I found on Facebook feed the next article [1]. The article title was so amusing that I had to read the article: Stop giving Wikimedia money.
Although I thought I'll find something totally irrelevant, the article actually reveals that the author is pretty well introduced into internal Wikimedia issues. Which is, in turn, insufficient for article to be a good one, but this one has some good points. Big banner. I admit, there are some benefits of living in the second class country by the Western financial norms. I saw that banner just on Commons. But that's the known issue. My question here is: Is there a way to get similar amount of money from the public in some other way? For example, I am sure that there are many people outside who would be willing to donate ~$10/month if they don't have to think about that (i.e., opt-in for monthly charge). "We're a small non-profit...". Huh. I am working for one American non-profit with few times bigger budget than WMF, which management treat themselves as "a small non-profit". I mean, I fully understand that kind of reasoning. There are much bigger non-profits in the wild. BUT, keep in mind that, not counting bigger retailers, I'd have to walk 15-20 minutes from my home to find a visible business which has comparable revenue. And I am living in not that poor city in the richest municipality of my country. Please, just remove that "small" in the future. There are some points in relation to the programming failures. They are now funny to me because I know that things are moving, as well as we have now engineering-focused ED. Just one year ago that wouldn't be that funny because it would hurt. $684.000 gross or $3200 per capita for furniture sounds, hm, interesting. May somebody explain that? I am not saying that employees should live nomadic lives inside of the office; not even that it's about outrageously decadent spending, but the amount doesn't sound too rational, as well as it's partially in collision with Sue's quote inside of the article. Now, the crucial point from the article "[Money] doesn’t go to content creation at all.". It's heresy to us, but the fact that it's heresy to us gives open field to that kind of very valid criticism: WMF is spending few percents of the budget on the content and people are using its projects because of the content (yes, few percents include projects where we are not paying people to actually write the content, but for the projects which lead to the content creation). I didn't think about possible answers. The argument just strikes me on the line that Wikimedia is basically exploitative toward her editors comparably to Uber toward their drivers. What differs us from Uber and makes our position better is the fact that we are community-driven movement (as well as encyclopedia publishers are on average much more predatory organizations than various organizations of taxi drivers). However, there are some issues which should be addressed, definitely. Ideas? [1] http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
