Comment by orlp
3 years ago
With the financial situation being how it is I, paradoxically, would currently consider donating to Wikipedia to be actively harmful to the future of Wikipedia. The larger its dragon hoard of money grows (which is already way beyond any sort of costs to keep up Wikipedia for decades), the larger the incentive for unscrupulous individuals to corrupt the Wikipedia mission to tap into this money for personal benefit. I can't help but conclude that if you love Wikipedia and what it does... don't give them any more money for the time being.
It is clear the foundation has been corrupted by the professional non-profit class. These are the same kinds of people who staff up a "housing foundation" in San Francisco, burn money for 10-15 years, and never build a single unit of housing.
The organization becomes a parasite that exists only to perpetuate itself. Hiring and spending expand to fill all available space which becomes its own justification to increase fundraising further. If any actual work for the public good gets done that's just a side benefit.
If WMF had simply held spending constant (adjusting for inflation) for just a few years they could have had an endowment big enough to ensure Wikipedia is able to run independently forever. If they were being responsible they'd also have spun it into a subsidiary non-profit that owned Wikipedia along with that endowment with a charter to focus exclusively on running Wikipedia and developing the software. Then their octopus of random spending programs could be operated as a sister subsidiary without any risk of destroying Wikipedia itself.
Honestly at this point if they proposed that plan I'd be willing to donate to get it done. Instead they hold Wikipedia hostage to justify their expanding empire.
The bigger threat to Wikipedia is people who want to corrupt its information content. People wanting to get their treasure chest is not an existential threat. The existing employees and collaborators are more likely to get corrupted by nefarious actors if they don't have independent revenue sources.
> if they don't have independent revenue sources.
Nobody is saying wikipedia should have zero donations. Just that people piling on extra money should cool it.
> People wanting to get their treasure chest is not an existential threat.
For the organization, sure. For the content it may very well be.
More reason to have fewer employees.
Right, I've seen many, many projects in the for-profit sector fail because the budget was too high.
Not fail, but I have seen tons of for profit companies become shitty, expensive, and wasteful products once they had a monopoly and massive revenue
Wow, that almost sounds like "don't feed the dog, because it'll become a beggar".
This metaphor is broken. Dogs (and their appetites) don't grow exponentially.
Whereas nonprofits are black holes for money
It's completely normal for a successful nonprofit to have an endowment that grows in good years and can be spent when needed. They don't pay dividends or anything like that so it sits in a cash reserve.
Is it really true that their hoard is enough to keep the site running for decades? it seems their annual surplus is less than their annual expenses..
You can't just look at the total expenses, you need to look at what the necessary expenses are. It's easy to create new expenses when you have available money to spend.
Exactly. Which is precisely what has happened.
Please have a look at this table:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
Then read this 2013 post from a past Wikimedia VP:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
So there is a difference between keeping the Wikimedia Foundation organization going and keeping Wikipedia going. Keeping the Wikimedia Foundation going at its current size costs about 10 times as much as just keeping Wikipedia going, under the assumptions of that 2013 post.
You can't use "keep Wikipedia online" indefinitely as a justification for raising ever more money in order to expand. The Wikimedia Foundation should talk far more in its fundraising about what those hundreds of additional people are actually doing, including projects other than Wikipedia, instead of projecting this image of a small raft of people struggling to hold Wikipedia together with duct tape.
"Decades" might be an exaggeration, but certainly several years if they got they spenditures under control.
Anyone remember cost disease[1]? My favorite hypothesis for one of the major causes is an excess of funding/resources/money without pressure to efficiently make use of those resources - which includes not siphoning them off for personal gain, as you point out here
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...