← Back to context

Comment by dannyw

9 hours ago

Some people here think Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to keep Wikipedia up. That's a subset of their mission. I attribute nearly all of the blame to WMF, because their donation ads are quite deceptive.

The actual, public mission of Wikimedia Foundation:

> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

As such, WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects, like funding photographers to go to events like Fifa World Cup and Cannes, and take (CC or public domain) portraits for Wikimedia Commons (https://www.wikiportraits.org); etc.

18 comments

dannyw

Reply
hobofan  6 hours ago

> WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects

According to [0], they intend to spend $18m on community projects total, out of their total $240m FY26-27 budget[1]. $330k of that go to the WikiPortraits project[2].

Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects). I would hardly call that deceptive.

[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Regions#Wikimedia_Com...

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Co...

  • idoubtit  5 hours ago

    > Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects)

    That's a bit of a stretch. I couldn't find any up to date information, but for 2024-2025 WMF wrote: "Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Services."[0]

    So "keeping Wikipedia up" is a very minor part (15%) of the "Investments in Technology" budget. It receives around 7% (15% of 48%) of the WMF total budget.

    That not to say the rest of those "Investments in Technology" is useless. It's just that it's mostly about developing features, like updating the Wikipedia app, or creating functions and Wikipedia Abstract.

    [0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

kosh2  4 hours ago

That is why I always say: Don't donate to wikipedia, donate to archive.org

  • x______________  3 hours ago

    >That is why I always say: Don't donate to wikipedia, donate to archive.org

    Just learned from a 2 sec llm query that archive.org archives Wikipedia, neat!

    Wiki should still receive donations but archive should receive more as a valid backup mechanism (in case the prior goes dark for example).

shimman  7 hours ago

That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO.

  • alt227  7 hours ago

    The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They make it sound like wikipedia is very much at risk of dying due to lack of funds when in reality they are looking for more funding for programmes like this, which is where a lot of the mistrust and 'deceptive advertising' opinions come from.

    • joshspankit  5 hours ago

      Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”.

      Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!

      1 reply →

  • akudha  5 hours ago

    Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it.

    Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?

    • krackers  4 hours ago

      I guess maybe the reasoning is that because it's a watched event it's useful to have libre/public domain photos of it?