The idea that because they pay people salaries, including a few hundred K per year for the people at the top, they’re drowning in money and there’s no point in donating as long as they can pay their hosting bills and nothing else, is wrong.

I in fact don’t think that - to get the sort of people you want to be running your company, a good salary is necessary. I suspect a lot of the people that wikimedia employs are unnecessary because this is way too much money to be spending on salaries overall, but I have no way of checking it since they don’t provide a breakdown of the salaries involved. I do think, however, that a company that’s not drowning in money wouldn’t be giving a bunch of generic research grants.

Furthermore I suspect that at least some of the bunch of people who suddenly started coming out of the woodwork to say a few variations on that exact same thing are part of some kind of deliberate misinformation, just because it’s kind of a weird conclusion for a whole bunch of people to all start talking about all at once.

That’s valid, though I note that in the worlds where I am a normal person and not an anti-wikipedia shill, the reason why I’m saying these things now and not at other times is because I saw this post, and you wrote this post because you saw other people talk about some India-related Wikipedia conspiracy theory, and one reason why you’d see these people crawl out of woodwork now is because wikipedia ramps up their donation campaign this time of year, prompting discussion about wikipedia.

The main issue I take with your opening post is its vagueness. You don’t mention any details in it, so it effectively acts as a cue for people to discuss anything at all controversial about wikipedia. And the way you frame the discussion is that such narratives “are fundamentally false” because Wikipedia “is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others” - that’s assuming the conclusion. It’s no surprise that this results in your seeing a lot of claims about Wikipedia that you think are misinformation!

P.S. Rethinking my previous comment a bit, it’s probably good overall that reading my comment made you donate to charity out of spite - even a mediocre charity like Wikimedia most likely has a net positive effect on the world. So I guess I should be happy about it. Consider also donating to one of these for better bang on your buck.

Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline. I don’t see how to estimate how much of that “salaries” part is related to Wikipedia rather to their other business. But even taking the most optimistic possible reading, I think it’s still true that the marginal value of donations to Wikimedia foundations will not be in support of Wikipedia’s existence or even in improvements to it, but in them doing more unrelated charity.

(If you want to donate specifically to charities that spread knowledge, then donating to Wikipedia makes more sense, though then in my opinion you should consider supporting the Internet Archive, which has ~8 times less revenue, and just this year was sued for copyright infringement this year and spent a while being DDOSed into nonfunctionality - that’s a lot of actually good reasons to need more money!).

I wondered when writing my comment whether people would combine this with the vague statement in the opening post and conclude “aha, I will now take this as misinformation without checking”, but then I looked at your other comments and saw you were actually talking about some India-related conspiracy I heard nothing about. Yet apparently you nevertheless think my comment is intentional misinfo?? That isn’t very coherent, is it now?

Last time I heard about wikipedia’s donation campaign (maybe 2 4 years ago or so), it was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation’s income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight. Did this change? If it didn’t, I wouldn’t particularly advise anyone to donate to them.

How did you notice that?