zlacker

>>akolbe+(OP)
This is an extremely misleading take.

Wikipedia had a really good year in 20-21, their most recent financial report.

They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget, and came out of the year with $240 million in assets.[1]

So they had about half a year's surplus, and wound up with ~2 years worth of savings. And yes, that's a simplification, a good chunk of those assets are necessary to continue operating and cannot be liquefied to cover operating expenses.

In 19-20, they took in $120 million against a $111 million operating budget.[2]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

[2]https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...

So, yes, Wikipedia is doing well - as we should hope they would be. But no, they are not rolling in it, and yes they do depend on our continued support to continue doing well.

Edit: The article linked in the tweet asks valid questions and puts the stats in better context, but the twitter thread presents the numbers in a way that is very, frustratingly, misleading.

>>dbingh+Ge
They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...

Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keeping the site serving is.

For example, in 2016 Wikipedia served a similar amount of page views as it does today [1] on an operating budget of about half [2]. Go farther back and my impression is it's much more dramatic, though I'm not finding good page view statistics for, say, 2010.

[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...

[2] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat... vs https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat...

>>jefftk+Eg
I appreciate this kind of thinking being shared by someone who I recall from previous HN postings spends a lot of time thinking about how to give to charity effectively. I've been turned off from donating to Wikipedia for the better part of the last decade.

>>z0r+mF
I think this kind of thinking is negative and an example of the free rider problem.

Wikipedia provides a good service for the money it charges you. It doesn't charge you anything.

The thing about free things is that they aren't really free, someone is paying for it and the people doing the work to keep Wikipedia online are the best skilled and placed and experienced to decide these kind of spending decisions, not people with no personal investment orwho do not donate and don't even edit or do any work but somehow have opinions how other people should do their job for free.

If you use Wikipedia and getting value from it then you can't really complain, it's not positive.

>>samsqu+UW
For a charitable/non-profit organization, providing them with funding way above their needs is counterproductive. As seen with Wikipedia, in the presence of excess money, costs proceed to grow uncoupled to the progression of their core mission.

As charity funding is effectively a closed system, excessive contribution to Wikipedia is to the detriment of other charities, with minimal net benefit.