Wikipedia Sucks!

Despite frequent protestations to the contrary, Wikimedia – the San Francisco-based parent non-profit of Wikipedia – has enormous financial reserves. There is no immediate need for more funds and its long-term strategy plan, Wikimedia 2030, lacks specificity about how additional money might be spent.

According to its latest financial disclosures, the Wikimedia Foundation has net assets adequate to run its servers for 75 years if it receives no further funds nor interest on its savings. Beyond that, the servers can hum along an additional 63 years from funds in a Wikimedia Endowment held by a partner charity, the Tides Foundation. Put into perspective, Wikimedia servers can function just under nine years from a one-time donation Wikimedia sent to Tides Advocacy in their last financial statement. They have about $1 million in reserves for every employee. Wikipedia is in no danger of going dark in our lifetime.

Tides runs a series of charities that enable donors to anonymouslypledge money which Tides then uses for grants to progressive organizations. There are several related but legally separate Tides charities, the largest being the Tides Foundation with 2019 net assets of $558 million. Tides are Donor Advised Funds: anonymous donors may direct Tides what to do with their donations though they may also choose to leave funding decisions to Tides. Tides discloses its largest benefactors by the amount donated without listing the identities of the individuals or organizations. Disbursements are reported but whose money went to which cause is entirely opaque.....

While Wikimedia donates money to Tides – to support its endowment and Knowledge Equity Fund (via Tides Advocacy) – Tides also donates money to Wikimedia. However, the Tides donations do not appear in Wikimedia annual reports, which list major benefactors who donate amounts above $50,000 except for a pass-through donation from Google (“The Google Foundation of Tides Foundation[12].”). Other donations from Tides to Wikimedia are presumably lumped into the group of anonymous donors.

I stumbled on conflict issues with Wikipedia when I attempted to add information to a Wikipedia article about deceased business executive Archie McCardell, former CEO of Xerox and International Harvester sourced to an article I wrote about McCardell. That edit was promptly deleted by one of Wikipedia’s pseudo-anonymous editors, “Tim1965,” with the claim that it was self-serving despite no benefit beyond Wikipedia’s vaunted knowledge spreading.[14]To clarify, my article was already second in Google search results about McCardell, with Wikipedia first, so there was no search engine optimization benefit. While there was no benefit to the link, the editor of the page wrongly accused me of conflict. However, reading his profile on a different page, I discovered he is a union activist editing the page of an infamous union buster, a serious and undisclosed conflict of interest.[15] This was my first realization that, paraphrasing the Bard of Avon, something was rotten in the state of Denmark.