Here's the big KPMG report.

And here's the "happy", "happy", "glad" Q&A.

And here's my favorite part from the report:



Oh, that and the fact that even though the Foundation has doubled payroll, the cash reserves have increased from $3 million to $6 million. Nothing like a charity that fulfills its mission by socking away more and more money into the bank.

One more thing... fundraising inefficiency quadrupled since the previous fiscal year. Way to go, WMF!

I can sort of see why they'd want to try to establish some sort of "endowment," but I have to admit, there are days when I really believe that the most objectionable thing about Wikipedia, out of all the many, many objectionable things about it, is the fact that they call themselves a "charity" and are allowed to get away with it.

Meanwhile, people who rob gas stations and convenience stores go to prison for months, even years. There's just no perspective or appreciation of scale in modern society anymore...

As I said, most nonprofits would take that money and either plow it back into their mission, or else buy or build their own headquarters building. Yet here sits a famous nonprofit institution, socking cash away like there's no tomorrow. And constantly begging (and getting) more.

They cough up $210k per year in rent, when they could BUY an office building for a couple million. Anyone else would say "screw this, let's buy a building and save money in the long run".....

Yet WMF continues to rent. And partly from Wikia, until recently. So, some of the donated money this nonprofit collected, went directly to the profit-making Wikia. As "rent". Correct?

Not only that:
WHAT LAWSUITS?? No explanation, anywhere.

Why in the name of the Spaghetti Monster do Jimbo and Co. continue to get away with this shit? If WMF had been a real, conventional nonprofit, people would be pounding on their doors, demanding answers. And very likely, investigative reporters would be sniffing around.

That settles it---WMF is not a nonprofit. It's a religious cult. What other explanation is there? Jimbo is the High Holy Man, and Sue Gardner is David Miscavige.

Highly unlikely that a young, quickly growing, non-profit charity would do that.

I'm getting a lot of traffic on Wikipedia Review today, thanks to a disparaging link from this blog. Thank you!

I thought there were cute emoticons for this type of sarcasm. Admittedly, I personally don't use them, but I also edit Wikipedia, so I think we already know what God (or lack thereof) I worship. Be the bigger man and mark your wit!

What's the average take from a convenience store robbery? $200? Maybe $500 tops? The WMF is getting millions per year by calling themselves a "charity," socking it away in a bank somewhere, and all the while they're putting reference publishers out of business and professional knowledge-workers out on the street. Meanwhile, they're doing nothing substantive at all for the "starving children in Africa" they profess to care about - in fact, they might be making their situations worse by circumventing the development of local/indigenous reference publishing in those countries. All they really do is make it harder for schoolteachers to know if their students are actually learning anything, other than how to do cut-n-paste plagiarism on term papers.

I'll admit that most people who rob convenience stores probably just use the money for drugs, booze, or guns, so I'm not trying to defend them... The point is, they don't get to do what they do in full view of everyone, and they do go to prison if they get caught. Not so with the WMF.

I think the correct term for this is "bollocks" (can I get a Brit over here?).

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the Wikimedia Foundation, but the fact that they've gone from $3 million to $6 million when they're running a top-ten website and involving themselves in far too many side projects is not one of them. The Wikimedia Foundation provides educational content for free. Without radically changing the definition of a "non-profit charity," I don't see how you can say they're not one. (For what it's worth, if this is discussed in greater detail in another thread, feel free to link me, I'm curious what the substantive arguments here are.)

With regard to putting people out of business, if we're going to make bad analogies, do you blame ATMs for the lack of so many bank tellers today? Will you be objecting to automated drug dispensers that will eventually replace most pharmacists? Photo developing used to be done in photo labs with actual film; today people just point and click at their computer screens at home. Your argument seems to be that progress and technology are putting people out of business and that's a bad thing. I can agree that they're putting people out of business (I think that much is undeniable), but it's the price we as a society pay for more efficiency and better technology.

I think you're going to argue that Wikipedia is producing content of substantially less quality than a professional publisher would and I would agree that most of Wikipedia's content is crap, but I don't see how that's Wikipedia's fault, per se. The market chooses what it wants; if it chooses free lesser-quality content over paid, higher-quality content, that's the fault of those producing the free content? Seems a bit unfair to me.


I need you to (please) explain to me how this argument is relevant given the greater context that Wikipedia is one website out of the entire Internet.


The primary issue (where you really lose any semblance of an argument, in my opinion) is that you're equating the distribution of an online encyclopedia with armed robbery and not providing anything compelling to back up your assertions. Have some of the Wikimedia Foundation's actions been unethical? Without a doubt. Have some of the Wikimedia Foundation's actions been illegal? I'd venture to say yes, though the Review's version of "break the law" and the, uh, law's seem to be often be quite different. Regardless, I don't think it's fair or even sane to make the analogy outside of pure sarcasm.

There's plenty of reasonable and legitimate criticism to be had. Squandering credibility on nonsense arguments like "Wikimedia is akin to bank robbers" just drowns out the signal.

The reforms I envision for Wikipedia are not cheap. They would require the commitment of large amounts of resources for staffing of program areas and abandonment of immunity as a risk management strategy. WMF shows no indication of making those reforms any time soon. I can't think of a better place for the money than in the bank.

If for some reason in the future the WMF ceases to exist, does anyone know what will happen to all those funds and assets? Who will benefit from them?

See: Distribution of Assets.

From personal experience, this clause is generally required to get IRS tax exempt status.

Depends largely on *why* it ceases to exist. But what's supposed to happen, according to the bylaws and the articles of incorporation, is that the assets are supposed to go to another 501©(3).

They go to a random nonprofit to be designated by the administrator of the residual estate in dissolution. Any remaining property after that (if, for some reason, some portion was not transferable, or the recipient refused the transfer) would be escheated to the State of Florida as the state of legal incorporation, to be used by that State however its laws should designate.

The WMF has not designated a successor charity, which is not all that surprising, when you think of it. Most of the other non-profits I've been involved in do designate one or more successor charities, typicall a parent or collateral organization, or another entity engaged in similar work in the same or nearby area. The generic language the WMF uses is what you use when you want to do the minimum necessary to comply with the regulations, which is, of course, what WMF always does.

I should also point out that the WMF is restricted in its ability to set up an endowment. One of the requirements of a public charity is that it must subsist, on an ongoing basis, primarily on public donations. Establishing an endowment and significantly subsisting on that endowment risks noncompliance with the public support requirement and could endanger the tax advantages that flow from being a public charity.

This isn't to say that they can't establish an endowment, just that doing so is legally very complicated. In any case, I seriously doubt that they're anywhere close to doing so; establishing a permanent endowment for a venture typically requires raising from 15 to 40 times as much money as is required to fund it for a single year, and their fundraising targets are nowhere near large enough for that.

From answers.com:

Charity: An institution, organization, or fund established to help the needy.

I can certainly see a reasonable (or at least relatively popular) definition by which The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't apply. Their primary focus is on helping the well-to-do, not the needy.

An endowment is the last thing I would want for WMF. It would only make them more insular and irresponsible. I only would like to see a significant cash reserve that would permit a transition toward responsibility once the shit finally hits the fan.

Or something decent for the plaintiffs to collect, anyway .

It is not a question of the market choosing what it wants, but rather it is whether an organization is improperly using its nonprofit status as the grounds to expand into money-making and influence-peddling operations The better analogy is not the convenience store bandits, but someone like Pat Robertson who used a nonprofit status as the foundation to build a media and political machinery.

Look here for the silver bullet to kill the wikimonster.

This was suggested in 07