Wikipedia fundraising is a scam. By Emil Kirkegaard.
If you go to Wikipedia, you will often be greeted with … begging you to please give them money. They have no salespeople, they say, and they need help to “keep Wikipedia online and growing”. It turns out this is not really true. At the end of 2023, Wikimedia (again, Wikipedia’s parent organization) has a staggering 250 million dollars in assets. … They have about 175 million in various kinds of stocks, bonds, securities and so on.
In 2023, Wikimedia had $169 m of expenses:
Server hosting is only 3 million (<5% of their donations). …
So what are they spending the other 166 million dollars on? … Well, Wikipedia itself says:
“Tides Foundation is a left-leaning donor advised fund based in the United States. … Tides distributes money from anonymous donors to other organizations, which are often politically progressive. An affiliated group, Tides Advocacy, is a “massive progressive incubator.” Tides has received substantial funding from George Soros.”
Aha, right, so the money is mainly being channeled behind the scenes into unrelated political advocacy. …
Salaries are also a very big money sink, about 100 million dollars in 2023. … we find that [CEO] Katherine Maher appears again, making a salary of about 800k in 2021. She’s been rapidly increasing in salary [from $397k in 2016]. …
A lot of money is also being given to something called the Knowledge Equity Fund. …
“The Equity Fund is a new US$4.5M fund created by the Wikimedia Foundation to provide grants to organizations external to the Wikimedia movement whose work increases the availability of free knowledge by counteracting structural inequalities relating to racial equity around the world. …
The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from US and Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.” …
Gotcha, it’s another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot. …
There’s a pattern here:
Wikipedia thus works surprisingly similar to most governments. Whenever someone says, maybe, just maybe, it’s not wise that people are paying half of their incomes in taxes, someone will bring up the roads, and maybe even the police, or the military defense.
While the state does pay for these essential things, most things the state pays for are not such essential things. Rather, the essential things provide cover for the state to keep raising and almost never lowering taxes. …
Evil:
Most of what Wikipedia (Wikimedia) does is not running an encyclopedia, but every year Wikipedia begs the users for more money, even though it has 100m+ dollars in the bank and server hosting is only 3-4 million a year.
The money is then redirected in a scammy way to other projects which have nothing to do with running an encyclopedia or promoting open knowledge. In fact, given that many of these are quasi-Marxist organizations, they are detrimental to open knowledge and explicitly advocate against the most knowledge producing people on the planet, European men.
Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher has a new job, just appointed to run NPR, national public radio in the US. Good to know what the ruling class are up to.