Oof. Aside from compute costs, what could justify a more than 100% increase in expenses from 2012 to the present? The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective).
I’m curious, it sounds like you’re a casual Wikipedia user so - how do you have any idea if this is true? What about editor features, community, moderation, administrative improvements?
This kind of attitude frustrates me - it’s the sort of attitude that kills nonprofit fundraising efforts unless they are for show in a way that laypeople can understand. Surely you can see how inefficient it would be to run a non profit if everything they spent money on had to be highly visible?
The pace of change appears to be very carefully managed to almost always be positive and minimize pointless disruption. The complaints in this thread are part of why you get those big, flashy redesigns that look great but hurt utility.
Of course as a donor I'd never turn down more good for less money, but I don't think maximizing thriftiness always yields the best value. I'd rather things be just a little plush (if that's how you'd describe the current state) and see Wikipedia continue to succeed as it (largely) has.
My money is limited, the causes which can benefit from it are not. It seems to me the height of self-absorption that an organisation should expect donations over the many other worthwhile causes without justifying the benefit that money would bring.
Changes to editor tools and processes don't cut it. All of those exist in service of improving Wikipedia as a resource. If I can't see those changes as an end-user, I question whether any of them really mattered. Is a fantastic new user-friendly diagnostic machine justified in a hospital if treatment rates don't go up?
In the same period, expenses have grown from 25k to 80M, a 3200x growth. [TFA]
[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e...
As it has attracted global attention and ever more significant influence on people worldwide, Wikipedia's threats are likely more varied and insidious than they were in 2004. The cost of offsetting these threats may not relate to the volume of edits.
I'm not, by the way, suggesting that a 3200x growth in expenses is inherently unjustifiable, just that it should in fact be justified.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... Planned spending 2019 ~92mil
https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e... - ~130% page edits growth 2012-2019 (~35mil expenses, a 260% increase)
https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e... - ~80% page edits growth 2015-2019 (~65mil expenses, a 140% increase)
The rate of increased page edits is closer and closer to the rate of increased expenses. I personally don't think that's a convincing argument, because I haven't seen this massive improvement in tools to justify the extra costs(most of the extra expenditure doesn't seem to be on development, anyway), but I don't think the argument can be dismissed out of hand.
Honest question: How would we as end-users know if information quality went up due to work-reducing changes to editor and administrator tools?
Being pragmatic I agree that there needs to be some saleswork involved in actually getting donations, but I don't like that this is true. It has nothing to do with the quality of the job being done, but simply visualizations of stuff (representative or not) that potential donors want before opening their purse strings.
We can talk all we want about the nonlinearity of cost, but that's such an enormous jump that the idea that a, by your own suggestion, possibly unnoticeable increase in quality is worth the cost beggars belief.
This is a joke, isn't it?
"Make Wikipedia better" is about as explanatory as "Cure Alzheimer's!" yet "Make Wikipedia better" is far more likely to be done and less likely to be funded than "Cure Alzheimer's!"
But here's an easy way to justify:
"Improve the moderation and content-editing tools to encourage more contributions," which has been the justification WMF has used for many recent projects.
It can easily be explained to you, but if that's your criteria, no foundation trying to cure any disease that isn't socially-caused should have your money.
I don't claim in the parent comment that Wikipedia don't justify their expenses (although I don't think they do so sufficiently). I'm responding to the specific claim that there shouldn't be an expectation by donators to understand the benefit of their donation.
To use your hospital analogy, diagnostic quality might be the difference between a hospital that works well, and one that carries our mostly unnecessary medical interventions.
You can't run a government by referendum.
The things do not need to be highly visible of course -- but they should be at least explained. I don't understand why they are not saying things like "we hired 50 more programmers to keep our servers running, and 25 more to develop new AI to fight spam".
Instead, I looked at "2018 Annual Report" [0], and found those specific points:
- Support researchers who make offline wikipedia
- Advertise itself in Nigeria
- Support participation of women in Wikipedia
- AI to detect vandalism
- Page previews
- Content translation tools
That's 1 user feature and 2 editor features. Did I miss something?
[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/
Komen style charities aren't charities.
Source: continuously edited since 2007, and continue in large part due to improved tools.
Do you think that $40 million is a reasonable cost for those improvements?
And yes, it's reasonable. I work in tech as a software engineer and it's not as cheap as people think.
But you’re right, plenty more companies burn through that without much to show for so in comparison WMF aren’t doing too bad, I guess. It still sounds somewhat excessive to me though.
People have finite attention spans and often ignore what isn’t clearly broken.
That's a feature not everything needs to be tricked out with the JavaScript equivalent of spinners.
[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
Also, the cost of those resources — bandwidth, storage, etc — have been decreasing on a per-capacity basis over this time period. Bandwidth, compute, and storage are all vastly cheaper than they were 10 years ago or even 5.