"I'm planning to donate a significant portion and use a significant portion for wt.social. I haven't made any final decisions. I offered to pledge to donate to the WMF, but they (the board) preferred that I not do that."

The way this is phrased could mean 95% for WT.Social and 5% for charity, or vice versa. 

WT.Social (current Alexa rank around 120,000) is Jimmy Wales' commercial enterprise and the successor to the failed Wikitribune site established in April 2017. Wikitribune Ltd.'s filing history (incl. financial statements), as linked on WT.Social's "About" page, is here:

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10713170/filing-history

Reading the above pledge, I was reminded of a previous pledge Jimmy Wales had made to support worthy causes. 

When he and Berners-Lee (who, incidentally, also auctioned an NFT recently) shared a controversial[2] $1M award from the United Arab Emirates (each receiving $500K) in 2014, he told the Daily Dot that he "never planned to keep the money and will use the funds to start his own foundation dedicated to furthering human rights."[3] 

Could Jimmy Wales or the WMF board provide further information, beyond what is below, on what became of this promise? 

And in the meantime, could readers help me with a crowdsourcing effort to survey what publicly available information there is on how this money was used, and whether its use matched the public pledge?

Looking at this over the weekend, I found that a Twitter account for the Jimmy Wales Foundation (@JWalesF) was set up in January 2015, soon after the Daily Dot report. 

Two-and-a-half years later, in September 2017, Jimmy Wales incorporated a "Jimmy Wales Foundation". Its filing history is here:

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10950000/filing-history

According to its certificate of incorporation, available in the filing history, the "Jimmy Wales Foundation" is a "private company limited by guarantee". This is quite different from the sort of charitable foundation the Wikimedia Foundation is. A search of the UK Register of Charities for the Jimmy Wales Foundation accordingly draws a blank:

https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/results/page/1/delta/20/keywords/Jimmy+Wales+Foundation

Section 24 of the certificate of incorporation states that the Jimmy Wales Foundation's "directors are entitled to such remuneration as the directors determine". This remuneration may "take any form." Jimmy Wales is the only director listed in the document.

The foundation's first financial statement after incorporation lists assets of £25,319 (around $30,000). More recent statements show a negative balance. I am left wondering: Where did the other $470,000 go?

Looking into what the Jimmy Wales Foundation has achieved since its inception, I found that it had made 1,267 tweets, with the last one of these occurring in February 2019. A Google News search finds 9 mentions of the Jimmy Wales Foundation in the media.

A number of these are mentions of Orit Kopel, the co-founder of WT.Social, who also describes herself as the Ex-CEO of the Jimmy Wales Foundation on Twitter.[4]

Given the size of the original award, this seems on the face of it remarkably modest value for money in terms of the fight for human rights. 

As the Daily Dot[3] reported, Wales promised that "every penny of the money will be used to combat human rights abuses worldwide with a specific focus on the Middle East and with a specific focus of freedom of speech/access to knowledge issues."

Of course – and I hope this is the case – there may have been other activities consistent with this pledge that I am unaware of. Any information shedding light on this would be very welcome.

Best,

Andreas

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Wales&diff=1058450267&oldid=1058449512 – see also statement on proceeds at https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/birth-wikipedia/jimmy-wales-b-1966-2001/141268

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20191107063546/https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20150624-uae-grants-belie-free-speech-activism-return-them-now/

[3] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/jimmy-wales-uae-prize-money/ 

[4] https://archive.md/wip/C2rxY