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The annual Wikipedia fund-raising drive is on, and I encourage everybody who uses the site to lend a hand!!!

Or not. Wikipedia is flush with cash--more than it knows what to do with, and orders of magnitude more than it takes to keep the site running.

What does it do with the money? Political lobbying for large corporations, mostly. After all, its contributors and editors are unpaid, and the amount it brings in has a couple more zeros on the end than the amount it takes to keep the Web site running. Wealthy donors and large corporations donate millions a year, and it recently nearly lost its tax exempt status in the UK for selling links to business-related articles on its front page "featured articles" list (for a few hundred thousand dollars a pop). Seriously, it doesn't need your contribution, and your contribution is more likely to end up in a lobbyist's pocket than paying for bandwidth.

Well, it's too late to take into consideration this year, but thanks for the input.

I didn't particularly care for the journalistic style of your linked Guardian article...not particularly what I'd call unbiased reporting, so I did some searching and found Wikimedia's unaudited financial statements for the 6 months ended 12-31-2012, which do show that they are, indeed, quite flush...$33,610,040 cash ($15,455,095 net income).

I've got no idea, though, what "why does it keep pestering you" means, because they do only one fund-raiser/year, in July, in the US, and they don't even make use of my e-mail address. (Pretty smart, actually, not bothering people at year-end when they're involved with an endless flow of solicitations.)

I've been out of accounting for many years and haven't kept up, but I thought the IRS had instituted rules to prevent cash accumulations such as Wikimedia's.