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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:
I do not have the means to donate to things that I care about. Most weeks, the difference between overdrafting my bank account or not is literally a few cents. I donate the $3.10 every time the pop up shows up on Wikipedia. I'm sure there are other organizations that need the money more, but I think Wikipedia is SO important, and so far has remained earnest in their behavior. Proud of you for donating what you could, glad I could help a little bit too.
Be well, friend
Hey, I remember a time when if I lost a 5€ bill, that meant I'd eat for 5 euros less that month.
We've got your back, take care of yourself and consider donating when you've come around and can do it without second thoughts.
Cheers and hang in there, it's worth it!
Usually its the far right or tankies that hate wikipedia, it seems pretty neutral for the most part.
they hate it, because it has all the info of everything bad that a republican/conservative, far right government did, and its very hard to deflect/ or deny the amount of evidence from it.
I was hearing that Wikipedia makes more than enough money from things outside of donations that it seems scammy to ask for donations the way they do from leftists before Trump's first term.
Nope
I give small monthly donations to three things:
I'm another monthly donor. I use Wikipedia nearly every day and appreciate the effort that goes into maintaining it.
Which effort? 99% of it is volunteer work by people not at the wikimedia foundation
I find it valuable and worth supporting, so I donate a dollar a month. It’s not much, but I want to contribute (monetarily, in addition to editing)
Making a monthly contribution. Who knows where the money goes but I've never heard of a wiki project I disapproved of and there is a lot to like about what they do.
Remember that there is a lot of anti-Wikipedia propaganda going around these days. Most "outrage" against Wikipedia is created and pushed artificially.
I give through my employer which matches donations. You should look into whether that's available since it'll double the amount.
Decentralized truth is essential to human freedom. It's not enough to just run wikipedia as a bare bones site, they need to be able to adapt to the times and maybe even fund new projects with the same goals. For people who actually care about the future, it's hard to think of a better use of the money.
I wonder if I could get my employer to match donations, be it Wikipedia or other projects or foss, with or without work use 🤔
This question got asked a couple years ago and I said what I found in their reported finances. Unless something changed over the last couple years, they likely still need the money.
Your analysis only addresses the income vs. expenditure being relatively balanced. It doesn’t address the criticisms OP was hearing about. The primary criticism is that the foundation only needs a fraction of their current expenditure if all they did was run Wikipedia.
DONATE!
Wikipedia made a conscious choice to remain free, ad free and neutral.
They get my money! Even if they don't need it.
I’ve increased the amount I donate since the campaign to discredit them has been in effect.
Maybe they aren’t perfect, but I don’t like the idea of a world without such a wonderful resource being freely available to everyone no matter their background or financial status.
I used it a lot as a student but couldn’t afford to donate then. I don’t use it directly a lot these days, but I’m sure indirectly it contributes to articles I read, & I can afford to donate now, so I try to pay it back & some.
Information is power, & those in/with power seem to currently be trying their best to bring everyone else down. Any small thing I can do to help prevent that is a win in my book.
Reddit users and now lemmy users seem to have a riotous distaste for non-profits generally.
Wikipedia is one of the last, good parts of the internet, and it's under increasing threat.
Nope
Wikimedia the tool is great, the foundation behind it, not so much
In the current day and age of misinformation I think donating is more important than ever. It doesn't need to be much.
Wikipedia, being a free source of information, is an incredibly important resource and a net good for humanity. But since Wikipedia is free for all they rely on donations to keep the lights on.
There are groups who would prefer it if that free access to information did not exist, or could be more easily be controlled and/or manipulated. It is in their interest to convince people not to donate to Wikipedia
I'm convinced that this "don't donate to Wikipedia" messaging that has cropped up in recent years is a psyop, set up by these groups with the goal to starve Wikipedia of income.
Don't fall for it. Support one of the last truly good places on the internet.
I never donated. Until the fascists told me not to donate. Now I donate regularly.
Wikipedia is being actively attacked by fascists who dont want it to exist or be well maintained. More important than ever. Criticism can be safely ignored.
"Fascists criticize Wikipedia, therefore all criticism is done by fascists"
I criticize them and I do not share the ideas you’re saying I do.
No I'm saying even if it's imperfect–they really don't want it to exist, so it's probably important that it does.
Obviously, preserving Wikipedia is important. Donating is not the way to do it though
If Elon doesn’t like it then you know Wikipedia is good.
I give them a little every year, and do not consider it a waste at all. I give $ each month to the community radio station with local news on it too.
Those free nonprofit media companies are important. They are the voice of the people.
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.
It's good to see Fediverse people actually supporting paying for something. Sometimes I think they want everything for free.
It's not that I want everything for free, it's that I want money to no longer be a factor in life. Like in The Orville.
(Star Trek too, I assume, but I'm not a Trekkie so I can't confirm whether or not money exists in that universe.)
I don't think people here mind paying for stuff I think it's more that enshittification and subscription based business models should not be supported.
I simultaneously believe that Wikipedia is valuable and that it's not clear that WMF needed $185 million dollars.
As far as I can tell the situation has not significantly changed since "the last time(s)" this was discussed. Wikipedia remains a valuable resource, and WMF continues to aggressively increase both spending and fundraising revenue. Whether you think that means you should donate or not is probably the same answer as it was several years ago for most individuals based on personal preferences.
edit: typo
I think the answer has changed a bit since they got a much better CEO who’s doing a lot more communication and engagement with the community, which dictates what Wikipedia looks like
Do you use it?
Donate. I donate $5/mo. Gonna bump it up to $10/month soon.
Always fund Wikipedia if you have the ability to
It may not need a donation at any given time, but given how volatile things are in the USA right now, there's every chance they might find themselves needing to suddenly spend a lot on lawyers
It's arguably one of the most important resources we have as humanity. It's imperative we protect it.
I donate $5 each month! ❤
People who down vote real dislikes Wikipedia!