Coming up to Christmas I generally make some small donations. Some of these I ask for as Christmas gifts because I’m old and basically have very basic wants and needs so I’m hard to buy for.

Curious to hear if / what others do.

I’ve expanded my annual list to include:

  • Wikipedia
  • Lemmy.world (my home instance)
  • Mozilla (I’m not happy with how they spend their money necessarily but I’m very thankful to have Firefox)
  • Signal messenger
  • A few Ukrainian things (u24.gov.ua is the official site if this is your thing but there’s a great lady on Reddit I give to occasionally too)
  • The guardian (I read so many articles from there linked on here that I feel like I should and I really appreciate the lack of paywall and easy cookie rejection but never use the site logged in)
  • @[email protected]
    19•6 days ago

    From what I’ve heard about Wikipedia’s finances they’re set for the foreseeäble and my money would be better used elsewhere.

    • @[email protected]
      3•5 days ago

      Here’s why knowing the above i still donate to wikipedia.

      Because we don’t want them to be in a position where they take money with strings attached. Imo its good for them to be reminded they serve the public first and foremost.

      • @vatlark
        4•3 days ago

        Yeah, Wikipedia is such a stable and positive force in the internet and directly reaches so many people. It’s easy to take it for granted but the internet would be so much incredibly worse without it.

        I happily donate.

        I want any organization that has shown that much commitment to making the world better to be well supported.

    • @[email protected]
      5•4 days ago

      Here’s their audit report. 59.8% of their expenses are in executive salaries, a total of $107,793,960 this year. They list internet hosting as 1.7% of their expenses at $3,116,445.

      • @[email protected]
        11•5 days ago

        That salary number is all ~700 employees, not just “executives”. That averages to about 150k apiece, not unreasonable for what is probably mostly tech workers.

          • @[email protected]
            5•5 days ago

            The actual total in your own link was 5.2 million for executives. The 88 million is, again, the entire salary base just in 2021. Assuming they still had 700 employees (which is a current figure, not 3 years ago) that’s still about 120k apiece for everyone else.

            I can’t tell if you’re just being disingenuous or you really can’t read your own sources…

            • @[email protected]
              3•5 days ago

              You’re right. It’s not just executives. I believed the criticism was over inflating executive salaries, but it is indeed all salaries. Wikimedia operated with a total salary of $26million in 2014 but now has salaries totalling $107million. Quadrupling their salaries in 10 years with little explanation. You’re assuming it goes to IT infrastructure workers, but they don’t explain where it actually goes.