If the turtle-saving foundation I donate to has a windfall, I would expect it to save more turtles, not to instead also focus on feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children. This does not mean that feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children is wrong, it is an even more important goal than saving the turtles, but somewhere in the process, there pillaged a decision maker that misinterpreted (acceptable) or ignored (unacceptable) the intentions of the benefactors.
Except the foundations mission statement isn't turtle-saving, that's just what you think is clearly the most important part of their work that they should solely focus on, in your opinion. And it's not wrong of you to want to be able to donate towards the parts that you care about, but it's an obvious disconnect from the reality of what their stated goals are (and hence you blame decision makers for decisions that are actually fully in line with the mission statements).
Mozilla Foundation never was the Firefox Development Foundation, as much as some of us want it to be. Wikimedia never was the Wikipedia Development and Operations Foundation. If you dislike that, donate to entities with narrower goals (I personally prefer directing money towards OSM and KDE for example)
If a foundation spins off a project's community with certain goals, they take on to some degree the goals and the vision of the people that built it. Those are opinions, and they are important to the cited goals. If then a foreign element enters the system due to the sad state of the technology/corporate enterprises nowadays and changes the mission statement, you have not changed the spirit it was created with, you changed a business strategy in a way that is disconnected and hostile to the initial goal. A lot of the times the goals aren't really stated at all clearly, are protected by different acts like codes of conduct, and open to modification by impassionate people with ephemeral leadership positions who don't care what happens to the organization down the line.
Sure, I can become the chairman of Turtle saving international and change our charter to prioritize feeding hotdogs to hungry Somalis, but I am still doing an ideological disservice to the grassroots initiative that built the foundation and created the position for me to be sitting on, no?
Also, this seems to me extremely fragile when situations are reversed, say that an outright awful organization like an international petrol company gets a new mission statement. Should all they did before and after that be forgiven because their stated goals say otherwise?
I personally see this as little less than a ground truth, but perhaps there is some way that stated goals stand above all regardless.
EDIT: I do see how you make a very good point when you're looking mostly from the present towards the future, though.
In both cases, their "wide" mission statements have been around for a long time, it's not a recent thing. E.g. you maybe can say that Mozilla Foundation in 2003 was presented as something else than what it decided to adopt in 2007 with the Mozilla Manifesto, but well, that's a 4 year period that ended 18 years ago and happened under the original leadership, it's not later executives somehow distorting it.
> Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être.
At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup).
Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
> Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?
Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to. And hell, it's been that way even decades ago with images of starving little African kids being used for emotional manipulation.
In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
I don’t believe that ‘capitalism’ is a good explanation for the behaviour of a charitable organisation with no shareholders.
An issue with private funding for charitable projects is, as you note, appeals to the emotions of private donors.
An issue with the public funding for charitable projects you propose is appeals to the emotions of both legislators and executive agents. Another issue is corruption: a project which can figure out how to both receive money from taxes and influence elections can ultimately write its own meal ticket.
You said that the Wikimedia Foundation's core mission is to basically do good things. Their core goal is not to keep Wikipedia running (as most people believe).
Wikimedia runs very prominent banner ads all the time on Wikipedia, saying that they need money to keep Wikipedia running, and that they're a small team that depends on community funding to keep Wikipedia running, and they can't do it without you, and please please please donate by this date. I think it is very reasonable for your average Wikipedia user to believe the following, thanks to how Wikimedia advertises:
* Wikimedia is the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. They're basically the same thing, since Wikimedia's goal is running Wikipedia.
* Wikipedia is run by a small team
* Wikipedia is heavily reliant on donations from normal people
* Wikipedia needs money all the time. I know this because they're constantly running big highlighted banner ads urgently asking for money before $DATE
If what you said is true, and Wikimedia's core mission is not in fact, to preserve Wikipedia, then they're engaging in deceptive advertising. They're giving the impression that they need money right now to keep Wikipedia's funding source secure, but in reality, their goal is much broader than just Wikipedia. I think it's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia's funding could be much more secure if the Wikimedia Foundation solely focused on running Wikipedia. In other words, if they stopped spending on $NOT_WIKIPEDIA_REL_COST they would be fine.
What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?
> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
Are we agreeing that they're knowingly being deceptive, and that they wouldn't need to be deceptive if they just focused on Wikipedia? And we're disagreeing on whether that deception is moral or immoral?
> What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?
To show that, thanks to capitalism, deception has become the norm in advertising (of all kind, frankly), and either you go along and play the game, or you go six feet under. It's immoral, sure, but I'd much more prefer to see the system itself fixed than to only nab random offenders.
> I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
No. The part with the poor countries refers to that I don't want to see any kind of fundraiser stuff that should be a government's job, and on top of that I disdain many of the charity campaigns relating to Africa because the "aid" we gave utterly crushed the local agricultural and textile industry, sending off many countries into a disastrous dependency loop - if you want to read more on that, look up "mitumba".
> Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to.
No.
*Even under a socialist framework*, the tactics used for fundraising would not be alien. The main difference would be to court either (a) the public votes for funding approval, or (b) the leadership votes that hold the administration's purse strings.
Don't blame it on the system. There are only so many ways to gather resources before the different methods overlap with each other.
> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
Counterpoint: Why is it *my* burden to bear on building up *their* economy/business/organization? They're not as inept as implied in your saviour complex.
Like, what is there even to say but constantly complain about that.