> But if I understand it right, they have a $50 million surplus on a ~$150 million budget? Why are they still fundraising so aggressively in such a situation?
If there is one thing that the COVID pandemic has shown us, it is that resilience is a very good idea - and that grave crises can easily last years at a time or yet another grave crisis comes up like the Ukraine invasion, followed by energy price explosions and insane inflation.
It is a decent idea to have at least five years worth of financial runway these days... you never know what is coming up (or well, we do, climate change, but that still leaves a host of other issues that can go badly wrong).
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was a Wikimedia employee. They told us at the time that in a worst-case scenario of zero fundraising and zero layoffs that the org had a runway of 18 months before they had to start making staffing cutbacks. The worst-case scenario didn't pan out but it was nice to know that my continued employment was fairly secure during that time.
Wikimedia does a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with but I think they do a fairly good job of ensuring the continued existence of Wikipedia.
That said, the Wikimedia foundation has much loftier ideas and sets goals far beyond just keeping the website running. I think almost everyone at the foundation genuinely cares about the org's mission, but that mission probably has different meaning and scope for different people.
Internally, there was a huge push to focus on strategy and expanding beyond just maintaining MediaWiki and some servers. For a taste of what they are aspiring to, at least what is being publicized externally and was getting a lot of focus internally over the last couple of years, see https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/tag/strategy-2/
I mean, they aren't. The amount they are giving to this Information Equity Fund is a small portion of the endownment they are building up; plus it's not "random", it's something they decided was mission-aligned. You disagree with that assessment, but it's not "random"; they've always given other grants too, and continue to, I'm not sure if you and others are opposed to _all_ granting from wikimedia or just disagree with this particular choice. You are allowed to disagree with this particular choice without being required to object to all granting of course -- I feel like people are feeling compelled to argue that wikimedia ought to never give any grants to any third parties, when they really just don't like this particualr choice. There is no reason for such a compulsion. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
But meanwhile... fund-raising to build up a "rainy day" fund of 5x your annual operating budget is... just not something non-profits generally do. It's certainly not standard practice. Of course most organizations wouldn't be able to pull that off even if they decided it's a goal, most orgs don't have the capacity to fund-raise an extra 50%+ beyond their operating budget "just in case". I think it's debatable whether it's a wise or responsible use of funds or a good goal.
There are already many comments saying this but the main objection is asking for money to do one thing and then doing something else with it. A secondary objection, for many, is the nature of the other thing they are doing with the money.
In the context of this particular thread, GP advocated for funding of organizational resilience. While this also isn't what Wikimedia was asking for money for, it would probably be less objectionable to those who disagree with the ultimate destination of their donation.
And yet nobody seems fired up about the other grants wikimedia gives, and has for years, while some are insisting it's just the prinicple of wikimedia giving any grants that they object to, what they are actually focusing on, and their lack of concern with even mentioning those other grants while getting really fired up about this "equity" fund (a topic very likely to fire people up), makes me think that's what's going on must be primarily not secondarily about this particular thing.
It seems silly to argue about whether the people who are making an argument are misrepresenting what their concerns are instead of just believing what they say. But it sounds like you are ready to make some sort of conspiratorial assertion for why that could be.
If there is one thing that the COVID pandemic has shown us, it is that resilience is a very good idea - and that grave crises can easily last years at a time or yet another grave crisis comes up like the Ukraine invasion, followed by energy price explosions and insane inflation.
It is a decent idea to have at least five years worth of financial runway these days... you never know what is coming up (or well, we do, climate change, but that still leaves a host of other issues that can go badly wrong).