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I've seen people expressing bafflement that the average midwit on Reddit might think they could run Musk's assets better than Musk if they had the same luck/unscrupulousness to have the same resources. I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?
I'm the resident Musk-skeptic here who called him a fraud, and expects SpaceX and Tesla to crash and burn in the middle-term. I don't think he's wrong here. The disproportion between the funding they're raising and the funding they need to run the site is massive and insane. I think someone back on Reddit mentioned it was literally running out of some guys closet for many years, until it became a Respectable Nonprofit, and they started looking for things to spend money on.
So while it doesn't literally cost no money, you can more or less round it down to it costing no money, and that's without attempting further optimizations like P2P hosting.
This is completely correct. It's not even up for debate, really: You can find the 2021-22 financial statment here and scroll to Page 4. In ONE YEAR, they (Wikimedia) received 160 million dollars in donations and in the SAME YEAR spent literally twice as much money (6.2 million dollars) in just processing those same donations than they did on internet hosting itself (what people assume the money is spent on) -- which was only 2.7 million dollars. Look at those two numbers. 160 vs 3 million. They aren't even in the same ballpark. 15 million dollars they literally just gave away in grants and 88 million dollars in salaries and 18 million on "professional services", which is odd for an organization that primarily (as far as I assume most donors are concerned) simply runs Wikipedia and literally prohibits (most) paid editing...
There's a reason why I advise people to avoid donating money to Wikipedia if at all possible. Wikipedia does not need the money, and at this point reducing the income stream is the only way they might change.
I'm not optimistic that they will, of course, but at the very least we stop rewarding irresponsible behaviour.
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Agreed. Wikimedia is a hugely profitable business, operated on a pay-what-you-want business model. It is impossible to tell just how profitable because the published accounts don't distinguish between spending that supports the encyclopedia and community (paying the salaries of the Wikimedia software developers, subsidising conference attendance for Wikipedia editors from poor countries etc.) and spending which is actually distributing profits to the pro-establishment leftist causes that Wikipedia's stakeholders like.
Per this 80,000 hours article, fundraising for ineffective charities (or for-profits masquerading as charities) is one of the most destructive things you can legally do because it reduces donations to effective charities. The Wikimedia Foundation know that their appeals are deceptive and that their marginal grantee is ineffective, so I have no qualms about calling them an evil organisation. (This is despite the fact that, unlike most Motteposters, I do not consider the pro-establishment left to be per se evil).
The English Wikipedia community who are actually editing the encyclopedia are eccentric but not evil, and produce a pretty good encyclopedia.
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