financial analyst and a 501c consultant.
For-profit companies have the margins they do because they’ve successfully detached humanity from their spending obligations. Wikipedia does not need to do quarterly global lay-offs or labor off-shoring when their technology doesn’t meet release deadlines. They are a nonprofit. They exist to bring factual, accessible information to the world. If you support for this cause, donate. If you don’t, don’t donate or don’t use. If you care for the cause but want the CEO to take a paycut, well, find them one who will stick around for more than a few years on less than the average mega CEO salary. Because most of them have not.
Love that everyone on this thread is a financial analyst and a 501c consultant.
So people shouldn’t have an opinion unless they’re professionally qualified? I’m not sure that’s how the internet works.
And also, people absolutely should check how their money will be spent when they consider donating. It’s their money, remember.
If you support for this cause, donate. If you don’t, don’t donate or don’t use.
I get that, and it’s often true I think. But when the thing that they do that you use and like is such a tiny part of their spending, is it still true?
I care about Wikipedia’s website. I would donate to that. I don’t care about the other 90% of the things they would spent my donation on. Should I still donate?
Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline. I don’t see how to estimate how much of that “salaries” part is related to Wikipedia rather to their other business. But even taking the most optimistic possible reading, I think it’s still true that the marginal value of donations to Wikimedia foundations will not be in support of Wikipedia’s existence or even in improvements to it, but in them doing more unrelated charity.
(If you want to donate specifically to charities that spread knowledge, then donating to Wikipedia makes more sense, though then in my opinion you should consider supporting the Internet Archive, which has ~8 times less revenue, and just this year was sued for copyright infringement this year and spent a while being DDOSed into nonfunctionality - that’s a lot of actually good reasons to need more money!).
Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline.
Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?
The salaries mostly are in the $100k-350k range, maybe up to $500-700k in the C suite. They’re perfectly reasonable by the standards of a San Francisco tech company that operates at the scale that Wikipedia does. The full list of exact salaries and recipients is listed in their form 990 filings if you want to read them for yourself.
Edit: Phrasing
Yep. Just like for-profit companies, having a diverse range of revenue streams is necessary for securing the financial health of the organization. While Wikipedia receives significant donations from companies like Google and Microsoft, it is essential to also solicit contributions from individuals to ensure that their income is not overly reliant on a single source. Just like in for-profits, Wikimedia likely determines the percentages of income from various sources needed to maintain this diversity. This concept seems particularly important for Wikipedia given its mission to provide unbiased information.
On another note, I’ve seen your same “100 years” notion mentioned a few times on this post. I can’t imagine that everyone who’s saying it independently had the idea to analyze their financial statements and calculate projections over 100 years. Is this an article you’re quoting? Just curious.
This perspective is very common in online communities about any sort of charity or non-profit.
“Don’t donate money to whatever charity, they just waste the money on whatever thing”
Truthfully, it’s just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.
Truthfully, it’s just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.
Sometimes.
Sometimes it’s a pretty accurate statement.
I used to run a medium-large charity. I have a fair bit of experience in fundraising and management. Most donators would be shocked at how little their donation actually achieves in isolation. Also at the waste that often goes on, and certainly the salaries at the upper tiers.
And I could also say that guilt is exactly why people donate. It’s to feel good about themselves, they’re buying karma. Central heating for the soul. I won’t say that’s a bad thing, but it is a thing. It’s also exactly how charities fundraise, because it works. That’s why your post and tv adverts are full of pictures of sad children crying. Every successful charity today is that way because it knows how to manipulate potential supporters. Is that always wrong? Of course not, charities couldn’t do good things without money. But sometimes the ethics in fundraising are extremely flexible.
Well, that’s definitely a super trustworthy thing, not at all relevant to the question of whether there is misinformation floating around that is targeted at Wikipedia.
I looked up their financial reports somewhere else in these comments when talking to someone else, and long story short, it’s not true. Also, just to annoy anyone who’s trying to spread this type of misinformation, I just set up a recurring $10/month donation to Wikipedia. I thought about including a note specifically requesting that it be used only for rather questionable things and funding very weird research, but there wasn’t a space for it.
I wondered when writing my comment whether people would combine this with the vague statement in the opening post and conclude “aha, I will now take this as misinformation without checking”, but then I looked at your other comments and saw you were actually talking about some India-related conspiracy I heard nothing about. Yet apparently you nevertheless think my comment is intentional misinfo?? That isn’t very coherent, is it now?
I was talking about your comment. The idea that because they pay people salaries, including a few hundred K per year for the people at the top, they’re drowning in money and there’s no point in donating as long as they can pay their hosting bills and nothing else, is wrong. Furthermore I suspect that at least some of the bunch of people who suddenly started coming out of the woodwork to say a few variations on that exact same thing are part of some kind of deliberate misinformation, just because it’s kind of a weird conclusion for a whole bunch of people to all start talking about all at once. Doubly so because it isn’t true.
There’s a whole separate thing where one of the other commenters sent me an article saying Israel is attacking Syria with nuclear weaponry and I only don’t know about it because I consume hopelessly pro-Western propaganda sources like Wikipedia, and he sent me India.com as his backing for it. That’s nothing to do with you, though.
