If I was misled about where my donation was spent, I suspect I am being misled about what this "Knowledge Equity" fund is doing.

Trust broken. I'm out forever.

surely $1m is a small fraction of their donations, which also means the vast majority of your donation does go to maintaining wikipedia.

>the vast majority of your donation does go to maintaining wikipedia.

Who knows? Is there any good investigative breakdown of exactly what Wikimedia Foundation spends most of its income on? Does it have a huge admin parasitical attachment sucking the money away? I'm not accusing, just wondering myself. Perhaps someone knows about this.

Their financials are public [1]. See page 4 of the document (6th page of the pdf) for their expenditure breakdown.

Some quick highlights: of their >$150M of usable donations, they spent about 57% of it on "salaries," 10% of it on "awards and grants," 4% of it just on processing donations, and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...

There's not a good public breakdown of how much of those salaries are on people developing Wikipedia/mediawiki/moderation tools, and how much are on special projects. It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget.

Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has....

> It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget.

This needs to be taken with the thought that not all projects necessarily end up good.

Yeah, in retrospect it's easy to say that something was a waste of money. Much harder to tell ahead of time.

Visual Editor is generally pretty popular with a significant portion of users (especially newer users) using it. If that's a failure WMF should have more failures.

I don't understand this kind of critique. 2% on pure hosting cost. The horror! And they spend things on salaries, like web admins, accountants, lawyers to defend against all the different legal threats the face, people to handle takedowns, spam attacks, botfarms, PR, write the obligatory reports like the one you quote from, etc etc ...

For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.

What "critique" are you talking about?

> a measly 2% on actual hosting costs

That's a good sign, isn't it? It means they are efficient and don't waste their budget on overpriced cloud services.

I'd be more pissed if a significant junk of the donations went straight to AWS.

> and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs.

Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ is the best source i know for this.

Only 42% of donations are used to maintaining Wikipedia and it's related sites.

> Only 42% of donations are used to maintaining Wikipedia and it's related sites.

How do you square that with this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180736) that says only they only spend "2% on actual hosting costs."

100% of the work of actually maintaining Wikipedia is is done by unpaid volunteers, and much of the tooling they use also appears to be developed on a volunteer basis.

It comes from the Wikimedia Foundation.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annu...

The 42% presumably includes hosting cost and salaries in support of "Wikipedia and its companion sites", whereas the ~2% is direct hosting expenses.

I think the 42% is over inflated. Of course it takes more than just hosting Wikipedia, but the 42% likely includes a lot of vanity projects that are not needed to keep the website operational longterm.

Reading some comments, there appears to have been a move a few years ago where they moved 10mil to some sort of "equity knowledge fund". The rabbit hole just got deeper and I'm seriously disappointed I didn't stop donating sooner.

I'm just gonna stop going down this rabbit hole before it depresses me even more.

> I just thought my money went to maintaining Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, it's purpose and intent is...

"to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal." - Jimmy Wales, 2008

The grants work to serve that goal. Of ensuring that everyone has access to that information and can use it.

So, my question is simple, if they didn't send the money to these organizations, but instead, used it instead to improve only, let's say, the machines it's hosted on, but you and whatever country you were in couldn't access it, would you still give them money? Wikipedia still exists for everyone else, but you and your fellow countrymen can't access it.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective

The page we are discussing lists specific grants.. which ones of those help with that goal?

There is nothing wrong with "matching racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications", but that work is clearly not required to "create and distribute a free encyclopedia".

It's not like they decided to use 100% of donations for other projects, it still supports the Wikipedia.

I am not sure it does - wikipedia famously does not pay contributors (except for that one guy). The majority of their spending is on wages though, for their 700 employees. I'm sure some of them are doing worthwhile development on MediaWiki etc but I suspect the majority are not. Like Mozilla, the organisation could charitably be described as bloated.

Only 42% of donations go to Wikipedia and related websites. There is no breakdown for this, and there are likely some vanity projects that are not needed (they mention data analytics)

Another thread was quoting 2% for hosting costs, so I'm curious where the 42% comes from.

It doesn't matter. It's highly reproachable that they decided to use the money that people donated to help keep Wikipedia's lights on, on a political endeavour. It sends a clear signal to me to never, ever, give money to them again. It is infuriating to see your resources being employed on political causes that you fiercely oppose.

won’t literally any charity spend money somewhere you wouldn’t necessarily agree with? most of the time you simply wouldn’t know.

Well, if you donate to a charity that is supposed to do X, and along the way said charity tells the whole world that "by the way, out of every 100 dollars that you donate to us, we'll give 5, maybe 10 dollars, to causes that you absolutely can't stand", you'll only continue donating to this charity if you are a self hating imbecile.

It's part of the Wikipedia mission. It hasn't been kept secret. It's been well-known for a long time. [1]

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective

How much money have you given to them so far?

I live in a third world country, so the level of my donations may not compare to the average HN user, but I used to pledge around 5 dollars per year. In the last couple of years to tell you the truth I hadn't donated since I started getting sick of those stupid banners, and now I think it's good that I did not participated in their shennanigans.

Oh no worries, I was just wondering how much I could increase my donation to counter everyone claiming that they'll stop donating in this thread.

I donate $1,000/yr and I’m stopping due to this

I see what you're doing and I'm here for it

Donate to the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine!

https://help.archive.org/help/category/donations-2/donating-...

or better yet, archive.today