SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Wikimedia Foundation [wikimediafoundation.org], which controls Wikipedia and other popular MediaWiki projects, has met its "December sprint" fundraising target [theregister.co.uk]:

This week the Wikimedia Foundation smashed through the $25m target [wikimedia.org] it had set for its "December sprint" – with a full 15 days of the month left. On December 3, Wiki's globetrotting figurehead Jimmy Wales promised that as soon as the Wikimedia Foundation met the target it had set for its traditional year-end fundraising drive, it would cease making the intrusive appeals. "We would still stop the fundraiser if enough money were raised in shorter than the planned time," Jimmy Wales promised [wikipedia.org] on December 2. But there's no sign of the Foundation doing that, yet.

The WMF has now raised $25,530,943.01 in December, and $51,182,044.37 this year. That means it's on course to smash 2015's fundraising record of $53,756,012.58. [...] "It's important here to remember that the Wikimedia Foundation has nothing to do with writing or checking the content of Wikipedia. All that is done by unpaid volunteers," writes former Wikipedia Signpost co-editor Andreas Kolbe in a detailed analysis of the WMF finances [quora.com].

Although the fundraising appeal states alarmingly that your cash is urgently required to "keep Wikipedia online", this is not the full picture. (As a WMF staff member admitted [theregister.co.uk] in 2014: "The urgency and alarm of the copy is not commensurate with my [admittedly limited] understanding of our financial situation".) Each year, the Foundation raises far more than it costs to operate the site, estimated at $3m a year. The clue comes in the full quote from the WMF, that cash is needed to "keep Wikipedia online and growing". The Foundation's own reports reveal what exactly it is that's growing.

That is one rich beggar.

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