Please don’t donate to the Wikimedia Foundation

For those aware of my past and present involvement in the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects, this post will probably come as a bit of a surprise. If you were considering making a charitable donation this year… please consider making it to another great organization with similar goals like the Internet Archive, the EFF, the ACLU, etc.

Earlier this year, The Wikimedia Foundation forcibly removed a board member selected by the community for reasons no one is able to quite articulate, and then lied in their FAQ about his removal multiple times. In my experience, James Heilman’s integrity is beyond reproach, but one of the co-founders of Wikipedia (who also currently holds a permanent trustee seat) has persisted in committing defamation per se against him — even by the hard standards California would impose, and even when the Wikimedia Foundation’s employees came to his active defense, stating that nothing improper had occured. This is made worse by the fact that James is a doctor, and baselessly impugning the integrity of a doctor is rather more serious than, say, baselessly impugning my integrity. In another unfortunate move, Denny Vrandečić, another community board member who I trust (and voted for) had conflict of interest issues arise to the leel where he felt it necessary to resign. On top of that, the Wikimedia Foundation has lost a huge number of their most talented individuals because of forced cultural change — and there’s no way people with the same talent as some of those lost will accept a non-profit salary.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s budget this year is around $65m, with $72m in reserve, and a $5m endowment (WMF only recently started their endowment.) Those numbers do not include restricted grants, something that the Wikimedia Foundation used to rarely accept, publicize well when they did accept, and only accept for exceptionally good reason — now WMF has staff dedicated to gathering them. Donating to the Wikimedia Foundation isn’t an issue of keeping the lights on, or the servers running, or the programmers caffeinated. I hope a day arrives when I can wholeheartedly recommend donating to the WMF again, but right now I cannot. If I got to pick where your charity dollars went, I’d go for the Internet Archive, an effective on-the-ground charity in, say, Syria, or even donating to individual Wikimedians as the Wikimedia Foundation is effectively prohibited from creating content, or sponsoring the creation of content.