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Darkness reigns over Wikipedia as official dark mode comes to pass
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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I thought this was gonna be about Wikipedia finally shutting down because nobody donates
They are actually getting too many donations, many times more than they need to run wikipedia. There was and is a big conflict about the unsustainable growth of donations to the foundation and its questionable use of those funds.
Wikimedia Foundation (the org behind the Wikipedia and similar projects) does get more donations than their operational cost, but that's expected. The idea is that they'll invest the extra fund^1 and some day the return alone will be able to sustain Wikipedia forever.
Although, some have criticized that the actual situation is not clearly conveyed in their asking for donation message. It gives people an impression that Wikipedia is going under if you don't donate.
Others also criticized that the feature development is slow compared to the funding, or that not enough portion is allocated to the feature development. See how many years it takes to get dark mode! I don't know how it's decided or what's their target, so I can't really comment on this.
They publish their annual financial auditions^2 and you can have a read if you're interested. There are some interesting things. For example, in 2022-2023, processing donations actually costs twice as much as internet hosting, which one would expect to be the major expense.
Similar to Mozilla (but not from donations but instead of its millions paid to it by Google)
they're a non profit, so their either banking money in a proverbial "war chest" or they're just nabbing donations to be used in the future, for large expansions or what not.
It's an interesting problem to have, being a non profit entity.