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Comment by samcrawford | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to nitpick, but exponentially? Really?

So I just typed the "Total Expenses" line from page 3 of each of their financial reports [0] into Excel, this is the result: https://imgur.com/lIL79IK

It looks like quadratic growth until around 2011, after that it becomes linear. This still seems like a lot of growth, considering the number of pageviews per article seems to be roughly constant over the last 5 years [1]

0: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

1: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...

Edit: this is how last year's expenses break down:

    Salaries and wages:             46,146,897
    Awards and grants:              12,653,284
    Internet hosting:                2,335,918
    In-kind service expenses:        1,361,958
    Donation processing expenses:    4,977,583
    Professional service expenses:   8,998,261
    Other operating expenses:        9,005,744
    Travel and conferences:          2,867,774
    Depreciation and amortization:   2,856,901
    Special event expense, net:        209,690
    ------------------------------------------ 
    Total expenses:                 91,414,010

(sorry if that's unreadable on mobile)

Excuse my ignorance. Does wikimedia pay content writers?

No. All the writing and most of the moderation is done by volunteers. The closest to that on the Foundation's payroll are the about three community managers. The Foundation does employ the engineers writing the software, the sysadmins keeping everything running, a UX team of 14 people, a lot of people related to fundraising, as well as outreach and public relations, some legal staff and various administrative staff. There's a full list of employees and contractors at https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/

They have a UX team? The UX hasn't changed in years!

It's changed pretty heavily for the people who actually do the editing.

Page previews are a fairly recent addition.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews

Nearly two years ago

It's well-documented that active writers are paid shills for corporate clients. I've read interviews where the writer brags about his "ownership" of certain pages.

Does anyone have links to the “well-documented” evidence mentioned above?

So they have huge expenses for a nonprofit, but the people saying exponential growth are actually hyperbolic. Got it.

It's a genuine thing for people these days to misuse the phrase "exponential growth" when they just mean "really fast grow". I don't the hyperbole was strictly intended.

> hyperbolic

Ha.

If the expenses grew with inflation, wouldn't that be exponential growth?

1.3 mill for donation processing expenses? What tge heck? Well, I surely am not donating to them anymore, that is terrible.

Nope - 4.9 million. I'm wondering - do they mean stuff like credit card processing fees, etc?

Most likely. It appears to be around 5% of this years budget. It’s typical to pay 2-3.6% in CC fees alone plus often a transaction fee of 10-30c which can add up on small $1-$5 donations (30c is 6% of $5 and much more of $1).

They may have raised more or less than their annual budget this year plus I imagine probably spend some money on their email campaigns etc.

So it doesn’t seem totally out of line.

Why is this surprising? Everyone who accepts credit cards has to deal with processing fees, fraud prevention, chargebacks, etc. And at a larger scale they need to deal with lawyers and contracts.

Why is no-one commenting that nearly half their expenses are in salaries and wages. They have 354 staff. That's ~130 000 USD per person.

That's pretty reasonable: benefits like health insurance are expensive!

Depending on where they are, and what those positions are, that's pretty cheap... that likely means their average employee's take home is around 80K give or take. Insurance, employer side taxes and other expenses aren't cheap. The government cuts both ways.

If you live in SF, Seattle, Portland, NYC, Boston, Chicago or Philly, 80K is lower-middle class if that. Other cities/countries, it's incredible... just depends.

If your company is spending 130k to employee someone, that likely means the persons actual salary is around 90k. Think of the insurance, administrative costs, recruitment costs etc the company bears.

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