Wikipedia is a fascinating story of well earned success and growth without the reigns of vc dominating its trajectory. I imagine they have had a lot of tricky decision making. I’m curious what their process has been (as someone who uses Wikipedia but really doesn’t know things are running behind the scenes).
It's sort of complicated -- there's an ideological nonprofit called the Wikimedia Foundation that hosts all the various WikiProjects and maintains the software that's used (mostly mediawiki and some associated services). When you see those banner ads on wikis for donations, that's who you're donating to.
However, the Foundation is very hands-off about the content of wikis, which tend to run on "consensus"[0] with the editing-community for that wiki. That establishes the policies for the wiki, and often influences the technical decision-making for specific wikis. Also, the Foundation writes mediawiki extensions for a bunch of non-core behavior, but the individual wiki communities take a strong hand in whether they're enabled for that wiki. It's why the WYSIWYG editing environment (VisualEditor) is so inconsistently available between wikis, for instance.
Some wiki communities have a fairly fraught relationship with the Foundation, generally if they feel like they're being pushed into things. There have been controversies about things like the Foundation banning abusive users project-wide, or Foundation employees editing wikis from their staff-affiliated accounts. It's generally very inside-baseball though, and if you're outside the community it's hard to hear about.
Wikipedia is a fascinating story of well earned success and growth without the reigns of vc dominating its trajectory. I imagine they have had a lot of tricky decision making. I’m curious what their process has been (as someone who uses Wikipedia but really doesn’t know things are running behind the scenes).