Absolutely not. They have way more money than they can sensibly spend, keep begging for more as if they could barely keep the lights on (they could probably easily keep the core mission going with about 10% of the money they’re getting), and then expand their spending to match the donations they collected.
They then created an endowment (i.e. a pile of wealth that generates enough interest to sustain them indefinitely), using both additional donations and some of the money given to Wikimedia (which reduces the apparent amount of money they spend and is not listed as money Wikipedia/Wikimedia has, as it is accounted for separately). The $100M endowment was planned to take 10 years to build, got completed in 2021, five years before schedule. Wikimedia also has a separate cash hoard of almost a quarter billion dollars.
Wow I didn’t know about this, thanks for the reading! I always feel morally in debt for using Wikipedia without giving back much and assume they were struggling a bit to operate, but wow they have received millions of dollars already!
edit: I’m still willing to donate though, and I just did, like I’m happy to pay for what I’ve learned from it, even if it doesn’t mean much to them.
They make it sound like they’re just about to close down, I’ve been sending them a few bucks every month for like a year and I feel a little bit slighted tbh
Among other projects I belive is beneficial to the world. It’s Libre software and provides free (CC-by-SA) knowledge without making you a product. I only made a one time 3$ donation but I might donate more in the future.
I have before, but I was crippled by a conservative pedo ran corporation called The Home Depot. So it’s not in the budget currently. Hide yo kids if you go in there.
Spread awareness wherever possible. Unless you approve of a billion dollar corporation that deals in trafficking and illegal firearm sales between managers at work. Hint: most states have a 20 plus stores. This one is the second largest and has 6 that’s controlled by a ring.
I did once or twice. I also donated to Signal and couple smaller projects I used. I always plan to donate more but a man has to eat and fly on vacations to Canary Islands…
It has an abominable political slant, so absolutely not. If there was a way to split the science/math/etc. segment from the rest of it, that one would totally be worth donating to.
Organizationally it’s had leadership with abominable politics. Jimmy Wales is a self-proclaimed libertarian. Katherine Maher was CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, then joined The Atlantic Council, and currently serves on the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. [edit: apostrophe’s]
That can be a touchy subject because the slant of Wikipedia and the slant of Reddit are very similar, but with Reddit leaning more towards chasing frivolous headlines and Wikipedia leaning more towards, like, rehabilitating Nazis and the like. The short version is that Wikipedia is far to the right of consensus among even neoliberal historians on many subjects and you will see things treated as plain there that are relatively fringe views academically.
I haven’t used it since I left school, even then sparingly and even back then it wasn’t particularly good (I abadonned it completely once I went to uni because it wasn’t helping at all). I’m surprised by how many people use it, but I guess it makes sense they speak up here.
I used to do a regular donation ($5 a month or something) but then I found out Jimmy Wales (who was a figurehead of the site at that point) was a weird Ayn Rand libertarian and stopped.
Unless he’s personally being enriched (as opposed to making a living), that wouldn’t bother me. I have never felt the need to check. I donate because it’s useful to me.
I didn’t buy a Tesla because that fucker is enriched af and I hate him and I can get other cars that serve me just as well. There’s no (real) replacement or substitute for Wikipedia.
So yet another example of an objectivist being ultra productively generous and benefitting society, and again it’s simply rejected by someone whose opinion of objectivism was formed by its opponents.
People always talk about how it’s all about “I got mine” and yet every single one of her protagonists makes enormous self sacrifice for people they love.
Contrary to popular misinformation, objectivism isn’t about “I serve only myself”; it’s about “I decide my own ideals”.
And very frequently, the ideals of her hero characters include giving enormous gifts to others.
Wikipedia is a great example of that same drive manifesting in reality: 100% contrary to the BS greed-only perception of what Rand was trying to point to, Wikipedia is a totally free resource for everybody, sustained entirely by voluntary funding.
The way it’s in line with Rand’s thinking has nothing to do with selfishness and everything to do with the fact that the Wikimedia foundation doesn’t ask for permission it just creates and gives.
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