Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising. It has followed the now well-trodden NGO path to respectability and riches. What has happened is that the formerly ramshackle Foundation, which not so long ago consisted of fewer than a dozen staff run out of a back room, has professionalised itself. Wikipedia’s Administrators and maintainers, who tweak the entries and correct the perpetual vandalism, don’t get paid a penny - they’re all volunteers. Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. He put the running costs at $10 million a year. “WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,” acknowledged the Foundation’s then VP of engineering, Erik Möller, in 2013.
#UNHERD CHILD LABOR FREE#
Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap. Yet the running costs of Wikipedia are a tiny fraction of the amount raised each year. In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase. The Foundation wanted to hit that figure in ten years, but found it had sailed past it in just five. It created an endowment, managed by the Tides Foundation, which now holds well over $100 million of that.
#UNHERD CHILD LABOR PROFESSIONAL#
After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March. Every year the NGO responsible for the fundraising adds tens of millions of dollars to its war chest. These banner ads have become very lucrative for the NGO that collects the money - the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco. But before you start feeling too guilty, it’s worth considering some facts. The banner ads beg for “just £2”, which doesn’t sound like much, for all that free information. Wikipedia is midway through a six-week fund-raising drive in Anglophone regions including the United States, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. No one wants to be a bad person, and you probably felt pretty bad when you saw the heart-breaking appeal and just carried on clicking.
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