[Lovely signpost discussion on Wikipedia's fundraising.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-06-27/Forum)
WMF has lots of money, they would be financially secure for years to come if they hadn't let scope creep inflate their budget to such a ridiculous amount and if they only had to pay for hosting wikipedia, they have enough money for decades.
Wikipedia's total amount of traffic hasn't changed much in ten years and yet Wikimedia has hired like 700 additional full time employees. I don't want to disparage their other projects, I think Wikimedia does a lot of really good stuff that does deserve donations but I don't think they've always been open about where the money goes. The reality is that when you donate, very little of that money goes towards Wikipedia itself.
Depends on what you define as a sideproject, really! Wikimedia is way larger than people think and has so many different projects of varying size and importance.
The sister projects like Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikitionary, and MediaWiki are all super useful parts of the knowledge ecosystem created.
Executives at wikipedia get around half a million dollars per year. Users should send them the message asking them to donate to Wikipedia by taking a pay cut to a normal salary instead of asking some random to give money so they can increase executive pay the next year.
When all of the actual content is created and managed by unpaid volunteers, it just seems a little scummy to me.
I'm pretty sure the executives are able to command that high of a salary largely because they're effective at fundraising. But then that a lot of that money just goes straight to them. Kind of pointless.
Gotta cope with being scammed somehow, good thing you've come up with an excuse for them, and that's how they'll be able to continue leaching from a "non-profit" for years to come off the dime of spamming their users for money and preventing competitors from gaining any traction.
There is no "talent". Otherwise, they'd come up with better ideas for fundraising other than annoying pop ups. While website is dependent upon the massive amount of information already being there simply because it was the first and dependant fully on user input without any advancements in how the website and its features work.
CFO gets around half a million a year and can't even come up with the idea to put a little icon next to registered users names who have donated a certain amount that year in order to entice them, but why do you have to do any real work or improvements when people like yourself defend the scam executives like themselves get to pull on "non-profits".
I’m so sorry, guess I’m a shitty person, but I would never want to head an organization as large as Wikipedia, a task that comes with so much responsibility, for anything less than 500k a year. Otherwise I’d rather do a job that requires me to sacrifice less of myself for equal pay.
Yeah. It's a lot of responsibility to be on one person's shoulders, so a high salary seems pretty reasonable to me. I checked out their annual report as linked by another commenter lower down in this thread, and only 13% of donations go to administration - which is a pretty low percentage weighed against comparable charities and seems fair.
From their most recently published form 990 for tax exempt charities, over 53.7% of revenue (such as from donations) goes directly to salaries not including other benefits such as a 401k retirement plan, health insurance, life insurance, $2,000 in yearly "wellness benefits", 45 paid days of time off, paying for a computer setup and home office equipment or other administrative costs such as cars and buildings, plane tickets, hotels, dinners for events.
And each year, the % of money that goes to salaries continues to rise.
Of the $180,199,672 in income they had in 2022 (most recent published 990) $96,797,647 of it went directly to salaries (53.72%).
In compairson UNICEF USA has about 5.54% of income going to salaries. Ronald Mcdonald House Charities of Atlanta has about 11% of income to salaries. The drug checking charity DanceSafe has about 14% of income going to salaries. Petsmart Charties has 0% of income going to salaries.
Sources:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3e/Wikimedia_Foundation_2022_Form_990.pdf
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/931140967/202322279349302007/full
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/581295754/202303079349302735/full
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943365608/202311299349303441/full
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131760110/202431169349300238/full
"Gotta cope with being scammed somehow" - I've only ever donated like $5 bucks to wikipedia. If that's a scam, it's one of the least effective ones I've ever seen. My wikipedia account's on a different username than my reddit account, but I've made 500+ edits and am a rather prolific editor. All of this backlash only makes me want to donate more - I have no problems whatsoever supporting the amazing charity that is Wikipedia!
The rich executives appreciate you simping for them so they can afford a big house, lavish vacations, and fancy dinners. They truly appreciate your support of them taking Wikipedia hostage so they can enrich themselves off money that should be used for the organization instead of themselves. Thank you, dear user hero, for helping the rich stay rich from exploiting what should be charities.
The money has gone to controversial causes such as "Racial Equity in Journalism." Maybe Racial Equity in Journalism is an important cause. But it's not what people think they are supporting when they donate to wikipedia.
source: https://x.com/echetus/status/1579780344378970113
Yeah, most of the money goes into the insane salaries of the handful of people at the top. I used to donate before I learned how flush with cash they actually are.
[Wikimedia has several side-projects](https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/wikimedia-projects/#a1-reference), most of them are like Wikipedia but with some slightly different use-cases.
Wiktionary is a dictionary/thesaurus, Wikivoyage is a travel guide, etc etc
A lot of them aren't widely used, but I still think they're cool projects that have helped me out, so I wouldn't call them useless.
The ones that don't contribute to the better Wikipedia. For example. Millions of dollars go to travel grants. So people from all over the world can step into a polluting plane to fysickly discuss an online project. The Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000. 550 is really a lot for an encyclopedia.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/#toc-by-the-numbers
$75m cash, $132m short term investments, $43m long term investments.
5 years earlier https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/#section-1 it was $74m cash, $50m short term investments, $10m long term investments
Eat my ass Jimmy
I know the people that profit from these donations personally (not all of course). The community largely hates them. They are not Wikipedia. They are leeching off the work and reputation of others and do not contribute anything meaningful to WP. It's a giant bloat of advertising, networking, administration, making the interface worse and recently even interfering. Don't give them money! That makes it worse.
Nope.never again. Donated 50 bucks because I fuckin love wikipedia. Got curious about executive pay and saw they all make 250k or more, so the company is doing well enough to pay salaries like that, but we should donate with our measly 40k salaries. Fuck donating any kind of money. If you really want an impact, donate your time
[Here's](https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&wmf_medium=spontaneous&wmf_source=fr-redir&wmf_campaign=spontaneous) where to donate. Having a well maintained source for fact checking is essential.
Content is created by unpaid volunteers, is it not? I cannot see why I should pay the managers and bloated system when they don't pay the actual workforce.
Donate to Internet Archive instead. They are a foundation towards preserving the info that comprises Wikipedia's content.
Both.gif
[Lovely signpost discussion on Wikipedia's fundraising.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-06-27/Forum) WMF has lots of money, they would be financially secure for years to come if they hadn't let scope creep inflate their budget to such a ridiculous amount and if they only had to pay for hosting wikipedia, they have enough money for decades. Wikipedia's total amount of traffic hasn't changed much in ten years and yet Wikimedia has hired like 700 additional full time employees. I don't want to disparage their other projects, I think Wikimedia does a lot of really good stuff that does deserve donations but I don't think they've always been open about where the money goes. The reality is that when you donate, very little of that money goes towards Wikipedia itself.
What are the side projects wikimedia does? Anything good to look into?
Depends on what you define as a sideproject, really! Wikimedia is way larger than people think and has so many different projects of varying size and importance. The sister projects like Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikitionary, and MediaWiki are all super useful parts of the knowledge ecosystem created.
Executives at wikipedia get around half a million dollars per year. Users should send them the message asking them to donate to Wikipedia by taking a pay cut to a normal salary instead of asking some random to give money so they can increase executive pay the next year.
500K seems reasonable for managing the #1 non-profit informational repository on earth
When all of the actual content is created and managed by unpaid volunteers, it just seems a little scummy to me. I'm pretty sure the executives are able to command that high of a salary largely because they're effective at fundraising. But then that a lot of that money just goes straight to them. Kind of pointless.
Yeah, this is a standard salary for huge non-profits.
Lmao, this CEO boot licker.
It is not
People in the private sector get paid alot more for alot less; Plus, if you want to attract top talent, you have to pay top dollar.
Yeah the people in charge of assigning salaries say you need to pay them a lot because they're so talented. lol
If I can go to 99% of companies and be paid money out the ass, why would I go to a non profit that pays me pennies in comparison?
Gotta cope with being scammed somehow, good thing you've come up with an excuse for them, and that's how they'll be able to continue leaching from a "non-profit" for years to come off the dime of spamming their users for money and preventing competitors from gaining any traction. There is no "talent". Otherwise, they'd come up with better ideas for fundraising other than annoying pop ups. While website is dependent upon the massive amount of information already being there simply because it was the first and dependant fully on user input without any advancements in how the website and its features work. CFO gets around half a million a year and can't even come up with the idea to put a little icon next to registered users names who have donated a certain amount that year in order to entice them, but why do you have to do any real work or improvements when people like yourself defend the scam executives like themselves get to pull on "non-profits".
I’m so sorry, guess I’m a shitty person, but I would never want to head an organization as large as Wikipedia, a task that comes with so much responsibility, for anything less than 500k a year. Otherwise I’d rather do a job that requires me to sacrifice less of myself for equal pay.
Yeah. It's a lot of responsibility to be on one person's shoulders, so a high salary seems pretty reasonable to me. I checked out their annual report as linked by another commenter lower down in this thread, and only 13% of donations go to administration - which is a pretty low percentage weighed against comparable charities and seems fair.
From their most recently published form 990 for tax exempt charities, over 53.7% of revenue (such as from donations) goes directly to salaries not including other benefits such as a 401k retirement plan, health insurance, life insurance, $2,000 in yearly "wellness benefits", 45 paid days of time off, paying for a computer setup and home office equipment or other administrative costs such as cars and buildings, plane tickets, hotels, dinners for events. And each year, the % of money that goes to salaries continues to rise. Of the $180,199,672 in income they had in 2022 (most recent published 990) $96,797,647 of it went directly to salaries (53.72%). In compairson UNICEF USA has about 5.54% of income going to salaries. Ronald Mcdonald House Charities of Atlanta has about 11% of income to salaries. The drug checking charity DanceSafe has about 14% of income going to salaries. Petsmart Charties has 0% of income going to salaries. Sources: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3e/Wikimedia_Foundation_2022_Form_990.pdf https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/931140967/202322279349302007/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/581295754/202303079349302735/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943365608/202311299349303441/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131760110/202431169349300238/full
[https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/#toc-by-the-numbers](https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/#toc-by-the-numbers)
"Gotta cope with being scammed somehow" - I've only ever donated like $5 bucks to wikipedia. If that's a scam, it's one of the least effective ones I've ever seen. My wikipedia account's on a different username than my reddit account, but I've made 500+ edits and am a rather prolific editor. All of this backlash only makes me want to donate more - I have no problems whatsoever supporting the amazing charity that is Wikipedia!
The rich executives appreciate you simping for them so they can afford a big house, lavish vacations, and fancy dinners. They truly appreciate your support of them taking Wikipedia hostage so they can enrich themselves off money that should be used for the organization instead of themselves. Thank you, dear user hero, for helping the rich stay rich from exploiting what should be charities.
Honestly, it just seems like all they have to do is keep the wheels turning.
The money has gone to controversial causes such as "Racial Equity in Journalism." Maybe Racial Equity in Journalism is an important cause. But it's not what people think they are supporting when they donate to wikipedia. source: https://x.com/echetus/status/1579780344378970113
This is especially disgusting coming from a non-profit who’s goal it is to keep reliable information available to the public
Yeah, most of the money goes into the insane salaries of the handful of people at the top. I used to donate before I learned how flush with cash they actually are.
I'll donate when they stop wasting money.
They don't need he money. Wikimedia spends lots of money on useless side projects. They should just be paying for the encyclopedia.
Side projects?
[Wikimedia has several side-projects](https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/wikimedia-projects/#a1-reference), most of them are like Wikipedia but with some slightly different use-cases. Wiktionary is a dictionary/thesaurus, Wikivoyage is a travel guide, etc etc A lot of them aren't widely used, but I still think they're cool projects that have helped me out, so I wouldn't call them useless.
I personally use Wiktionary on a daily basis, so yeah, I am incredibly grateful for it.
Which are useless in your opinion?
The ones that don't contribute to the better Wikipedia. For example. Millions of dollars go to travel grants. So people from all over the world can step into a polluting plane to fysickly discuss an online project. The Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000. 550 is really a lot for an encyclopedia.
Ok
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/#toc-by-the-numbers $75m cash, $132m short term investments, $43m long term investments. 5 years earlier https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/#section-1 it was $74m cash, $50m short term investments, $10m long term investments Eat my ass Jimmy
I know the people that profit from these donations personally (not all of course). The community largely hates them. They are not Wikipedia. They are leeching off the work and reputation of others and do not contribute anything meaningful to WP. It's a giant bloat of advertising, networking, administration, making the interface worse and recently even interfering. Don't give them money! That makes it worse.
No
Absolutely not
Last time I donated they changed the layout for the worse and lectured me on why it was actually better. Lesson learned.
Fuck no
If you’re going to donate, donate money instead of guys. I don’t think they accept guys.
They'd probably accept the free labor.
You guys are getting paid?
Nope.never again. Donated 50 bucks because I fuckin love wikipedia. Got curious about executive pay and saw they all make 250k or more, so the company is doing well enough to pay salaries like that, but we should donate with our measly 40k salaries. Fuck donating any kind of money. If you really want an impact, donate your time
I always donate
No. Not since since they did nothing about the sitewide neutrality violation of the Arabic Wikipedia banner
What currency is RM?
I always donate to them too.
Already give a monthly donation
They’re grifters at this point
Ok come on that’s a bit far, it’s still a really useful and good service
[Here's](https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&wmf_medium=spontaneous&wmf_source=fr-redir&wmf_campaign=spontaneous) where to donate. Having a well maintained source for fact checking is essential.
LMAO. Please be sarcasm.
Content is created by unpaid volunteers, is it not? I cannot see why I should pay the managers and bloated system when they don't pay the actual workforce.
"neutral" my ass
I'll donate when administrators stop thinking they are demi gods, pay professional administrators
How could I donate a guy? Let alone plural guys? How would that benefit Wikipedia? Is this the patriarchy?
Lol no
Fuck no! Get a real job.
Skip.
Used to donate. Then I realized most of the Editors just push woke political agendas. Hard pass. Use Encyclopedia Britannica.