I have donated in the past, but then there were wild accusations, people saying it’s not needed, it’s to fund other things, and so on and so forth.
Yesterday I got the popup begging for a couple of euros, so what’s the status? Should I donate or is it a waste of time and money?
Cheers
Edit: Thanks for all the insightful posts! I’m jobless at the moment so just ten bucks this time:
You gotta remember this is a massive website that doesn’t run on donations alone. It needs qualified people that have experience with websites of this scale.
Those people aren’t cheap.
Then pay the people who actually keep the website running. I bet they don’t earn half a million per year.
Who hires those people? Who gives them direction? CEOs don’t do nothing. They are overpaid in for profit companies, but this is probably what they should be making.
If you believe that CEO are doing that in vacuum you’re being very naive. They are for sure taking decisions but they take them most of the time based on shareholders constraints, external guidance or internal influences.
They don’t pay the people who do the actual work anything, though…
Did you think they run their servers using volunteers?
No I don’t but I think the articles are slightly more important, yet the writers get nothing.
The articles don’t get written without the servers running, and the writers are not forced to write them. Wikipedia is a free service to share information, so writers are using it as a service, not as an employee. They could have easily not used wikipedia.
Saying they should be paid is like saying developers should be paid for sharing their code on Github. What you actually want is to follow the FOSS model and donate to the Wikipedia writers directly, not expect the foundation to pay people who use their service for free.
I can download wikipedia to a usb drive and distribute via torrenting. The content is objectively more valuable than the website.
Where did that download come from? Who compiled all those written information into something that can be downloaded by you?
Try making a compilation of information directly through torrents from scratch and tell me how far you get with that. I’m sure you’ll find that most people do not want to go through that hassle.
You’re severely underestimating the value of making it easy to compile the information in the first place. And again, those information do not need to be compiled to wikipedia by the writers. They do so because of the value provided by the service.
The question is, do you think the writers will get paid any better by you sharing their work through torrents than through wikipedia? I don’t think so. If you actually cared about this, go and donate to the writers instead of devaluing the contribution of wikipedia in compiling these information.
Sure bud. Enjoy your empty website with nothing on it
Like I said, writers have no problem writing for Wikipedia. You can enjoy emailing writers to add to your torrent collection and donating to them directly.
I really love your fake concern about writers being paid yet never once addressed my points about donating to them. Guess it wasn’t that important to you, in the end.