The Wikipedia fundraising scam

Do you know what your donations are going to?

Wikipedia, and its parent organization Wikimedia, has been making the rounds on Twitter. This seems to be because Chris Rufo is attacking the new CEO of NPR (US public 'radio'), Katherine Maher. It turns out that Maher previously served as the CEO of Wikimedia. This got a lot of people looking into her behavior there, and this brought up the Wikipedia fundraising scam into the limelight. In the interest of making this information more publicly known, I provide a summary of it here as well. Many of the sources I draw on are published by minor accounts and writers, who clearly deserve a bigger audience.

If you go to Wikipedia, you will often be greeted with this kind of annoying banner:

It may even pop-up multiple times and vary somewhat. Wikipedia is begging you to please give them money. They have no salespeople, they say, and they need help to "keep Wikipedia online and growing". It turns out this is not really true. The one image summary is this, from Wikipedia user Guy Macon:

At the end of 2023, Wikimedia (again, Wikipedia's parent organization) has a staggering 250 million dollars in assets. Now, some people said these were not really "money in the bank", as I had tweeted. However, Twitter user Zeki Seskir showed that these are actually mostly money in the bank (2023 annual report):

Specifically, they have about 175 million in various kinds of stocks, bonds, securities and so on.

Looking again at the table above in the expense column, you might get the impression that it's really really expensive to run a big website (mostly staffed by volunteers). Must require some expensive servers? It does:

But server hosting is only 3 million (<5% of their donations). Lunduke provides this visual summary (up to 2021):

So what are they spending the other 166 million dollars on? Well, for starters, they give away 24 million to various organizations. Which ones? It's hard to say exactly due to lack of transparency. However, again, Lunduke did the important investigative work, and found that most of the money is managed by the Tides foundation. What is that? Well, Wikipedia itself says:

Tides Foundation is a left-leaning donor advised fund based in the United States.^[4] It was founded in San Francisco in 1976 by Drummond Pike. Tides distributes money from anonymous donors to other organizations, which are often politically progressive.^[5] An affiliated group, Tides Advocacy, is a "massive progressive incubator."^[6] Tides has received substantial funding from George Soros.^[7]

Aha, right, so the money is mainly being channeled behind the scenes into unrelated political advocacy.

Salaries are also a very big money sink, about 100 million dollars in 2023. We can look into the filings to see who's getting what to some extent (2021 IRS filings, thanks to Twitter user yasen):

These are only the ones listed for the main organization, not the various sub-organizations, so the numbers above don't sum to ~ 100 million dollars (and also because these are 2021 numbers, not 2023; IRS filings have a delay of 2 years).

Tellingly, we find that Katherine Maher appears again, making a salary of about 800k in 2021. She's been rapidly increasing in salary:

From 2016 to 2021 she increased from 307k to 789k.

It gets better. A lot of money is also being given to something called the Knowledge Equity Fund. Sounds potentially dubious, so what is that? Well, they tell us:

1. What is the Equity Fund?

The Equity Fund is a new US$4.5M fund created by the Wikimedia Foundation to provide grants to organizations external to the Wikimedia movement whose work increases the availability of free knowledge by counteracting structural inequalities relating to racial equity around the world.

The Equity Fund is a pilot initiative that came out of the commitments the Foundation’s leadership team made in June 2020, in the wake of global protests against racial injustice. Our goal was to create a grant-making fund with an explicit focus on addressing barriers to free knowledge experienced by Black, Indigenous and communities of color around the world. This is part of our commitment to advancing knowledge equity, one of two key pillars of our 2030 strategic direction of becoming the essential infrastructure of free knowledge.

...

7. How do you define “racial justice/ racial equity”?

The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from US and Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide. These modes of privilege mentioned above function as setting the dominant social, political, legal, policy-oriented, and cultural norms around the world.

Racial equity means acknowledging explicit and implicit affirmative actions for White people and groups with privilege related to skin color are created systemically through institutional power, dominance, and control.

Racial equity aims to promote consistent and sustained repair for non-White, non-US and Eurocentric communities and communities that continue to experience harm due to racism and colorism.

Lastly, racial equity includes authentic and intersectional, racial, ethnic and/or color demographic representation that promotes sustained and consistent participation of people from oppressed communities based on skin color.

Gotcha, it's another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot. Wikipedia spends less than 5% of its revenue on actual server hosting. It's unclear to what extent the salaries and donations are being spent on efforts to undermine western civilization and the people who built it, but there are some hints courtesy of Twitter user Stakeholder Consultant. One grant was given to something called the "SeRCH Foundation" (not to be confused with the similarly named "SEARCH Foundation", "established in 1990 as a successor organisation of the Communist Party of Australia"). SeRCH uses the money to produce these kinds of videos:

Their goal is to:

Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, or #VanguardSTEM for short, is an online platform and community devoted to encouraging conversations between emerging and established women of color, girls of color and non-binary people of color in STEM.

Oh boy. You can also check their roster and confirm that Wikimedia is a sponsor:

Again, read the thread by Stakeholder Consultant for more examples of what the money is being spent on.

Elon to the rescue?

Maybe Elon Musk can do something about this? At least, he showed up in my replies, so I used the chance to at least tell him that maybe he should do something:

Wikipedia as analogy of the state

Wikipedia thus works surprisingly similar to most governments. Whenever someone says, maybe, just maybe, it's not wise that people are paying half of their incomes in taxes, someone will bring up the roads, and maybe even the police, or the military defense. While the state does pay for these essential things, most things the state pays for are not such essential things. Rather, the essential things provide cover for the state to keep raising and almost never lowering taxes. This is the same thing Wikipedia does. Most of what Wikipedia (Wikimedia) does is not running an encyclopedia, but every year Wikipedia begs the users for more money, even though it has 100+ dollars in the bank and server hosting is only 3-4 million a year. The money is then redirected in a scammy way to other projects which have nothing to do with running an encyclopedia or promoting open knowledge. In fact, given that many of these are quasi-Marxist organizations, they are detrimental to open knowledge and explicitly advocate against the most knowledge producing people on the planet, European men.

To be clear, I want to say that Wikipedia and its associated projects (Wikidata, Wiktionary, Wikiquote etc.) are awesome projects, showing the great things humanity can do when we work together, even on an unpaid basis. However, like most organizations, it expanded its scope from running and building this great resource into being yet another organization whose aims is to undermine society as we know it.

The only good thing about this issue is that everything Wikipedia has is under a free license, so that anyone else can copy the contents. If Elon could be convinced to intervene, he could do something sneaky, like redirecting all Wikipedia links to 'New-Wikipedia', which is free of these issues. This would give this site a huge initial boost, perhaps enough to kick it into being a stable alternative. In fact, given the small costs of actually running Wikipedia, Musk could easily fund this as well, no begging needed. I realize that redirecting links is very sneaky, but let me know in the comments if you have any better idea for Musk. For who else can do something about such an issue?

Bonus

Somehow, Katherine Maher also sits on the Signal foundation board! Maybe one can come up with some semi-plausible sounding conspiracy theory for why that is.