this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

They are actually getting too many donations, many times more than they need to run wikipedia. There was and is a big conflict about the unsustainable growth of donations to the foundation and its questionable use of those funds.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Wikimedia Foundation (the org behind the Wikipedia and similar projects) does get more donations than their operational cost, but that's expected. The idea is that they'll invest the extra fund^1 and some day the return alone will be able to sustain Wikipedia forever.

Although, some have criticized that the actual situation is not clearly conveyed in their asking for donation message. It gives people an impression that Wikipedia is going under if you don't donate.

Others also criticized that the feature development is slow compared to the funding, or that not enough portion is allocated to the feature development. See how many years it takes to get dark mode! I don't know how it's decided or what's their target, so I can't really comment on this.

They publish their annual financial auditions^2 and you can have a read if you're interested. There are some interesting things. For example, in 2022-2023, processing donations actually costs twice as much as internet hosting, which one would expect to be the major expense.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Similar to Mozilla (but not from donations but instead of its millions paid to it by Google)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Huh, now that is a truly interesting bit of information.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

An interesting bit of information without any sources at all...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As is good and proper on Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Providing sources is probably a lot more common on Lemmy than anywhere else

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

idk man, i'd probably bet money on scientific papers,

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Lol obviously I meant places where random users post content

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

i mean, technically the authors posting papers are going to be pretty randomly sampled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

im just continuing the joke where it left off

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not sure what joke that is, but Lemmy is a lot better to provide sources than users of sites like Facebook or reddit. That was my point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

i believe the joke was that we're on lemmy, which is pretty shit, compared to most academic settings, better than facebook argubaly, but that's a low bar.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Something tells me you're often disappointed

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

generally yes, i find most people and things to be rather boring and uninteresting.

reddit was exceptionally boring. Lemmy is a decent bit better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

they're a non profit, so their either banking money in a proverbial "war chest" or they're just nabbing donations to be used in the future, for large expansions or what not.

It's an interesting problem to have, being a non profit entity.