Here is the message wikipedia has on its donation page:
> We'll get straight to the point: Today we ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence.
> We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online and thriving, but 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way. If everyone who reads Wikipedia gave just a little, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of a cup of coffee is all we ask.
> When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people told us we’d regret it. But if Wikipedia were to become commercial, it would be a great loss to the world.
> Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a community of people working to bring you unlimited access to reliable, neutral information.
> We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of €5, €20, €50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Whether or not one likes the causes they give the money to, if they spend $100 million and they only use $2.4 million for hosting, and they also give money for political activism, then this is a misleading message, making it sound like they are on the cusp of not being able to cover the costs that keep the site online unless they start having ads on wikipedia.
Oh I completely agree, misleading is the best way I'd describe this message as well.
But the idea that they're "going woke" or "going political" with their money because they support BIPOC journalists and presenting that as a waste of money ($250k, about a month of hosting), that's where you completely lose me.
Also I'm pretty sure Wikimedia does way more than just hosting.
Well, they apparently did donate to some woke-adjacent pseudoscience, which seems like a waste of money to me. Regardless, I agree with you that the question isn't where some $0.25 million went, but why they are spending $100 million and still asking for donations with that misleading message, while a few years ago they were spending a small fraction of that even though their hosting costs were actually higher back then. It increasingly looks like Wikimedia as an organisation has a parasitical relationship with Wikipedia, doing enough to keep its host alive with a small fraction of its budget, while benefiting from the work of volunteers and not even fixing longstanding issues with the software that the volunteers ask to be fixed. Even beyond fixing bugs, I'd be happy to add to their $100 million budget if they actually did useful things with it. I can easily think of 10 features that would improve Wikipedia. For instance, Wikipedia pages such as "list of countries by GDP per capita" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...) are useful, but the table UI is not that great and the map is a non-interactive PNG image. For $100 million, why can't we hover over the country and see its name and the exact GDP per capita number?
Most of the money from the Knowledge Equity Fund so far has gone to organisations in the U.S. I think that indicates how much genuine thinking about diversity is taking place in the Wikimedia Foundation.
> We'll get straight to the point: Today we ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence.
> We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online and thriving, but 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way. If everyone who reads Wikipedia gave just a little, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of a cup of coffee is all we ask.
> When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people told us we’d regret it. But if Wikipedia were to become commercial, it would be a great loss to the world.
> Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a community of people working to bring you unlimited access to reliable, neutral information.
> We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of €5, €20, €50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Whether or not one likes the causes they give the money to, if they spend $100 million and they only use $2.4 million for hosting, and they also give money for political activism, then this is a misleading message, making it sound like they are on the cusp of not being able to cover the costs that keep the site online unless they start having ads on wikipedia.