Well-funded Wikipedia

There's been talk on Twitter lately about the massive funds of the Wikimedia Foundation. I had no idea, and I think others were surprised too. It makes sense, though. I was always surprised at the professionalism of their work compared to the homemade vibe of the volunteer communities that run the wikis. They use professional graphic design, run the most impressive donation appeal setup I've seen online and give out grants to editors for small projects. I had known that they had many more staff than one might expect. They have a whole team of lawyers for instance.

Recently, the Foundation made a very rare move in banning a huge number of admins from Middle Eastern language wikipedias. On Arabic wikipedia, they banned seven of the twenty-six administrators. These are editors who have huge powers over the whole wiki. Some of the banned accounts had hundreds of thousands of edits across multiple wikipedias, including English wikipedia. They had created five articles on English wikipedia, mostly related to Saudi Arabia, and had edited the Jamal Kashoggi page to soften the description of his Saudi detention.

This is obviously vital work. It's the kind of thing that would be very hard to accomplish by volunteers in the open. It makes me grateful they exist. I probably won't donate to the WMF any more, but I'm glad they are well-funded.