There’s no need. They have enough money to run Wikipedia for many many decades.
Comment on wiki workers united!
itrealgood@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
[deleted]
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
terranoid@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
As of June 30, 2025, the Foundation’s net assets were $296.6 million, which represents 17.1 months of operating expenses
lol not decades and mostly donations
Revenue: The Foundation’s total revenue increased by $23.2 million, to $208.6 million during fiscal year 2024-2025. The vast majority of this revenue came from donations (including grants from the Endowment), as well as investment income, Wikimedia Enterprise revenue, and other revenue primarily related to a cost sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Endowment, which, to keep the Endowment’s costs down, allows the Endowment to leverage staffing and other resources from the Foundation and reimburse the Foundation for this usage. Donation revenue increased $14.8 million, from $174.7 million to $189.5 million.
How much do you think payroll is? Major layoffs would likely begin in a year if people stopped donating i’d imagine.
Expenses: Our expenses totaled $190.9 million, of which 77.4% went to programmatic activities
That includes their data centers engineering and security payroll from what I read. The bulk of expenses is literally just to run the application smoothly, and keep these employees paid.
The only way to make their funds lasts decades would be to shut down a ton of shit and lay off employees, which would not be something anyone wants.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They don’t have to shut it all down but they should absolutely split off all their bloated non-Wikipedia endeavors from the rest of the organization. If they were actually honest to people about where the donations get spent a lot fewer people would donate.
terranoid@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
Okay so I’m not too familiar with Wikimedia’s other offerings so I decided to look it up
wikimediafoundation.org/…/wikimedia-projects/
WikiBooks free ebooks, cool I should go through what they have
wikisource: freely licensed historical texts and docs, cool don’t need but sounds good to have
Wikiversity: free education via learning resources and projects, fucking awesome and wish I knew about it before
wikivoyage: free travel guide, cool stuff
…
You’re really arguing that all this is unnecessary bloat? There’s a lot of cool shit here that seems like it’s totally made with awesome intentions, to provide all sorts of free resources from a certified non profit org that is literally just trying to crowd source information and provide it back to the community for 100% free with no ads.
That’s like saying your city library takes up too much space and should downsize because fuck free stuff. Except your taxes don’t even go to this… just donations, and you’re literally telling people online to not donate to them because they have too much money and lying about how long they can survive on it…
Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you?
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
[citation needed]
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
wikimediafoundation.org/…/financial-reports/
If you poke around there you will see a million line items that can be accurately summarized as “not Wikipedia”. The wikimedia foundation is massively bloated because they have an infinite source of funding. I don’t even think all the projects they are doing are bad or anything, it’s just that they aren’t Wikipedia.
It’s highly unethical the way they solicit for donations and heavily imply that the donations are to run Wikipedia. They aren’t. They are spending all that money on other pet projects and pinkertons to do union busting.
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Thanks! I can’t really make much sense of it, do you know if there’s an example you can point me to?
not_IO@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
yes