Wikipedia Donations Exposed. The Truth.
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- čas přidán 16. 05. 2024
- I’m sure you’ve all seen the Wikipedia pop-up asking for donations. At first glance, the request seems like a humble ask to keep the community-oriented website up and running. But, many would argue that this pop-up is not only extremely misleading but highly unethical. Even Wikipedia’s own ex-outreach officer says that he is ashamed of Wikipedia’s fundraising tactics. Why you ask? Well, the simple truth is that Wikipedia itself is not actually all that dependent on donations. In fact, according to Wikipedia’s own founder, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia can be run for just $5,000 per month. He made that statement a while ago, but even accounting for inflation and more traffic, the cost to keep up Wikipedia is extremely minimal. As such, the vast majority of your donations actually end up going to efforts outside Wikipedia that you’re probably not even familiar with like grants and other Wiki products. This video explains the controversy surrounding Wikipedia donations and why their fundraising effort may not be as wholesome as think.
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Wikipedia Donations
2:04 - A Fundamental Flaw
6:08 - A Rich Charity
10:41 - The Wikipedia Controversy
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My Face 👉 😑 after donating ₹2000 to Wikipedia and watching this video 6 months later
That looks like it's ingame currency of Cyberpunk or something like that haha
wtf is that, like 2 bucks? 😂
@@charlech It's 24 bucks. Actually a pretty generous amount of money for an Indian tho.
Cuck
Entire comment section is full of aholes
It would be horrible if someone like Google or amazon bought this company, I am glad it runs the way it does
Agreed with this one. Wikipedia being over funded is a good thing so the option of selling out is out of the picture.
Yeah, asking for voluntary donations rather than showing ads or putting things behind pay walls is fine. This expose seems to just be a video in search of a topic worthy of the label.
@@JasonNichols75 Yeah, I think they ask like once a year. And ‘hound’ you is a bit much. When they’re doing fundraisers they ask in a pop up that you can just click away.
@@ruekurei88 I have never seen the pop up lol
Could you imagine if meta/ Facebook bought it? *shudder*
I was an editor on Wikipedia for seven years and I never donated. I supported them by contributing to them instead of donating. I grew up on Wikipedia and I still read it a lot but I am not an editor anymore.
Why is that
Unpaid editors? Thank you for your service! Even google maps sent me gifts for my shitty reviews 😂
that’s pretty reasonable. side note - the three content policies are pretty cool imo. just found these:
“…[N]o Original Research (NOR) is one of three core content policies that, along with Neutral point of view and Verifiability, determines the type and quality of material acceptable in articles.”
@@felibubbleteawhat gifts 😮, I never got any
@@tylerdurden788 I am not an editor on Wikipedia anymore because I have gotten bored of it. To be fair, I mainly edited the Hungarian version since I'm Hungarian. I also edited the English and the German versions and they are great, I still read them a lot. But the Hungarian one is so bad it makes one scream. It's filled with uninteresting and unnecessary stuff which would've been thrown out of a regular encyclopedia, while the Hungarian wikipedia is fine with those. Okay, I know that the whole point of WP is that it can be edited freely, yet the English wikipedia is so good, it's filled with interesting information and adequate sources. But to avoid sounding like a fanboy, I know it's not perfect either. It has its own faults as well, but then again, that's the consequence of free editing. But the Hungarian wikipedia is enough to make one suicidal, it's so bad (maybe an exaggeration but still). Aside from the point mentioned before, the editors are rude and stupid, they think they are so high and mighty when they really aren't. So this is why I stopped editing.
I used to donate like $10-$20 annually then they got really in your face about the donations so I quit
Donating to them in the first place is shameless
Good goy!
Yeah, go spend your money in pornhub instead which is more visited than Wikipedia.
While your comment makes sense on the face, it doesn't match up with reality. In my experience, those popups asking for donations are removed from the page after donating. I don't think it even required that I be logged in.
If you use Wikipedia on any PC or device that you didn't donate on you would still see it. I'm sure you've visited the site on your phone at some point
Literally no amount of corruption or complaining or lack of need could make the current situation worse than wikipedia being a for-profit business. The organization that controls essentially all information in the modern age being non-profit and open is important and a good thing.
I heard that the CIA manipulates Wikipedia
It's not "open" . A couple dozen power mods basically control the whole thing and you will be banned if you disagree with them
@@71M3L4PSE great to know.
How wrong is wikipedia again?
There are verifications/sources.
Don't use wiki for important stuff use it for fun and finding actual sources @@71M3L4PSE
@sazaraki wrong enough for teachers and professors to explicitly instruct their students not to list Wikipedia as a source and tell them from high-school that Wikipedia is not a reliable source.
I donate to them annually since it’s one of the few sites left with no sponsors and no ads and no stupid monetization strategies. The side projects actually seem cool. Idk. I’m relieved to hear that Wikipedia has enough money to not be starving in a country (US) that constantly tries to get rid of PBS/public media.
When I wanted to know something, in past times, I used to check with Wikipedia and I always got a good answer; I would give then $10 - $15 almost every year; now, I rarely use them (maybe once or twice a year); I'm glad it exists ; I'm now an older man and I've seen too many people with problems and sufferings in their life; it is so difficult to create and maintain something that helps "humanity"; instead of criticasing Wikipedia, try to do better than they do.
no stupid monetization strategies eh
oh hi lexi! didn't expect to see you here
And that's why the former CEO is now heading NPR.
lexi from emkay!
You have to also remember that Wikimedia also makes Mediawiki, the software that runs Wikipedia.
This software is used all across the internet to host many wikis. (e.g. Minecraft wiki, fandom, etc)
I'm sure they are making more than what the cost to develop Mediawiki is, but its just another thing to take into account as Mediawiki is the backbone to many wikis across the web.
The other forums are a very small portion of their profit tho
I knew it was a little suspicious that such a big and "successful" company needed funds so desperately
Same with the Red Cross. All these charities are scams.
i mean is not that weird weh ones heard how much other services of that reach cost to operate. ofc then most people dont realize how insanely cheap is for them to actually run it with almost no employees and 99% of the workd being done by volunteers and hosting mostly just plain text.
Notice that Wikipedia have no ads you dont wonder how they make money?
@@sjneow they just don't spend much. Probably 6 figures cost per year if you ignore salaries, which you should ignore because so much is volunteers.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 yeah even if their cost is miniscule compare to other popular site like Facebook or CZcams the money still has to come from somewhere
I genuinely forgot that I donate $20 yearly to wikipedia until this video came up
Well, now you remember hahaha
Now you'd have chance to fix it...
Like on autopay??
@@RoIIingStoned ye
43% of what I donate goes directly to support opensource websites? And 32% goes to supporting communities? That's amazing good use of the money I donate.
I'm glad the are not in desperate need and will be safely alive for a long time.
I'm relieved that the "exposure" was such a small issue.
I donated this year and will definitely donate again next year.
TLDR: Nonprofits can be just as greedy and shady as a standard corporation.
haha... just ask any ex-mormon!
As someone who worked for a non-profit small charity, yes, they are greedy, the inside is just finding ways to move money so it can maintain its "non-profit" status whist funds vanish elsewhere.
See, the problem with the concept of a non profit is that people expect a non profit to mean they don’t make any money.
Non Profit really just means they can make a shit ton of money, but costs are higher.
What we really want are Anti Payment companies.
Companies that cannot have access to any currency of any kind.
The thing is I didn’t see much that actually proved that though. 43% goes to the site, 34% goes to other charitable causes and legal fees (because having lawyers is expensive and they make enough money to get sued. Sure 12% to admin is a bit high but the vast majority is still going to charity. Those other projects he mentioned aren’t corporate endeavors, they’re sites like “give free access to textbooks” or “compile a bunch of creative commons images”. Personally I find this video a bit deceptive.
Are they being disingenuous? Yes. Shady? Perhaps. Greedy? No.
Donations are voluntary and you're free to donate as little or as much as you want to.
They're transparent about how they spend the money donated and ~2/3 is spent on running the website.
They don't restrict access to content by putting it behind a paywall.
They don't make any money from advertising.
Perhaps most importantly, as long they're profitable and financially secure they can remain independent.
Their only crime appears to be misrepresenting their financial situation, which a lot of charities do, presumably because donations are their main source of funding.
That argument works for any social media really, the users bring it value but don’t get paid
Everyone getting paid implies everyone getting charged. Guess what people don't want to do (hence the proliferation of services like Gmail).
Yeah, but usually other sites are not non profits or foundations.
My senior at uni was a regular editor on wikipedia. He was freelancer and did editing and writing articles for many. He said that it is a good way to practice your skill and also he was also a believer in free education and knowledge for all. The problem is not that they have money rather telling us that they are “ nonprofit “ and then asking us money cuz they don’t have it which they do.
Great video 👍
Could def be more upfront :)
@@LogicallyAnswered 😄
you know, this is unfortunately true for non-profit hospitals in the US. They pay their CEOs and Board of Directors nearly as much as for profit hospitals, and then they just spend the rest, so it doesn't get counted as "profits". This is one reason we should have Medicare for all, and not the corrupt medical system we have.
the misconseption here is that none profit = does not have money to spare .
NON PROFIT purly means after expencess / operating cost [ which includes all operating staff 's wages ]
ie a none profit company can pay the ceo a million a year and have a private jet [ all are expences to a non profit ]
the term is one uesd by a company to GET BIG TAX BREAKES .
Hmmm
Anyone who donated to Wikipedia in the last couple of years has donated to Katherine Maher's $400,000 salary.
And donating to Khan Academy is donating to Sal Khan's $850,000 salary
She's at NPR now.
When I first saw the begging for donation I remember an article about Jimmy Wales from about 20 years ago. Wales almost boasted and said that he had made enough money in Wall Street to never need to work again. It has always been an easy decision not to donate to them.
He gets nearly nothing from it anyway, mainly just the cred for being the guy who started it. So that's a non-factor. Judge them based on what the foundation itself does, not Jimmy Wales.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn Fair comment. However, it swings both ways. If you brag about your wealth, then it may have long enduring effects on how people perceive your business intentions.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn you say that as if that "cred" doesn't have monetary value. If Wales wanted to create a new startup, for example, that cred would translate to millions from VCs. But he's using that cred to raise money for Wikipedia, which also can be pegged to a dollar amount. This is the game of non-profits, (especially US "non-profit" hospitals) -the money is funneled into spending, including CEOs' and board members' salaries and pet projects, and they say "see! no profits?"
8:10 does that $35K per month cost figure include wikimedia commons? because I imagine the media requires a lot more storage than just the wikipedia articles themselves.
I don't think so. People that usually criticize Wikimedia forgot that Wikimedia Foundation need to manage other projects, including WikiMedia Commons. Sure, in this video they talk about "the money goes to other project that you don't know they exist", but they did not mention that those projects most often than not help Wikipedia for their vision and contents.
I believe you can self-host the entire website, including images, in less than 50 gigs, I believe the challenge is to actually serve that data world-wide
@@iwontlagback7236 Thats with no media. With media its 428.36 TB.
@@iwontlagback7236Isn't wikidata like 1.4tb
edit: oops i did not realize what you were mentioning
@@iwontlagback7236 That's no entirely true. According to Wikipedia article "Size of Wikipedia", only *English* articles would take 22 GB, *compressed*, without media. Expands to over 86 GB when decompressed. If you want all pages with edit history, 10 TB decompressed. If you include media like images, videos, it's around 428 TB.
And here I am broke as hell donating $25 or so every year... What a shame... Thank you to all the editors that put in the work and sacrifice their time. You deserve better.
i stopped donating to wikipedia when they started locking certain articles and only allowing certain editors to edit them. this has lead to alot of propaganda on wikipedia, with no ability for the average non biased editor to change it.
There's no such thing as a person with no bias. How would you even vet or verify that someone has no biases for anything?
I don't think their current system is perfect, but they lock to certain editors because those people have likely established a track record of not obviously abusing the system.
Who do you think “they” is lmao? “They” are other editors. It’s not a huge ask to require 500 edits to edit sensitive articles.
You can talk about the Reddit-like hivemind of left leaning users, but to imply that “they” are locking you out just shows you have no idea what you’re talking about.
@@deeelle6567 Or they believe the same things as the head editors and so are never banned or restricted from editing anything.
@@ironmatic1 Defending Wikipedia's biases and practices doesn't make you look better.
@@user-jz9dd5sj1wits about their edit counts not belief
6:45 - While the screenshot states these details outright, I think it's lowkey disingenuous to omit the fact that it'd be ~22 GB *only* while compressed, and without any of the site's media assets (i.e. images, video, sound bites), leaving just the articles' text.
While the text itself is the most valuable part of any given Wikipedia article, the media assets are crucial in the context of some articles (articles on countries, historical figures, or election results for example).
Yeah... feels like a bit of a bad faith argument to make out how small it is while skipping over the fact you're removing everything that's remotely large from it.
This video in itself looks like a way to diss on Wikimedia. They do need the money fund their other projects which do directly or indirectly affect Wikipedia. I just have a feeling that this video is extremely biased and omits the complete truth and only states the partial bad side of Wikimedia. He just lost a subscriber.
Wikimedia also develops MediaWiki which is the underlying software that is used in almost all the wikis out there like fandom and other wikis including Wikipedia. And in fact MediaWiki is free and open-source. Saying donating to Wikimedia is wrong is like saying donating to Vim or GNU is wrong.
At this point we're talking about nearly 400 gigabytes at this rate, near the 1TB hard disk drive mark to store every single asset of the site, including the media uploaded on the platform.
Wikipedia is good if you want to know how many people died on Mount Everest in 2008, or what Shaq’s free throw average was. But the minute you search for anything remotely controversial that you know a thing or two about, you realize that they’re more slanted and misleading than the worst corporate news networks. The editing process is known to be hoarded over by a surprisingly small number of people, and they aren’t experts.
Anything that has marketing value is governed by undisclosed paid editors with connections to the subject at hand. These are people (usually administrators and their many accounts) "editing" hours a day, without a job and no value on the job-market who make ends meet by lying about their affiliation.
there's also a lot of misinformation on nutrition and fitness related articles. Like, a lot of misinformation, propagading information that was never scientifically proven and been debunked for 20+ years
and don’t even start to talk about anything politics related…
Ah, Wikipedia, the crowning jewel of the internet's dissemination of knowledge, or so it proclaims. Here, in this vast expanse of cyberspace, self-proclaimed enlightened geniuses appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of truth. With a flourish of their keyboards, they weave narratives, handpicking sources with the precision of artists selecting their colors, ensuring each one aligns perfectly with their carefully curated perspectives. These chosen facts, plucked from the tree of knowledge with discerning taste, are then presented to the world as irrefutable truths, as if etched into the very fabric of reality by the quill of knowledge itself.
Venture forth to challenge these sacred scriptures, these meticulously composed articles, and find yourself embarking on a quixotic quest. For to question the gospel according to Wikipedia's elite is to commit digital heresy. Attempt to rectify, to edit, to dare suggest an alternative view, and watch as the guardians of this digital domain descend upon you. With a few swift keystrokes, they smite your contributions, casting them into the abyss of the internet's forgotten memories.
And should you persist, daring to challenge the sanctity of their so-called facts, a more severe punishment awaits. Your digital identity, your very means of contribution, is excommunicated. Your IP address, now deemed a heretic’s banner, is banished, cast out into the outer darkness of the online world. There, you'll find yourself among the other lost souls who dared to question, to challenge, to think differently.
Thus, Wikipedia stands, a towering ivory tower of self-righteous knowledge, its foundations supported by the echoes of those it has silenced. It remains an untouchable church of information, where only the anointed may preach. Here, in this pantheon of selective truth, the power of knowledge is wielded like a sword, cutting down dissenters and elevating the chosen narratives to the status of holy writ.
Indeed, Wikipedia offers a beacon of light - but only to those who navigate its waters with blind acceptance. To all others, it serves as a stark reminder that in the quest for knowledge, not all voices are valued equally. In this world, some are elevated to sainthood, while others are doomed to linger in the shadows, their whispers of dissent lost to the howling wind of orthodoxy.
No Encyclopedia is going to 100% comprehensive. I used to own encyclopedia brittanicas and various other encyclopaedias and I’m guessing a lot of experts have problems with those.
A lot of people don't realize that many of the same people behind Wikipedia also run the commercial wiki site Fandom, which is plastered in adverts. They complain about "conflict of interest" editing on Wikipedia but then do this.
Half-true. Jimmy Wales and some others did start Wikicities (which later became Fandom), but they sold it off years ago and aren't really involved at all.
I'm a Wikipedia editor, and this video is wildly inaccurate. That sentence, believe or not, is a compliment. Covering Wikipedia is extremely hard, and the _press_ usually gets everything painfully wrong. You didn't get any plainly obvious facts objectively incorrect, so, seriously, kudos.
The actual problem with this video is that it misses the point, because said point is buried deep in Wikimedia institutional memory.
Let me start out by saying that Wikimedians love to criticize the WMF for everything they do. Sometimes it's logical. Spending habits is a very popular topic.
First, the grants. When the WMF talks about community outreach and funding, they're talking about grants. They are _terrible_ at giving out grants. They go to all sorts of programs proposed by people with no reputation and when they turn out to be grifters (all the time) the WMF usually makes little to no effort to revoke them. This has been an ongoing problem for several years.
We also like to criticize their donation banners, for the same reasons you talk about here. Did you know that Jimbo Wales is barely involved with Wikipedia nowadays? The fundraising banners wouldn't tell you.
On the WMF 'profiting off of' our work: I cannot stress enough that *Wikimedia contributors do not want to be paid*. There are exceptions to every role, but the predominant view among us is that paying contributors would just bring more grifters and other forms of extrinsically motivated people to disrupt things.
All in all, I like the WMF. I think that what we got (a group of well-meaning people paralyzed by bureaucracy) could've been much worse.
The continued existence of Wikipedia is honestly amazing in this capitalist landscape. I'll continue my modest donations, thank you.
The moment they started behaving like Jehovah's witness, I knew something was fishy😂
Please keep donating to Wikipedia. It’s a real gem we have on the internet, although not a flawless one. There’s no such thing as nonprofit in a capitalist system and the capital WILL guide business practices towards profit sooner or later. But it’d be A LOT worse if it was purchased by your average rocket tech bro or virtual warehouse egg head owner.
Honestly I doubt it would be really worse if Elon Musk (who I assume you're talking about by "rocket tech bro") bought it
Why?? They're completely self sufficient at this point?? They don't need my money and frankly they don't deserve it.
Wikipedia, the website where factual correct information is removed because someone with a higher edit count doesn't like it.
Wikipedia CEO salary should give you all the pause you need.
How much is it?
@@withoutatrace52 Just do a simple web search and you'll see their current and past CEOs and other execs there have made a "boatload" of money.
It's actually quite low for a big tech CEO
It's actually pretty low. I should really become a freelance writer sometime in the future though...
400k for ceo that needed to maintain so called "unbiased" informative page isn't too high. Maybe some big corpo want to CEO to some pages to looks good. So big salary could be a barrier to prevent such things happen.
The reason Wikipedia collects a lot of money but doesn't use it is because they're storing it for when the donations stop coming.
People may be donating right now, but this ensures that they're able to keep running the website to the same quality for as long as needed.
“Now if you just take out 99% of the size of Wikipedia it will fit on a flash drive!”
I am happy to give them some money here and there because this is the website I think the Internet was build for. I honestly don't care how they spent it. I am just thankful that they exist.
Also, I regularly download a Wikipedia backup, so the articles don't get lost someday, and I think more people should too. To have a decentralized backup
But yeah I get that the vibes are a bit off in the campaign, but you know I think its okay to scare people a little sometimes
How do you download Wikipedia?
@@Butterscotch_96 just Google it. Easiest way is with the magnet link
Can you guide me please?
@@shashwatsinha2704 Bro. It is literally one of the first hits on Google. There are even CZcams Tutorials. It's like a 1 min research
I honestly don't understand why you're discussing these dubious schemes. There are plenty of options like Eledator and similar ones that are fast and profitable.
Wikipedia is one of the last sites around that isn't built around a bollocks subscription model. In my opinion, all of the Wikimedia Foundation's efforts are worth supporting financially. Asking for support the way they do isn't unethical, and as we can see here in the comments, it offends exactly the right people.
You must have studied ethics at Stanford.
Go on pay for their conference parties and nepotistic handwaving projects that bring no results.
For real, as long as they are community organized and ad free, I will continue to support them. Even if financially they don't need it, we vote with our dollars, and I'm glad they can boast profitability, because it's a signal to the world that this is what people want.
@@Arigator2 I'm a paramedic in the UK. I don't have the money to go to university, so I choose to support Wikipedia, which provides free knowledge for all.
@@AB-wf8ek Yeah.
I donated in grad school for math and physics topics. The political bias pushes me away now.
Reality has a political bias. Cope.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 I don’t know what that means. I just support what I support.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 You sound upset.
@@thewhitefalcon8539This guy sounds way too personally invested in the topic for it to be healthy if he reacted like that immediately
@@cougar2013 It means 99% of people who talk like you are upset that Wikipedia has facts on it instead of their propaganda. Prove you're in the 1%.
You're wrong...
Wikipedia's monthly operating costs can be estimated based on the annual expenses reported. In 2019-2020, Wikipedia spent $112 million on expenses. Dividing this annual expense by 12 months gives an approximate monthly cost of about $9.33 million. Additionally, specific costs such as hosting are reported to be $2.4 million annually, which translates to about $200,000 per month for hosting alone.
I have a site that gets a around 20,000 visitors monthly and the hosting costs over $50.
I honestly don't feel guilt because wikipedia spreads a lot of misinformation
Like what?
At least Wikipedia provides sources, unlike this comment which only makes a claim
@@thewhitefalcon8539 It does not say the things I believe and want! therefore misinformation/bias
@@thewhitefalcon8539The article on "The Epoch Times" is a good example
Never donated. Never will.
Wikipedia is totally biased. I did donate to them one time back in the day.
May I ask why?
@@noorlancer I guess they're biased because they assume it's in their best interest to manipulate people into believing what they would like them to believe.
I donated to them back in the day because I was more naive, and because they were more neutral back then.
@@noorlancer because the people that have the final word on what get written are people with a bias. the same thing about a lot of things can be written very differently if you are more far left or far right politically no matter the country. and I am not even talking about just blatant lies. you can write about the same thing getting the facts right and still imprint it into a positive or negative light. for example is you write about the US foreign policy those other countries will have a a VERY different perspective compared to the US and there is millions of examples like that. also about people. was this person good or bad, there is not hard factual answers for this about almost nobody. for example the guy that invented fertilizer that helped billions also invented chemical weapons for WW1. the nobel guy that founded those awards was called the merchant of death when he was alive because he invented dynamite.
Was this written by chatgpt or something? A whole video complaining about Wikipedia being marginally misleading in the way they ask for donations that spends the entire runtime hyping up absolutely nothing. This is exactly how a well functioning not for profit organisation should function.
you have a lot of subs
I also only ever noticed their ads for donations started happening after the site overtly started keeping up articles they where well aware where factually wrong that where kept such for political reasons. It's one thing to keep contentious subjects up because the matter is controversial, it's another to have information that is flat out incorrect that has every study, statement by government agencies, law enforcement and anyone who has ever commented on the matter under oath all say the same thing and yet post the exact opposite because one blog said otherwise and for whatever reason certain blogs from no name individuals of ill repute can somehow be considered more credible then the god damn FBI and what the people involved had to say when lying would potentially see them imprisoned for doing so.
Wikipidia isn't just inaccurate, it has no qualms lying to you, knowingly so, with the intention of making readers ignorant of the facts believe a lie they know to be untrue.
Always look at the financial report for any charity you donate to. I first looked into this 2 years ago and it was obviously some fraud or admin bloat going on since the hosting costs are a mere fraction of the total spend.
They spend a lot on parties (that they call conferences), some family member's branding company and wages for a few hundred employees who do very little, but can't get a job otherwise and here they can feel like gods.
Is that hosting worldwide?
I find it funny how people are like “Wikipedia isn’t a good source because anyone can edit it” but when they change that they go “noooo that’s biased and corrupt if I can’t edit it”
This is one problem with running via random donations - no one knows how much anyone else is giving nor how much more is needed
Without going into the detail of the new projects, its incorrect to criticize. I would like to see more projects like Wikipedia, but haven't seen one yet. many of these AI engines are scrapping through wiki without paying a penny and making billions in profit.
So ? Stop complaining ab sht if you put things on public domain, people with mind like you are slowing humanity development
I used to write console and videogame articles for Wikipedia. And millions of others and myself never asked for money. For me it was just the joy of sharing what I knew about gaming. And I do understand Wikipedia does need to pay for server space and basically to "keep the lights on". But when I discovered some of their biggest contributors were donating millions from places like the Soros Foundation, the Gates Foundation and other huge names, I had to wonder was it really free?
The knowledge sharing is, but nothing else is. And those huge contributors donation tens of millions of dollars then having the stones to ask users for money? It smelled just like Goodwill's formula. Goodwill is a "charity" who resells lots of old clothes, dishes, electronics, you name it. At least they used to. Now they auction premium items for huge profit. You have to be so cautious with how these organizations really handle donations.
Based on the numbers here, with the dividends on investments it has it could probably maintain the infrastructure and staff without needing a penny in donations ever again.
That's a really stupid thing to question. You're basically giving George Soros a veto over any nonprofit - you're giving him the power to stop you from ever donating to that nonprofit again.
Plus the political bias they have nowadays, to me it makes it clear those bigger donors have much more power over the site than its users do
@@My_Old_YT_Account do you mean the reality bias?
@@thewhitefalcon8539 it certainly isn't reality, just mods and admins' delusions
if everyone stops donating... maybe they will move on and do something else with the side.
to be honest if they just put adds in there they would get a hella lot more than 180m a year. so they could be worse.
@@lucaskp16 and someone would make a free version without ads
@@thewhitefalcon8539 most people who care would use an add blocker. also adds dont always mean unskipable video that is what people really hate. they can just be recommended links embedded in the page. and you forget that people really dont like to change their habits, and just default to the first thing know or available. why do you think google pays apple 18Billions a year just to be the default browser in IOS, is easy to change it but most people stick with what is in there as default. and Wikipedia is even more synonyms of encyclopedia than google is of web search. yes you could scrap and clone Wikipedia but wont be worth shit really with no users.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 But it wouldn't last because we should take server costs into consideration.
@@thewhitefalcon8539Who's going to pay for the site though because there's hundreds of thousands of articles on Wikipedia
Thanks. I'm stopping donating this year.
I have never donated to Wikipedia in the first place, but it was always obvious to me they were lying. I never felt guilt about not donating, because I knew they were lying and actually made tons of money
Wikimedia is built on lies. It's a grift that grew too big, just not as obvious as the failed scams of recent years.
I used to volunteer as an editor for Wikipedia sometimes back in 2022. I edited a bunch of articles there but eventually got tired of doing free work and called it a quit. Good to realize this today.
8:20 when that full-time engineer gets 10,000 USD a month, the employer actually pays 13k-15k USD a month
If you make 120k a year, your employer pays 150k-200k
Why?
Health insurance
Unemployment insurance
401k contributions (maybe)
2 weeks of paid vacation (maybe)
+ Recruitment costs and advertising costs
And many other costs
True, just an estimate
I never donate. They are not a non profit. All nonprofits are run the exact same as for-profit. It’s just taxation status
if it was a for profit they would just add ads and get a couple billions from it every year.
Non profits are worse. They try to get stuff for free and then steal the money somehow.
It's a for-profit that doesn't pay taxes. Like Jeff.
🙄 Nonprofit is absolutely NOT the same. Good thing there are free ways for you to look that up...
They accumulate money until someone in management figures out how to steal it.
Huh... Did not know those details!
Thanks for the video!
Hundreds of millions of dollars and yet Wikipedia doesn’t have a native dark mode stylesheet
Nice
I support Wikipedia raising donations even if the narrative seem to be unethical.
They are running the world's largest encyclopedia project ever and it needs to fund lot other projects and research.
Also, donating is not a compulsion here. It would be a crime if they put a subscription fee that is way unaffordable and compulsory.
In conclusion, I don't see anything wrong in Wikipedia raising donations.
We voluntarily donated consistently over DECADES to public broadcast TV. In the last 10 years, I've noticed we can't watch much of the archived content that we "supported", unless we now buy the annual Passport membership. Now that Amazon forces commercials (unless you pay additional monthly), we may consider the PBS Passport.
This video couldn't stop me to donate $10 to $15 because they need maintenance in their servers
Uri Berliner, a long-time senior editor at NPR recently resigned over its had-core left bias. NPR's current head is Katherine Maher, who recently switched from being Wikipedia's long-time head. In her 2022 TED Talk (when she was head of Wikipedia), she said:
"What about the hard things? The places where we are prime to disagreements? Say politics and religion. As it turns out, not only does Wikipedia's model work there, it actually works really well. Because in our normal lives, these contentioius conversations tend to erupt over disagreement over what the truth actually is. But the people who write these articles are not focused on the truth, they're focused on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now. After seven years of working with these brilliant folks, I've come to believe they are on to something.
Perhaps, on our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start.
In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.
That is not to say that the truth doesn't exist or to say that the truth isn't important. Clearly the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things, but I think if I were to really ask you to think about this, one thing you would acknowledge is one reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths.
I'm certain that the truth exists for you. And probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth. That is because the truth of the matter is very often for many people what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world. So we all have different truths. They are based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us."
In other words, Wikipedia gives you THEIR truth, NOT OBJECTIVE TRUTH.
Do a video on the economy of the Wikipedia editorial process, how the editors make money and how some vested interest groups keeps control of what kind of information available to user and so on!
Many thanks for this particular video!
On top of that Wikipedia went in deep into politics and often used as a tool in political competition. This is very misleading and unethical.
You should make a video on FANDOM... It's running on a model similar to wikipedia... But display ads instead of asking for donations
I donate. 🤷🏽♀️ It's a nonprofit. My money goes to WAYYYYYYY worse things, like the military industrial complex.
Now that Im older and have a job Id happily support Wikipedia with how much Ive read it over the years, but with how blatantly politically biased it has become Ill spend my money elsewhere.
Their model all but guarantees that the articles will be written by obsessive students or people with way too much time on their hands, and few people with life experience or active researchers. Most of their Bible articles are overrun with references to form theorists instead of regular scholars.
What bias?
6:57 I'm no software engineer but this seems naive as hell. This "analysis" is completely ignoring response times, and the myriad of techniques to keep it down(cost of laboran expertise in web development). What about storing the information in different data centers around the world to cache it or something. What about managing all the minor and major changes that happen simultaneously worldwide. Twitter also only had to worry about text years ago but it was neither free nor cheap to run.
edit: 8:15 why assume that cost will grow linearly with the amount of traffic?
Since I donated last year, wikipedia hasn't sent any donation pop-up since then. Thanks for reminding me.. Just donated $10 worth of money.
TL;DR:
- Wikipedia is doing just fine
- Wikipedia helps donate grants and fund public works
If they were more transparent about what's actually going on, I'm almost certain the people who currently donate would still donate. But the fact that they're not being forthright is going to make almost everyone pull away.
I'm pretty sure the first time i saw that pop up on Wikipedia was a few years ago and again I'm pretty sure it said if you l everyone donated $1 they could stay up and running. But if not as of like that coming Tuesday it would be no more. Yet here we are and it's still popping up. I do my best to not use it at all anymore
1:19 that's a wild username
Trick Se.....
Oh
@@Ronin03my reaction:
i donated 3$ ONCE...years ago..and i STILL get emails from them :/ i swear i unsubcribed and blocked but i keep getting emails
"Exposed", meanwhile its at the top of their own page $255 million. They're also pretty clear about where the money goes.
No, they aren't. They absolutely obfuscate what they spend their money on.
@@burningphoneix At 9:26 it shows a WMF page disclosing them. You can find it by searching "Where Your Money Goes WMF"
12:04 - tbh, no one will donate a penny if they said that.
I would consider it if they said that. With their current whining model they will only make me ensure even my laptop camera can't see my credit card number.
😂
This is a similar issue with open source software owned by corporations like Microsoft. But you could argue you volunteer and understand you aren't getting compensated.
not paying volunteers is not the problem here. is just lying about how much money they need. if they disclosed how much they make and need most people would not donate once the goal is reach.
And permissively licensed open source software (MIT, BSD, etc)
I am proud to have never donated to Wikipedia. My usage has drastically reduced over the years.
I'm using Wikipedia to look up certain years or other facts. It's one of the few sites that isn't ad-based, no algorithms, no vertical videos and is quite helpful. I don't mind donating €5 per year. It's good that you made this video so people can decide for themselves.
I donated exactly 10 US dollars (suffering the taxes from converting my original currency, which was A BIG amount), about 2-3 times maybe. Then this year, I got these emails again, and started to get a bit suspicious. Thanks!
Would be cool if they would fund open source software with it, like Linux and stuff.
thanks i never felt bad about not donating but now i feel equally not bad
I don't have a problem with this and will continue to donate whatever that minimum is that they say, so that the request will go away for another 6 months to a year. I'll do this unless I see a major increase in bias compared to how it is currently. The bias is still much less than if any actual corporation owned it. Organizations (and regular people!) should have a large pool of built up funds so they are not always on the verge of bankruptcy. I look forward to my next paycheck not because I am running on empty and need that paycheck specifically to be able to pay my bills for the next month. I look forward to my paycheck so that it can secure my stability further into the future. I'm happy with Wikipedia building up as much money as it wants and also keeping operations light so as to stretch those funds for the long term. People donate their time and knowledge without any compulsion. They should not get paid for that. This is knowledge that is free, with just a few campaigns per year, and if you can't give that little amount per year for that, then you can put up with the messages.
Surely wikimedia executives can survive without Six figure paychecks?
@@burningphoneix I guess. Most executives earn seven figures at least, but sure, I guess the head of one of the largest websites on the web can make five figures just like me... I wouldn't really expect that, though... By the way, it's about $3 per year or so that I pay. A part of the purchase prices of every single other thing you buy in your life is going to those who probably earn eight or more figures, though. So I still fail to see how $3 per year is something I should skimp on.
It's a great thing that Jimmy cracked the formula to create a sustainable public service. Maybe the world would be a better place if the search engine we use 30 times a day were not motivated by profits from ads.
Nobody is getting rich, it's not a scam as you imply, but a very valuable, ad-free, unsponsored, dependable service.
The fact that they have 250M in cushion money in the bank is great... they would be able to weather (almost any storm), war, natural disaster, global financial crisis and the like, without being too vulnerable to the conditions of the day. I hope the money and infrastructure they've built is enough to weather the upcoming WW3.
I further hope that the formula they've put in place will allow Wikipedia to survive a long time after Jimmy Wales' inevitable, eventual death.
"Nobody is getting rich"
Wikimedia executives are paid six figure salaries by essentially getting the slave laborers to pay them.
If Wikipedia wasn’t deeply biased about a lot of information that matters, I’d support them greatly. Wiki is a great idea, at least in theory.
When they went from once every year to constantly I knew I did the right thing by not donating
asking for donations and pretending that they don’t take money from certain organisations to write biased articles is crazy
It's ebegging through and through and I've never donated because I've known since forever that they didn't need it
This is the same business model as Christian radio stations. At least once a month, they sit on the air asking for donations to "keep the station running". I bet they get donations enough to run that station for the next 100 years...
Y'all really don't understand nonprofits
I never donated because Wikimedia IP banned me for vandalism once for an edit that was made in good faith, violating their own "assume good faith" policy. But this was many years ago. I now have an account, many edits and no issues. Still a bit disappointed of that IP ban in the 2000s.
i clicked with skepticism but i came out with: the Wikimedia foundation isn't doing anything evil, but it turn out the y don't need my money at all and if they did they would have to be transparent about their real situtation.
Thanks, i will put my money to better use.
Honestly I’m glad I’m finding out about their other projects through this video. They’re all insanely useful, especially the free creative commons images, and free textbook/course materials. Donated a couple times and I’m not opposed to people being able to access these things for free without ads. Also in that 34% they also mention legal fees and yeah. A company as big as Wikipedia needs money for lawyers. And lawyers are expensive. Honestly didn’t see anything too bad in this video.
I started to donate $3 once. All of the fine print involved lead me to decide against it.
I used to donate $10 a month and they always wanted more so I stopped it seem like it was never enough
How are they wanting more? They're always appreciative.
@@Heyu7her3"12 comments on this channel" lmao touch grass kid
@@NoSaysJo 12 comments? that's nothing.
Another thing to consider: It's very likely they don't need to pay taxes on any of it either because it's just donations.
In for-profit companies, if you exclude employee salary as an expense and instead say profits are used to pay employees, less than half of the generated profits go to the employees. People complain about taxes eating away at their income, but the bosses / shareholders easily take twice as much as the government takes in taxes. I know that isn't the point of what you were saying, but for-profit companies do not in any sense give most of the surplus value created by employee labor to the employees that created it. We should honestly just do away with the concept of money entirely; we don't need to use money as a method of allocating resources where they are needed, and it mostly just facilitates hoarding resources by wealthy psychopaths.
I use Wikipedia. I don't mind giving $2. I was asked 2x for the last 10 years. Pretty good deal.
I use Wikipedia fairly frequently, so I donate occasionally when I have some money spare. But I have been aware that Wikipedia's finances are solid for many years now and I feel absolutely no guilt ignoring their donation requests. Particularly the ones that are sent to my email box after I've already donated money to them.
I simped because I was grateful.
I hope Wiki collected a lot of donations to pay the lawyers fees, court costs and penalties for the blatant lies they put on their joke of a website. Hey Wiki, enjoy the lawsuits!
i was actually going to donate so thanks for this
As long as they are community organized and ad free, I will continue to support them.
Even if they don't need it financially, we vote with our dollars, and I'm glad they can boast profitability. It's a signal to the world that this is what we want.
We want free and concise information that's not motivated by ad dollars to generate clickbait content, which I can't say about this video.
I haven't given them a cent. I wrote and maintain one small entry, and have for 18 years. That's my contribution.
I donate nothing to corporations.
my biggest issue with the Wikimedia foundation is that they just don't care. non-English Wikipedias are often a hellhole. many of them are hostile to editors of marginalised communities, and I'm not kidding when I say I literally had someone say to me "if the users decide by majority that the speed of light is 6kmh, we will write it like it's so". heck, there was even a time an entire language's Wikipedia was overrun by literal red white and black Nazis, and the Wikimedia foundation did literally nothing.
Pay those volunteers. Especially the 1/3rd Guy, my Gosh