I have donated in the past, but then there were wild accusations, people saying it’s not needed, it’s to fund other things, and so on and so forth.

Yesterday I got the popup begging for a couple of euros, so what’s the status? Should I donate or is it a waste of time and money?

Cheers

Edit: Thanks for all the insightful posts! I’m jobless at the moment so just ten bucks this time:

  • Electricd
    13·
    2 days ago

    Nope

    Wikimedia the tool is great, the foundation behind it, not so much

      • Electricd
        2·
        11 hours ago

        Thanks for asking! The subject has been coming up for quite some time. I might edit this comment with more sources later on, because I’ve learned about this a few years ago and don’t keep a full list of my sources on me.

        I have a few reasons for this:

        1. The Wikimedia Foundation (the entity that receives your donations) only uses a really small fraction of your donations for the Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. The rest goes into various non-essential spendings. [1]
        2. They’re not efficient about spendings. Each year they receive more, and each year they spend more, way more than they should compared to Wikipedia’s growth.
        3. The WMF doesn’t really do much on Wikipedia. All the writing and nearly all the moderation is done by volunteers.
        4. They block anonymous proxies, VPNs, Tor exit nodes from editing, even if you create an account. No exceptions for regular people.

        [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#RfC_on_the_banners_for_the_December_2022_fundraising_campaign

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