There were some posts over the holiday season asking for projects to donate to, and for those who have the means to comfortably do so, this is an important gift to consider.

If there's only a limited amount each of us is able to give, I assume there's no point giving it all to, for one example, The Linux Foundation, because a small personal donation is trivial next to the ~$15,000,000 USD they receive from sponsors dependent on them[1]. I understand that funding sources can be a major and profound source of bias[2] and ideally we would be, for example, helping to make Firefox independent of Google, but until we have more collective power, it's not worth letting smaller important projects struggle instead.

So, which important projects should we leave to the sponsors, and which really need our support?

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[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 25 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Maybe I can say Wikipedia because if it’s mediawiki software. Every year they ask for money but a lot of their funds don’t go towards the Wikipedia project.

[–] wargreymon@sh.itjust.works 10 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Their only defence is to support other mediawiki projects, but it is ambiguous we don't know how the money goes. The project, whatever that is, should speak for itself instead of going through Wikipedia.

[–] Orbituary@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Getting your ideas from Elon I see.

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Did you even read what I said? Go look where their money goes, it’s mostly for random outreach programs.

[–] folkrav@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goes/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Donations+to+the+Wikimedia+Foundation%2Cour+ecosystem+of+Wikimedia+projects.

58% goes to fundraising, administrative and technological costs. The rest has some money going towards, but no limited to, other programs.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikimedia_Foundation_2024_Audited_Financial_Statements.pdf

Only thing I can find in their financials that would maybe qualify as "random outreach" would be "awards and grants", at 26mil last year out of 185mil revenue, or 14%.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund

As far as I can tell, it's not particularly random.

Maybe I'm missing something?

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 0 points 3 hours ago

To me that still shows most doesn’t go where you think, especially when volunteers do the hard work.