WIKIPEDIA DONATIONS: I’m sure you’ve all seen this
pop-up. “We ask you, humbly: don’t scroll away. Hi reader in the UK, it seems you use Wikipedia
a lot; that’s great! This is the 4th appeal we’ve shown you. It’s awkward, but this Tuesday we need
your help. We don’t have salespeople. We depend on donations from exceptional readers, but fewer than
2% give. If you donate just $2, or whatever you can this Tuesday, Wikipedia could keep thriving.
Thank you.” When you see this message, most of you probably feel a bit guilty. You’ve probably used
Wikipedia hundreds of times over the past year, and for the most part, it’s been a great source
of information. So, you feel that Wikipedia’s request for donations is very much justified.
Most of you are probably not gonna follow through with this feeling and actually donate, but hey,
it’s the thought that counts right? Well, maybe not. Maybe you shouldn’t feel bad about skipping
past this message at all. In fact, there are dozens of articles and discussion threads
questioning Wikipedia’s entire fundraising effort. “It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me.
The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality
they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year.” “For a few years,
I was like, ya man ya'll are doing good work, here's $25. Now they hound me, it's a little
off-putting.” “Without many people realizing, Wikipedia has become the world’s most aggressive
online chugger. It’s okay to say no.” And it’s not just a few extremists online who share this
perspective but even Wikipedia’s own ex-public outreach officer, Pete Forsyth. “I have simply
lost faith in the integrity of the Wikimedia Foundation's fund-raising operation. I am,
honestly, ashamed to tell people that I used to work in the fund-raising department there (though
I believe the work we did was valuable).” But why? What did Wikipedia do that was
bad enough to turn its own fundraising staff against them? Well, let’s find out.
A FUNDAMENTAL FLAW: If you're interested in deeper dives,
interviews with insiders, and exclusive tech analysis, consider subscribing to our free
weekly newsletter. But anyway, one of the biggest critiques against Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts
is the entire fundamentals and mechanics of Wikipedia. Just think about it, what gives
Wikipedia its value? Well, it’s obviously the millions of articles about any topic that you
can read completely for free. But, it’s not the Wikimedia Foundation that writes or curates any
of this content. In fact, they make that clear on their own Wikipedia page. Instead, all of the
writing and editing work is done by a bunch of volunteers like this guy. Apparently, this guy
has played a part in ⅓ of all Wikipedia articles. But, when you donate to Wikipedia, none of that
money actually goes towards the writers who make the website possible. Instead, the money goes to
the Wikimedia Foundation which has somehow managed to convince thousands of people to work for them
for free. And let’s be clear here, these are the people who actually make Wikipedia possible and no
one knows this better than Wikipedia themselves. You see, before Wikipedia became a thing,
its founder, Jimmy Wales, was trying to get a much more robust encyclopedia off the ground called
Nupedia. With Nupedia, Jimmy was trying to create the number 1 factual encyclopedia on the web,
and as such, he assembled a large group of academics and implemented a rigorous review
process. This consisted of 7 steps including assignment, finding a lead reviewer, lead review,
open review, lead copyediting, open copyediting, and final approval and markup. But despite
emailing 2,000 interested editors and having their own in-house full-time editor-in-chief, Nupedia
was only able to put out 12 articles throughout the entire first year. It turns out that asking a
bunch of experts to spend their free time writing encyclopedia articles for free wasn’t all that
appealing. Given the extremely slow production speed, Nupedia began thinking of ways to organize
knowledge faster and one of the suggestions was opening up writing to the community. The
idea was that these community-driven articles could be used as a base for experts to review
and edit after which the article could be posted on Nupedia. Much of the Nupedia organization was
actually strongly opposed to this idea because they felt that it took away from the credibility
of Nupedia. And that’s partially why Wikipedia was launched under a new domain as a completely
separate side project. They wanted to keep Nupedia and Wikipedia as distinct as possible while also
speeding up the production speed of Nupedia. Unfortunately, the production speed of Nupedia
never really increased, but Wikipedia would explode beyond their wildest dreams. Wikipedia.com
was officially launched on January 15, 2001. Within a month, Wikipedia had 1,000 articles,
within 8 months, Wikipedia had 10,000 articles, and by the end of the first year, Wikipedia had
20,000 articles. As you can see, it was clearly the community that made Wikipedia successful
as opposed to the team behind the project. With that being said, many argue that it makes little
sense to donate to the Wikipedia team as a way of thanking the community. Many take this sentiment
one step further and argue that it’s unfair that a small group is able to enrich themselves based on
the work of the community at large. I mean, this is obviously how capitalism works, but Wikimedia
is technically supposed to be a nonprofit. So, the argument is why donate to an organization
that basically operates like a for-profit? At least with for-profits, some of the revenue or
even a large amount of the revenue goes to the employees. With Wikipedia, however, none of it
goes to the writers who actually make the platform valuable. Now, a lot of you are probably saying
that there’s a lot more that goes into running Wikipedia than just writing articles, and you’re
absolutely right. And that brings us to the topic of what happens to all the money that is raised.
A RICH CHARITY: Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the
world, pulling in 9.8 billion visits every single month. So, naturally, you would think that you
need a bunch of engineering talent to maintain the tech infrastructure of Wikipedia, but that’s not
actually the case due to the extreme simplicity of the site. Wikipedia isn’t hosting millions of
4k videos or having to constantly develop a recommendation algorithm. They just have to
host a bunch of text. In fact, if you take out the supplementary media that articles sometimes have,
the entirety of Wikipedia can be compressed down to just 22.14 GB. In other words, the entirety of
Wikipedia can be stored on an $8 SD card. Now, of course, storing this information is not the
same as serving it to 9.8 billion visitors every single month, but the latter is a lot easier than
you might think. In fact, this is exactly how the Pirate Bay operates in 2024. The original
website was taken down 10 years ago but we still see duplicates of the website all over the place
because it’s extremely easy to host. The entirety of the Pirate Bay can be compressed down to just
90 megabytes, so whenever one version of the site is taken down, another one pops up in no
time. Now, Wikipedia is a lot larger than 90 MB, but the same logic applies. And you don’t have to
just take my word for it. In fact, here’s Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia bragging about
how cheap it is to run the site. Let me repeat that. Only $5,000 per month to support 1.4 billion
monthly page views, and they don’t even need a full-time employee. Now, Wikipedia receives
7 times the visits nowadays, but that’s still only $35,000 per month. We can even assume that
cloud costs have doubled since Jimmy made this statement, and it would still only cost $70,000
per month. You can even throw in 3 full-time engineers and pay them each $10,000 per month,
and you’d only be at $100,000 per month or $1.2 million per year. That’s actually insane to think
about. The world’s 5th most visited website can be kept operational for just a little more than
a million dollars per year. Now, of course, that would be a super barebones operation, but do you
wanna guess how much the Wikimedia Foundation pulls in every year thanks to donations? Well,
the answer is a whopping $180 million. In other words, 1 year's worth of donations is enough to
keep Wikipedia alive for approximately 150 years. Now again, that’s assuming barebones operations.
Even with a far more generous annual budget of $10 million, 1 year worth of donations is enough to
sustain Wikipedia for 18 years. Where are all the extra donations going you ask? Well, most of it is
not actually going to Wikipedia. 32% goes towards direct support to communities which includes a
bunch of grants and side projects that Wikimedia is involved in. 13% goes towards admin and 12%
goes towards fundraising. Only 43% actually goes towards website maintenance, and Wikipedia is just
one website that they maintain. The money you donate is also going towards supporting all of
these other Wiki products. I should also mention that the foundation is “profitable”. Technically,
as a nonprofit, they don’t have profit but they do have excess donations. In fact, they
currently have a quarter billion dollars worth of excess donations. Even at $10 million per year,
Wikimedia can sustain Wikipedia for another 25 years without you ever donating. Also,
it’s not like Wikimedia is just holding a bunch of cash, they invest their cash. As of 2 years ago,
they had $46 million in corporate bonds, $21 million in mortgage-backed securities,
and $73 million in treasuries, and that’s just short-term investments.
They also have $3.9 million in long-term corporate bonds, $25 million in stocks,
$5.9 million in long-term mortgage securities, and $4.8 million in long-term treasuries. With
a total of $180 million in investments, Wikimedia is likely able to consistently
generate $10 million in annual profit. And that brings us to Wikipedia’s donation controversy.
THE WIKIPEDIA CONTROVERSY: As you can see, Wikipedia is doing just fine
financially and your donation is not actually helping to keep the website alive. Instead,
your donation is just helping Wikimedia fund a bunch of programs that you probably didn’t even
know they were involved in. And this is really the crux of the ethics problem surrounding Wikipedia’s
fundraising effort. They make it seem like without your donation, Wikipedia will have to
shut down next year, but really, it barely costs any money to keep Wikipedia alive, none of the
money you donate will actually go to the people writing the articles, and Wikimedia already has
a boatload of money. Wikipedia was never in any danger of shutting down or even coming close,
and most of the money you donate doesn’t even go towards Wikipedia itself. It actually goes
towards a bunch of projects that you’re not even familiar with. With all that being said,
I don’t want to paint Wikipedia as too much of a villain because they’re not. The amount of value
they have provided to the world is far more than the $100 or $200 million that they consume in
donations every year. And it’s perfectly fine that they engage in community-oriented projects outside
of just Wikipedia. All that people are really criticizing is the misleading way that Wikipedia
goes about getting these donations. Instead of guilting people into donating using these
dire-looking pop-ups, it would be far more ethical to come clean and tell people that Wikipedia is
doing just fine but that donations could help develop projects with similar altruistic motives
and goals. As a nonprofit, I think this is what Wikimedia should do but that’s just what I think.
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