Frederick,
The paragraph in your letter that resonated most with me was this one:
(9) The Wikipedia movement also seems to be shifting away from its volunteer model. This is what gave it its strength and vitality. We seem to be moving to an NGO/funded or even corporate model of operations. Wikipedia may well have the resources to afford this. But could such an approach actually demoralise volunteers who have, and continue to, put in a lot of their labour of love?
There are and have been many signs of this increasing corporatization.
The vast majority of volunteer contributors never ask for or receive funding from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Yet the board members [s]elected by this unpaid majority of contributors have only ever formed a small minority on the WMF board.
Meanwhile, the WMF is accumulating every greater amounts of money – an income generated by annual fundraising banners that convey a misleading impression of urgent financial need to millions of readers.[1]
Every year, tens of millions of donor dollars flow into a completely opaque fund, the Wikimedia Endowment, which
– has never published audited accounts
– is with the Tides Foundation, which specialises in obscuring money flows through "donor-advised funds" (such funds, whether right-leaning or left-leaning, are the very antithesis of transparency)
– has never disclosed how much it pays the Tides Foundation for managing this fund
– has never to my knowledge disclosed any other expenditure, including whether or how much it pays any contractors, consultants, advisers etc.
Per the most recent Form 990 available, the WMF spent $56 million on salary costs in 2019, while reporting a total of 291 employees. This makes an average of over $190,000 per head (by now most likely substantially exceeded, as salary costs have kept rising), a figure the WMF neither confirms nor denies.[2]
For its most recent major strategy process, which resulted in its Strategy 2030, the WMF enlisted the help of Hillary Clinton's erstwhile trip director, a lady who has since stood (unsuccessfully) for political office herself.[3]
For its PR strategy, it has long relied on a firm founded by the chief communications and marketing officer of the Clinton Foundation.[4]
The various foundations that have donated the most substantial amounts of money to the Wikimedia Foundation generally have strong links to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an American think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations.[5]
The WMF's most important partners are to be found among the most dominant and richest U.S. tech companies, which earn vast amounts of advertising revenue from the content Wikimedia volunteers create, while at the same time holding back education and healthcare investment in the Global South by doing everything they can to avoid paying taxes in these countries.[6]
I don't think that these choices, priorities and strategies are a particularly good match for what the average global volunteer contributor is about, nor are they in tune with the project's original and declared founding aim of political neutrality.
I agree that the overall effect is rather demoralising, all the more so as none of this had to be this way.
Andreas
