[adventured]

> whereas if they had an endowment or some other investment account backing them, they'd be able to survive in perpetuity

There's a strong argument that entities like Wikipedia having to constantly go back to the community trough to survive, assists in keeping them well behaved. I prefer to keep Wikipedia begging and slightly desperate, rather than obese, detached, entitled, crusty and overly bureaucratic.

The user community that funds them can kill them off through funding deprivation in a short amount of time if Wikipedia decided to become a scumbag. Their annual cost to operate has perpetually increased, it's closing in on $100 million now (three or four more fiscal years at the rate they've been increasing it). They wouldn't survive long without the donations flowing in every year. They could plausibly make a large deal with eg Google on advertising if the user funding dried up due to bad behavior, however that would just be more likely to accelerate their implosion.

It's dangerous to the mission of a charity / non-profit to hand it a position of certain financial perpetuity. All organizations are very much susceptible to bureaucratic creep and wandering off mission in such situations. It's why many of the great philanthropists (Buffett, Gates and Carnegie to name a few) have sought to expend their fortunes relatively rapidly in charity rather than have the charitable trove exist in perpetuity via a perma-institution for parasites to attach to over many decades.

[adriand]

This is a great comment and a really valuable perspective. I have to note, however, that financially precarious nonprofits can also veer off in bad directions, or become ossified, or whatever, and the result is they fail outright.

A benefit to Wikipedia’s situation is they go directly to their user base for funds. When nonprofits are financially precarious or dependent and rely on small numbers of moneyed donors, they can just as easily go off mission and/or become corrupted.

[kijin]

> When nonprofits are financially precarious or dependent and rely on small numbers of moneyed donors, they can just as easily go off mission and/or become corrupted.

What you're describing is exactly the situation that Mozilla has been in for the last decade or so, and I always feel a little uncomfortable about it. The vast majority of their income is from search deals with one or two vendors.

[taohansen]

This was the Buddha's own thinking when he established his order of monks. Sadly, it has not weathered the last couple thousand years in such grace, as many East Asian Buddhist monasteries have become thoroughly corrupt, with monks misappropriating funds.

Perhaps nothing can preserve institutions from ossifying than date-determined termination.