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Comment by fluoridation

3 years ago

The relevance is that some of those donors are donating the little money they have because they think there's a chance Wikipedia might cease to exist otherwise, not knowing that the WMF is actually using that money on gold water dishes rather than saving it for a rainy day.

Simply put, if Wikipedia asks for donations to continue operating, 100% of those donations should go towards server costs. That can include the hardware costs, the power, the bandwidth, and the people who maintain those servers. Using the money that was raised to keep it running for any other purpose is at least deceptive.

>Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.

Now imagine that the shelter spends only 10% of its donations on dog food and other dog-related costs, and the rest goes to salaries for people who aren't caring for the dogs and to awareness campaigns. (I'm not implying this is the breakdown in Wikipedia's case; it's just an example.) Even if you think these are worthwhile uses for those funds, don't you think donors should know that their donations will be spent this way before they donate?

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fluoridation

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bawolff  3 years ago

But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.

I know people like to complain that managers are useless, but if they really were, every company would get rid of them.

The cost of managers is what is being complained about in this thread. There might be other superflorus things wmf might spend money on which i might agree with you on, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.