I'm in a third world country and even I would contribute $10 a year. I already contribute to Wikipedia on occasion. Making it monthly feels like too much of an obligation.
This was quite debunked last time - they do have reserves because in case something really bad happens (eg. people stop donating), they don’t want to go down instantly. I really don’t see how having a few years worth of reserves a bad thing - people really held open-source/non-profit companies to impossible standards.
Debunked... how? Can you link to this "debunking"?
>they do have reserves because in case something really bad happens (eg. people stop donating), they don’t want to go down instantly. I really don’t see how having a few years worth of reserves a bad thing - people really held open-source/non-profit companies to impossible standards.
This was addressed in the article.
>The WMF’s financial independence is clearly not at any risk. So what is going on? The official answer is that the WMF thinks you can never have too much money put aside for a rainy day. The WMF also has high-flying, global plans to “become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge” by 2030. It says it wants to create “knowledge equity”—a world where people everywhere will have as much access to information in their own language as a first-world citizen—and that this will require continuous budget increases. In all of these endeavors, it is aided by the discovery that it has a money tap in Wikipedia, built through the work of volunteers, that it can open whenever it pleases.
The article isn't just decrying wikimedia building a massive reserve, it's decrying them massively expanding their scope.
Donation drives aren’t misleading. Donation drives don’t use shadow profiles. Donation drives don’t impact content. Donation drives don’t convince my grandma that she needs to send the IRS Target gift cards.
Right, they just install some ads and then next thing you know they’re trying to optimize page views and mysteriously the articles get split into multiple pages and the site gets worse and worse over time.
On top of that, the fact that they could implement ads is no reason to not contribute to them right now.
Running ads would make them beholden to advertisers. Though I would say don't contribute to Wikipedia because it has enough money to fund itself. What you are actually donating to is Wikimedia, which may or may not be doing things you want to donate too. Similar to how donating to Firefox is actually donating to Mozilla, who may or may not do anything you consider useful with it.
