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I have donated in the past, but then there were wild accusations, people saying it's not needed, it's to fund other things, and so on and so forth.
Yesterday I got the popup begging for a couple of euros, so what's the status? Should I donate or is it a waste of time and money?
Cheers
Edit: Thanks for all the insightful posts! I'm jobless at the moment so just ten bucks this time:
The website itself needs a really small amount of money. Most of the money goes for other stuff which might not seem useful to you.
They make it seem like they don’t have money but it’s quite the opposite: they increase their spendings based on their revenue. They have enough for many years.
Don’t donate to them. There are far better ways to spend your money than a foundation that doesn’t really do anything on Wikipedia and that still actively blocks anonymous proxies.
What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.
Then you have to accept Wikipedia is not free. I’m personally not willing to give them my IP, and I’ve been actively prevented from editing, fixing and adding information on the website.
The sole knowledge that they don’t use the money to fund Wikipedia should be enough to understand that your donation is not needed. When you donate, you think you donate for the great content, and maintaining Wikipedia, but that money isn’t used for that, or at least in a very small proportion.
Wikimedia foundation doesn’t write articles and do very few moderation. Iirc there are less than 100 employees working on the site. They’re financially profiting from the volunteer work people do. Just like Reddit.
Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
The whole point of Wikipedia is that the "IP" is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn't exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.
In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I've never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That's why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.
Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That's humanity for you. We fuck things up. It's up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that's a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn't that, and it's old enough to have proven it won't be captured in that way.
I think maybe you're confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.