One good thing is that unlike AI, Wikipedia at least allows you to see how an article grew. Yes, for the most part you only see pseudonyms in the edit history, but they represent individual editors with discernible interests and biases, whereas an AI-based 'pedia is a black box.
You can argue with Wikipedians; with an AI-'pedia, not so much.
It is searchable. I cannot find a single mention of "Wikimedia" or "Wikipedia" or "Wiki" in it. So what does it tell us about what happened with people's Wikipedia donations?
It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour. The people earning the most money from that volunteer labour aren't even the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Big Tech companies who use Wikipedia and Wikidata content to populate Knowledge Graph panels (Google, Microsoft Bing), have their voice assistants read Wikipedia articles in response to questions (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant), etc.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a partner of all these organisations. Amazon regularly donates a million to the Wikimedia Endowment, there is a little-publicised Google partnership ...
... as did the originator of the Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia projects, and the seed money for Wikidata came from Microsoft founder Paul Allen and Google:
The Wikimedia Endowment has amassed $100 million in five years, half the time anticipated, and there has never been a single audited financial statement or Form 990 disclosure, because the money is stashed away with the completely opaque Tides Foundation:
The public has no way of knowing how much Tides is paid to host the fund (and the Wikimedia Foundation refuses to say when asked), nor is there any way of knowing whether and to whom any money from this fund has been paid out. Even if there is no abuse, this sort of set-up is so clearly vulnerable to abuse that one wonders why anyone would choose it.
Though in fact, the real surplus was nearly $90 million, because in addition, their Endowment, held at the Tides Foundation (and therefore not included in Wikimedia Foundation assets) increased from $62.9 million:
Note also that each year the Wikimedia Foundation pays at least $5 million into its Endowment. These payments are included in the Foundation's expenses:
Moreover, most of the money to date has gone to U.S. organisations.
This is truly bizarre if you consider that the Wikimedia Foundation raises funds in places like India, South Africa and South America – with heart-wrenching messages about donations being needed to keep Wikipedia online, independent, subscription-free and so on:
Most of the money from the Knowledge Equity Fund so far has gone to organisations in the U.S. I think that indicates how much genuine thinking about diversity is taking place in the Wikimedia Foundation.
I've reviewed several grants and I remain deeply worried we are spending money on stuff that is a poorly disguised attempt to raid WMF coffers. A lot of grants are 1) being used for stuff that has ZERO connection with Wikimedia movement, 2) have little to no accountaiblity (people promise to do stuff, if they fail, I see no mechanism for money to be returned to WMF) and 3) seem to have very inflated costs (ex. one project I remember well asked for ~6k$ for open access publishing, whereas I know that the average costs of OA in this very field is usually under $2k, and a lot of similar research is published at no cost yet still using OA model). While I am sure some grants are being spent on worthy causes, the amount of problems I see here is very worrying. I am glad this issue is making more waves. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:44, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
Okay, I get your point. Speaks to the organisation's basic lack of honesty, which is arguably the real problem here. That's come up before – a recent poll among Wikipedians judged the WMF's fundraising emails "unethical and misleading":
You're right, but that is what the post you are replying to was proposing: they should say what they are raising the money for.
Then people can decide, instead of being panicked into donating because they are made to think there is an urgent need for money "to defend Wikipedia's independence" or "to keep Wikipedia online".
It's the culture at the very top of the WMF that has allowed this "sketchy" fund to come about. It's even worse with the Wikimedia Endowment at the Tides Foundation. That's over $100 million in donations collected over a period of 6.5 years without a single Form 990 disclosure, without a single audited financial statement ever published:
The budget and headcount simply keep growing and growing. At the same time, the Foundation has had eight-figure surpluses for nine of the last ten years:
In the July 2020 – June 2021 financial year, the surplus was close to $90 million (over $50 million increase in Foundation assets, almost $40 million increase in Endowment).
Yet when volunteers complain that software tools need updating and bug-fixing, the Foundation claims there is a lack of resources:
One thing they do spend money on is consultants and "community organizers" trying to figure out how to get people in the developing world to write Wikipedia articles in their languages for free – in part so that Big Tech's voice assistants and Knowledge Graph panels can provide answers in Indian and African languages and extend their monopolies to new markets.
Money actually flowing to people in the developing world however has been a really small amount – less than $4 million in 2020:
You can argue with Wikipedians; with an AI-'pedia, not so much.