Comment by lwf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lwf | Hacker News Reader

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The latter two of your questions are answered in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports... .

>"In-kind service revenue” includes goods and services that the Wikimedia Foundation would normally pay for, but have been donated to us at no charge, such as bandwidth and hosting services and pro-bono legal services. Further detail is available in ...

> "Other operating expenses” include expenses for facilities such as rent and office and non-office supplies, insurance, annual staff meeting, recruiting, staff development, property taxes and Wikidata project funding.

You can find a more detailed audit report at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...

Thanks for that. I was scratching my head at the "in-kind service revenue". For others that were likewise confused, there is a line item on both sides: it's income and expenses and cancels out. So that makes sense.

The detailed audit report indicates that rent is about $1.5 million. The rest is essentially computer purchases.

I'd still like to see a better explanation of the professional services. But it definitely makes more sense.

I suspect that the majority of of professional services spending is on accountants and lawyers. The Independent Audit report itself likely costs a 6-figure sum. Depending on how much accounting is done in-house vs outsourced, some of it might also fall into professional services.

The bulk of it is likely going to lawyers. A lot of the in-kind donations fall into the same bucket:

> In-kind service revenue and expenses recorded in the statements of activities consist of contributed legal services. The amounts of specialized contributed legal services as revenue and expenses are $2,748,512 and $156,191 for the years ended June 30, 2018 and 2017, respectively. The value of contributed internet hosting services for the years ended June 30, 2018 and 2017 are $32,722 and $58,390, respectively.

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