Comment by spywaregorilla
3 years ago
Seems a bit silly to me. Working on the UI that enables expanding and maintaining wikipedia feels like a reasonable top priority of the organization responsible for maintaining wikipedia. If they just "served" it, it would collapse.
I agree it's a reasonable thing for them to work on, but not to fundraise for under the banner of "keep Wikipedia online".
I don't know. Here's where I start to break with some of the ways people are thinking about this.
When you pay a fee to a website - do you question how they spend that money to this level of detail? Do you ask, I dunno, lets go with Slack, to break down their fee by how much of it is necessary to keep Slack online "as is"?
I don't think I've ever seen someone do that. There's a level of entitlement that comes with donations that people just don't attach to services they purchase.
Wikipedia isn't a charity in the traditional sense - IE it's not taking those donations and redistributing them to those in poverty.
It's an organization building and maintaining a platform that provides pretty a vital service to society. Almost everyone who donates to it will have gotten far more value from Wikipedia than the cost of their donation. Maybe, instead of thinking of it as "donation", people should be thinking of their contributions as a "sliding scale fee".
On the other hand, I do believe Wikipedia should be open and should be accountable to its community. I just believe the community should be reasonable when exercising that accountability.
I certainly think it's reasonable to donate money without a breakdown of where it's going to go. I also think that the things that Wikipedia is doing are perfectly reasonable.
Where I have an issue (and I suspect many others do) is when Wikipedia phrases donation requests as "keeping the lights on" or something to that effect. I suspect there would be a lot less hate if the requests were phrased like "help Wikipedia grow" or something like that.
It's more of a framing issue than an issue with where money is being spent. If Slack was claiming that they needed my fee to "keep the lights on," I think most people would have issues with that language/framing.
When I pay money for a service I compare the benefit I'm getting to the cost of the service and decide whether it's worth it. This works pretty well!
When I donate to a charity I compare the altruistic benefit my marginal contribution will produce to the amount I'm donating. This doesn't work very well, because it's really hard to estimate the benefit to society. But it still worth doing, because there are a lot of really valuable things that aren't going to be funded unless we put up our money.
A nonprofit should always be held to a higher standard. Slack is a profit making concern valued by its utility, not its cost.
Nonprofits are cost centric and it’s both valid and essential to question the cost structure. $100M turnover seems like a lot of opex
Why not?
Because it doesn't contribute to Wikipedia remaining online.
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