![]() Since then, the organization’s financial situation has changed dramatically. In the early days, the WMF operated on a shoestring budget that funded Wikipedia’s servers and technical infrastructure, but paid for very few full-time employees. Whether the WMF is “rolling in cash” perhaps depends on your perspective. ![]() 24, he noted that “there was broad, near-unanimous consensus that these fundraising banners should not be run on the English Wikipedia in their current form.” When an administrator closed the debate on Nov. The language in the draft ads urged donors to “support Wikipedia’s independence” because “without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.” Several Wikipedia editors characterized this message as unethical. In this monthlong debate, volunteers voiced concerns that the ads gave the false impression that Wikipedia was under dire financial stress. That day, the Village Pump hosted a “Request for comment,” or RfC, about the proposed banner ads for the annual year-end fundraising campaign. 25 on a Wikipedia community discussion page called the Village Pump. The self-governing wiki community has long insisted that the WMF consult them when it comes to key decisions about how Wikipedia is managed, a process that WMF’s CEO Maryana Iskander referred to in an interview as “healthy democratic noise.” ![]() Could not happen anywhere other than Wikipedia.” Over the course of a messy monthlong debate, participating Wikipedia editors protested that the proposed ads were misleading and unethical, while raising the specter of what would happen if the site’s contributors and the foundation failed to come to an agreement before the start of the annual fundraising season. “I can’t imagine the Facebook or Twitter communities organizing a protest like this, attacking hundreds of millions of dollars for the parent tech company. “The wiki community is challenging the Wikimedia Foundation’s right or ability to run fundraising ads on English Wikipedia,” said Lane Rasberry, a long-term Wikipedian and data scientist at the University of Virginia. The Wikipedia editing community recently held a poll rejecting the proposed banner ads, pressuring the foundation that supports the site into drafting alternative ads with softer language. But for many of Wikipedia’s most dedicated contributors, this year’s proposed banner ads presented something like a moral crisis.
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