Peggy, I have never been of the opinion that Carnegie (or anybody else who has accumulated that much wealth) was any kind of an angel. I celebrate the libraries for their own sake, because libraries and archives are so essential to genealogical research. Still, I am a big believer in making sure that the profiles of notables are of as high a quality as we can manage (narrative biography, at least one picture, sourced, connected, etc.), because it's mostly notable profiles that draw people to WikiTree, and it's the ads shown to visitors that pay for the servers, internet connection, domain registration, and so on. (Much as I personally find him fascinating, my great-great uncle Horatio just isn't going to draw as many visitors to the site.)
And, just generally, I don't consider it my job to pass judgement on people I've never even met. As a genealogist, my job is to document what happened. Other people are perfectly capable of deciding whether a given historical figure was a good person, a bad person, or a mixture of both on the basis of what that person did. So what they need from me is a documented record of what that person did, not my opinions about what they did.
All that said, I don't believe that the comparison with Bill Gates is quite fair. According to Wikipedia, Carnegie gave away nearly 90% of his fortune. According to Bloomberg, Gates was worth $110 billion in 2019, so the $5 billion that he has donated to his foundation is nearly pocket change to him. When Gates has given away so much money that his net worth is down to about $11 billion, then we can compare him to Carnegie.
I know it's common for charities to chase the wealthy for big donations, but that's not as useful a strategy as most people think. I've heard for years that rich people give a smaller percentage of their earnings than poor people do, but I figured that that was an average, and that there would be exceptions. But a few weeks back, I read a story about the top ten charitable donors in the world. Not one (not one!) of the top ten donors gave even 10% of their wealth away. (10%, or a tithe, was what the Law required of the Israelites, and many, if not most, Christians regard it as kind of a minimum giving threshold.) If you gathered together enough people in the bottom decile of annual income to equal the annual income of anybody in the ten ten donors list, and tallied up their charitable contributions, the results would be pretty embarrassing -- for the billionaires.
Although if Wikipedia is correct, then Carnegie does seem to have been the exception. It's too bad that nobody seems to be following his example in that realm.
