#and most recently: “if you give money to this nonprofit i don't like you're a bad person”

[macro-microcosm]

Your sanctimony helps victims of genocide equally as much as fandom posting.

[abigail-pent]

I am seeing the usual nonsense in the replies, and as a charity researcher I am begging you to learn something. It's totally fine if you as an individual are irritated by the little Wikipedia banner and don't want to donate, or if you decide not to give for other reasons. Everyone has their own priorities and I'm not here to judge you for that. I *am* here to judge you for spreading ignorance.

First: Wikipedia is not a company. It's a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a nonprofit. One of the criteria for being a nonprofit, legally, is that you cannot disburse your profits to your owners. And Wikipedia abides by that. What you can do, as a nonprofit, is pay your employees a salary. This is what Wikipedia does. And frankly, this is what every nonprofit (and company) ought to be doing. Now, they do have quite a lot of volunteers, globally, but they also have some 320 paid employees. Some of those employees are paid very handsomely, yes, but this does not mean a reasonable response is "starve the whole organization"!

Second: it is not the case that we are looking at an organization that could just keep going forever without more contributions. Per their working capital ratio, if they brought in no new revenue, they would be around for a little less than two years. That is not a whole lot of time; in fact it's quite short. Do they manage a lot of assets? Yes. Are they also doing expensive things? Also yes! Wikipedia is huge, so many people depend on it, and that kind of site costs big money to host. Not even mentioning how much they must spend on keeping the site up and running and preventing the spread of misinformation there. All of those things cost money, even though a lot of labor is donated by volunteers.

Third: yes, if you look at their Form 990, they do have a fair few employees with pretty high reportable compensation. But this organization pays most of its people pretty well, and this is not a bad thing. You have to understand that nonprofit workers -- just like artists! -- may have a passion for what they do, but that doesn't mean they should be underpaid because they believe in their employer's mission. If you expect that of nonprofit workers, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you're arguing against labor rights. That argument is used all the time to justify paying people peanuts for doing important work that they love. For a big recent example, go look up any of the strikes by graduate student workers, like the one in the University of California system this past year. The (nonprofit!) institution insists its laborers work at far below a living wage. And you know who benefits when that happens? The institution. The bosses. Not the workers. So yes, the Wikipedia workers are paid pretty well; and if you'd have it otherwise, then you've got far more in common with exploitative bosses than you do with exploited workers. But on top of that: by paying workers well, you can attract and keep talent. As a worker, if you've got a transferable skill, you can try to get work at a number of different firms, if they're hiring someone with your skill. Some of those jobs are going to have extra perks, like the pride you might feel in working for an organization like Wikipedia. But how much pay are you willing to give up in order to keep that psychic benefit? Some, surely; but not necessarily a super high percentage of what you might earn elsewhere. And again, you might say: well *I* would never sell out like that. And sure, maybe you'd stick around for a while longer. But if the workplace is asking too much of you -- in terms of your time and emotional investment -- then eventually you would look at your other options with more interest. This is exactly the dynamic that low overhead costs drive nonprofits towards. Especially for a tech-sector organization, where the other firms that their workers might be interested in pay *extremely* well, you have to compensate your workers well enough, and treat them decently, in order to get them to stay. Per their most recent Form 990, workers at Wikipedia are paid about $200,000, on average. This is a lot relative to most American workers, but it is on the low side compared to most tech-sector jobs. I'm not saying you should feel bad for the Wikipedia employees, or anything like that; but it is not practical to insist that they be paid lower than they are. They are already underpaid for their industry.

If you don't want to give your money to them, if you prefer to give to smaller or more local orgs, you can just say that. There's nothing at all wrong with that. But it isn't true that they're a rich organization that's going to last forever and they're just using your donations to line their owners' pockets. They have less than two years' worth of working capital, and they compensate their employees in a manner that appears to be non-exploitative, even though those workers could easily make much more by taking their skills elsewhere. They make and maintain a high-quality public good, one which you probably use for fun or for work every day. Your donation decision is your business, but there's no need to slander Wikipedia.

hey i know a lot of you cannot donate, but wikipedia NEEDS money to keep functioning. AO3 was able to surpass their fundraising goal in days, but wikipedia has been trying to get donations for months now to no avail. that’s not a “don’t donate to AO3”, that’s a “also donate to wikipedia” or “donate to wikipedia instead, because AO3 is doing good”. if any of you can donate, please do. wikipedia is one of the best things to happen on the internet, and i would hate to see it with tons of ads or worse.

donate to wikipedia!!

[copperbadge]

Your recent(ish) post about donating made me go out and donate a few times when I got emails from my city library and a few other causes I donated to in the past and unexpectedly I've been getting calls? From people? Thanking me for donating? My social anxiety levels have gone up through the roof.

I mean, it's good to get practice into answering the phone, but Mr. Badge, I'm terrified

LOL that is indeed a disadvantage of giving under one's own name. Nonprofits make a habit of perceiving people who may not wish to be perceived!

If it helps, a lot of orgs don't have a dedicated phone team and just have their regular staff working those thank-you lines, meaning the person on the other end is probably as anxious about calling you as you are about answering. :D

I ran into this on some level during Giving Tuesday this week -- I'd been getting Black Friday mailings since like, October, and I got a few emails for Cyber Monday, but I've blocked most retailers who have me on their list so it wasn't too awful. But a lot of nonprofits only email me two or three times a year so I don't bother blocking, and that meant after a relatively mild Cyber Monday I got this AVALANCHE of appeals on Giving Tuesday. Which was mostly just hilarious.

I will say, generally if you recently gave and someone calls to thank you, they just want to "steward" you -- to keep building your relationship to the organization. This can come off as a one-way street if you don't want to be pestered, but it's also an opportunity -- if you have questions about where your money goes, what progress the org is making, etc. this is the time to ask! It's a chance for YOU to build your relationship too. If you tell someone from the library, for example, that you think they're doing a great job, that kind of feedback does make it up the chain. So does feedback like "I love the library but I wish you'd offer more new books by trans authors" or similar.

It's also a great time to change anything you want to change -- like say you don't want paper mailings, you can ask them if they can make sure you're only getting e-appeals. You can say "Hey, I really appreciate the call, but I don't love getting phone calls in general -- could you mark me do-not-call in my record?" and if they have database access they should be able to help you out.

Anyway, thank you for your giving! I'm so glad to see that my nattering on about nonprofits and such is having an impact, because I kind of worried I was just annoyingly shouting about something people wish I wouldn't shout about :D Congratulations, philanthropist! You are doing good works in the world!