If I donate to Wikipedia, I expect that my donation will go to Wikipedia, not to unknown external groups. That's a bait and switch. According to the twitter thread, $22.9 million was given in such grants. That's almost 10x what Wikipedia is paying for hosting. That's not "funneling." That's taking the whole pie.
It's a donation, not an investment. There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions on your behalf.
You can expect money to be used in some ways, sure, but it's not like WM uses 50% of your donation on vanity projects.
Personally, I wish WM would invest more in the quality of non-English articles. French "toponymie" sections tend to be brigaded for whatever reasons for instance. French linguists wage wars apparently.
If the money is being sent elsewhere, it means they are receiving more than they can manage. That changes the fundraising message. If a friend said please help me with my medical bills, then you later find out a portion of the money was spent on something unrelated, you are either going to give them less money the next time around or nothing.
Sure, but there's also no obligation to donate to Wikimedia in the first place, and it's quite reasonable to decide that if the organization is flush enough with money that it can donate it to outside organizations, it doesn't need more. (And it certainly shouldn't imply it needs more to keep the lights on.)
> There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions on your behalf.
That’s the whole point of nonprofits?
From Wikipedia (ha!):
> Key aspects of nonprofits are accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to every person who has invested time, money, and faith into the organization. Nonprofit organizations are accountable to the donors, founders, volunteers, program recipients, and the public community.
And if they pay tons of other foundations that aren't them, with the money I donated to them, then they're not getting my money anymore. Or probably a lot of peoples'.
> There is no obligation on Wikimedia's part to do specific actions
Uh, people have gotten in a lot of trouble in the past for claiming to raise money for specific causes and using that money for something else. I'm guessing Wikimedia is on the legal side of this fairly gray area, but as a blanket statement, you're mistaken: Wikimedia is very much under a specific legal obligation to use funds collected through charitable fundraising for that charity.
You're right. They don't use 50% on vanity projects. They use way more than that. Their donation income last year was around $150 million and their hosting costs were $2.4 million. Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate). That's >80% on BS.
I think you misunderstand what Wikimedia is and does. It's not just Wikipedia and hosting. It is also a lot of research into their Wikidata free knowledge database (look it up) for instance.
It requires a lot of people and core knowledge to develop and run. To some extent Wikimedia is a research company too.
> Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate)
On this site, you will find many who will breathlessly insist that the only way to run a website at scale is through top tier engineering solutions developed by teams of highly paid engineers. I am not sure why the calculus changes so much for a non profit. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that they have $8 million in processing fees just for their donations.
I have no idea what is the right number they should be spending, but I know their costs are much higher than servers and bandwidth.
