[Wikitech-l] Fwd: How Does Wikimedia Succeed As A Non-Profit?

       Here's a crazy question.       Non-profit organizations are famous for having terrible web sites.  Generally they get a fixed budget and after they spend it,  they have a party and announced that they succeeded.  Nobody ever tells the users,  or rather,  the people who might have been the users if they found out about it.      For a long time I thought "non-profit" was a cause of failure,  or rather,  that profit was a cause of success.  Nobody at a library benefits from making a digital library 5% easier to use,  but if a company like AMZN improves its site by 5%,  that translates into happy customers plus a pile of money that can go into bonuses,  dividends,  etc.      That continuous improvement is missing in most non-profits.  At best they get a series of grants to do things and set goals for major upgrades.  Sometimes these upgrades fail,  sometimes they really help, often they end up spending a lot of money for 3 years to get something that's about the same as what they had before.      How does the Wikimedia foundation escape this trap? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l