Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
It’s that time of the year again. The time when Wikipedia (and every organization on earth) asks you for money. Large pink pop ups appear over the top of a disputed article about the Moro War (according to Wikipedia, it’s a ‘rebellion’) about Oct 7 (according to Wikipedia, it was a ‘battle’) or the David Horowitz Freedom Center (according to Wikipedia, we’re an “anti-Islam hate group”) that demands you send money or “the world’s largest encyclopedia” will shut down.
It won’t.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which does the actual fundraising, has over $310 million in assets.
Why does a platform whose claim to fame is that it’s written and edited by unpaid volunteers need hundreds of millions of dollars? You would think that hosting and editing millions of articles is expensive, and it’s certainly not cheap, but Wikipedia only spent around $3.1 million on internet hosting in 2024. Despite Wikimedia’s claims that there’s been a significant increase in costs due to AI ‘scraping’ their content, internet hosting costs in 2025 were around $3.4 million.
That’s less than half the $8.2 million revenues that Wikimedia gets from contracts. And, over half of its $6.8 million investment income. If all Wikipedia wanted to do was maintain its platform, it could do that with its contracts and investment revenue and have plenty left over.
But, like most institutions, the Wikipedia of 2025 has little resemblance to the organization that it once was. And its mission isn’t an “open source internet”, but a propaganda machine.
The internet visionaries who helped make Wikipedia a reality have long since been warning about the organization’s radical mission drift.
“Wikipedia earned $184M from donations last year. Keeping the servers running costs less than $5M. They don’t need your money,” Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said.
While Wikipedia spends $3.4 million on hosting, it spends $3.7 million on ‘executive compensation’. That includes a roughly $500,000 salary for Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander and her majority female and minority ‘executive team’.
What are Maryana Iskander’s qualifications for running a major internet platform? Well she was the Egyptian-born former CEO of Planned Parenthood.
How had Wikipedia managed without an abortion centered Egyptian CEO before?
What are Lisa Seitz’s qualifications for pulling down around $400,000 as the chief of advocacy for Wikipedia? Well she was a former ‘progressive’ consultant who worked for Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Democrats, whose mission, according to her Wikipedia article, is “supporting people who want to take the progressive movement places.”
What about Margeigh Novotny, the head of product design at Wikipedia? Well she is a member of the ‘Climate Reality Project.’
Wikipedia had been founded by a bunch of white guys. It now has three white men, six white women, one black man, one Latino man, and is now widely mistrusted and seen as useless.
But Wikimedia’s very ‘progressive’ executive team only gobbles up a fraction of the cash (although far more than Wikipedia actually spends on internet hosting for its articles.)
Donations to Wikipedia go to the Wikimedia Endowment which is headed by Lisa Seitz and has its own board. Wikimedia then works with the Tides Foundation, the go-to managers for leftist non-profits, as a Collective Action Fund, to be dispensed for various projects.
Tens of millions of dollars have been going to ‘awards and grants’ for Wikipedia’s ideological projects like its ‘Project Rewrite’ venture to “improve coverage of cis, trans women, gender” and assorted ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’ projects. Donating to Wikipedia doesn’t keep the ‘lights on’, it doesn’t pay for the site hosting, it’s a money pot that the organization uses to fund DEI projects on and off the site, on the usual DEI mission of making the current organization more diverse.
Wikimedia’s Knowledge Equity Fund hands out money to the sort of third world activist groups that the Soros Open Society Foundation cash tends to go to, and considering the $2 million donation from George Soros and the $1 million from Craig Newmark (of which about $500,000 appears to have been earmarked for censorship tools), Wikimedia looks like a fairly generic leftist Bay Area nonprofit, that exists to promote and fund leftist projects around the world.
The ‘Wiki’ part is as incidental to its core mission of leftist advocacy and funding as the car connection is to the Ford Foundation. Like nearly all the big foundations, Wikipedia has become a machine for hijacking funding and directing it to the same old tired woke leftist causes.
The problem is that while the Ford Foundation doesn’t get to decide what goes into your Ford Focus or what you do in it, Wikimedia is hijacking “the world’s largest encyclopedia” not just to raise money to finance its agendas, but to taint as much of that encyclopedia as possible.
And that is the real problem.
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, has proposed his ‘nine theses’ to reform the platform. They include restoring neutrality, reducing the power of nameless administrators, ending bans on conservative sites and creating a legislative process. These are well within the norms of what Wikipedia used to be, but no longer is, instead Wikipedia has become an institutional leftist tool, systemically biased, and wielded to enforce a narrative, rather than to document anything.
That ‘centralization’ is a large part of why Wikipedia requires so much money.
Giving money to Wikipedia doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse. The more money that its leftist executives have to play with, the more they will fund their radical causes and bias its content. Starve Wikipedia of funds and it may no longer be as appealing a venue for ex-Planned Parenthood CEOs, Newsom staffers and the usual Bay Area professional wokesters.
If you want to make Wikipedia better, don’t give it a dime. Then maybe woke will go broke.
