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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all contributed around $50,000 by matching employee gifts."

That seems paltry for Google, given that their knowledge graph benefits a lot from Wikipedia content.

Google gave $2 million in 2010 from searches, and Brin gave $500k. I'm guessing they gave more at various times, but I think you're right, Wikipedia is a vital resource used by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon's AI agents, and they should be donating far more since it is arguably a significant value add for those products.

Throwing money at an organization has diminishing efficacy.

What do you think $2 million or $10 million or $100 million would have done for the Wikimedia organization, you think they would hide the donation <div> next year?

Establish an endowment to ensure they are not fighting for survival in the future.

They could do that themselves and in fact they are - $5m/year goes into their endowment. Take a look at their budget:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

Quite a lot of waste in there, e.g. $850k on "brand strategy" - kind of looks like they have more money than they know what to do with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

I never saw these "Signposts" before, interesting. Was there ever an opposing view released to this, uh, blogpost? Signpost?

edit: apparently there is a kind of discussion section at the bottom

In 2017 WMF had $120M in assets. It's probably closer to $150M today, since they are making over $20M a year in "profit" (revenues minus expenes). The cost of actually running Wikimedia projects (servers + network + salaries of dev ops and salaries of code maintainers) should easily fit below $10M, because it did in 2012. There has been growth since then in terms of usage, but this is very scalable growth that's cheap to handle: it's not servers and network expenses that's been skyrocketing, these are pretty much constant since 2012. It's the salaries, grants and awards. Look at their financial reports[1], and especially compare the growth in expenses over time. Suffice to say, if WMF struggles in the future, it's only due to mismanagement of its cancerous growth.

[1] - https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

> It's the salaries, grants and awards.

Salaries for who?

Grants to who and for what?

Awards to who and for what?

Like, can someone provide a summary, for those of us who don't really have the time to dive into the reports?

The reports are the summary.

They have around 300 FTEs. It might sound high, but they are the 5th most visited website in the world. Of others in the top 10, I think Reddit is the only other company with under 1,000 employees (at around 250). In comparison, Taobao which is also in the top 10 has over 30,000 employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

It was already top 8 in 2012, and had less than half of the headcount it has today, spending a third of what it spends today in salaries.

Eh - I find this public over-scrutiny of a company just because it's a nonprofit to be a little offputing. Sure, you want to know your donations aren't being wasted, but I keep in mind that most non-profits where my friends work have people under-staffed and without enough budgets overall compared to their parallels in commercial businesses.

Do you know for a fact there that what they were doing in 2012 was sustainable for their employees, and building a solid future path for growth? If everyone's overworked and not efficient, keeping it overly lean isn't good in the long term.

Sure, I was an admin on Wikipedia in 2008-2012, and we were doing completely fine. The Foundation was tenth of its current size at the time, and wasn't doing much except keeping the lights running, which is all the community needed. Bear in mind that Wikipedia is run by community, and if the Foundation has anything to say in Wikipedia's internal affairs, it is through employees who also happen to be community members. If the Foundation is overworked and not efficient, it literally doesn't matter, as they don't actually do much on Wikipedia itself.

WMF has been throwing out money for virtually everything except the actual *pedias.

Whatever it takes not to see Jimmy Wales' sad puppy dog mug begging for $5 donations at the top of every page.

I think no matter how much you donate to Wikimedia, they still like having the sad puppy dog. Wikimedia has a huge endowment, with the way the stock market did in recent years, it has grown significantly too.

Your money could have more impact elsewhere.

You can move to Finland, they don't ask for donations here.

In fact, trying to donate gets you a "Thank you for your interest" page: https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...

The legislation could use modernization, but progress is slow...

> by matching employee gifts

The employees of those companies collectively donated $50,000.

Also, WMF has more than enough money to run Wikipedia probably indefinitely anyway. They do other things, but Wikipedia is at no risk of going away.

That seems typical for Google. Since when do they pay content creators properly?

This is called putting lipstick on the pig.

The pig, in this case, being marginal utility theory.

Amazon should be picking up the tab on the AWS costs. Great PR move, great for customer case studies etc and slash what is probably 2nd or 3rd biggest cost driver.

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