
Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours? - sparkzilla
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/
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sparkzilla
Wikipedia is a fundraising project that happens to make an encyclopedia.
Having written a couple of articles on this topic, my main concern is that
none of the donation money goes to the contributors, and instead goes to an
ineffective tech and executive team, whose goal is more fundraising. All while
Google makes millions by scraping and presenting Wikipedia's content.
[http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best-
friends-...](http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best-friends-
forever/)

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ThrustVectoring
Much like Susan G. Komen is a fundraising project that happens to make pink
ribbons and talk about breast cancer, right?

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electricblue
$77 million doesn't sound like that much for a site the size of Wikipedia

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juliangoldsmith
As the article says, it's about 3 times what it takes to run the site for a
year.

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sparkzilla
After you count the inflated headcount, yes. If it ran on a reasonable budget
of $10 million it would be able to run for many years even on existing
reserves.

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jcrben
Does Wikipedia "need" the money? Does any software need any money beyond the
cost of servers? If Wikipedia is to remain relevant, it _needs_ money. But
everyone has different priorities, and admittedly not everyone can afford to
donate a few dollars to support free information. (Disclosure: I'm a community
volunteer serving on the Wikimedia Foundation audit committee, so I'm a bit
biased.)

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deepnet
The stats in the article seem to be out by orders of magnitude.

374M Uniques in August viewed 17.9 Billion Pages according to
[https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/#](https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/#)

but main graph in the article suggests ~20M Pageviews in 2015 - which seems to
rather downplay the utility and influence of Wikipedia.

