Big Nonprofit strikes again.

The money you donate is not going to support Wikipedia as you know it. The people writing the wikipedia articles you read will not see a cent of the money you donate, as Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced community effort by volunteers. The server costs, the techie employees hired to manage the servers, develop the wiki software, mobile applications, etc, are less than 3% of their current expenses.

Your donations are going to Big Nonprofit, a type of industry that attaches itself to any community it can get its hands on, and then focuses on 2 goals only: 1) survive at all costs, and 2) grow forever. There will never be a day where Big Nonprofit will say "we have enough money". Or "mission accomplished, we can close this department". Never.

Big Nonprofit attaches itself to a host (core mission, core product, community, whatever you want to call it), and slowly takes it over, while still presenting as the original host. It uses deception, and intentional blurring of the line between host and parasite, to use people's support of the host to the benefit of the parasite. More and more responsibilities are put under the rug of the initial mission goals, and these responsibilities grow to infinity.

And one day, if/when money gets tight, what do you think happens? Will Big Nonprofit trim its fat a little bit? Laughable! No, the host is sacrificed so the parasite can live. This is how companies like Mozilla end up sacking actual engineers like the Rust team, while still keeping hundreds of non-techie trustfund kids doing "activism" from lavish Bay Area offices.

You cannot get around this. Maybe you wisened up, saw the blurred lines, and figured "I'll just donate directly to the project I support". You cannot donate directly to Wikipedia the website, or to Firefox the web browser, or to Rust (when it was a Mozilla project). Big Nonprofit made sure to cut off those avenues for you. Your money can only be spent the way Big Nonprofit wants, i.e. on itself.

Here's (https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/08/wikimedia-fo...) where your donations end up going. Regardless of whether you support these groups or not (I think they're race grifters), they have nothing to do with Wikipedia, encyclopedias, or even off-topic-but-still-sorta-relevant goals like wanting more poor people to use Wikipedia. You'll notice one thing they all have in common: they have no truly measurable metrics for success. Because Big Nonprofit can't grow if the question "what benefits are we getting by spending donation money this way?" can be answered. Bezos and Musk could gift them their entire fortunes overnight, and the only change at the end of the year will be more Big Nonprofit employees hired, and more fund-raisers campaigns.

You can see some people who raised the issue of where all this money is going here (https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...), including mysterious multi-million donations to outside nonprofits, a huge ballooning in operating expenses, etc. The people raising these issues are rebuked by Wikimedia employees whose signatures and blogs show they spend a lot of time at various conferences around the world and virtue signaling for diversity. I wouldn't want my gravy train of free trips to Bangkok to end either.