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[return to "Wikipedia is not short on cash"]
1. ripper+m8[view] [source] 2022-10-12 10:37:15
>>nickpa+(OP)
Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely useful.

For what it's worth, Charity Navigator gives them 4 out of 4 stars with a 98.33/100 rating: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

Meanwhile eg the American Cancer Society gets 73/100 and spends more on fundraising than WMF's entire budget, so oncologists can snort blow off hookers in Vegas, but nobody cares.

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2. lanfeu+Px[view] [source] 2022-10-12 13:26:38
>>ripper+m8
According to a recent SA post here - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397?..., :

"Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead?"

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