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Does Wikipedia really need my donations? (infosec.pub)

submitted 2 months ago by Findmysec@infosec.pub to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Every now and then I'll get an email from someone higher up in Wikipedia asking for a donation. I don't really mind a tenner but I don't know if it pads the pockets of corporate management or actual contributors. Also, are they really short of money or is this tugging at emotional strings a play at something else? I wish Wikipedia survives but there's a lot of projects I need to donate to and I have a budget.

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[–] immutable@lemm.ee 143 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (11 children)

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

[–] ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works 40 points 2 months ago (10 children)

If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

A bit of an aside, but breezewiki.com is a great open sourced way to get away from this (their internal search doesn't always work, but a search engine search for fandom name + breezewiki should do it)

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 12 points 2 months ago (9 children)

You're an absolute hero. I'm easily irritated by ads, and fandom has driven me to genuine rage a couple of times when I'm on mobile and only have DNS-based adblocking some of the time. It's a wiki, for Christ's sake, so why does it need so, so many ads‽ It's just static content most of the time!

edit: to provide more context, this is a frontend for fandom wikis that strips out the bullshit.

[–] M500@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago

I hate fandom so much. Their site is very annoying on mobile.

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