• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle




  • Wikipedia gets a lot of funding from billionaires and corporations. It’s not going to be easy for most instances to be funded entirely by user donations long term.

    Wikimedia Endowment
    In January 2016, the Foundation announced the creation of an endowment to safeguard its future.[93] The Wikimedia Endowment was established as a donor-advised fund at the Tides Foundation, with a stated goal to raise US$100 million in the next 10 years.[94] Craig Newmark was one of the initial donors, giving US$1 million.[95] Peter Baldwin and his wife, Lisbet Rausing, donated US$5 million to it in 2017.[96]

    In 2018, major donations to the endowment were received from Amazon and Facebook (US$1 million each) and George Soros (US$2 million).[97][98][99] In 2019, donations included US$2 million from Google,[100] US$3.5 million more from Baldwin and Rausing,[96] US$2.5 million more from Newmark,[101] and another US$1 million from Amazon in October 2019 and again in September 2020.[102][103]

    As of 2022, the advisory board consists of Jimmy Wales, Peter Baldwin, former Wikimedia Foundation Trustees Patricio Lorente and Phoebe Ayers, former Wikimedia Foundation Board Visitor Doron Weber of the Sloan Foundation, investor Annette Campbell-White, businessman Niels Christian Nielsen, and venture capitalist Michael Kim.

    The Foundation itself has provided annual grants of $5 million to its Endowment since 2016.[104] These amounts have been recorded as part of the Foundation’s “awards and grants” expenses.[105] In September 2021, the Foundation announced that the Wikimedia Endowment had reached its initial $100 million fundraising goal in June 2021, five years ahead of its initial target.[4]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Wikimedia_Endowment

    edit: removed “most”