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The Wikimedia Foundation, which controls Wikipedia and other popular MediaWiki projects, has met its "December sprint" fundraising target:
This week the Wikimedia Foundation smashed through the $25m target 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 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.
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 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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday December 17 2016, @08:32PM
It's the same deal with the Mozilla Foundation. Sure, they spend a few million here and there on worthwhile development of Firefox and other projects, and help to prevent a browser monoculture even as their browsers have fallen out of favor. But a lot gets thrown at the wall or funds complete bureaucratic bullshit.
The difference is that Mozilla wastes hundreds of millions of search deal dollars rather than begging (AFAIK). Wikimedia misrepresents their need for cash to fleece the public. As we can see, they are partially transparent about this, and they've also demonstrated how little money it takes to run one of the world's most visited websites (to be fair, a lot of traffic is text, but they have images and videos as well).
Luckily for Mozilla, they have secured a tremendous amount of funding [arstechnica.com] from the dying husk that is Yahoo! If they invest and save some of that money, they could continue to exist perpetually, and they have a good chance of inking some search deals after 2019.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 17 2016, @08:37PM
To clarify, the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation are essentially interchangeable. All the money made by the Corporation gets funneled back into the Foundation, which controls 100% of the Corporation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]