The Foundation supports challenges to laws in Texas and Florida that jeopardize Wikipedia’s community-led governance model and the right to freedom of expression.
An amicus brief, also known as a “friend-of-the-court” brief, is a document filed by individuals or organizations who are not part of a lawsuit, but who have an interest in the outcome of the case and want to raise awareness about their concerns. The Wikimedia Foundation’s amicus brief calls upon the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed in 2021 by Texas and Florida state legislatures. Texas House Bill 20 and Florida Senate Bill 7072 prohibit website operators from banning users or removing speech and content based on the viewpoints and opinions of the users in question.
“These laws expose residents of Florida and Texas who edit Wikipedia to lawsuits by people who disagree with their work,” said Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. “For over twenty years, a community of volunteers from around the world have designed, debated, and deployed a range of content moderation policies to ensure the information on Wikipedia is reliable and neutral. We urge the Supreme Court to rule in favor of NetChoice to protect Wikipedia’s unique model of community-led governance, as well as the free expression rights of the encyclopedia’s dedicated editors.”
“The quality of Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia depends entirely on the ability of volunteers to develop and enforce nuanced rules for well-sourced, encyclopedic content,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Without the discretion to make editorial decisions in line with established policies around verifiability and neutrality, Wikipedia would be overwhelmed with opinions, conspiracies, and irrelevant information that would jeopardize the project’s reason for existing.”
The expenses isn’t just to run Wikipedia, it’s for additional things like making a service to sell for enterprise use. The point (from my understanding at least) of an endowment is for whatever that owns it to basically live off of it in the worst case scenario. They also exclude the endowment from their net assets and annual revenue.
There are lemmy posts about this and I’m sure they explain it better then me, but from what I have read, in my opinion, donations to them seem less beneficial than a lot of things. Especially with their advertising that they need donations so much when they make millions every year.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20231206084743/https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/
The “cost estimate” for running Wikipedia, which that article just asserts as gospel, is a “a casual 2013 estimate by Erik Möller, its VP of engineering and product development at the time.” So a very OLD and uninformed guess by someone who wasnt directly involved in finance. To me, that makes this read like a sensationalized hit piece, not credible journalism.
Point remains. Those expenses are for other projects as well not directly related to Wikipedia. There is no public information of actual cost to running / supporting just the Wikipedia, so that was probably the best source they could find. There are a ton of news articles about this and you can look them up if you want better sources. The end here is that your donating $ to a company that makes a millions in profit every year without the donations.
Here is a lemmy comment detailing it. Maybe I am ass at explaining this. I am also not trying to be like “spend your money elsewhere” but just trying to make sure you are aware their donation drives aren’t desperate as they seem.
https://feddit.de/comment/2220700