like you could afford to donate to either (other than your time to moderate which is much more valuable than money)
I mistook it for Dickipedia and was sending sperm samples until their lawyers sent me a strongly worded cease and desist letter.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html The foundation makes the case that “every donation we receive is invested back into serving Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and our free knowledge mission.” Wikipedia is among the top 10 most visited websites worldwide—and the only one run by a nonprofit organization. The internet encyclopedia is not funded by advertising, doesn’t charge a subscription fee, and does not sell user data. It’s worth underscoring that Wikipedia’s approach is heartening and relatively unique—other top websites are shamelessly exploiting user data or introducing haphazard subscription plans. In an interview, Wales characterized Wikipedia as “the opposite of Elon Musk” in that the project tends to make decisions slowly based on its long-term mission and because it uses a more community-minded approach. The self-governing wiki community has long insisted that the WMF consult them when it comes to key decisions about how Wikipedia is managed, a process that WMF’s CEO Maryana Iskander referred to in an interview as “healthy democratic noise.” That noise got a lot louder on Oct. 25 on a Wikipedia community discussion page called the Village Pump. That day, the Village Pump hosted a “Request for comment,” or RfC, about the proposed banner ads for the annual year-end fundraising campaign. In this monthlong debate, volunteers voiced concerns that the ads gave the false impression that Wikipedia was under dire financial stress. The language in the draft ads urged donors to “support Wikipedia’s independence” because “without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.” Several Wikipedia editors characterized this message as unethical. When an administrator closed the debate on Nov. 24, he noted that “there was broad, near-unanimous consensus that these fundraising banners should not be run on the English Wikipedia in their current form.” Jim Heaphy, a 70-year-old Wikipedia editor and administrator who lives in Grass Valley, California, told me that he opposed any messaging that suggested the WMF was running out of money. “Wikipedia is under threat. But it is not under threat financially,” Heaphy said in an email. “The Wikimedia Foundation is rolling in cash.” Heaphy told me he sees the main threats to Wikipedia as coming from authoritarian regimes, ideologues, spammers, and vandals. (See Slate’s previous coverage of how Wikipedia has been censored in different forms by Russia, China, and Turkey.) Whether the WMF is “rolling in cash” perhaps depends on your perspective. In the early days, the WMF operated on a shoestring budget that funded Wikipedia’s servers and technical infrastructure, but paid for very few full-time employees. Since then, the organization’s financial situation has changed dramatically. The WMF’s net assets grew from about $57,000 in June 2004 to $180 million as of June 2020. “I’m proud that we’ve managed to grow like this,” Wales said. The WMF also launched an endowment in January 2016 to safeguard the future for Wikipedia and related projects such as Wikidata. This endowment reached its initial $100 million fundraising goal in September 2021, well ahead of its 2026 target date. Wales and the foundation’s CEO, Iskander, told me that having reserves that cover 12 to 18 months of operating costs was in line with standard best practices for nonprofit organizations. For reference, the WMF’s annual operating budget for the 2022–23 year is $175 million. But as the foundation points out, the WMF still operates at a fraction of the budget and staffing as for-profit internet companies despite having the same (if not higher) levels of global traffic. How does the WMF direct funds to the Wikipedia editing community? The foundation supports events for volunteers, such as edit-a-thons and the annual user conference, Wikimania. They also support volunteers and affiliate groups via grant-making, which makes up about 13.5 percent of the foundation’s budget. This year’s grant recipients include AfroCrowd, an initiative to create and improve information about Black culture and history on Wikipedia, the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest in Peru, and several other organizations across the world. The WMF also invests in Wikipedia’s technology, though some contributors report that’s a sore subject. “We still have a lot of technology on Wikipedia that’s 1990s software, and you don’t find such software anywhere else on the internet,” Rasberry said. In an interview, Iskander noted that product and technology have always made up the biggest portion of the foundation’s budget and that there are more than 40 teams devoted to the effort. The challenge, Iskander said, is prioritizing requests made by small and medium-sized languages along with those of the large and active community on English Wikipedia.