Above is pie chart reflecting the Wikipedia Foundation’s own report on how it spent its money over the past year. This arrives while every Wikipedia search is afflicted with drop-down pleas for contributions. In the categories listed above, the only ones that should be active concerns of the online search service are infrastructure and effectiveness. Equity and Inclusion are irrelevant to what people are seeking when they use Wikipedia; I’m not even sure what “safety” refers to. 29% of the budget was devoted to these dubious, discriminatory—but woke!—objectives.
Elon Musk has been issuing critical tweets about these priorities, with good reason. Wikipedia is both essential and inherently flawed and unreliable because of its vulnerability to bias and manipulation. To be a trustworthy source of information for online research, it must be closely monitored to identify agenda-driven entries and misleading statements motivated by partisan and ideological objectives. Quite simply, an organization that devoted to DEI cant cannot be trusted in this regard.
No one interested in improving Wikipedia’s accuracy and competence should give a single dollar in response to its constant pleas for money as long as almost a third of that dollar will be spend on dubious programs that, if anything, are likely to impair the service’s effectiveness rather than enhance it.
Ethics Alarms 
I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that “safety” means, essentially, censorship.
Thanks for posting this. I dug out an old fundraising email from Wikipedia, which I had simply deleted, and replied asking them — in light of this spending breakdown — why I should donate to them when they have strayed so far from their core mission.
I don’t really expect a reply.
And yes, I do think the fundraising messages on their site have gotten even more obnoxious and intrusive this year.
An update — I did get an answer of sorts to my email, but not one that really allayed any concerns I raised. Here is a link he sent me to the Wikipedia’s Annual Plan:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024
It’s not reassuring — apparently Wikipedia got new management last year and shifted directions. One of the lines I made note of: “For the second consecutive year, the Wikimedia Foundation is anchoring its annual plan in the Movement’s strategy to advance equity.”
There’s a link on the word ‘equity’ but…..
So no, none of that changed my mind, but I wanted to report since they did at least respond to my concerns.
The Wokerati has been plying Wikipedia for quite while, now. 15 years ago as we speak, it was discovered that Global Warming Warrior William Connolley personally rewrote over 5400 wiki climate-related articles, and outright spiked ~ 500 others.
Why? They didn’t sufficiently…um…support the cause. His credentials? His ponytail and beard suggest all manner of “The Ends Justify The Means” Green Cred, but most think others with similar levels of…er…concern are nothing more than ideologically clueless spoiled morons
PWS
Paul,
I’m glad you follow the climate stuff so closely. I knew nothing about that!
I remembered it from when it hit the news, though at the time it wasn’t given the attention a perfect world would have have deemed fit.
Oddly enough, tracking down objective reportage (via Herr Google) of what something the skeptical crowd considered signature significance, was quantifiably more challenging than finding links to Trump Is A Raycist.
PWS
Back in the day, I used Wikipedia as a secondary/confirming source for a solid percentage of the pieces I wrote when publishing my this-day-in-history website. Granted, I wrote very few DEI-sensitive pieces, but when I learned of its liberal/woke leanings, I reduced my reliance on it, even if it cost me more time and money tracking down salient information.
Those that use Wikipedia are right to question this. Its display of budgetary priorities is only slightly removed from the Black Lives Matter shakedown. BLM coerced donations as a virtue-signaling device for the donator (to broadcast innocence of racism), whereas Wikipedia is displaying this budget as a virtue-signaling device for itself (for broadcasting to the donators that it’s willing to twist history and facts to show it doesn’t discriminate).
Wikipedia writes, “…with grants and Movement support representing the majority of the budget within the Equity goal.” What does that even mean? What are “grants and Movement support?” Are they taking the money for their site and re-donating it to discriminatory practices elsewhere?
The cynic in me pairs with the software developer in me to ask: how is it that Wikipedia spends nearly $52 million a year on these initiatives? Are they purchasing software that scans the pages for keywords and/or phrases (software that could be written in-house with a minimum of fuss and a trivial cost)? Are they hiring outside firms to manually scan and re-scan pages for “unsafe” content? If so, that’s a tremendous waste of resources. Are they using AI systems? If so, it seems they’re overpaying.
You know what? I would suggest following whatever people are in charge of Wikipedia to their homes, watching the garage doors open, and then counting the number of vehicles with Italian monikers (Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc.) squirreled away there. At that point, you will have probably found where much of that DEI budget has been “invested.”
I wonder…does Wikipedia (a-la NPR) receive any money from the government?
I trust Maryana Iskander a hell of a lot more than I trust Elon Musk.
Why? Do you not trust the pie chart? Is there any way to logically defend that allocation of funds by a non-profit seeking contributions for its main mission?
I certainly don’t where $52 million is concerned.
I still am curious about Nancy’s reasoning here, especially since the widespread vilification of Elon Musk bewilders me almost as much as the deification of Anthony Fauci. I’m considering making Musk the Ethics Alarms Ethics Hero of 2024.
The vilification of Elon Musk? To some degree, it’s the same as the vilification of President Trump…and Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert Kennedy, and to a similar degree, Jack Marshall. I don’t know your party affiliation – or even if you have one – but the others, as lifetime Democrats, have committed the unforgiveable sin: they have rejected “the hive mentality” of anti-free-speech, anti-gun, pro-trust-the-science. Each has questioned the far-left migration of his/her party and rejected it to a degree that each can no longer identify with it.
Musk had the audacity to buy Twitter – the redoubt of the left and a bastion of liberal thought and conservative cancellation – and attempt to return it to a platform that supports all sides of an argument without suppression.
Kennedy had the audacity to run as a Democrat against the most anti-free-speech Democratic candidates in American history, and to speak with more intelligence than Harris/Walz…on any subject.
Trump had the audacity to run as a Republican and beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, who was “next in line”.
Gabbard had the audacity to eschew the Democratic party line in 2020. She was easily the most intelligent, most thoughtful candidate, but because she rejected the far-left tilt of the party, she was summarily rejected and cast as a Russian plant.
Marshall had the audacity to call out the ridiculous attacks made against Trump over the last eight years. He never made excuses for Trump’s sometimes outlandish behavior, his outrageous claims, and his destruction of Presidential decorum. But because Marshall refused to buy into every Trump lie, he was shunned by a large part of his once-thoughtful, but now fully-Trump-deranged commentariat.
That’s what I think.