Wikipedians are rebelling against “unethical” Wikipedia fundraising banners

&quot;Wikipedians are rebelling&quot; is a bit overstated. We&#x27;re talking about a discussion thread which 35 people have commented in, not universally in opposition, versus the ~120k users[1] who&#x27;ve made an edit on English Wikipedia in the last 30 days.<p>(Fun trick: use <i>this</i> URL to turn on the summary headers that&#x27;re why I know how many people are in the discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)?dtenable=1#RfC_on_the_banners_for_the_December_2022_fundraising_campaign" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...</a> )<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Special:Statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Special:Statistics</a>

I was hoping someone could help me understand. The objective of the Wikimedia Endowment[0] is to invest until the profits fully fund Wikipedia, expenses, as is the case with most endowments. According to Wikipedia’s financial statements[1], their spending balloons by tens of millions of dollars each year.<p>2015-2016: $66M<p>2019-2020: $112M<p>2021-2022: $146M<p>Assuming a modest return of 5%, isn’t it the case they would need billions in their endowment to fully fund Wikipedia?<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikimediaendowment.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikimediaendowment.org&#x2F;</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...</a>

There is nothing about “intersectional scientific method” anywhere on the internet or on the org’s website. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanguardstem.com&#x2F;serch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanguardstem.com&#x2F;serch</a>.<p>Non profits (WMF) grant money to programs that directly or indirectly affect the content of all products offered by the WMF. It’s not just Wikipedia. There are grants that goto volunteers to increase editorship&#x2F;authorship of non English Wikipedia or in countries and culture where Wikipedia does not have as many articles.<p>Calling this culture wars and simply saying “the money doesn’t goto hosting” is low complexity thinking that fails to account for all the things the foundation does.

Link to the actual discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#RfC_on_the_banners_for_the_December_2022_fundraising_campaign" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...</a>

I love this part in the discussion information section:<p>&gt; If there is a consensus that the banners are not appropriate to run but the WMF tries to run them without implementing the required changes then our proposed method to enforce the consensus is for Common.css to be modified to prevent them from appearing.

I don&#x27;t mind giving to Wikipedia despite the recent controversies, what I can&#x27;t bear is regularly giving them money, and receiving messages titled &quot;We&#x27;ve had enough&quot;, clearly designed at guilting me into giving more. This is abusing psychology, which is probably effective, but unethical. I have no doubt they feel in the right to do so given their mission. Wrongdoing for the right reasons is still wrongdoing.

Wikipedia is and continues to be the best resource on the web. I really don&#x27;t care to armchair run their parents organization. I&#x27;ll continue to donate and hope that they know what they&#x27;re doing.<p>I think HN gets too tunnel visioned on the technical side of the project. Look at how many comments reduce Wikipedia to it&#x27;s &quot;hosting&quot; costs. There&#x27;s more to running an organization than the servers.<p>All large organizations experience waste and spend some money poorly. It&#x27;s basically an operating expense at scale. The net value creation tends to still be positive.<p>I believe there&#x27;s more to running a successful global comprehensive and free encyclopedia than hosting. To keep the content and community vibrant, to expand into new languages and communities. These things probably require more than just &quot;hosting&quot;. I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s required but I&#x27;ll continue to donate to WMF and hope for the best.

You can read Wikimedia&#x27;s financial statements here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikimediafoundation.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;financial-reports&#x2F;#a1-2022-2023" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikimediafoundation.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;financial-reports&#x2F;#a1-...</a><p>I&#x27;m completely fine with how they use their money and will continue donating as long as Wikipedia remains a valuable resource for me. I do not care much that Wikimedia is not directly Wikipedia and that they spend more money than Wikipedia would alone.<p>This feels similar to the Mozilla vs Firefox &quot;why is Mozilla spending money on other things&quot; argument.<p>I will continue donating to Mozilla, Wikimedia, and the Internet Archive because I think they&#x27;re all doing important work beyond their core products. I don&#x27;t have to pick one or the other, I can give to all of them.

I have been donating annually around $50 or less for the last ten years. I was quite surprised to get an email from jimmy@wikipedia.org last month suggesting I increase my donation to $250.<p>I&#x27;m planning to not donate at all this year, (instead to Internet Archive) based largely on discussions I have read here at HN. But I thought the request to suddenly increase my typical donation five-fold was pretty outrageous.

It’s sad that such a wonderful resource as Wikipedia is owned by borderline scammers.

I&#x27;ve been a stubborn Wikipedia defender and donator for the past couple years, but this new fundraising banner style is the first time Wikipedia has begun to lose sympathy for me. I hope to see much less of this in the future

I stopped giving money to wikipedia a few years back. It seemed that as their endownment continued to grow their pleading became more desperate.<p>This rubs me the wrong way. I want my money to go to wikipedia, with the amount of money they now have my donation will go to side projects. That&#x27;s not what I want to donate to, and also not what they are advertising in their banner.

The begging banner always have left a bad taste in my mouth. A small link on the bottom of the site &#x27;donate&#x27; should have sufficed.

Seems reasonable for wikipedia to want more money year on year every one wants to see the platform grow. Obviously they need to cover more than just hosting costs trying to do anything for the public good results in you getting sued by every company thats trying to commercialise that good.<p>That being said the lack of transparency is alarming why not be public about it all? Sure some will use it against you but the people that actually care and fund them won&#x27;t really care what its being spent on as long as the quality of service remains good.

What is surprising about all this is that it wouldn&#x27;t take much effort at all to get fed up and fork Wikipedia. Surely Wales and company understand this danger.

Funny thing is that Wikipedia used to run on fully sponsored servers at least in the European region, provided by educational organizations.<p>But they left because they wanted to be independent and they had plenty of sponsorship money anyway. And they still do. They get much more from business and government than they&#x27;ll ever get from us.<p>Like the other poster above I also donate to archive.org instead which really does need it.

Again with this?<p>WMF gives a small fractional amount to some causes some people disagree with. Nearly every charity I donate to imperfectly spends their funds.<p>The question I have is: reading the title of this post, how many wikipedians are taking this &quot;rebellious&quot; stance? How many wikipedians don&#x27;t care or don&#x27;t notice?

I hopped onto Mastodon, and threw money at our local instance (infosec.exchange)<p>Right now, they&#x27;re seeing loads of x10 and above. And since Mastodon is inherently noncommercial, I&#x27;m glad to support the instance im on.<p>And it&#x27;s so much more peaceful there. Fake viralness doesn&#x27;t exist. Re-toots (re-tweets) don&#x27;t exist as a intentional design ideal. And its chronological. No re-loading to see more forced psychological viral garbage for more forced interaction.<p>So far, it&#x27;s calmer and much more pleasant than I had thought possible.

I&#x27;m willing to give a little leeway with donations. I&#x27;d rather have Wikimedia run a surplus or embezzle the money than see Wikipedia having to count every penny. I pay $17 for Netflix and I also donate $17 for Wikipedia every month. My Wikipedia &quot;subscription&quot; is hands down the one I&#x27;d keep if money was tight.

That reminded me of donating to WP this year. Done.<p>I don&#x27;t care what their fundraisings are, I just know that they deserve a donation now and then.<p>(Also, they employ more than 500 people, and this is consistent with their donations volume, so I don&#x27;t think they are burning money for nothing.)

I don&#x27;t go to wikipedia.org anymore, and use my browser to redirect all links to Wikiless.<p>Regardless of the reason, if a page I&#x27;m going to doesn&#x27;t display the content I reasonably expected it to have, I consider that page broken, and try to find a replacement as soon as possible.<p>The cognitive load of cookie banners, newsletter prompts, paywalls, tutorials, and so on, is just not acceptable to me, and I choose to leave all of it on the other Web, the AOLWeb and FacebookWeb, the one which I rarely access, mostly by accident. The GoodWeb, the one with the content and fast, lightly formatted pages, is where I stay.<p>I vote with my browser, only allowing JS selectively, choosing to close the tab whenever the AOLWeb rears its head, using various proxies on the rare occasion AOLWeb has anything I actually want, clipping anything useful into my cliplog for others to access more easily.<p>It&#x27;s refreshing, let me tell you.

Seeing news like this makes me sad initially because it feels like every &quot;decent&quot; tech company out there (Mozilla, Wikipedia come to mind) keeps getting sucked into culture wars that distract from their core missions.<p>Take a step back, and you realize that it&#x27;s actually a very very positive thing to see this kind of news. We&#x27;re seeing it because Wikipedians are not OK with this behavior, and they&#x27;re trying to signal that to the folks running the show. I hope they listen more than Mozilla&#x27;s management.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;echetus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1579776106034757633" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;echetus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1579776106034757633</a> - that&#x27;s all you need to read.<p>They&#x27;re funneling tens of millions of dollars of donations into the US culture war.

many posters here have no problem with Wikimedia&#x2F;Mozilla&#x2F;etc redirecting the money to political activists.<p>I&#x27;d just like to remind you what happened when Brendan Eich had donated $1000 <i>of his own damn money</i> to a cause <i>you</i> found disagreeable.

There&#x27;s a firefox extension called &quot;Defund Wikipedia&quot; which works very well to block these messages.<p>I personally use Britannica.

So dad that no one looks like to be willing to fork Wikipedia&#x2F;wmf.<p>I would be happy to make a donation to it and have the original wmf rot.

Wikipedia is one of the worst things that was ever launched on the web. Many people say that it&#x27;s reliable, except in cases of controversy. That&#x27;s a spin. A more honest way of describing it is that it&#x27;s a system designed to accumulate trust by providing people with trivial information and then spectacularly fail them when the information is critically important for some society-wide issue. The failures aren&#x27;t unfortunate mishaps, they are inevitable by design.