Dear Wikimedia Foundation,

2021-12-22 Permalink

For over a decade, Wikimedia Foundation was regularly asking for money. Yet, despite being a regular user on your platform, I’d never felt like paying you.

Here are my reasons:

• Lack of transparency. The donation banners do not provide any indication of where the donated money goes. There are no links to any financial reports or breakdown of expenses.

• Inefficient operation. Turns out 70% are pocketed by the foundation members and associates. Less than 20% are spent on the running costs.[1]

• Unnecessary internationalization. Why should I sponsor Cebuano Wikipedia with millions of articles written by a bot?

• Hostile design. The community already donates their time by writing the content. Please respect us back and don’t show obtrusive banners shaming us for not paying you on top.

• Bad nofollow practices. Wikipedia marks all outgoing links with nofollow, disregarding their age or the author who posted them. This unfairly grabs pagerank and gives no internet credit to the sources that the articles are based on.[2]

• Arcane technology stack. Wikimedia uses PHP and a horrible markup language to this day. And no, we really don’t need a visual editor. Keep ’em idiots out.

• GPLed software. I don’t support copyleft software. I request it to be released into the public domain, or, at the minimum, permissively licensed.

• We don’t need you. The content is licensed under CC BY-SA. If the foundation dies the content remains. Somebody else will take the baton.[3]

Thus I had never payed Wikimedia Foundation.

I hereby advise others to follow suit.

Footnotes

1. Based off the 2020/2021 Audit report.
2. This is a cop-out way of dealing with spammers, by both, search engines and platforms with user-generated content. Stackoverflow handles this much better by annotating only new links by untrusted users. See also NoFollow Reciprocity.
3. There are plenty of Wikipedia mirrors already. I refer here specifically to the wiki (i.e. user-edited) platform.