Comment by Grombobulous
17 hours ago
Thank you for breaking this down. Every time Wikipedia comes up the exact comment parent to yours is posted in some form.
This comment and all its flavors is posted by a contingent of people out there who:
1. Think that Wikimedia is a wasteful, corrupt organization full of greedy employees (I guess that could be true? Doesn't seem that greedy to me given that they've never run an advertisement or enshittified their product)
2. Think that Wikimedia should operate more similarly to a for-profit organization with investors (e.g., it should start downsizing and stop investing in its platform because it stopped growing in MAUs)
3. Think that Wikimedia is being financially irresponsible and will run out of money (even though their own data shows that donations have grown faster than expenses)
I think we can just accept that Wikipedia gets a lot of donations and has the luxury of hiring people. And they really don't have that many employees given their traffic.
I don't get upset that my local art museum can buy better art when they get more donations even though the same number of people visit the museum every year. The people who donate to Wikipedia want more money to go into Wikipedia.
This completely supports 1. The extremely useful website provides the funding for all the much less useful efforts.
And of course it’s not immoral greedy people. It’s ordinary greedy people who like comfort, security, and doing interesting work.
And yes the admins want more money so they can do more projects and have more people work for them. And that’s also a kind of greed for status and importance that people who work in admin typically have.
I doubt most people have put that much thought into it. However, a $100M a year for a website with an amount of traffic that isn't absurd, pages which are largely static, and doesn't have to secure financial transactions, seems a bit high to many people. Its that coupled with the constant requests for donations that doesn't match in most people's heads. For that amount of money, I expect most people think they can accomplish a lot more than the wiki foundation does. I expect that's most of where the criticism comes from, not the ideological attacks you are claiming.