The Foundation supports challenges to laws in Texas and Florida that jeopardize Wikipedia’s community-led governance model and the right to freedom of expression.
An amicus brief, also known as a “friend-of-the-court” brief, is a document filed by individuals or organizations who are not part of a lawsuit, but who have an interest in the outcome of the case and want to raise awareness about their concerns. The Wikimedia Foundation’s amicus brief calls upon the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed in 2021 by Texas and Florida state legislatures. Texas House Bill 20 and Florida Senate Bill 7072 prohibit website operators from banning users or removing speech and content based on the viewpoints and opinions of the users in question.
“These laws expose residents of Florida and Texas who edit Wikipedia to lawsuits by people who disagree with their work,” said Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. “For over twenty years, a community of volunteers from around the world have designed, debated, and deployed a range of content moderation policies to ensure the information on Wikipedia is reliable and neutral. We urge the Supreme Court to rule in favor of NetChoice to protect Wikipedia’s unique model of community-led governance, as well as the free expression rights of the encyclopedia’s dedicated editors.”
“The quality of Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia depends entirely on the ability of volunteers to develop and enforce nuanced rules for well-sourced, encyclopedic content,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Without the discretion to make editorial decisions in line with established policies around verifiability and neutrality, Wikipedia would be overwhelmed with opinions, conspiracies, and irrelevant information that would jeopardize the project’s reason for existing.”
Wikipedia is one of the most impressive collective creations of the modern world. One day corrupt politicians will ruin it. They’re one of the organizations I donate to every year in my futile hope they preserve it as long as possible. Articles like this just reinforces the need to vote for people who aren’t actually cartoon villains. May not vote for SC but we do for who appoints them.
I donate frequently also. It pains me that people poke fun at Wikimedia or Jimmy Wales for their constant fundraising. It’s such a ubiquitous tool, it’s a miracle that it’s free.
They have so much money that all of their expenses are covered by interest though.
Source? That doesn’t match up with their published numbers, so I’m skeptical. Post up a source if you’re going to make such an absurd claim.
Their endowment is around $100MM USD, as of 2021, which is nowhere near enough to cover their operating costs just from interest. Unless they’re somehow obtaining 112% interest…
Revenue: $162.9 million (2021)
Expenses: $111.8 million (2021)
Endowment: $100 million (2021)
Source(s) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
So you could argue that they got plenty of donations in 2021, I suppose. But that’s a very different claim.
More likely, though, you’re just talking out of your ass and have no idea how finances work.
The expenses isn’t just to run Wikipedia, it’s for additional things like making a service to sell for enterprise use. The point (from my understanding at least) of an endowment is for whatever that owns it to basically live off of it in the worst case scenario. They also exclude the endowment from their net assets and annual revenue.
There are lemmy posts about this and I’m sure they explain it better then me, but from what I have read, in my opinion, donations to them seem less beneficial than a lot of things. Especially with their advertising that they need donations so much when they make millions every year.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20231206084743/https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/
The “cost estimate” for running Wikipedia, which that article just asserts as gospel, is a “a casual 2013 estimate by Erik Möller, its VP of engineering and product development at the time.” So a very OLD and uninformed guess by someone who wasnt directly involved in finance. To me, that makes this read like a sensationalized hit piece, not credible journalism.
Here is a lemmy comment detailing it. Maybe I am ass at explaining this. I am also not trying to be like “spend your money elsewhere” but just trying to make sure you are aware their donation drives aren’t desperate as they seem.
https://feddit.de/comment/2220700
Point remains. Those expenses are for other projects as well not directly related to Wikipedia. There is no public information of actual cost to running / supporting just the Wikipedia, so that was probably the best source they could find. There are a ton of news articles about this and you can look them up if you want better sources. The end here is that your donating $ to a company that makes a millions in profit every year without the donations.
Yeah but since they donate they can sit on a high horse and look down on those of us that don’t unquestioningly hand over our meagre earnings.
Wikipedia has become one of the most important sources of information in modern life, up there with GPS, GIS, anfpd Google Search. It deserves to be very well supported. It deserves anything it needs to continue in perpetuity.
And yes, if it keeps making stands for truth, knowledge and free speech, it’s going to have to have more of my money
Its amazing how much people disagree in this thread compared to reception from the other one I linked where they pointed it out. Their own Wikipedia page has a whole section about how their aggressive donation system makes them look like they are about to be shutdown yet they made over 10 million in profit excluding donations for the last couple years.
I don’t even care if someone donates or not. Wikipedia making it look like they are going to fall apart if they didn’t get your $1 donation is bull.
And if that were true I wouldn’t care. I know plenty of people who have their expenses paid and I would love for them to make more money.
It’s ridiculous that this comment got downvoted so harshly. Wikimedia currently has 250 million $ in assets. They also spend >100 million each year, and for the life of me I can’t imagine where that money could have gone, certainly not on the servers and improving the UX (the recent redesign was totally useless, as far as I could notice). Wikipedia by itself certainly could be funded just from the interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
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It’s entirely possible to get it out of their reach. It needs to be pushed out to the point of the Pirate Bay.
It’s just begging for their primary mechanism to be decentralized. They could severely reduce their operating expenses if they went to community hosting.
DHT, chunks of it hosted everywhere. New content and corrections come down as deltas. There are already copies of it on IPFS that are relatively robust, as robust as IPFS can be anyway.
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