Its cool that people are donating, but they are doing it without knowing that the wikimedia foundation is actually receiving like 100 times the amount in donations that it needs to run Wikipedia. All the while the banners say something like “Wikipedia is fucking dying we need more donations NOW”. Yes lots of the other projects of the foundation are probably good and they have more legal and quality control costs now than 20 years ago, but there its not thaaat much and its just not what is being communicated to the users. And as this guy has pointed out, there is no such thing as infinite growth, so the question is what happens when that juicy donation income starts dropping? Or what if all the people working at the foundation want to unionize? And now we know…
On the other hand it’s legitimately one of the wonders of the digital world. A communally edited source of knowledge free for all to access. While it’s good to scrutinise foundations and how they are run I’ve not seen anyone propose a better solution so far. The data is freely licensed so forking is possible but it’s not really the technical details that make Wikipedia the resource it is today.
That graph isnt as damning as you think… it means they have a single year of runway at best. ideally net assets should be large enough they can live off the float.
For people interested in some numbers have this user post that has been getting updated every year called “Wikipedia has Cancer”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
Its cool that people are donating, but they are doing it without knowing that the wikimedia foundation is actually receiving like 100 times the amount in donations that it needs to run Wikipedia. All the while the banners say something like “Wikipedia is fucking dying we need more donations NOW”. Yes lots of the other projects of the foundation are probably good and they have more legal and quality control costs now than 20 years ago, but there its not thaaat much and its just not what is being communicated to the users. And as this guy has pointed out, there is no such thing as infinite growth, so the question is what happens when that juicy donation income starts dropping? Or what if all the people working at the foundation want to unionize? And now we know…
On the other hand it’s legitimately one of the wonders of the digital world. A communally edited source of knowledge free for all to access. While it’s good to scrutinise foundations and how they are run I’ve not seen anyone propose a better solution so far. The data is freely licensed so forking is possible but it’s not really the technical details that make Wikipedia the resource it is today.
Download it forever, then.
https://kiwix.org/en/
That graph isnt as damning as you think… it means they have a single year of runway at best. ideally net assets should be large enough they can live off the float.