I really don't like this. The foundation already has many multiples more money than it needs to cover its core goal: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
This can, at best, be useless, at worst, corrupt its mission to serve corporations.
There used to be an expression "don't fix what ain't broke." I feel like this old maxim is now completely ignored.
> access to Wikimedia content by reusers is currently achieved through three broad means: Scraping of web pages; data dumps; and APIs. These services are provided freely to all reusers of Wikimedia content. They are and will remain free, libre and gratis, to everyone.
> What many of the largest commercial technology organizations require in order to effectively utilize Wikimedia content goes beyond what we currently provide.
If ISOC had shunted its profits into an endowment like it should have, it might not have ended up as a corrupt organization. This should be a legal requirement for non-profits with positive cash flow.
In this case, it strongly incentivizes them to provide poor service to non-paying, non-enterprise API users. Wikimedia Enterprise apparently generates daily snapshots for paying customers[1]. The general public only gets them twice a month[2]. Wikimedia's goal should be to serve the public.
Why does an organisation that has more than enough money to achieve its current and long term goals, appeal to their site visitors that they really need more money? The ads are in my opinion dishonest and emotionally manipulative, and have actively put me off supporting Wikimedia as a foundation.
What I'd like to see happen (though it's extremely unlikely) would be to rely less on emotionally charged banners thanks to the new revenue provided by the enterprise product.
But the current fundraising strategy works extremely well so I really can't see it changing it at all.
Full disclosure: Until very recently I was employed by Wikimedia as a Release Engineer. I was there for 7 years, however, I left for a new opportunity in February of this year.
I am not a fan of the direction the organization seems to be headed. During the past few years there has been rapid growth and increased corporate culture. Seems to be kind of similar to what happened with the Mozilla foundation and that really hasn't worked out well for them so I am not entirely optimistic about the future of Wikipedia and the free knowledge movement in general.
Goals can be expanded to infinity, uncertainty and inflation is always a thing, thus the need to diversify revenue streams to ensure survival and sustainability.
> The more money they have, the more likely they are to exist in perpetuity.
I think the opposite is true. Consider examples like broke lottery winners, the resource curse [1], and the long history of startups getting lots of money and then cratering, from Webvan to WeWork.
With Wikipedia in particular, I'm concerned that the more money there is, the more attractive it is to people who want to be near large streams of money for various reasons, including living large and diverting money to their own friends, pet projects, and grand visions. I'm also concerned that even if they are able to avoid those people entirely, large budgets pose other risks, including inflexibility in downturns, which I think increase the odds of a setback turning into a full collapse.
Corruption, like cancer, is statistically inevitable for organizations. The only question is whether they have the right mechanisms to detect and exercise the tumors when they're small. But the scrappier Wikipedia stays, the less we have to worry about that.
The more money Wikimedia has, the less likely it gets that they keep recurring expenses in a sustainable range.
And you can be corrupt without money, true. But corrupt people tend to avoid organisations that don't have a lot of money, they all try to work where the money is. And the do-gooders that are the other group of people likely to push into an org like Wikimedia tend to be particularly defenseless against the first kind.
Not exactly, because ads would result in people not donating and go against their mission. Forming into Wikimedia Enterprise allows them to get enterprise revenue without compromising the experience of reading the content
Some people just don't have enough. For them it is necessary.
The only thing that is sad is that is difficult to explain to a child that wiki{m,p}edia is just another "news" outlet and everything there shall be taken with a grain of salt.
Why would a non-profit organization with like 10x more money than they need to achieve their mission beg me for even more money? With multiple screens worth of banners and paragraphs that actually push the article I'm trying to read out of the way in order to nag me for donations? Even ads aren't this bad.
Mate, if there's one thing Wikipedia isn't is bloated. It serves one of the biggest websites on the internet with a fraction of the infrastructure of similar sites.
Depends on their services? Wikipedia serves static sites. Their hosting costs are 3 million a year according to their accountants. They have no real recommendation engine, or really dynamic content at all. 100% of their content is free for them. They can easily store their entire site in ram on a small cluster. Given that I'd say 10-30 million would be reasonable.
I don't really agree with your definition of static. Wikipedia has no request time processing on their pages. If you request the english version of the hacker news article it'll just grab the HTML from ram and send it over. Of course there's an api for posting edits, but that's as simple as updating a few rows in a database, and only happens once, when the edit it posted.
In the ideal case yes - and a significant portion of requests fall into that case (varnish cache), but its also the cheapest case by far.
Wikipedia gets edited a lot, and a single edit can often affect many pages (in extreme cases, millions of pages). Keeping up with content churn is where a lot of the computational resources are directed.
Now sure, this is still a lot easier than if every page view had to be rendered on demand dynamically. However a truly static site where things don't change at all is trivial compared to wikipedia to host.
There used to be an expression "don't fix what ain't broke." I feel like this old maxim is now completely ignored.