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How do you feel about the Foundation using most of the money on Not-Wikipedia and then making highly misleading statements when the do fundraising drives on Wikipedia?

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TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
most of the money on things that are Wikipedia

Assuming you meant “aren’t Wikipedia”, there are a few aspects to this.

These are the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2024 financial statements.

You can see how it’s organized here.

Here’s a table of salaries. CEO Katherine Maher’s salary is about $790,000, which is very average for this role. Other salaries look average as well.

I permanently hide donation drive banners in my preferences and so can’t speak to how they’ve been lately (read: last 8-ish years). I remember them being terrible. Genuinely hated them.

Wikimedia is a lot bigger than just the English Wikipedia; it’s a movement, and one that’s been highly successful in a way it couldn’t have been just through volunteer work. For example, I heavily encourage you to check out Wikipedia’s sister projects sometime. Not all of them are created equal, but Wiktionary for example to me is the best single dictionary in the world. I wish many of these received similar levels of appreciation to Wikipedia. And far from being tacked-on side projects, most of these factor into a coherent ecosystem in their own way.

The WMF’s legal team in my eyes especially has been phenomenal. The movement I volunteer so many hours for would be heavily fractured and probably dead in the water if it weren’t for them.

On top of obvious things like developing MediaWiki, I actively want the WMF to be doing outreach through programs like grants. If the WMF just sits by and coasts on hosting costs and maybe MediaWiki bug fixes, it will die. Figuring out how to make editing more inviting, more accessible, and more efficient is crucial not just to keeping Wikipedia alive but its sister projects and even to improving other non-WMF wikis.

In summary, I don’t like the banners but have seen zero issue with how they handle finances. The money donated that’s used beyond maintaining a skeleton crew and keeping the lights on is profoundly useful to me as an editor and directly helps me write the articles that the people donating expect their money to go to.
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