Probably the most important part of that page is that Wikipedia asks people for donations when they already have enough money to exist perpetually. All the money people donate simply goes to executives’ salaries.
WMF’s salary costs have risen from $7 million in 2010/11 to $88 million in 2021/22. Yet, only 2% of the raised money goes towards hosting costs, and the remuneration for the hard-working contributors to Wikipedia remains the same: zero.
That’s all untrue or misrepresentation. There aren’t that many executives and while money does get misused, that’s not where it’s going - instead some of it is going to grants and other programs that aren’t very important to the mission. However, quite a lot of donations go to very important projects, such as lawyers to keep editors in repressive countries out of jail, programmers to keep the website going, etc etc.
“2%” is a misrepresentation because programmer and operations salaries are a lot more than that and they’re equally important to keeping the lights on. If I own and operate a server for a website, then clearly my salary is part of what it takes to run the website even if it’s not included in “hosting”.
“Renumeration” is a red herring as paying contributors is obviously a non-starter.
I remember right before the reddit migration there were a surge of wiki related memes about paying Wikipedia instead of doing this or that and it felt super weird.
I always wondered if it was paid shilling or if it was organic users who just loved Wikipedia so much they felt the need to make a bunch of memes about giving them money
Probably the most important part of that page is that Wikipedia asks people for donations when they already have enough money to exist perpetually. All the money people donate simply goes to executives’ salaries.
That’s all untrue or misrepresentation. There aren’t that many executives and while money does get misused, that’s not where it’s going - instead some of it is going to grants and other programs that aren’t very important to the mission. However, quite a lot of donations go to very important projects, such as lawyers to keep editors in repressive countries out of jail, programmers to keep the website going, etc etc.
“2%” is a misrepresentation because programmer and operations salaries are a lot more than that and they’re equally important to keeping the lights on. If I own and operate a server for a website, then clearly my salary is part of what it takes to run the website even if it’s not included in “hosting”.
“Renumeration” is a red herring as paying contributors is obviously a non-starter.
I literally just copy and pasted from the wiki page the person above me linked to.
Wiki has a weird cult around it.
I remember right before the reddit migration there were a surge of wiki related memes about paying Wikipedia instead of doing this or that and it felt super weird.
I always wondered if it was paid shilling or if it was organic users who just loved Wikipedia so much they felt the need to make a bunch of memes about giving them money