They have millions to spare every year, yet their hosting costs is just a couple thousand.
And yet they insist on community moderators, who aren’t trained, paid or impartial. A lot of the information on the site has been quite terrible recently.
Meanwhile, they beg and beg for more money. Where that cash goes? Well a big chunk of it is labeled “other” and “community projects”. They currently have about 250 million sitting in the bank. Enough to keep their hosting services running for over 400 years if their funding were to abruptly stop.
And then still, they accept grants on top of donations.
Their hosting is a couple million a year, and they have $80 million in cash, not $250.
Their cash flow from donations after expenses is about $6 million.
They absolutely cannot keep running for 400 years without further funding.
If nothing else, people are needed to run the servers and actually manage the basic operations of the foundation.
They’re definitely not in a dire financial situation, but they’re not centuries of hands off operation by any means.
If you use it frequently, and have money to spare for that (after maybe considering other projects that may better align with you personally), yes.
I donate a small amount every year. Before now, I had not given much thought about its internal politics or whether they really need it to stay afloat (my contribution is too small to make a difference anyway).
To me, it’s more of a way of being thankful for having ad-free content with a good enough material.
I worked for them ten years ago. I was excited to do something important for once. And it was better than competing with Amazon for book sales. I was really helping.
I eventually left because I didn’t think we were being a great steward of donor money. And I didnt have the best relationship with my boss. Nice guy, but we didn’t clock.
Back then they spent like half their money on donations and programs trying to get more editors. That included supporting projects in smaller languages and diversity on current projects. Mostly good stuff as far as I could tell.
Where they invested their money for tech was where I disagreed. But even so, I’ve donated since then. They are supporting important work. Everyone makes mistakes.
Ultimately, I dunno.
Not really. They haven’t been giving me a good reason. I’ve seen too many broken articles, formats that aren’t consistent and an abundance of editing issues. Those are not good reasons for me to be donating to them over.
Yeah, fuck them, right? Fucking assholes building a database with everything we learned and did as a species, making it accessible for everyone for free with their inconsistent editing. Let Wikipedia go broke with it’s abundance of editing issues! Who will miss this piece of shit site everyone can add to, edit and correct even without an account. Not us, right!
So edgy. Ooooo, petty downvotes, must make your one-inch dick hard, doesn’t it?
Yes definitely. Anything that spreads knowledge should be hugely supported.
Be very suspicious of anyone advocating for less support of knowledge sharing.
this is my take also. def be suspicious of anyone trying to hide or gatekeep knowledge, transparency is key. it doesn’t hurt anyone to be properly informed. I say “properly” because look at MAGA bullshit.
we all do better with real, legit knowledge.
BRAWNDO! it’s what plants crave!
