Wikipedia getting excess funding isn't really a problem on its own, its when you see other projects like the Internet Archive struggling as with the recent court case against Hachette getting much less attention because of how much fundraising attention Wikipedia draws
The issue with Internet Archive isn't money but copyright laws. Because they are clearly breaking the current ones. You can't just undo that with a few millions.
@@Alias_Anybody How are they breaking "copyright laws" when all they do is archive the original website?; why don't they sue search engines for listing the sites with illegally spread software? It just seems like politicians are being bribed by corporations to bring it down without any real reason
@@Alias_Anybody They broke copyright law in 2020 with their emergency library initiative. They are not currently breaking copyright law so that money would help. That wouldn't solve all their problems as they'd need to get their library status reinvoked and would need to honor DMCA requests in the interim, but they would be able to survive.
I think it's fair to ask for a donation, but be transparent. I'd rather see "Hey, do you like Wikipedia? Would you mind making a donation to maintain the services?" instead of "We are about to shut down, please donate"
@@Andrewdeank That is incredibly short sighted. You know you can change Wikipedia, right? Now imagine someone owning it. They would obviously manipulate the information to serve their own interest, both old articles and new ones. Just look at how Musk manipulates Twitter. He literally threatened to do the same to Wikipedia.
As a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, we actually are pretty hard pressed. With the scale that we run things, we really need world-class engineers, but that also means that we need to compete in salary and benefits with big tech companies, but we don't have any stocks or bonuses to give out. That just isn't happening. I personally passed up $70,000 in the first year alone by joining Wikimedia over Microsoft or Amazon. My team is ridiculously small compared to the amount of work that we govern, and I don't think other teams are faring much better. But everyone is here because we actually care. Everything we do is to benefit the volunteer community. Making a new visual editor, making tools to combat abuse and spam, making better ways to visualize data, etc. Can you imagine how difficult it is to make a program that has to work in 300+ different languages? I remember one time years ago I changed some random piece of code and it broke only arabic wikidata and I still don't know how that happened. I'm going to shut up now before I go on a rant
@@mojewjewjew4420 I mean... As far as I know Wikipedia just pops up the info you look up. You're hardly gonna become a flat earther by looking up stuff on Wikipedia
@@mojewjewjew4420 THEY don't put, they allow it to be there because its community driven, they can't monitor their entire website, dumbshit. Plus they don't do edits, or add content
@@balls450 yeah but still not everyone uses an ad blocker and its just annoying in general to have to do so, i think ads wld take away from what the site is like tbh which an ad blocker cant rlly hide
On the one hand, it is definitely kind of deceptive with how they frame the “need” for independent donations. On the other, I visit Wikipedia so much that I feel like giving $3 to them once is only fair given that I already pay like $10 a month just to stream music.
The problem is that wikipedia is almost entirely run by volunteers. The server costs are negligible to actually host the webpages. Therefore, your not really supporting the people who provide you with the value when you donate.
@@oscarharvey6215That’s fair. I would probably repeatedly donate to them if I knew that the site moderators were actually getting compensated, I just don’t mind giving a small one time donation as a sort of “thank you” to the site’s owners given how much I have gained from using it. I completely get what you’re saying though
I mean, apart from the guilt tripping, i have used Wikipedia on so many assignments, and to gather knowledge, that i feel fair to donate some money, knowing that Wikipedia is not going to shut down any time soon, i can make more informed decisions, but I'd still donate to Wikipedia for not giving ads, and just asking for a money on a banner that i can close.... I feel it's fair to give my share towards keeping such a legendary website alive and thriving
My professor in college said to us that we must not use Wikipedia as our source because it can be edited by random people. I read Wikipedia sometimes but about artists/politicians info only.
@@tradingnewbs3347 obviously don't cite Wikipedia as your reference, but you can definitely use the references/citations provided in the entries. I also think that Wikipedia pages are a really good starting point if you really don't know where to start.
@@tradingnewbs3347 It can be edited by random people. And the edits can be reversed by random people. There's a record of every change, by who, when, what the changes are. There's a button to reverse any changes. BS changes are removed, often within 24 hours. Vandals and misinformation people can't keep up. I've had a lot of my contributions reversed, cuz there was no references, wasn't the right style, was WRONG. And I'm not even vandalizing.
The video does have a point in that Wikipedia's banners are honestly pretty annoying, but a lot of the math behind it seems disingenuous and trying to craft a more clickbait-ey narrative for TH-cam. For example, it looks like Wikipedia has $375M in cash/securities, but how is that enough to run it for 100 years...? Even assuming that old burn rate of $10M/year, it would be gone in less than 40 years. I've worked in Silicon Valley for 10+ years including at Big Tech companies like Facebook, and running a huge website or app isn't cheap. At Wikimedia's scale, you need a ton of compute and a ton of world-class software engineers. $375M sounds like a lot of money to the average non-tech person, but trust me, it's really not a lot when you are literally serving billions of page visits per month.
@@alexveber Even then, invested money is earning at most 5% to 10% annually. Assuming a very generous 10% annual return, that's an additional $37.5M per year. That's peanuts when you're operating at Wikipedia's scale - You can easily burn through that in a single quarter. In order to comfortably run something at Wikipedia's scale for literally 100 years, you would need *minimum* $10 billion in the bank.
@@FBWalshyFTWI get that it costs a lot of money to run a huge website like that but is it really THAT much? You can burn 37.5 million in a quarter, really? How do you back those claims? I’m not trying to be confrontational just asking. Yes it’s huge amounts of data and visits but servers are cheap nowadays. You only need to pay the developers to keep the site running, they aren’t really developing any groundbreaking new features to Wikipedia. Many employees aren’t even tech staff like the video said, but marketing and lobbying and similar.
I agree with you. Plus, this video makes those banners out to be a larger problem than they actually are. There are much worse things happening on the internet to do a 12 minute video going after Wikipedia (one of the nicest places on the internet).
Wikipedia is one of the last vestiges of the Internet that has not yet ensh*tiffied while everyone else has. In the old days, Wikipedia actually reached server capacity limits. It is too easy to take them for granted just because it's been there for a long time and nothing seriously has gone wrong.
@@bubbleboy821 I'm sure they will need it one day once the AI bubble bursts and the world enters an energy crisis. On a side note Wikipedia content can be downloaded or forked if you have a large enough disk to store it, so that hopefully at least some version of it survives if something did go wrong.
And yet whilst the servers were running at near catch fire capacity, Jimmy was paying himself six figure sums and rolling around in a Beemer on our dime whilst reading hagiographies of himself published by well-meaning sycophants 😂
yes. wikipedia is probably less than ~5tb images included, if it goes out of business there will be other sites mirroring the content. if the IA goes down, hundreds of petabytes of data that are not available anywhere else are gone forever
@kingace6186 Very well! Then let's make a society where not-profit media don't need to pay to mantain their core goals alive do you have any fucking idea how much keeping up all the wikimedia servers up, and all the related expenses fucking cost? There are definitely not-profit companies which are just ways for corporations to get around laws and stuff, but come on, wikipedia? The only big site left with no ads, no trackers, no fucking scam, and which everyone in the world relies upon as an actual good source of information in a see of bullshit wellsite created only to get clicks, but with no actual value to the user? Really? Jeez, thanks man! Definitely do not be angry with google, microsoft, apple,... who day after day just make the web shittier and shittier only to get two more dollars here and here. Definitely be angry at wikipedia, instead, for asking for money the legitimately need to PAY FOR THEIR FUCKING EXPENSES
A foundation is not meant to spend its entire portfolio in a few years but to invest it so that it can grow faster than its spending requirements. Thus ensuring it can fulfil its mission indefinitely.
For those of you looking for the information in the title, skip to 5:30. Before that is a basic summary of what wikipedia is, "Wikipedia is always asking for money" rephrased three times ad break and then a general history of wikipedia unrelated to their funding.
I'm an accountant with experience in the non-profit sector and I took a look at their audited financials, and I think this video is misguided and potentially dangerous. Donations made up $165m of the $180m contributions/revenue for 2023, while their expenses were 170mil. Their current assets only totaled $213m, which roughly matches their 16 month claim. However a large part of this video seems to guide the viewer towards the idea that Wikipedia is rich (including the title) and doesn't need your money and would be able to operate for a long time without donations and that their advertising is fearmongering. For example in calculating that Wikipedia would be able to operate their servers for 100 years with their current resources you made a bold assumption that server hosting is the only significant cost to maintain basic functionality of the website, despite only making up around 1-2% of their expenses in FY23. Now this leads into what Wikipedia is spending money on. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the operational requirements of an organization such as Wikipedia, but I'd be wary to assume the only critical costs are server hosting. Perhaps they could be more conservative with their spending, but that's an entirely different argument beyond "Wikipedia doesn't need your donation money to survive".
I think both Wikimedia and Fern made some mistakes in their thought process. Wikimedia it's asking money on it's website Wikipedia for the support of the entire company whilst claiming the money it's directed directly towards the maintenance for Wikipedia(otherwise it would close down) . Fern it's doing the oposite , he's focusing solely on Wikipedia (since that's where the banner came) , and he's taking the large amount (165 million) just for Wikipedia. So in a way Fern is more right than wrong . If i'm seeing a banner on Wikipedia , i would assume they are asking money for just this purpose and not for their other products/companies.
People who probably have never run an organisation do not understand how incredibly complex and expensive things can get. There is also an issue of recording assets at fair value vs recording historical value, which skews the perspective. The video is indeed misguided and sending a wrong message. Wikipedia is certainly one of the best things on the internet and it simply amazing that it is a free service.
Thank you for your perspective, even though we disagree. The main points we are making is that 1) WMF is collecting large amounts of money often in the name of protecting or saving Wikipedia, while 2) the money is actually used for a variety of purposes (which might be agreeable or not, but the donator will seldomly be aware of that) and 3) the writers, who make Wikipedia so amazing and worth supporting really do not appreciate the language on the banners. Assessing WMF's financials at a surface level does not indicate how expensive it is to maintain Wikipedia - as it is just one of many projects of the foundation, as detailed in the video. So in conclusion we believe all 3 points we are making are reasonable - this is probably best supported by the fact that WMF itself has been adjusting their donation banner wordings. Our video does not suggest that one should not donate to Wikipedia - just that one doesn't have to be afraid it will go up in flames if one doesn't.
Did you... not watch the video? The whole point is that their high costs are mostly the result of trying to get even more money, e.g. the salaries of people whose only job is to try to make even more money and expand the "business". It might be more than 1-2% but it's way closer to that than Wikipedia's ask. It's not that they could be "more conservative", it's that they are being the _opposite_ of conservative, there is no conservation there whatsoever.
To all the people thinking Wikipedia is awful for asking for money: software developers are really expensive, servers are REALLY expensive. To host a website that, WITHOUT ANY ADS, hosts billions of pages to users every month, and works in over 300 languages, is insanely expensive. Asking for a few dollars in a pop-up occasionally that you can close is basically nothing for that level of cost. Most websites would just sell your data instead.
This is kind of what I'm also thinking about. My niche little community of 70,000 people once served 260 TB (terabytes) of data in barely a week, and we don't actually even *host* anything in real size. One of the developers said that if we had been an actual hosting site, it'd have rung upwards of $15,000 in server costs. Absolutely insane. All that said, their tone that they use I cannot really defend. But - yes - server and development costs really skyrocket beyond a certain point.
I wish some of the people I’ve read in these comments (as well as the author of this video) had a little better perspective on what the world was like before Wikipedia. Even among the rest of internet phenomena, Wikipedia is truly unique, and utterly invaluable. If the donation banners are working, it’s worth keeping them. I increased my monthly contribution after seeing this video.
For a fun comparison point... look at a list of the top 10 websites. Wikipedia is generally in that list, somewhere around #5. Every other company in that top 10 is a for-profit company that has revenue measured in billions of dollars. (Except for maybe reddit, if it's on the particular list you choose. It's just under a billion.) The hosting of Wikipedia is a lean shoestring affair compared to any of its traffic / cultural-relevance peers.
A “foundation” is often designed to have a banked amount of money where only the profits are used to pay expenses. Wikipedia is one of the few resources that still retains the original utility and directness of the internet. If they are profiting from it, hooray! They are maintaining a wonderful (though not perfect) product. Regarding asking for Money from areas like India, my take is that they are simply asking the strata of Indian society that are wealthy (even by western standards). Additionally paying the contributors is a sure way to begin corrupting the process with bots and nefarious actors trying to game the system. These donation banners are simply the closest thing to an ad that ever grace Wikipedia and if that is the trade off… I will willingly endure that
@@desudesudesudesudesudesuweb hosting is not cheap when your website is linked on most Google searches, Wikipedia gets 15 billion visitors monthly. You obviously don't know anything about hosting if you think this is cheap. And they OBVIOUSLY can't pay editors, that creates a conflict of interest which means editors will be biased, and try to focus on quantity instead of quality.
I have absolutely No problems donating to Wikipedia. I do it almost every time they ask, which is rare. Over 20 years, I've probably donated a few dollars 4-5 times. And I use Wikipedia almost daily and often many times a day. I've also occasionally contributed with corrections to the site. I would have no problems, if the creators even got a fat salary every year, despite being a non-profit organization. In any non-profit company, you are paid a salary, as an employee or employer.
@@GT_177 Yes it does. When in fact, she and her husband were friendly supporters who were both working for his campaign. Their affair began even before the death of Joe's wife. Once Jill's husband found out, he filed for a divorce. Jill wanted everything in the divorce (house, business, et cetera) but got nothing because the judge said that her adulterous actions were treacherous beyond compare.
This is my story almost exactly. They've asked me maybe twice through email and I've donated 2 or 3 times when hitting the wikipedia page and they asked. I usually give about $50 every 2-3 years. Honestly it's really not that intrusive and I like wikipedia. Good on them for getting bank. I'm sure it has problems but to me it's one of the best sites on the internet.
Ok, so the banners are a bit deceptive (but the foundation is actually quite receptive to criticism), but overall - they are spending this money either for very interesting projects or to create more stable revenue sources. Overall, it seems pretty reasonable.
I'm conflicted. One part hates that they are doing this, the other part is thinking, well ya. Servers aren't cheap, more money means longer service for generations. They GENUINELY provide an actual service. Not a service created BECAUSE of another issue, but because they wanted to keep the information alive.
> "Servers aren't cheap" We're in 2024 now, not the 1990's. Server costs are indeed very cheap, relative the the income revenue. (it's about merely 1% ish of the income Wikipedia has, or in other words every year they get enough to run themselves for another hundred years!)
I don't know enough about this topic to argue that this video is misleading but the claim that oh the server cost is only 1% seems way too simplified, like saying that all restaurant owners must be rich because the rent isn't that expensive. Jimmy Wales has a networth of 1mil, honestly I would be totally content with him being a billionaire, running one of the most used resources in our modern world. There are so many variables to take into account, like okay let's cut all the fundraising people, money stops coming in, some investments fail and you miss one single payment for example and you have to sell out minimally, yet even that opens the doors to a world of shit and ruins the integrety.
You are absolutely on point. I'm from India and donated in their last campaign. When I read the banner, it really made me feel that wikipedia was in some sort of crisis. Upon reading and without a second thought, I donated. I have been receiving follow up donation requests ever since, with the same crazy urgent tone.
just remove it from your subscription or i think there is a option for opting out. i never got any tbh but do check it, also dosen't it get removed it you donated to it once, they give you a link that you can paste to reset your cookies to never see that banner on your browser/browsers.
So true, if they just said please consider donating no one would even notice and that may have a worse affect like adding ads to make up for the unrealised income
I dont appreciate the notion that “it’s ~Especially~ desperate for them to ask for donations in India. 2/3rds of the country is so poor!” India’s population is 1.3 Billion people. 1/3 of 1.3 Billion is 433,333,333 people. That means MORE than the population of the United States is not below the poverty line, and many of which are actually fairly well off, meaning that WikiMedia’s India campaigns are not unfounded or preying on the poor. Most people in the 2/3rds will never go on Wikipedia in their life, and most of them are in rural India, living off the land. My own family in the village of Bihar is okay because they live off the land, poverty is not such a sad thing as it’s made out to be in the west. Poverty in the cities is a different story. Anyway, your statistic was unfair, and you used it in order to add some gravity to wikimedia’s actions, but it unfairly represents the issue. It is still “wrong” I guess? I mean are we surprised human beings want more money? It’s just life. At least they haven’t created a subscription service to use Wikipedia. If people give, that’s their choice
It's rather annoying when people who have probably never been to your country and know next to nothing about it denigrate it. Unfortunately, it seems like most nations have to put up with these kinds of assumptions.
And especially for those 1/3 of population and for most of the people who is 'able' to have internet connection and visit the website, 25 Rs is really not that much (in the sense they are well of, it does not cost a fortune) To top it off, you can just ignore it and still use the site as usual Edit: I am also a fellow Indian
I agree, but I do find it wild the notion of "They want money, that's life, it's fine" You could use that logic to excuse literally anything that specifically is not a good point, but your overall point very well said good comment
If they only ask for money when they desparately need it then they wouldn't be stable. They have 16 months of reserves while asking for donations for the future so they aren't at risk of shutting down. And branching into other aspects of spreading free information is hardly a bad thing. Using money to lobby lawmakers for better education is a noble cause. With how many people visit the site and for them to have no ads, and they're working on other projects to make it easier to access information, $2 every few months is perfectly fine.
> "They have 16 months of reserves while asking for donations for the future so they aren't at risk of shutting down. " That's a total lie though. They easily have enough money to run the wikipedia website itself for the next century plus if they stripped back to only the core costs of running the website (such as server hosting). It's all the other extravagantly wasteful ways they're spending money which means they've "only got enough for the next 16 months".
its all relative. 10% of India is poor, if you live in India, and earn Indian money. 66% of India is poor if you look at it from the outside, and you're earning euros and dollars, while they earn rupees.
I am an Indian and that 10% is just there because our corrupt politicians has set the minimum income so low that we all look out of poverty. Heck if you earn minimum wage you are in the top 10% richest individuals in India. More than 60% of the wealth is controlled by the top 1%.
yeah that seemed realllly off. most of my family is in india and they do very fine. theyre what we woulld call middle class. but yes, there are some very very poor parts. but its not 2/3rds
well fern has a point tbh, about 2/3rds of india's populace are farmers, most of whom are living in poor conditions, some work as construction workers, who live in slums and earn some of the lowest salaries in the country, others work as housemaids and cooks and they dont earn a lot either so he's not actually wrong
i feel like they should be transparent with their operating costs and then when asking for donations, show how much has been donated against the total amount needed
they literally are.. where the fuck do you think this dude got all the info from? its a none profit so they legally have to disclose all this information...
Many people don't seem to understand (this video is included) that they have their own data centers and those cost money to keep online. There is a cost of hardware and refreshing it. In turn, they can keep their data safe from other cloud providers. Not to mention, there is a ton of other projects they have OTHER than Wikipedia.
That's part of the problem , they are asking money for Wikimedia , on the Wikipedia website , claiming that Wikipedia would close rather than just saying they are spending too much on their other projects.
@@DexteruL The other projects, which includes Wiki Commons, a giant (essentially) data dump that a lot of wikipedia articles reference for recordings, pictures, videos, etc. The only things not hosted on wiki commons are copyrighted images used under fair use (which have to have tons of justification for being displayed to avoid copyright). Everything else, when you click on most images or media on wikipedia, is user submitted. I could argue there are probably 100s of TB of data on wiki commons. And thats just wikicommons, not wikidata, not wikispecies, not wikibooks, not any other sister project.. which all under the banner of wikimedia's mission statement: Free, Accessible information for all
To be completely honest It's not that bad when you think about it, at least we get to enjoy the website for free and barely with any ads or malicious trackers.
This video feels like a hit piece. 1. The amount of capital Wikipedia has ($375 million apparently) is peanuts in the tech world. Many large tech companies blow through more than that in a single year. As a business-related video essayist, you should know that better, fern. 2. Wikipedia provides one of the most important services on the Internet. As a researcher for your video topics which I am sure inevitably leads you to Wikipedia quite often, you should know that better, fern. 3. The banners seem stupid, but they work. As a TH-camr who makes clickbait titles/thumbnails, you should know that better, fern. I agree that Wikipedia has some minor management issues but that's about as far as we can agree. EDIT: I know fern said it was 'peanuts', too. Once. They said "Wikipedia is rich" and similar statements at least half a dozen times that I can count in this video. The two are mutually exclusive, in this context.
"Wikipedia is actually very rich" is such a funny quote, I just had to post it. Also, the $10 million annual operating cost estimation in 2013 is severely outdated. That number has now well over doubled, and actually getting closer to triple that. At the current estimate of $25 million annually, with $225 million in funds that aren't already partitioned, that's just 9 more years of Wikipedia. Even using your lowball, outdated 2013 number of $10 million, and if we put it into the total amount of money Wikipedia has whether they can use it or not ($375 million), then that's 37 and a half years of uptime... which is not 100 years, like you said in the video. Where did you even get that number?!
@@krakenmahboy > That number has now well over doubled, and actually getting closer to triple that. So they still raise like 5 times their operating costs? 30 million vs > 150 million?
@@BrunoNeureiter "It's peanuts in the tech world" and "Wikipedia is rich" are two conflicting statements. Wikipedia is not rich if they have a small amount of money compared to their peers.
Idk why you keep harping on about the India part. India has plenty of people who are middle class by western standards and they are the ones who mainly use Wikipedia. The message is obviously aiming at those people not the people earning $2 a day
The Wikimedia foundation did get into some hot water recently with some of the groups it disbursed donated funds to, both internal and external to the foundation. The problem being Wikipedia itself goes to great lengths to be politically neutral, it's really essential when you're the largest encyclopedia in the world not to appear to have a shred of bias. The problem was some of these groups were anything but politically neutral, and that made some donors on the politically opposite side of these groups angry.
4:35 What are you saying dude...2/3rds of India is not in poverty. Maybe it was while the British were looting them🙃. Its more like around 10-15% at max today!
4:38 oye fern Your own source says 5% Where did you get 66% from Quote “ However, in percentage terms, the situation has improved immensely: In the past four decades, the poverty rate in India has fallen from over 60 to around 17 percent (as of December 2021). About five percent of the Indian population is considered extremely poor, so they still have less than two US dollars available for daily life. 415 million people escaped poverty within the last 15 years alone. “
@@epender living on 2 dollars and living on 50 dollars is a lot of difference in india mate. so they clearly defined the 2 dollar population, which is 5%, dont get me wrong, india is full of poor people as 5% of its population is a lot, but 66% is a fing crime.
@epender I think he is saying 5% because fern qualified what he meant by under poverty line as "$2 or less per day" which is what the source is calling extremely poor.
I love how their response e-mail about how long there reserves will last, was about the WHOLE operation, not JUST wikipedia. Making it a true answer, but not to our question.
I already donate a few dollars monthly to Wikipedia. Even though it's a controversial source of information it's still extremely important for obscure topics.
At the end of the day, without an urgent call-to-action, those banners would be pretty ineffective at fundraising. Personally, I've never even once felt bothered by them
This is a perfect start to a series that criticizes and examines non-profit organizations, and wiki is nearly the most harmless + most useful. If the biggest criticism is sounding whiny and desperate for donations, that is an incredible accolade. Thank you for actual journalism. The fact that wiki was willing to respond also says good things about their morals. Marketing should not get in the way of their mission.
What if they would make an org that builds schools in poor countries that cannot use Wikipedia because of no computers etc. Thats what a real knowledge sharing company would do.
I'm an active author on both the German and English Wikipedia. The irony is that the Wikimedia Foundation is doing a good job by limiting itself to hosting Wikipedia and not interfering with article content or creation. That’s the fundamental basis of an open and independent encyclopedia: they don’t decide what goes into the articles; they only make them accessible (mainly handling the technical and legal side). But this is also why the fundraising feels misleading to me. Most people don’t realize they’re donating to the host, not to the authors, photographers, and developers who actually created the article they were about to read.
_That’s the fundamental basis of an open and independent encyclopedia: they don’t decide what goes into the articles;_ I attempted to edit the absurd lies about how Jill/Joe Biden met, both before and then after her ex-husband's book was released, to no avail.
Which isn't a good strategy. Gate-keeping is done by volunteers who don't need any expertise in the subject, and my dealings with Wikipedia have not been good. It's not an empirical source using primary sources. There are too many shortcoming for it to be as reliable as it presents itself.
@@TheRabbitsnest Fun fact, there are methods to have discussions on expertise-required subjects. They are called discussions, and they occur daily on tons of articles. If you have a sour taste in your mouth about how a highly-specialized topic is written, feel free to expand the article or fix issues with.. that's the points of the open encyclopedia. Your complaints for primary sourcing are easily answered by "Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary sources", but the short answer is, secondary sources are used most often as a means to verify information being put into the encyclopedia. But Wikipedia even admits that primary shouldnt be used as a boogeyman term, but instead shouldn't be relied upon because of the potential for false information or bad actors, same reason you can't "self-research" and create an article. You can do research and write the article as you feel, but must have references for the information used/quoted in the article. Wikipedia also mentions that sometimes you have to use a primary source, like for quotes, because it may be the only direct source for that topic, but also cautions that the primary source in use MUST be the original document to avoid false or incorrect information. Doesn't mean the information in the document cant be false or disproven, but the actual information you are referencing MUST be accurate. If the information in primary is false, then that just creates a case for finding a secondary source that disproves that X document was wrong about Y issue while listing other research that is indicative of that
Don't they? I always thought most people knew WIki was written for free by people? Especially those most likely to donate. They don't even imply such a thing anywhere
Wiki Editor Wrote: "Angel" is a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan. The song first appeared on McLachlan's fourth studio album, Surfacing, in 1997 and was released as the album's fourth and final single in September 1998. The lyrics are about the death of musician Jonathan Melvoin (1961-1996) from a heroin overdose,[1] as McLachlan explained on VH1 Storytellers. It is sometimes mistitled as "In the Arms of an Angel".[2] or "Arms of the Angel".
when you explained what they do with the money in terms of other projects, it made me want to donate more. Maybe that should be the angle they use in their campaigns because I find the begging really annoying
You need to see, the wiki could be 8billion dollar company overnight of they decide to run adds on it. But jimmy decides not to, because just like meta their entire focus will change to achieving diffing set of goals. I respect jimmy for that.
Wikipedia having money and people contributing to it are great news! If Wikimedia isn't struggling, it means they are competent, and I for sure will support them even more! In contrast, I am disappointed by fern for this disingenuous criticism for the sake of views and profit.
4:36 Sorry I have to fact check you on this but 2/3rd of India is not in poverty the official poverty rate of India is approx 12% in 2021 and estimated to fall around 5% in next few years.
Are you serious? A simple Google search will result in more than a dozen different "FACTS" 1) According to research by the State Bank of India, released in February 2024, the poverty rate in the country fell to 4.5-5 percent in 2022-23. 2) According to Moni Basu, of CNN, about 60% of India's nearly 1.3 billion people live on less than $3.10 a day, the World Bank's median poverty line. And 21%, or more than 250 million people, survive on less than $2 a day. 3) According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India#2020s it's significantly more. The FACT IS... NO-ONE KNOWS for sure. So why should we pay attention to what you're saying. What makes you the authoritative voice that we MUST LISTEN TO YOU? If you are going to FACTCHECK someone... the proper thing to do is CITE YOUR SOURCE 🤦
I remember doing a school project in 6th grade on Argentina. When I was in wiki I saw the add and felt deeply ashamed and sad for not donating. I thought they would really have to shut the servers down… man fuck em 😂
If the 700 ppl number is correct, yes, they compete with large tech companies for skilled staff, you rarely hear about outages or site breaking bugd because they have skilled people
to be fair, not everyone is getting 143k. it’s split up differently depending on their jobs. and honestly, 143k is not really that competitive for a software engineer. if wikipedia wants to keep running as smoothly as it does, they need the best of the best engineers, & that isn’t cheap. why would the best engineers work at wikipedia for 150k when high-end startups can offer even more?
I think the critical focus is too much on India / developing countries. But it seems like the moderator is forgetting that the people using the service are not the ones working on the fields. And also in developing countries you can have a very nice income because you are taking advantage of the inequality.
Thanks a lot for making this video. I have been seeing the ad continuously for the past 2 weeks, and thought the site is at risk of going down. This gives me a broader view. Thanks a lot for the great work!!
I think most of the critiques are not very problematic. It's mostly that the desperate messaging is a bit deceptive. The goals of the wikimedia are admirable, and those financial numbers don't seem unreasonable for such a big non profit.
Got me thinking about the time I fully redesigned my media wiki to look super cool but was contacted by a guy from staff who was like "we're really really really sorry and your theme is extremely cool but we're going to have to remove all of it because it isn't in line with our overall theme for wikis, I'm SO sorry I have to do this." Immediately after they undid my theme I abandoned the wiki and never edited it again and I hope it keeps that staff guy up at night.
Unlike other internet services like Google, which make substantial profits through ads, Wikipedia remains free and ad-free. Even if they manage millions in revenue, it's still far less than what other tech giants earn. Why shouldn't they have the right to grow? As more online services shift towards paid models or become saturated with ads, it seems fair for a platform that avoids both to ask-without forcing-users for voluntary support, doesn't it?
Because people think they donate to Wikipedia, which has already been funded till the heat death of the universe. What actually happens is that 90% of whatever comes in is wasted on all the side projects, that people don't even know they are donating to, and would NEVER have donated to.
I've been a Wikipedia volunteer since 2006, with tens of thousands of edits. Your video is well made and accurate. I also share the criticism that the fundraising banners convey too much desperation. However, I strongly disagree that WMF needs to only keep the servers running. Wikipedia's future is indeed under threat from multiple sides: - there are fewer and fewer volunteers. Turns out writing an encyclopedia from scratch is a lot more fun than maintaining it. Many other reasons too. - on the other hand, there are more and more commercial interests that try to manipulate Wikipedia articles. Volunteers have to fend off these attempts, which takes a lot of time and isn't very fun - AI/LLM is a huge disruption in several ways. It means fewer people visit Wikipedia itself (less potential to recruit volunteers or to raise funds). And that LLMs can be used to generate Wikipedia articles that look legit but are BS. As a volunteer I was heavily relying on the fact that BS articles also look very bad (not fitting the Wikipedia style guides, general outline, etc.). This is no longer a reliable measure. Filtering through the AI-generated junk is an incredibly difficult task. Volunteers are very good at what they do, but the community is very conservative and unwilling to adapt to these challenges. A strong WMF is necessary to tackle them.
People doesn't understand how much money it takes to run a non-profit at this scale. Even though both this video and Wikimedia's donation banners are misleading, they still need the money.
7:07 Net Assets: $254 million, Total Support/Revenue: $180 million, Total Expenses: $170 million. So yeah, 16 months seems fairly accurate. So, your $3 million number for "server costs" would last longer . . . if that was the only expense. While $100 million in salaries for 700 staff and contractors works out to approximately $143k each, they are in IT and salaries are high. What does that include? Contractors tend to price in equipment costs, right? The $3 million in "server costs" you quote are just the internet hosting costs. They have 2000 servers around the world. They spend twice as much just processing payments.
I think what they were trying to say is that of that $100 million salaries, a good chunk is for marketing people and similar non-core jobs. If they just kept the IT people and other necessary staff, they shouldn't need quite as much -- though of course you'd have to argue which staff is necessary. Does a non-profit like Wikimedia need a 'Committee Support Manager'? Or a full time Human Rights Lead?
@@peperoni_pepino As one of the most influential sources of information on the entire planet, I would say that human rights are a legitimate concern. Especially when it comes to access of that information, such as the censorship of Wikipedia in some places. So yes, a Human Rights Lead is a necessary position when you are dealing with hosting the largest repository of information ever, which contains information that could potentially affect real world policy making.
@bumpjammy But note that Wikimedia foundation employees are not allowed to change or interfere with the content of Wikipedia; the encyclopedia is independent of the non-profit that funds it. So having someone who manages human rights as a Wikipedia admin makes a ton of sense, but what is their role within the foundation?
@bumpjammy "So yes, a Human Rights Lead is a necessary position when you are dealing with hosting the largest repository of information ever" That's the problem with the people who defend Wikimedia's gross mismanagement, they have these grandiose beliefs in themselves which distract them away from caring about the fundamentals. As no, Wikipedia is *not* "the largest repository of information ever", The Internet Archive and Google are bigger, just to name two of many.
It's not asking for donations that's the problem, it's the deceptive and manipulative messaging acting like the site is going to go down or get sold if you don't donate immediately.
6:12 Why is New Zealand ALWAYS excluded from World Maps! Also I think it's good Wikipedia has excess money,That way they can keep giving us new features which cost time and money.
Interestingly, I've never seen a single ad asking for donations to wikipedia in Croatia. When I visited the UK or Sweden I got them, but not in Croatia.
I donate small amounts occasionally, because they really are something the internet can’t live without, I still get emails asking for me to donate every few months
There's one small caveat that I think makes Wikipedia's case justifiable: there are absolutely no banner ads or ads from third parties , unlike other sites
Repeated example of India is wrong on many levels. 1. Less than 1/5 of population is under poverty line (< $1.8/day). 2. Secondly, considering purchase power parity, ₹150 are around $5-6 for the US. So it is equivalent. 3. Thirdly, middle class of India is much bigger than middle class of US or Europe. These people have 24/7 internet & use extensively (including wikipedia)
The deceptive ads rub me the wrong way and I never felt comfortable donating to wikipedia, so I just mirror the site on my home server in case it actually goes down. The Linux foundation is also on my blacklist, as the money they spend is almost entirely on things unrelated to supporting the Linux kernel.
not worth the effort, because if you don't have enough server capacity for the peak then your website will go down, if you plan for peak then you are wasting server capacity which is literally burning money for doing nothing. and you dont even know what the "peak" for your website would be so generally its a waste of bandwidth for most companies to host servers. amazon google etc can just spin up their own servers and then sell the excess capacity to other people for money.
I have donated multiple times now and was about to do again a few days ago. I'm now glad that that payment did not go thru. I tried a second time with a different card, and the same. I was wondering if the folks at Wikipedia were aware the payment network isn't working for some of us or not. I felt sympatetic too. I'm glad I found this video because I keep seeing those popups on every visit to Wikipedia and I kept feeling sympatetic. Here's what makes this murkier, they asked to me to "consider" paying an additional INR 100 (for an INR 2500 donation) to cover to transaction costs. India's UPI is MDR free. They should have gotten those 2500 anyway, but still another 100. This is just scammy now.
Dude, you are really beating on a dead horse right now. All you're saying is "oh, they're asking for money, and now that they have it, they're expanding their reach, so bad!" You can tell from this video that you're not used to how NGOs or humanitarian organisations work... Of course you are going to have people with big salaries in a 700+ organisation, of course you're going to have a sizeable amount of money in reserves to anticipate for future spending. You speak about the volunteers that should receive part of the money, which is completely opposed to the principle of volunteering... Compared to organisations like the ICRC and UNICEF, Wikipedia's budget is nothing remarkable, and you can argue that they have an outsized impact compared to the amount of money that's poured in. And to be whining about Wikimedia branching in open access content and knowledge repository is like whining that Unicef gave children food when you gave money so that they would have water. In addition, you're complaining that the contributors don't see that money, that's not true, the events that Wikimedia organises are for those volunteers, creating community, sense of purpose, giving them visibility, having an outsized impact on the world. I'm usually a big fan of your videos, but this one feels like a miss. It's like you tried to make a scandal out of something that's normal, but didn't find anything really to go on, and so tried to make things seem dramatic by taking them out of context (well, you tried, but the ending is just undermining the whole point of the video). And where you make a good point on the "desperate pleas", you again don't put it the context of other humanitarian ads who show you starved children and say "THIS CHILD IS ABOUT TO DIE GIVE MONEY SO YOU SAVE THE CHILD", which is arguably more violent than Wikipedia's message. And again, you didn't put it in the context of the change of approach of humanitarian organisations, who are reducing the calls to emotion to instead be more mindful. There could have been much better things said, more pertinent points with the same content.
I love the Wikimedia Foundation and what it stands for, and I've made a commitment to donate $50 a year, once a year. Why, then, do I get constant junk emails from them asking me to donate and constantly have my Wikipedia taken over with massive banners begging me to donate more. Nobody will donate if it's shoved down their throat like this.
Wow, thanks Fern team. This was well researched and eye opening. I'm an Indian, and I have donated without giving a second thought or research (which I usually do), looking at their banner campaigns. But this is now a shocker. I hope they change the language. Thanks much!❤
If Wikipedia would be just sometimes have a banner that says I can donate, then I would have, but with this, it just feels like they try to guilt trip me into giving them money
4 หลายเดือนก่อน +13
I have been at a presentation of Wikipedia’s fundraising team maybe 10 years ago. They are in a very unique situation: They might have the all time + everywhere best opportunity for fundraising. There likely is no Organisation in history (so far) with better fundraising opportunities. Wikipedia is both obviously a good cause. And they are one of the highest traffic websites. 10 or so years ago they were able to test fundraising ideas multiple times a day. Meaning: „should the button be green, blue, yellow or red to generate more donations?“ By now they most likely know exactly which shade of color gets most donations. Imagine Amazon trying to figure out ways so you buy more or Facebook so you share more. You can get really good if you can test your stuff with millions of people. So I imagine they just got extremely good with fundraising and never stopped. Imagine how thrilling it must be to test different background images of donation campaigns and see your average donation increase by 3% just because of a better image. Leading to maybe 30k more donations within a week.
Probably. If you have a team focussed on fundraising, they just want to keep going and fundraising just becomes a goal in and of itself, instead of a method to keep Wikipedia afloat
@@computerfan1079…or they have transparent policies, goals, and endeavors that reinforce and support their core mission, and use additional resources to further expand and establish those capabilities. That anyone finds any of this exceptional is wildly naive, and willfully ignorant considering they operate fully in the open for anyone to engage with.
Be honest with yourself, you have used it your entire life and if you haven't even pitched in the price of a newspaper once, you are abusing the website. We throw a lot more money at everything else so even if they have an excess, they deserve at least 2€ over a lifetime.
@@cobra4455well no of the Wikimedia projects have ads which means that they don't have a stable income. If everyone would just decide to stop donate (incl. all major companies) then, yes, Wikipedia would disappear.
I'm a software engineer and Wikipedia foundation offered me a job once. Their offering was in the bottom end of my country's average for the position, which I thought being odd. They were clearly saving on salaries and I didn't take the offer. They don't pay as an international organization, their strategy is to pay according to the region, which isn't a bad thing but it goes to show they also save a lot of money that way.
If Wikipedia was constantly on the brink of bankruptcy this could be used as leverage by nefarious actors against the project. Financial stability is purely a good thing for a non-profit organisation. Sure, maybe they already have millions in the bank, but who actually benefits from that? I donate every month to the Wikimedia foundation and will continue to do so. As I see it, I get enormous value out of Wikipedia and so do all of my friends and family who do not donate. I’m paying for myself and those around me to have free and open access to the world’s collected knowledge. To me, that’s pretty cool.
Or they could layoff 90 percent of their staff and still run Wikipedia very successfully. But they don't want to do that. They want to justify their need for more and more fundraising with non technical employees. You are feeding the beast and you need to let them starve a little bit so they get the memo to reduce the scope of their employees and get rid of their vacations (conferences)
@@cobra4455 yes, you make a good point, that potentially a big drop in donation income might make Wikipedia *more* stable in the long run if it forced them to confront the need to trim the wasteful spending. As a Wikipedia that spends $10M/yr is going to be far more financially stable for the long term than a Wikipedia that burns through well over $100M+ per year.
It's because both Wikimedia's donation banners and Fern's video is a little misleading. For the average guy, it might sound like they have a lot of money, but in reality, in tech terms, they aren't that rich.
"2/3 of india lives in poverty" where the F did you got that data from according to world bank's data from 2019 India's poverty rate is 10% heck even united states has 11.5% poverty rate according to 2022 data
I have never donated to Wikipedia. I didn't think anyone would because they aren't exactly helping the world with their website. It's just an encyclopedia. And the aggressive way they beg for money would surely put people off
Jimmy Wales also owns wikia which was later rebranded to Fandom. That site had a lot of video game walk-throughs and articles with informationon TV, music, movies and other media. All these articles were fan generated. Wales made a profit by putting up ads on that site and selling parts of the company to other media companies. It's likely that he will do the same if he doesn't keep getting some financial benefit from Wikipedia. There is no reason for a non-profit to have an operating cost of $100m when most of its contributors are volunteers. This is one of the reasons I'm hesitant to donate to charities. The executives at the top have oversized salaries, while the people who are meant to receive benefits from donations recieve very little in comparison.
I once donated to Wikipedia but ended up regretting it because after that, I kept getting (spam) emails asking me to donate more.
Lmao that must feel awful
Same
Me too, I was just thinking about the "hey it's me Jimmy from Wikipedia, we need your help" emails throughout the video
always use a burner email and burner address when donating!
you should be able to optionally unsubscribe, its usually at the bottom of most emails.
Wikipedia getting excess funding isn't really a problem on its own, its when you see other projects like the Internet Archive struggling as with the recent court case against Hachette getting much less attention because of how much fundraising attention Wikipedia draws
Internet Archive needs more love. Wikipedia depends on IA a lot for its sources. Lots of websites are turning into dust at an alarming rate.
The issue with Internet Archive isn't money but copyright laws. Because they are clearly breaking the current ones. You can't just undo that with a few millions.
@@Alias_Anybody How are they breaking "copyright laws" when all they do is archive the original website?; why don't they sue search engines for listing the sites with illegally spread software? It just seems like politicians are being bribed by corporations to bring it down without any real reason
@@Alias_Anybodyif you spend money lobbying for specific people to get into power, you can change the law to what you want, if they get in
@@Alias_Anybody They broke copyright law in 2020 with their emergency library initiative. They are not currently breaking copyright law so that money would help. That wouldn't solve all their problems as they'd need to get their library status reinvoked and would need to honor DMCA requests in the interim, but they would be able to survive.
I think it's fair to ask for a donation, but be transparent. I'd rather see "Hey, do you like Wikipedia? Would you mind making a donation to maintain the services?" instead of "We are about to shut down, please donate"
My thing is, even if Wikipedia get sold, we will still have the information out there anyways…
@@Andrewdeankyes, but they might add ads
@@babo213True. The fact that Wikipedia is still ad free is kinda incredible.
@@Andrewdeank That is incredibly short sighted. You know you can change Wikipedia, right? Now imagine someone owning it. They would obviously manipulate the information to serve their own interest, both old articles and new ones. Just look at how Musk manipulates Twitter. He literally threatened to do the same to Wikipedia.
I got one just like that a few days ago.
As a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, we actually are pretty hard pressed. With the scale that we run things, we really need world-class engineers, but that also means that we need to compete in salary and benefits with big tech companies, but we don't have any stocks or bonuses to give out. That just isn't happening. I personally passed up $70,000 in the first year alone by joining Wikimedia over Microsoft or Amazon. My team is ridiculously small compared to the amount of work that we govern, and I don't think other teams are faring much better. But everyone is here because we actually care. Everything we do is to benefit the volunteer community. Making a new visual editor, making tools to combat abuse and spam, making better ways to visualize data, etc. Can you imagine how difficult it is to make a program that has to work in 300+ different languages? I remember one time years ago I changed some random piece of code and it broke only arabic wikidata and I still don't know how that happened. I'm going to shut up now before I go on a rant
You deserve to go bankrupt for all the propaganda and theories you all put on wiki.
@@mojewjewjew4420
I mean... As far as I know Wikipedia just pops up the info you look up. You're hardly gonna become a flat earther by looking up stuff on Wikipedia
@@mojewjewjew4420 THEY don't put, they allow it to be there because its community driven, they can't monitor their entire website, dumbshit. Plus they don't do edits, or add content
@mojewjewjew4420 really? You're gonna say that while *that* is your username?
Appreciate your work man!
Well, still better than having thousands of ad banners with tracking and targeted ads on a page
true
fandom be like
couldnt you just run an adblocker?
@@balls450 yeah but still not everyone uses an ad blocker and its just annoying in general to have to do so, i think ads wld take away from what the site is like tbh which an ad blocker cant rlly hide
fair!
On the one hand, it is definitely kind of deceptive with how they frame the “need” for independent donations.
On the other, I visit Wikipedia so much that I feel like giving $3 to them once is only fair given that I already pay like $10 a month just to stream music.
True!
You literally support slavery.
The problem is that wikipedia is almost entirely run by volunteers. The server costs are negligible to actually host the webpages. Therefore, your not really supporting the people who provide you with the value when you donate.
@@oscarharvey6215That’s fair. I would probably repeatedly donate to them if I knew that the site moderators were actually getting compensated, I just don’t mind giving a small one time donation as a sort of “thank you” to the site’s owners given how much I have gained from using it. I completely get what you’re saying though
Skill issue, I gave them $5
I mean, apart from the guilt tripping, i have used Wikipedia on so many assignments, and to gather knowledge, that i feel fair to donate some money, knowing that Wikipedia is not going to shut down any time soon, i can make more informed decisions, but I'd still donate to Wikipedia for not giving ads, and just asking for a money on a banner that i can close.... I feel it's fair to give my share towards keeping such a legendary website alive and thriving
how much have you donated?
My professor in college said to us that we must not use Wikipedia as our source because it can be edited by random people. I read Wikipedia sometimes but about artists/politicians info only.
@@tradingnewbs3347 obviously don't cite Wikipedia as your reference, but you can definitely use the references/citations provided in the entries. I also think that Wikipedia pages are a really good starting point if you really don't know where to start.
@@tradingnewbs3347 It can be edited by random people. And the edits can be reversed by random people. There's a record of every change, by who, when, what the changes are. There's a button to reverse any changes. BS changes are removed, often within 24 hours. Vandals and misinformation people can't keep up.
I've had a lot of my contributions reversed, cuz there was no references, wasn't the right style, was WRONG. And I'm not even vandalizing.
@@tradingnewbs3347 Yeah, you use the sources that are cited in the wikipedia articles, not the wikipedia article itself.
The video does have a point in that Wikipedia's banners are honestly pretty annoying, but a lot of the math behind it seems disingenuous and trying to craft a more clickbait-ey narrative for TH-cam.
For example, it looks like Wikipedia has $375M in cash/securities, but how is that enough to run it for 100 years...? Even assuming that old burn rate of $10M/year, it would be gone in less than 40 years.
I've worked in Silicon Valley for 10+ years including at Big Tech companies like Facebook, and running a huge website or app isn't cheap. At Wikimedia's scale, you need a ton of compute and a ton of world-class software engineers. $375M sounds like a lot of money to the average non-tech person, but trust me, it's really not a lot when you are literally serving billions of page visits per month.
No comments?
Their money is invested and earning a profit, it's not just sitting there in a bank account.
@@alexveber Even then, invested money is earning at most 5% to 10% annually. Assuming a very generous 10% annual return, that's an additional $37.5M per year. That's peanuts when you're operating at Wikipedia's scale - You can easily burn through that in a single quarter.
In order to comfortably run something at Wikipedia's scale for literally 100 years, you would need *minimum* $10 billion in the bank.
@@FBWalshyFTWI get that it costs a lot of money to run a huge website like that but is it really THAT much? You can burn 37.5 million in a quarter, really? How do you back those claims? I’m not trying to be confrontational just asking. Yes it’s huge amounts of data and visits but servers are cheap nowadays. You only need to pay the developers to keep the site running, they aren’t really developing any groundbreaking new features to Wikipedia. Many employees aren’t even tech staff like the video said, but marketing and lobbying and similar.
I agree with you. Plus, this video makes those banners out to be a larger problem than they actually are. There are much worse things happening on the internet to do a 12 minute video going after Wikipedia (one of the nicest places on the internet).
Wikipedia is one of the last vestiges of the Internet that has not yet ensh*tiffied while everyone else has. In the old days, Wikipedia actually reached server capacity limits. It is too easy to take them for granted just because it's been there for a long time and nothing seriously has gone wrong.
They could save money by decentralizing their servers, let me donate my bandwidth!
@@bubbleboy821 I'm sure they will need it one day once the AI bubble bursts and the world enters an energy crisis. On a side note Wikipedia content can be downloaded or forked if you have a large enough disk to store it, so that hopefully at least some version of it survives if something did go wrong.
And yet whilst the servers were running at near catch fire capacity, Jimmy was paying himself six figure sums and rolling around in a Beemer on our dime whilst reading hagiographies of himself published by well-meaning sycophants 😂
@@sgbuseswhat is the word and what does it mean? The one you censored
@@sgbusescan you elaborate on what your original comment meant? Im not a native speaker
The Internet archive is what deserves attention and donations at this point in time.
true and real
yes. wikipedia is probably less than ~5tb images included, if it goes out of business there will be other sites mirroring the content. if the IA goes down, hundreds of petabytes of data that are not available anywhere else are gone forever
Considering how scummy 99% of other online businesses are with their monetization, I don't think Wikipedia is that bad by comparison.
Dumping those hundreds of millions in US bonds at 5% is printing money haha. The founder’s kids and their kid’s kids will be set for life
So Wikipedia is only a little bit worse than the average business?
The difference is that Wikipedia are a nonprofit. Nonprofits should never act like for-profits.
@kingace6186
Very well! Then let's make a society where not-profit media don't need to pay to mantain their core goals alive
do you have any fucking idea how much keeping up all the wikimedia servers up, and all the related expenses fucking cost?
There are definitely not-profit companies which are just ways for corporations to get around laws and stuff, but come on, wikipedia? The only big site left with no ads, no trackers, no fucking scam, and which everyone in the world relies upon as an actual good source of information in a see of bullshit wellsite created only to get clicks, but with no actual value to the user?
Really?
Jeez, thanks man! Definitely do not be angry with google, microsoft, apple,... who day after day just make the web shittier and shittier only to get two more dollars here and here.
Definitely be angry at wikipedia, instead, for asking for money the legitimately need to PAY FOR THEIR FUCKING EXPENSES
@@kingace6186that’s true. Still better than a typical for profit
A foundation is not meant to spend its entire portfolio in a few years but to invest it so that it can grow faster than its spending requirements. Thus ensuring it can fulfil its mission indefinitely.
E
6:15 did you watch the video?
For those of you looking for the information in the title, skip to 5:30. Before that is a basic summary of what wikipedia is, "Wikipedia is always asking for money" rephrased three times ad break and then a general history of wikipedia unrelated to their funding.
Thanks bro, realized these days I just fast forward vids at least two minutes
Thanks.
Thanks 🙏
you guys will not die if you guys learn a little extra history & information
@@rni4069 shut up
I'm an accountant with experience in the non-profit sector and I took a look at their audited financials, and I think this video is misguided and potentially dangerous. Donations made up $165m of the $180m contributions/revenue for 2023, while their expenses were 170mil. Their current assets only totaled $213m, which roughly matches their 16 month claim. However a large part of this video seems to guide the viewer towards the idea that Wikipedia is rich (including the title) and doesn't need your money and would be able to operate for a long time without donations and that their advertising is fearmongering. For example in calculating that Wikipedia would be able to operate their servers for 100 years with their current resources you made a bold assumption that server hosting is the only significant cost to maintain basic functionality of the website, despite only making up around 1-2% of their expenses in FY23.
Now this leads into what Wikipedia is spending money on. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the operational requirements of an organization such as Wikipedia, but I'd be wary to assume the only critical costs are server hosting. Perhaps they could be more conservative with their spending, but that's an entirely different argument beyond "Wikipedia doesn't need your donation money to survive".
I think both Wikimedia and Fern made some mistakes in their thought process. Wikimedia it's asking money on it's website Wikipedia for the support of the entire company whilst claiming the money it's directed directly towards the maintenance for Wikipedia(otherwise it would close down) . Fern it's doing the oposite , he's focusing solely on Wikipedia (since that's where the banner came) , and he's taking the large amount (165 million) just for Wikipedia. So in a way Fern is more right than wrong . If i'm seeing a banner on Wikipedia , i would assume they are asking money for just this purpose and not for their other products/companies.
People who probably have never run an organisation do not understand how incredibly complex and expensive things can get. There is also an issue of recording assets at fair value vs recording historical value, which skews the perspective. The video is indeed misguided and sending a wrong message. Wikipedia is certainly one of the best things on the internet and it simply amazing that it is a free service.
Thank you for your perspective, even though we disagree. The main points we are making is that 1) WMF is collecting large amounts of money often in the name of protecting or saving Wikipedia, while 2) the money is actually used for a variety of purposes (which might be agreeable or not, but the donator will seldomly be aware of that) and 3) the writers, who make Wikipedia so amazing and worth supporting really do not appreciate the language on the banners. Assessing WMF's financials at a surface level does not indicate how expensive it is to maintain Wikipedia - as it is just one of many projects of the foundation, as detailed in the video. So in conclusion we believe all 3 points we are making are reasonable - this is probably best supported by the fact that WMF itself has been adjusting their donation banner wordings. Our video does not suggest that one should not donate to Wikipedia - just that one doesn't have to be afraid it will go up in flames if one doesn't.
Did you... not watch the video? The whole point is that their high costs are mostly the result of trying to get even more money, e.g. the salaries of people whose only job is to try to make even more money and expand the "business". It might be more than 1-2% but it's way closer to that than Wikipedia's ask. It's not that they could be "more conservative", it's that they are being the _opposite_ of conservative, there is no conservation there whatsoever.
@@fern-tv I feel like the title of the video "How Wikipedia got so rich" is kind of misleading
To all the people thinking Wikipedia is awful for asking for money: software developers are really expensive, servers are REALLY expensive. To host a website that, WITHOUT ANY ADS, hosts billions of pages to users every month, and works in over 300 languages, is insanely expensive. Asking for a few dollars in a pop-up occasionally that you can close is basically nothing for that level of cost. Most websites would just sell your data instead.
This is kind of what I'm also thinking about. My niche little community of 70,000 people once served 260 TB (terabytes) of data in barely a week, and we don't actually even *host* anything in real size. One of the developers said that if we had been an actual hosting site, it'd have rung upwards of $15,000 in server costs. Absolutely insane.
All that said, their tone that they use I cannot really defend. But - yes - server and development costs really skyrocket beyond a certain point.
I wish some of the people I’ve read in these comments (as well as the author of this video) had a little better perspective on what the world was like before Wikipedia. Even among the rest of internet phenomena, Wikipedia is truly unique, and utterly invaluable. If the donation banners are working, it’s worth keeping them. I increased my monthly contribution after seeing this video.
I’ve honestly never heard anyone complain about Wikipedia asking for donations. This video kinda sucks tbh
It's not that they're asking for money, it's that they're manipulating people for their money that they need more than wikipedia does
For a fun comparison point... look at a list of the top 10 websites. Wikipedia is generally in that list, somewhere around #5. Every other company in that top 10 is a for-profit company that has revenue measured in billions of dollars. (Except for maybe reddit, if it's on the particular list you choose. It's just under a billion.)
The hosting of Wikipedia is a lean shoestring affair compared to any of its traffic / cultural-relevance peers.
A “foundation” is often designed to have a banked amount of money where only the profits are used to pay expenses. Wikipedia is one of the few resources that still retains the original utility and directness of the internet. If they are profiting from it, hooray! They are maintaining a wonderful (though not perfect) product. Regarding asking for Money from areas like India, my take is that they are simply asking the strata of Indian society that are wealthy (even by western standards). Additionally paying the contributors is a sure way to begin corrupting the process with bots and nefarious actors trying to game the system. These donation banners are simply the closest thing to an ad that ever grace Wikipedia and if that is the trade off… I will willingly endure that
Web hosting is cheap; and the users that make Wikipedia what it is aren't rewarded
Couldn't agree more.
@@desudesudesudesudesudesuCompared to all their other spending it's a drop in the bucket
@@desudesudesudesudesudesuweb hosting is not cheap when your website is linked on most Google searches, Wikipedia gets 15 billion visitors monthly. You obviously don't know anything about hosting if you think this is cheap.
And they OBVIOUSLY can't pay editors, that creates a conflict of interest which means editors will be biased, and try to focus on quantity instead of quality.
i dont understand why some call turkey devloping its already devloped into top 10 economies
I have absolutely No problems donating to Wikipedia. I do it almost every time they ask, which is rare. Over 20 years, I've probably donated a few dollars 4-5 times. And I use Wikipedia almost daily and often many times a day. I've also occasionally contributed with corrections to the site.
I would have no problems, if the creators even got a fat salary every year, despite being a non-profit organization. In any non-profit company, you are paid a salary, as an employee or employer.
You should attempt to edit the absurd lies about how Jill/Joe Biden met and see what happens.
Those lies are sacred.
@@John.Flower.Productionsit says they met on a blind date?..
@@John.Flower.Productions oh no the way they met, this is sure to alter the fabric of reality
@@GT_177 Yes it does.
When in fact, she and her husband were friendly supporters who were both working for his campaign. Their affair began even before the death of Joe's wife.
Once Jill's husband found out, he filed for a divorce. Jill wanted everything in the divorce (house, business, et cetera) but got nothing because the judge said that her adulterous actions were treacherous beyond compare.
This is my story almost exactly. They've asked me maybe twice through email and I've donated 2 or 3 times when hitting the wikipedia page and they asked. I usually give about $50 every 2-3 years. Honestly it's really not that intrusive and I like wikipedia. Good on them for getting bank. I'm sure it has problems but to me it's one of the best sites on the internet.
Ok, so the banners are a bit deceptive (but the foundation is actually quite receptive to criticism), but overall - they are spending this money either for very interesting projects or to create more stable revenue sources. Overall, it seems pretty reasonable.
60% goes to DEI and little goes to infrastructure
I'm conflicted. One part hates that they are doing this, the other part is thinking, well ya.
Servers aren't cheap, more money means longer service for generations.
They GENUINELY provide an actual service. Not a service created BECAUSE of another issue, but because they wanted to keep the information alive.
> "Servers aren't cheap"
We're in 2024 now, not the 1990's. Server costs are indeed very cheap, relative the the income revenue. (it's about merely 1% ish of the income Wikipedia has, or in other words every year they get enough to run themselves for another hundred years!)
I don't know enough about this topic to argue that this video is misleading but the claim that oh the server cost is only 1% seems way too simplified, like saying that all restaurant owners must be rich because the rent isn't that expensive. Jimmy Wales has a networth of 1mil, honestly I would be totally content with him being a billionaire, running one of the most used resources in our modern world.
There are so many variables to take into account, like okay let's cut all the fundraising people, money stops coming in, some investments fail and you miss one single payment for example and you have to sell out minimally, yet even that opens the doors to a world of shit and ruins the integrety.
@@davidcmpeterson I am here to learn and understand people's points so please give a source or something
You are absolutely on point. I'm from India and donated in their last campaign. When I read the banner, it really made me feel that wikipedia was in some sort of crisis. Upon reading and without a second thought, I donated.
I have been receiving follow up donation requests ever since, with the same crazy urgent tone.
Just click the button saying you've already donated?
just remove it from your subscription or i think there is a option for opting out. i never got any tbh but do check it, also dosen't it get removed it you donated to it once, they give you a link that you can paste to reset your cookies to never see that banner on your browser/browsers.
10:43 This chart is inaccurate. Google's net worth bar is ~102x larger than Wikipedia's, but it should be 423x larger
😂
To be fair, everyone would have turned a blind eye if they never sounded desperate for donations.
E
So true, if they just said please consider donating no one would even notice and that may have a worse affect like adding ads to make up for the unrealised income
@@EEEEEEEEtruely an E moment
12min video on wikipedia just to say : please make your donation requests less aggressive.
simplicisimus and fern are running out of ideas i feel
If wikipedia put just one ad on. every page, they'd be swimming in money.
I dont appreciate the notion that “it’s ~Especially~ desperate for them to ask for donations in India. 2/3rds of the country is so poor!” India’s population is 1.3 Billion people. 1/3 of 1.3 Billion is 433,333,333 people. That means MORE than the population of the United States is not below the poverty line, and many of which are actually fairly well off, meaning that WikiMedia’s India campaigns are not unfounded or preying on the poor. Most people in the 2/3rds will never go on Wikipedia in their life, and most of them are in rural India, living off the land. My own family in the village of Bihar is okay because they live off the land, poverty is not such a sad thing as it’s made out to be in the west. Poverty in the cities is a different story. Anyway, your statistic was unfair, and you used it in order to add some gravity to wikimedia’s actions, but it unfairly represents the issue. It is still “wrong” I guess? I mean are we surprised human beings want more money? It’s just life. At least they haven’t created a subscription service to use Wikipedia. If people give, that’s their choice
Oh right THAT'S what we should be worried about. Thanks for letting us know, we really couldn't live without that information.
@@_Lodiirealistically what did your reply contribute
It's rather annoying when people who have probably never been to your country and know next to nothing about it denigrate it. Unfortunately, it seems like most nations have to put up with these kinds of assumptions.
And especially for those 1/3 of population and for most of the people who is 'able' to have internet connection and visit the website, 25 Rs is really not that much (in the sense they are well of, it does not cost a fortune)
To top it off, you can just ignore it and still use the site as usual
Edit: I am also a fellow Indian
I agree, but I do find it wild the notion of
"They want money, that's life, it's fine"
You could use that logic to excuse literally anything that specifically is not a good point, but your overall point very well said good comment
If they only ask for money when they desparately need it then they wouldn't be stable. They have 16 months of reserves while asking for donations for the future so they aren't at risk of shutting down. And branching into other aspects of spreading free information is hardly a bad thing. Using money to lobby lawmakers for better education is a noble cause. With how many people visit the site and for them to have no ads, and they're working on other projects to make it easier to access information, $2 every few months is perfectly fine.
E
> "They have 16 months of reserves while asking for donations for the future so they aren't at risk of shutting down. "
That's a total lie though. They easily have enough money to run the wikipedia website itself for the next century plus if they stripped back to only the core costs of running the website (such as server hosting).
It's all the other extravagantly wasteful ways they're spending money which means they've "only got enough for the next 16 months".
In 4:40, you said 2/3rd of India is poverty struck...but when I searched it out, I got results showing 10%, and that too, in 2020...
its all relative. 10% of India is poor, if you live in India, and earn Indian money.
66% of India is poor if you look at it from the outside, and you're earning euros and dollars, while they earn rupees.
I am an Indian and that 10% is just there because our corrupt politicians has set the minimum income so low that we all look out of poverty. Heck if you earn minimum wage you are in the top 10% richest individuals in India. More than 60% of the wealth is controlled by the top 1%.
yeah that seemed realllly off. most of my family is in india and they do very fine. theyre what we woulld call middle class. but yes, there are some very very poor parts. but its not 2/3rds
they literally sh1t in the streets, imagine saying only 10% are poor XD
well fern has a point tbh, about 2/3rds of india's populace are farmers, most of whom are living in poor conditions, some work as construction workers, who live in slums and earn some of the lowest salaries in the country, others work as housemaids and cooks and they dont earn a lot either so he's not actually wrong
i feel like they should be transparent with their operating costs and then when asking for donations, show how much has been donated against the total amount needed
they literally are.. where the fuck do you think this dude got all the info from? its a none profit so they legally have to disclose all this information...
@@jacoL8 ok I was kinda stupid putting that but they should probably show the total donated out of how much they need when asking for them
Many people don't seem to understand (this video is included) that they have their own data centers and those cost money to keep online. There is a cost of hardware and refreshing it. In turn, they can keep their data safe from other cloud providers. Not to mention, there is a ton of other projects they have OTHER than Wikipedia.
I was definitely misled by those banners. However, I do agree that it's still an overall positive thing to donate to Wikipedia (well, Wikimedia)
That's part of the problem , they are asking money for Wikimedia , on the Wikipedia website , claiming that Wikipedia would close rather than just saying they are spending too much on their other projects.
@@DexteruL The other projects, which includes Wiki Commons, a giant (essentially) data dump that a lot of wikipedia articles reference for recordings, pictures, videos, etc. The only things not hosted on wiki commons are copyrighted images used under fair use (which have to have tons of justification for being displayed to avoid copyright). Everything else, when you click on most images or media on wikipedia, is user submitted. I could argue there are probably 100s of TB of data on wiki commons.
And thats just wikicommons, not wikidata, not wikispecies, not wikibooks, not any other sister project.. which all under the banner of wikimedia's mission statement: Free, Accessible information for all
To be completely honest It's not that bad when you think about it, at least we get to enjoy the website for free and barely with any ads or malicious trackers.
This video feels like a hit piece.
1. The amount of capital Wikipedia has ($375 million apparently) is peanuts in the tech world. Many large tech companies blow through more than that in a single year. As a business-related video essayist, you should know that better, fern.
2. Wikipedia provides one of the most important services on the Internet. As a researcher for your video topics which I am sure inevitably leads you to Wikipedia quite often, you should know that better, fern.
3. The banners seem stupid, but they work. As a TH-camr who makes clickbait titles/thumbnails, you should know that better, fern.
I agree that Wikipedia has some minor management issues but that's about as far as we can agree.
EDIT: I know fern said it was 'peanuts', too. Once. They said "Wikipedia is rich" and similar statements at least half a dozen times that I can count in this video. The two are mutually exclusive, in this context.
"Wikipedia is actually very rich" is such a funny quote, I just had to post it.
Also, the $10 million annual operating cost estimation in 2013 is severely outdated. That number has now well over doubled, and actually getting closer to triple that. At the current estimate of $25 million annually, with $225 million in funds that aren't already partitioned, that's just 9 more years of Wikipedia.
Even using your lowball, outdated 2013 number of $10 million, and if we put it into the total amount of money Wikipedia has whether they can use it or not ($375 million), then that's 37 and a half years of uptime... which is not 100 years, like you said in the video. Where did you even get that number?!
10:33
> is peanuts in the tech world
They show that in the video
@@krakenmahboy > That number has now well over doubled, and actually getting closer to triple that.
So they still raise like 5 times their operating costs? 30 million vs > 150 million?
@@BrunoNeureiter "It's peanuts in the tech world" and "Wikipedia is rich" are two conflicting statements. Wikipedia is not rich if they have a small amount of money compared to their peers.
Idk why you keep harping on about the India part. India has plenty of people who are middle class by western standards and they are the ones who mainly use Wikipedia. The message is obviously aiming at those people not the people earning $2 a day
It’s aimed at everyone who uses Wikipedia, irregardless of their income.
Every year our local drive-in says they're about to close and asks for more support but every year there they are
The Wikimedia foundation did get into some hot water recently with some of the groups it disbursed donated funds to, both internal and external to the foundation. The problem being Wikipedia itself goes to great lengths to be politically neutral, it's really essential when you're the largest encyclopedia in the world not to appear to have a shred of bias. The problem was some of these groups were anything but politically neutral, and that made some donors on the politically opposite side of these groups angry.
You don't even have to leave the site to see the bias. Just try reading the first section of Trump's wikipedia page.
that ad transition was smooooooth
4:35 What are you saying dude...2/3rds of India is not in poverty. Maybe it was while the British were looting them🙃. Its more like around 10-15% at max today!
4:38 oye fern
Your own source says 5%
Where did you get 66% from
Quote “ However, in percentage terms, the situation has improved immensely: In the past four decades, the poverty rate in India has fallen from over 60 to around 17 percent (as of December 2021). About five percent of the Indian population is considered extremely poor, so they still have less than two US dollars available for daily life. 415 million people escaped poverty within the last 15 years alone. “
Good point, but doesn't that particular source say 17% then? Being "extremely poor" is different to simply being in poverty.
@@epender living on 2 dollars and living on 50 dollars is a lot of difference in india mate.
so they clearly defined the 2 dollar population, which is 5%, dont get me wrong, india is full of poor people as 5% of its population is a lot, but 66% is a fing crime.
@epender I think he is saying 5% because fern qualified what he meant by under poverty line as "$2 or less per day" which is what the source is calling extremely poor.
Sh1t in the streets = poor
I love how their response e-mail about how long there reserves will last, was about the WHOLE operation, not JUST wikipedia. Making it a true answer, but not to our question.
I already donate a few dollars monthly to Wikipedia. Even though it's a controversial source of information it's still extremely important for obscure topics.
Controversial or not , it makes up for the fact that it's all in one place and it's relatevely fact checked (to some degree) .
i rather have a controversial source of information than no source of information.
@@tjeulinknot always. If it were disinformation it can be worse than nothing. That said Wikipedia is informative.
At the end of the day, without an urgent call-to-action, those banners would be pretty ineffective at fundraising. Personally, I've never even once felt bothered by them
This is a perfect start to a series that criticizes and examines non-profit organizations, and wiki is nearly the most harmless + most useful. If the biggest criticism is sounding whiny and desperate for donations, that is an incredible accolade.
Thank you for actual journalism. The fact that wiki was willing to respond also says good things about their morals. Marketing should not get in the way of their mission.
Wow, they responded? Where can you find their response?
I think I'm the reason Wikipedia introduced a dark mode
no
Why
What if they would make an org that builds schools in poor countries that cannot use Wikipedia because of no computers etc. Thats what a real knowledge sharing company would do.
I'm an active author on both the German and English Wikipedia. The irony is that the Wikimedia Foundation is doing a good job by limiting itself to hosting Wikipedia and not interfering with article content or creation. That’s the fundamental basis of an open and independent encyclopedia: they don’t decide what goes into the articles; they only make them accessible (mainly handling the technical and legal side). But this is also why the fundraising feels misleading to me. Most people don’t realize they’re donating to the host, not to the authors, photographers, and developers who actually created the article they were about to read.
_That’s the fundamental basis of an open and independent encyclopedia: they don’t decide what goes into the articles;_
I attempted to edit the absurd lies about how Jill/Joe Biden met, both before and then after her ex-husband's book was released, to no avail.
Which isn't a good strategy. Gate-keeping is done by volunteers who don't need any expertise in the subject, and my dealings with Wikipedia have not been good. It's not an empirical source using primary sources. There are too many shortcoming for it to be as reliable as it presents itself.
"Most people don’t realize they’re donating to the host"
How do you know that?
@@TheRabbitsnest Fun fact, there are methods to have discussions on expertise-required subjects. They are called discussions, and they occur daily on tons of articles. If you have a sour taste in your mouth about how a highly-specialized topic is written, feel free to expand the article or fix issues with.. that's the points of the open encyclopedia.
Your complaints for primary sourcing are easily answered by "Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary sources", but the short answer is, secondary sources are used most often as a means to verify information being put into the encyclopedia. But Wikipedia even admits that primary shouldnt be used as a boogeyman term, but instead shouldn't be relied upon because of the potential for false information or bad actors, same reason you can't "self-research" and create an article. You can do research and write the article as you feel, but must have references for the information used/quoted in the article.
Wikipedia also mentions that sometimes you have to use a primary source, like for quotes, because it may be the only direct source for that topic, but also cautions that the primary source in use MUST be the original document to avoid false or incorrect information. Doesn't mean the information in the document cant be false or disproven, but the actual information you are referencing MUST be accurate. If the information in primary is false, then that just creates a case for finding a secondary source that disproves that X document was wrong about Y issue while listing other research that is indicative of that
Don't they? I always thought most people knew WIki was written for free by people? Especially those most likely to donate. They don't even imply such a thing anywhere
I'm surprised they don't start blasting "In the aaaaaaarms of an aaaaaaangel" out of my speakers every time they ask for money
Give them time🙄
Wiki Editor Wrote: "Angel" is a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan. The song first appeared on McLachlan's fourth studio album, Surfacing, in 1997 and was released as the album's fourth and final single in September 1998. The lyrics are about the death of musician Jonathan Melvoin (1961-1996) from a heroin overdose,[1] as McLachlan explained on VH1 Storytellers. It is sometimes mistitled as "In the Arms of an Angel".[2] or "Arms of the Angel".
no lie, I liked that song the first time I heard it.
This was no longer true somewhere around the 20th time I'd seen that commercial.
Oh you mean tears of an angel. By hinder
@@Acesmcnugget that's a little heavy handed, Acesmcnugget😉
everyone gangsta until jimmy goes on a villain arc and shuts down wikipedia for real
E
A powerful cry that cannot be implemented because the Wikipedia founder no longer has control over it.
when you explained what they do with the money in terms of other projects, it made me want to donate more. Maybe that should be the angle they use in their campaigns because I find the begging really annoying
You need to see, the wiki could be 8billion dollar company overnight of they decide to run adds on it. But jimmy decides not to, because just like meta their entire focus will change to achieving diffing set of goals. I respect jimmy for that.
Wikipedia having money and people contributing to it are great news!
If Wikimedia isn't struggling, it means they are competent, and I for sure will support them even more!
In contrast, I am disappointed by fern for this disingenuous criticism for the sake of views and profit.
4:36 Sorry I have to fact check you on this but 2/3rd of India is not in poverty the official poverty rate of India is approx 12% in 2021 and estimated to fall around 5% in next few years.
Are you serious?
A simple Google search will result in more than a dozen different "FACTS"
1) According to research by the State Bank of India, released in February 2024, the poverty rate in the country fell to 4.5-5 percent in 2022-23.
2) According to Moni Basu, of CNN, about 60% of India's nearly 1.3 billion people live on less than $3.10 a day, the World Bank's median poverty line. And 21%, or more than 250 million people, survive on less than $2 a day.
3) According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India#2020s it's significantly more.
The FACT IS... NO-ONE KNOWS for sure.
So why should we pay attention to what you're saying. What makes you the authoritative voice that we MUST LISTEN TO YOU?
If you are going to FACTCHECK someone... the proper thing to do is CITE YOUR SOURCE 🤦
I remember doing a school project in 6th grade on Argentina. When I was in wiki I saw the add and felt deeply ashamed and sad for not donating. I thought they would really have to shut the servers down… man fuck em 😂
So 100'000'000 million in salaries / 700 = 143'000 average yearly wage for Wikipedia’s employees?
If the 700 ppl number is correct, yes, they compete with large tech companies for skilled staff, you rarely hear about outages or site breaking bugd because they have skilled people
to be fair, not everyone is getting 143k. it’s split up differently depending on their jobs. and honestly, 143k is not really that competitive for a software engineer. if wikipedia wants to keep running as smoothly as it does, they need the best of the best engineers, & that isn’t cheap. why would the best engineers work at wikipedia for 150k when high-end startups can offer even more?
We need a global curated knowledge base not for people or events, but rather for companies, business models, technologies and best practices
I think the critical focus is too much on India / developing countries. But it seems like the moderator is forgetting that the people using the service are not the ones working on the fields. And also in developing countries you can have a very nice income because you are taking advantage of the inequality.
Thanks a lot for making this video. I have been seeing the ad continuously for the past 2 weeks, and thought the site is at risk of going down. This gives me a broader view. Thanks a lot for the great work!!
I think most of the critiques are not very problematic. It's mostly that the desperate messaging is a bit deceptive. The goals of the wikimedia are admirable, and those financial numbers don't seem unreasonable for such a big non profit.
Those "wikipedia is not for sale" banners always read like a chain email.
E
@@EEEEEEEE E
Got me thinking about the time I fully redesigned my media wiki to look super cool but was contacted by a guy from staff who was like "we're really really really sorry and your theme is extremely cool but we're going to have to remove all of it because it isn't in line with our overall theme for wikis, I'm SO sorry I have to do this."
Immediately after they undid my theme I abandoned the wiki and never edited it again and I hope it keeps that staff guy up at night.
Phew that's quite a relief. I was having trouble sleeping at night, thinking that somehow we would lose all accumlated Wiki knowledge into the void.
Unlike other internet services like Google, which make substantial profits through ads, Wikipedia remains free and ad-free. Even if they manage millions in revenue, it's still far less than what other tech giants earn. Why shouldn't they have the right to grow? As more online services shift towards paid models or become saturated with ads, it seems fair for a platform that avoids both to ask-without forcing-users for voluntary support, doesn't it?
It is! This fucking content creator is just grasping with his AI made video for clout
Because people think they donate to Wikipedia, which has already been funded till the heat death of the universe. What actually happens is that 90% of whatever comes in is wasted on all the side projects, that people don't even know they are donating to, and would NEVER have donated to.
As a programmer the only problem I've ever had with the wikimedia foundation is that mediawiki (the software) is written in php 😂
Second this. PHP sucks. 😂
And it's open source ✨ and it works like a charm. PHP still works. Get over it
php haters unite 😹
@@muydale yes but oh god why did they choose an arrow for the class member syntax
I've been a Wikipedia volunteer since 2006, with tens of thousands of edits. Your video is well made and accurate. I also share the criticism that the fundraising banners convey too much desperation. However, I strongly disagree that WMF needs to only keep the servers running. Wikipedia's future is indeed under threat from multiple sides:
- there are fewer and fewer volunteers. Turns out writing an encyclopedia from scratch is a lot more fun than maintaining it. Many other reasons too.
- on the other hand, there are more and more commercial interests that try to manipulate Wikipedia articles. Volunteers have to fend off these attempts, which takes a lot of time and isn't very fun
- AI/LLM is a huge disruption in several ways. It means fewer people visit Wikipedia itself (less potential to recruit volunteers or to raise funds). And that LLMs can be used to generate Wikipedia articles that look legit but are BS. As a volunteer I was heavily relying on the fact that BS articles also look very bad (not fitting the Wikipedia style guides, general outline, etc.). This is no longer a reliable measure. Filtering through the AI-generated junk is an incredibly difficult task.
Volunteers are very good at what they do, but the community is very conservative and unwilling to adapt to these challenges. A strong WMF is necessary to tackle them.
Imagine youtube start saying it's about to go bankrupt and all videos will be deleted
In its fairness, those excess money would be useful in the event of a lawsuit
People doesn't understand how much money it takes to run a non-profit at this scale. Even though both this video and Wikimedia's donation banners are misleading, they still need the money.
7:07 Net Assets: $254 million, Total Support/Revenue: $180 million, Total Expenses: $170 million. So yeah, 16 months seems fairly accurate. So, your $3 million number for "server costs" would last longer . . . if that was the only expense. While $100 million in salaries for 700 staff and contractors works out to approximately $143k each, they are in IT and salaries are high. What does that include? Contractors tend to price in equipment costs, right? The $3 million in "server costs" you quote are just the internet hosting costs. They have 2000 servers around the world. They spend twice as much just processing payments.
I think what they were trying to say is that of that $100 million salaries, a good chunk is for marketing people and similar non-core jobs. If they just kept the IT people and other necessary staff, they shouldn't need quite as much -- though of course you'd have to argue which staff is necessary. Does a non-profit like Wikimedia need a 'Committee Support Manager'? Or a full time Human Rights Lead?
@@peperoni_pepino As one of the most influential sources of information on the entire planet, I would say that human rights are a legitimate concern. Especially when it comes to access of that information, such as the censorship of Wikipedia in some places. So yes, a Human Rights Lead is a necessary position when you are dealing with hosting the largest repository of information ever, which contains information that could potentially affect real world policy making.
@bumpjammy But note that Wikimedia foundation employees are not allowed to change or interfere with the content of Wikipedia; the encyclopedia is independent of the non-profit that funds it. So having someone who manages human rights as a Wikipedia admin makes a ton of sense, but what is their role within the foundation?
@@peperoni_pepinoto make sure human rights aren’t being violated by their employees.
@bumpjammy "So yes, a Human Rights Lead is a necessary position when you are dealing with hosting the largest repository of information ever"
That's the problem with the people who defend Wikimedia's gross mismanagement, they have these grandiose beliefs in themselves which distract them away from caring about the fundamentals.
As no, Wikipedia is *not* "the largest repository of information ever", The Internet Archive and Google are bigger, just to name two of many.
Y'all are seriously complaining about a free website that doesn't even run ads asking for donations..
Really?
It's not asking for donations that's the problem, it's the deceptive and manipulative messaging acting like the site is going to go down or get sold if you don't donate immediately.
6:12 Why is New Zealand ALWAYS excluded from World Maps! Also I think it's good Wikipedia has excess money,That way they can keep giving us new features which cost time and money.
I mean, panama, the carribeans, a ton of islands etc are all missing
@furinick yeah,the map needs to be fixed so everyone's on it.
Interestingly, I've never seen a single ad asking for donations to wikipedia in Croatia. When I visited the UK or Sweden I got them, but not in Croatia.
I donate small amounts occasionally, because they really are something the internet can’t live without, I still get emails asking for me to donate every few months
8:02 what lobbying efforts, specifically?
There's one small caveat that I think makes Wikipedia's case justifiable: there are absolutely no banner ads or ads from third parties , unlike other sites
Repeated example of India is wrong on many levels.
1. Less than 1/5 of population is under poverty line (< $1.8/day).
2. Secondly, considering purchase power parity, ₹150 are around $5-6 for the US. So it is equivalent.
3. Thirdly, middle class of India is much bigger than middle class of US or Europe. These people have 24/7 internet & use extensively (including wikipedia)
to think the site isn't getting direct donations from huge organizations is absurd
I wish bro gets to have his own netflix documentary.
Everyone has dirt on their hands. Wikipedia has positive karma in my eyes.
Wikipedia asked me to pay so I clicked “I already paid”. I haven’t.
Then why do they keep asking for money!?!
Cause they still need it
I once donated $100 to wikipedia, so I could feel absolved from donating for the rest of my life
The deceptive ads rub me the wrong way and I never felt comfortable donating to wikipedia, so I just mirror the site on my home server in case it actually goes down. The Linux foundation is also on my blacklist, as the money they spend is almost entirely on things unrelated to supporting the Linux kernel.
Fern page in wikipedia will be termed as 'was' from tomorrow
/J
0:28 "the adder way"
"Vikipedia"
Yeah man now you say it in german go ahead
bottom line: professional begging is profitable.
They have enough cash to make their own massive server systems powered by their own renewable electricity. That would be a cool project.
not worth the effort, because if you don't have enough server capacity for the peak then your website will go down, if you plan for peak then you are wasting server capacity which is literally burning money for doing nothing. and you dont even know what the "peak" for your website would be so generally its a waste of bandwidth for most companies to host servers.
amazon google etc can just spin up their own servers and then sell the excess capacity to other people for money.
@@siliconhawk What's to stop Wikipedia from selling their off peak capacity too?
I was on Wikipedia this morning and I felt so bad for not donating😢
I have donated multiple times now and was about to do again a few days ago.
I'm now glad that that payment did not go thru. I tried a second time with a different card, and the same. I was wondering if the folks at Wikipedia were aware the payment network isn't working for some of us or not. I felt sympatetic too.
I'm glad I found this video because I keep seeing those popups on every visit to Wikipedia and I kept feeling sympatetic.
Here's what makes this murkier, they asked to me to "consider" paying an additional INR 100 (for an INR 2500 donation) to cover to transaction costs. India's UPI is MDR free. They should have gotten those 2500 anyway, but still another 100. This is just scammy now.
Dude, you are really beating on a dead horse right now. All you're saying is "oh, they're asking for money, and now that they have it, they're expanding their reach, so bad!"
You can tell from this video that you're not used to how NGOs or humanitarian organisations work... Of course you are going to have people with big salaries in a 700+ organisation, of course you're going to have a sizeable amount of money in reserves to anticipate for future spending. You speak about the volunteers that should receive part of the money, which is completely opposed to the principle of volunteering... Compared to organisations like the ICRC and UNICEF, Wikipedia's budget is nothing remarkable, and you can argue that they have an outsized impact compared to the amount of money that's poured in. And to be whining about Wikimedia branching in open access content and knowledge repository is like whining that Unicef gave children food when you gave money so that they would have water.
In addition, you're complaining that the contributors don't see that money, that's not true, the events that Wikimedia organises are for those volunteers, creating community, sense of purpose, giving them visibility, having an outsized impact on the world.
I'm usually a big fan of your videos, but this one feels like a miss. It's like you tried to make a scandal out of something that's normal, but didn't find anything really to go on, and so tried to make things seem dramatic by taking them out of context (well, you tried, but the ending is just undermining the whole point of the video). And where you make a good point on the "desperate pleas", you again don't put it the context of other humanitarian ads who show you starved children and say "THIS CHILD IS ABOUT TO DIE GIVE MONEY SO YOU SAVE THE CHILD", which is arguably more violent than Wikipedia's message. And again, you didn't put it in the context of the change of approach of humanitarian organisations, who are reducing the calls to emotion to instead be more mindful. There could have been much better things said, more pertinent points with the same content.
I love the Wikimedia Foundation and what it stands for, and I've made a commitment to donate $50 a year, once a year. Why, then, do I get constant junk emails from them asking me to donate and constantly have my Wikipedia taken over with massive banners begging me to donate more. Nobody will donate if it's shoved down their throat like this.
Wow, thanks Fern team. This was well researched and eye opening. I'm an Indian, and I have donated without giving a second thought or research (which I usually do), looking at their banner campaigns. But this is now a shocker. I hope they change the language. Thanks much!❤
If Wikipedia would be just sometimes have a banner that says I can donate, then I would have, but with this, it just feels like they try to guilt trip me into giving them money
I have been at a presentation of Wikipedia’s fundraising team maybe 10 years ago.
They are in a very unique situation: They might have the all time + everywhere best opportunity for fundraising.
There likely is no Organisation in history (so far) with better fundraising opportunities.
Wikipedia is both obviously a good cause. And they are one of the highest traffic websites.
10 or so years ago they were able to test fundraising ideas multiple times a day.
Meaning: „should the button be green, blue, yellow or red to generate more donations?“
By now they most likely know exactly which shade of color gets most donations.
Imagine Amazon trying to figure out ways so you buy more or Facebook so you share more.
You can get really good if you can test your stuff with millions of people.
So I imagine they just got extremely good with fundraising and never stopped.
Imagine how thrilling it must be to test different background images of donation campaigns and see your average donation increase by 3% just because of a better image. Leading to maybe 30k more donations within a week.
Probably. If you have a team focussed on fundraising, they just want to keep going and fundraising just becomes a goal in and of itself, instead of a method to keep Wikipedia afloat
@@computerfan1079…or they have transparent policies, goals, and endeavors that reinforce and support their core mission, and use additional resources to further expand and establish those capabilities. That anyone finds any of this exceptional is wildly naive, and willfully ignorant considering they operate fully in the open for anyone to engage with.
Be honest with yourself, you have used it your entire life and if you haven't even pitched in the price of a newspaper once, you are abusing the website. We throw a lot more money at everything else so even if they have an excess, they deserve at least 2€ over a lifetime.
non profit propaganda machine
@@alexjames995 You can contribute to it if you want and if you feel an article is framed a certain way you can flag it.
Please do.
I'll pitch in if they stop fundraising right after they meet their server costs and the money they need to pay their engineers.
@@cobra4455well no of the Wikimedia projects have ads which means that they don't have a stable income. If everyone would just decide to stop donate (incl. all major companies) then, yes, Wikipedia would disappear.
Internet archive need more donation than Wikipedia
Exactly! And the big fundraising campaigns by Wikipedia draws away funds from where they're more badly needed. such as The Internet Archive.
Yeah, I mean both need donations but Wikipedia is more well-known than IA. Moste people haven't even heard of IA, and that's a shame
I wish Wikipedia would know that you had donated so it would stop asking once you had donated.
I'm a software engineer and Wikipedia foundation offered me a job once. Their offering was in the bottom end of my country's average for the position, which I thought being odd. They were clearly saving on salaries and I didn't take the offer. They don't pay as an international organization, their strategy is to pay according to the region, which isn't a bad thing but it goes to show they also save a lot of money that way.
If Wikipedia was constantly on the brink of bankruptcy this could be used as leverage by nefarious actors against the project. Financial stability is purely a good thing for a non-profit organisation. Sure, maybe they already have millions in the bank, but who actually benefits from that?
I donate every month to the Wikimedia foundation and will continue to do so. As I see it, I get enormous value out of Wikipedia and so do all of my friends and family who do not donate. I’m paying for myself and those around me to have free and open access to the world’s collected knowledge. To me, that’s pretty cool.
Yeah, but that wouldn't make for a good clickbaity title and video. Fern picks dramaturgy over actual facts, get used to it.
Or they could layoff 90 percent of their staff and still run Wikipedia very successfully. But they don't want to do that. They want to justify their need for more and more fundraising with non technical employees. You are feeding the beast and you need to let them starve a little bit so they get the memo to reduce the scope of their employees and get rid of their vacations (conferences)
@@cobra4455 yes, you make a good point, that potentially a big drop in donation income might make Wikipedia *more* stable in the long run if it forced them to confront the need to trim the wasteful spending.
As a Wikipedia that spends $10M/yr is going to be far more financially stable for the long term than a Wikipedia that burns through well over $100M+ per year.
If they're so rich why are they always begging for donations
It's because both Wikimedia's donation banners and Fern's video is a little misleading. For the average guy, it might sound like they have a lot of money, but in reality, in tech terms, they aren't that rich.
"2/3 of india lives in poverty" where the F did you got that data from according to world bank's data from 2019 India's poverty rate is 10%
heck even united states has 11.5% poverty rate according to 2022 data
maybe some old info, in the past the poverty rate in India was much higher
According to Wikipedia?
I have never donated to Wikipedia. I didn't think anyone would because they aren't exactly helping the world with their website. It's just an encyclopedia. And the aggressive way they beg for money would surely put people off
Jimmy Wales also owns wikia which was later rebranded to Fandom. That site had a lot of video game walk-throughs and articles with informationon TV, music, movies and other media. All these articles were fan generated. Wales made a profit by putting up ads on that site and selling parts of the company to other media companies. It's likely that he will do the same if he doesn't keep getting some financial benefit from Wikipedia. There is no reason for a non-profit to have an operating cost of $100m when most of its contributors are volunteers. This is one of the reasons I'm hesitant to donate to charities. The executives at the top have oversized salaries, while the people who are meant to receive benefits from donations recieve very little in comparison.