[scrollaway]

Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons are both heavily used within Wikipedia, and Wiktionary is a very useful resource. It's kinda like saying "I don't want the money I donate to Mozilla to end up funding shitty projects like Gecko and Servo! I want it to end up in Firefox!"

There are offshoots in those, yes, but that doesn't make it a huge waste. Remember wikipedia was a very, very long shot for a very long time. To fund successes, you have to fund a lot of potential failures.

In other words, if you trust what the wikimedia foundation is doing, then you should donate to them and trust what they do with it (but feel free to challenge it and voice your opinion as a donor). And if you don't trust what they're doing, then you shouldn't be donating to them in the first place IMO, regardless of their ownership of Wikipedia.

[hug]

Re: Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, I feel like you glossed over "except as those projects also support Wikipedia", and as for Wiktionary, any of the ninety other online dictionary services will do me just as well.

With regards to the comparison to Gecko & Servo: If 80% of the development effort was going towards those projects being used only for integration with FirefoxOS, I would have the same complaint. Mozilla isn't doing that, though, and even when they were funding FirefoxOS, they didn't spit a half page banner in my face every time I opened Firefox saying "Firefox will be dead if you don't send us money!" when they were really talking about FirefoxOS.

In case it wasn't abundantly clear, I'm pointing fingers at Wikimedia's scummy donation-soliciting practices on Wikpedia.

> if you don't trust what they're doing, then you shouldn't be donating to them in the first place IMO, regardless of their ownership of Wikipedia.

I don't. So I don't. And, in fact, will be happy to argue in a bar that they shouldn't be donated to. If I could donate purely to support Wikipedia only, however, I would, and I would also argue that others should too. But I can't. So I don't.

[Mediterraneo10]

> as for Wiktionary, any of the ninety other online dictionary services will do me just as well.

Wiktionary already covers a large number of languages where other online dictionaries have noticeably poorer content, or there may be no other real online dictionary at all. Wiktionary’s entry template puts a lot of emphasis on etymologies, for instance, and these etymologies are often not easy to find on the web (as opposed to dusty print dictionaries one might not have ready access to).

[hug]

Granted, the etymology section on Wiktionary is useful (although I personally have a tendency to hit etymonline.com for etymology).

I really didn't intend for this to come across as a broadside against all of the Wikimedia properties. A projects by themselves, I would say they're all okay, I guess, but they're none of them projects I would siphon money from Wikipedia to fund.