Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved
twitter.com
twitter.com
Wikipedia had a really good year in 20-21, their most recent financial report.
They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget, and came out of the year with $240 million in assets.[1]
So they had about half a year's surplus, and wound up with ~2 years worth of savings. And yes, that's a simplification, a good chunk of those assets are necessary to continue operating and cannot be liquefied to cover operating expenses.
In 19-20, they took in $120 million against a $111 million operating budget.[2]
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
[2]https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
So, yes, Wikipedia is doing well - as we should hope they would be. But no, they are not rolling in it, and yes they do depend on our continued support to continue doing well.
Edit: The article linked in the tweet asks valid questions and puts the stats in better context, but the twitter thread presents the numbers in a way that is very, frustratingly, misleading.
Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keeping the site serving is.
For example, in 2016 Wikipedia served a similar amount of page views as it does today [1] on an operating budget of about half [2]. Go farther back and my impression is it's much more dramatic, though I'm not finding good page view statistics for, say, 2010.
[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...
[2] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat... vs https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat...
In this case their program expenses are a mix of incredibly valuable things ("keep wikipedia online") and more borderline things ("redesigning the article editing UI"). When their fundraising talks about the former as if it's what the marginal dollar will be spent on, that's pretty misleading.
(I don't think this marketing is unusually misleading for a non-profit, and likely better than average; the bar for honesty in fundraising is depressingly low.)
You keep harping on this, but improving the article editing UI seems like an absolutely valuable thing for wikipedia to invest in. Retaining existing and attracting new contributors is essential to wikipedia's future, and the editing experience is an essential part of that.
I don't know how long ago they added the hover infoboxes, but I also noticed those. But that's a relatively small feature, at least from my perspective.
Sysadmins are paid to make sure wikipedia doesn't have random downtime. Time spent on bugfixing should only be noticed if someone screws up.
If you want to see what people are doing - the git repo is public. https://github.com/wikimedia
I'm guessing I'll end up either using an extension or writing something up in Greasemonkey. There might even already be a userscript out there I can use.
I'm pretty sure there's a public roadmap somewhere, and you could always follow through their bug system or PRs. Everything is developed in the open, even the infrastructure (disclaimer: I founded wikimedia cloud services, and opened up the infrastructure development).
But that tweet and thread are sensationalist and not doing it in a way that will lead to a reasonable dialog around that question. The linked article is better - but still sensationalist.
Compare that budget and the scale of Wikimedia foundation to the organizations that are running websites of a similar scale. Wikimedia is still tiny. And they are doing a ton of good.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
It's gone through a phase of planned, aggressive growth of its headcount. Its salary costs have increased tenfold over a decade:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
As you can see on that page, individual executives' salaries have risen by 20, 30 percent in the space of two years. And all the while people are told the Wikimedia Foundation needs money "to keep Wikipedia online", or "to protect Wikipedia's independence".
No. If you want to grow your headcount, tell people why. If you want ten times as much money from the public ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
... then say what you are going to do with it. Don't hide behind "keeping Wikipedia online".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
> ... then say what you are going to do with it. Don't hide behind "keeping Wikipedia online".
Fair. I'm with you there. I would like clearer documentation of Wikimedia's organizational breakdown and where they are spending that budget.
Nobody has ever seen one in all the six years the Endowment has existed.
Wellll that's an interesting topic in and of itself. But OK I get what you mean.
https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TCPB1...
When you pay a fee to a website - do you question how they spend that money to this level of detail? Do you ask, I dunno, lets go with Slack, to break down their fee by how much of it is necessary to keep Slack online "as is"?
I don't think I've ever seen someone do that. There's a level of entitlement that comes with donations that people just don't attach to services they purchase.
Wikipedia isn't a charity in the traditional sense - IE it's not taking those donations and redistributing them to those in poverty.
It's an organization building and maintaining a platform that provides pretty a vital service to society. Almost everyone who donates to it will have gotten far more value from Wikipedia than the cost of their donation. Maybe, instead of thinking of it as "donation", people should be thinking of their contributions as a "sliding scale fee".
On the other hand, I do believe Wikipedia should be open and should be accountable to its community. I just believe the community should be reasonable when exercising that accountability.
When I donate to a charity I compare the altruistic benefit my marginal contribution will produce to the amount I'm donating. This doesn't work very well, because it's really hard to estimate the benefit to society. But it still worth doing, because there are a lot of really valuable things that aren't going to be funded unless we put up our money.
Where I have an issue (and I suspect many others do) is when Wikipedia phrases donation requests as "keeping the lights on" or something to that effect. I suspect there would be a lot less hate if the requests were phrased like "help Wikipedia grow" or something like that.
It's more of a framing issue than an issue with where money is being spent. If Slack was claiming that they needed my fee to "keep the lights on," I think most people would have issues with that language/framing.
Nonprofits are cost centric and it’s both valid and essential to question the cost structure. $100M turnover seems like a lot of opex
In particular, "32% direct support to communities" was seen as complete pie in the sky. 32% of $163M revenue would be $52 million.
But once you deduct the $68M salary bill and $6M in donation processing expenses from the $112M expenses total, you only have $38M left!
So how can 32% of revenue be "direct support to communities"??
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
"Direct support to communities", to me, is when you give something "directly" to a community member, such as a travel grant, or a grant for equipment, or pay for reference material.
The Wikimedia Foundation does things like that too, to be fair, but it accounts for about 3% of its expenditure, not 32%.
It's in the $9.8M "Awards and grants" item here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
However, $5.5M of that $9.8M is money the Foundation paid into its own Endowment (which, by the way, has never published audited accounts). So only a little over $4M are left for "direct support to the communities".
I'm not sure what they intend to communicate with the word 'direct', either in "Direct support to communities" or "Direct support to websites".
Wikipedia provides a good service for the money it charges you. It doesn't charge you anything.
The thing about free things is that they aren't really free, someone is paying for it and the people doing the work to keep Wikipedia online are the best skilled and placed and experienced to decide these kind of spending decisions, not people with no personal investment orwho do not donate and don't even edit or do any work but somehow have opinions how other people should do their job for free.
If you use Wikipedia and getting value from it then you can't really complain, it's not positive.
I get a lot of utility from Wikipedia, but is my marginal dollar helping the mission or paying for dinner at a conference? Perhaps I’d be better off donating to an open source foundation for that part of the charity portfolio, which may actually have more impact on Wikipedia!
I think this org doesn’t communicate what it does well.
In person conferences move open source projects forward. They build relationships and synergy between people who usually only see each other online. A cheap dinner is probably a lot of bang for buck when it comes to outcomes.
"I thought you were doing it"
If you want to give, then give and I recommend giving to charity, the world needs lasting regular investment.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, someone is ultimately paying. If everybody assumes everybody else will pay for it and nobody is willing to add funds, then that service shall pass away.
Look at any social good and the investment it receives and the state of repair of those same services.
As charity funding is effectively a closed system, excessive contribution to Wikipedia is to the detriment of other charities, with minimal net benefit.
If you think one charity is more deserving your money than Wikipedia, then you are free to decide that with your resources.
You decide how to spend your money and Wikipedia decides how to spend theirs.
Resource allocation is not a solved problem and it is inherently political.
If you're working in the field, you have a perspective of what resources you need to do the job properly and it's always higher than what people outside the field believe.
Were the situations reversed (you were Wikipedia), would you believe what you do today?
If you could do it cheaper, why aren't you?
Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) can be the best in its class without the Wikimedia foundation being beyond criticism. 99% of what makes Wikipedia great was already there a decade ago, with exponentially less cost.
That's where money should be going.
I can write using simpler language. It just doesn't come naturally--so perhaps, "re-write using simpler language" would be more correct. My apologies.
When deciding where to donate we should consider where our money will do the most good. "Keep Wikipedia online" is a candidate for one of the most important things, if that's actually what your money will help do. But other Wikimedia projects, while useful, are generally nowhere near as high priority, and there are a lot of other places we could be donating!
People may be excited to fund that other work too, but they should make the case for it instead of pretending there's a risk Wikipedia and their other sites will drop off the internet.
The giant operating budget is what people take issue with.
People see these banners on the website and assume that their donations are going to fund the website. However, the Wikimedia Foundation has been inexplicably expanding their budgets to match whatever amount of money comes in each year, leading them to this endless cycle of needing ever-increasing amounts of donations because they're doing ever-increasing amounts of spending on various activities unrelated to serving the website.
Remember: the WMF less than ten years ago themselves said they could survive quite well on "$10M+/year".
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
Now they ask for $160M+.
At some point the message has to change. It has to become something a little more like: Look, so far we've done this which you thought was cool. Now we want to do X, Y and Z. Will you support us?
They have had some marginal change in hosting fees, so a 1200% change in costs seems reasonable?
I think this is a perfectly valid idea and would encourage you to lead with this sort of approach in trying to get the Foundation to change strategy. It's straightforward and constructive. Pointing out all the ways the fundraising is bad is not nearly as useful as suggesting ways to approach it differently and improve it.
(I normally don't talk about Fundraising stuff as a volunteer, but the Meta thread where I was pinged led me here).
Where does it all go?
For the organization, sure. For the content it may very well be.
Nobody is saying wikipedia should have zero donations. Just that people piling on extra money should cool it.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
Then read this 2013 post from a past Wikimedia VP:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
So there is a difference between keeping the Wikimedia Foundation organization going and keeping Wikipedia going. Keeping the Wikimedia Foundation going at its current size costs about 10 times as much as just keeping Wikipedia going, under the assumptions of that 2013 post.
You can't use "keep Wikipedia online" indefinitely as a justification for raising ever more money in order to expand. The Wikimedia Foundation should talk far more in its fundraising about what those hundreds of additional people are actually doing, including projects other than Wikipedia, instead of projecting this image of a small raft of people struggling to hold Wikipedia together with duct tape.
The organization becomes a parasite that exists only to perpetuate itself. Hiring and spending expand to fill all available space which becomes its own justification to increase fundraising further. If any actual work for the public good gets done that's just a side benefit.
If WMF had simply held spending constant (adjusting for inflation) for just a few years they could have had an endowment big enough to ensure Wikipedia is able to run independently forever. If they were being responsible they'd also have spun it into a subsidiary non-profit that owned Wikipedia along with that endowment with a charter to focus exclusively on running Wikipedia and developing the software. Then their octopus of random spending programs could be operated as a sister subsidiary without any risk of destroying Wikipedia itself.
Honestly at this point if they proposed that plan I'd be willing to donate to get it done. Instead they hold Wikipedia hostage to justify their expanding empire.
It’s such an amazingly great deal that I honestly think, who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way? Who cares that Jimmy Wales drives a BMW instead of a Volkswagen?
Who is the loser here? Do we really need to get this level of angry online because an already amazing situation isn’t perfect?
Wikipedia is the most widely read reference source on the planet. Wouldn't you rather it was stewarded by an organisation that was honest with the public?
There are other losers. This man, guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#S...
Actually, that sounds wrong. He is a wonderful man, but one that really should not have been put in this invidious position.
What about her?
https://twitter.com/tizzie/status/1570095249044967424
There are other losers still. People in India and South Africa are scared into donating to Wikipedia by emails that raise the spectre of a subscription fee, or of Wikipedia blinking out of existence for lack of funds.
There are other charitable causes they could have donated to in their own country, rather than sending money to the US, money that might have saved lives in their own country, rather than added another treat to a US employee's benefits package.
Those are some of the "losers".
If Wikipedia didn't "guilt-trip" him into it I'm sure some Nigerian prince would have.
Speaking of manipulative your augment takes a complex situation and turns it into "poor people using the last of their money to pay for US employees extra benefits"
https://wantremote.com/company_for_remote_job/wikimedia-foun...
... include "reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, massages, cooking classes and much more"
This is a fine thing I'm sure, but I wouldn't want it to be paid for by Indian or African donors worried Wikipedia will disappear, or start charging a subscription, if they don't donate.
So fundraising appeals in the developing world in particular should be dialed right down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
You can't get employees if you don't pay them. This is what paying employees means in the tech industry.
When you have big money then you think like big money. What people are angry about is WMF becoming too big and the heads managing this budget becoming independent of the actual foot soldiers. It's not about starving wikipedia, it's about not making it bigger than it needs to be, because the bigger you are, the more problems you have.
> who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way?
It's not about optimizing stuff, it's about not growing into a monster.
Jimmy is not a wikimedia foundation employee (he is a board member, but that is unpaid). None of the donations are going to him.
It's not, really. It's about how you frame things, and the follow-up tweets touch on that:
>You wouldn't think so from the fundraising emails currently being sent out, telling people to donate "to keep Wikipedia online", saying it's "awkward to ask", etc. A recent poll of Wikipedia volunteers condemned these emails as unethical and misleading
>If people want to throw money into a bottomless pit, fine; but let's not pretend that the money is needed "to keep Wikipedia online".
>And that story is not the story told to prospective donors. Wikipedia and its unpaid volunteers – the people who actually write and curate Wikipedia – deserve better.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#S...
The Wikimedia Foundation has also just been fundraising in India and South Africa, again asking people there to donate so Wikipedia stays online for them, ad-free, subscription-free and independent.
None of these executives have anything do with the Wikipedia content. All of that is written by unpaid volunteers in their spare time. When Wikipedia first became a top-10 website, the Wikimedia Foundation had less than a dozen staff, and annual expenses of $2 million. I am not saying lets go back to that; I'm only saying this to make the point that the success of Wikipedia was not dependent on highly paid executives. It happened when there weren't any. The main value of the site comes from the volunteers.
Most in-demand, skilled labour is much more pricey than what the average person makes.
Imagine you were asked to donate to "keep the animal shelter open", and went you went there you found that they were using gold water dishes for the little critters. You would be within your right to complain. You thought you were donating to keep it operating, but now you find that they're using funds on frivolous expenses. Is there something a dish made out of gold does that one made out of plastic doesn't, to justify the expense? Is there something a $350k executive does that a minimum wage one (or even none at all) doesn't?
Any organization that asks for donations would be subject to criticism if it doesn't optimize its operations as much as possible.
Then what is the relavence of saying "I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled ..."? The donors dont do work similar. The only reason i could possibly imagine bringing this up would be something to do with envy between the average person's salary vs the salary of a high skill position. If not that, what was this sentence trying to say?
> Is there something a $350k executive does that a minimum wage one
350k executives exist. Minimum wage one's don't.
Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.
Simply put, if Wikipedia asks for donations to continue operating, 100% of those donations should go towards server costs. That can include the hardware costs, the power, the bandwidth, and the people who maintain those servers. Using the money that was raised to keep it running for any other purpose is at least deceptive.
>Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.
Now imagine that the shelter spends only 10% of its donations on dog food and other dog-related costs, and the rest goes to salaries for people who aren't caring for the dogs and to awareness campaigns. (I'm not implying this is the breakdown in Wikipedia's case; it's just an example.) Even if you think these are worthwhile uses for those funds, don't you think donors should know that their donations will be spent this way before they donate?
I know people like to complain that managers are useless, but if they really were, every company would get rid of them.
The cost of managers is what is being complained about in this thread. There might be other superflorus things wmf might spend money on which i might agree with you on, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.
Which is way way below industry average.
>But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.
you were raising an irrelevant point, because the salaries of the direct managers of the operations team is not what's under discussion here. They wouldn't need such a deep organizational structure if they weren't paying a bunch of people that take no part in running the site.
Even if you cut everyone doing software development (which would in itself probably cause a collapse since that is critical to keeping wikipedia running), cut all the lawyers (also pretty important), cut the trust and safety people, etc - you are still left with quite a lot of sysadmins, more than can reasonably be handled by a single manager.
Now, if your primary objective is not to run a website but something else entirely, then it does make sense for your infrastructure and the salaries of the people maintaining it not to be the largest part of your budget.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
This was two years ago. Some of these salaries rose by over 20 or 30 percent in the space of two years, when annual US inflation was at 2%. I fully expect to find even greater salary rises since – once the Form 990 for this year is published sometime in 2024 – as US inflation went up during the pandemic.
And Wikipedia became a top-10 website in 2007, when there was no C-Suite. There seems to be little awareness these days that the main value of the site to the public was and is built and maintained by unpaid volunteers.
As far as early days of wikipedia. I agree the community is what provides value. But at the same time i think there is a lot of rose coloured glasses for that era. I remember there being a lot of downtime and slowness on the site in that era.
In fact, I would argue that an executive at a small operation has more responsibility than one at a large operation.
Of course, judging performance like that is very difficult, and predicting it in advance is even harder, so it's possible that the highly paid executive would actually perform worse than a volunteer (or a random number generator), but if the complaint about "lavishness" is really about inequality (i.e. the executive's standard of living being much higher than they need / the median citizen's) then that criticism should probably be directed at the tax policies of the relevant governments.
But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive.
The difference is who is in control and what are their priorities and influences. Since "the organization" is making the decisions - and, completely incidentally, "the CEO" is the head of "the organization" - it just so happens that "the organization" finds that "the CEO" should be paid lavishly.
Rich people gonna prioritize rich people.
Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?
Individual persons are not orders of magnitude more productive on their own, they're just in environments that allow them to be more productive, for example by giving them control over more resources.
True, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's a realistic hypothetical at all.
They're not though. Especially not multiple of them providing the same service.
Probably any tech company of note is paying "executives" far, far more than that, at least in the US.
They are all a bit over-the-top.
SDEs with a few YOE are getting this no problem at top companies. Why wouldn't the CEO of the fifth biggest website on the internet?
YouTube however is a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is a tech company.
They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content.
In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maintaining some sort of technology, then pretty much every company would be a tech company nowadays. In that scenario the category would be truly meaningless.
The easiest way to spot a tech company is looking at their R&D spending: a tech company is constantly exploring instead of just maintaining.
Parag has around 3900 employees. Wikipedia has around 550. Around 7x multiplier.
$30m / 7 = ~$4.3mil
Sundar has around 135k employees. 245x multiplier.
$250m / 245 = ~$1mil.
$350k seems like a steal no matter how you put it.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
Wikimedia Foundation (2019): 291 employees, $56M salary costs.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
Less than twice the US employees, more than five times the salary costs. (Both orgs also have some non-US employees included in the salary costs total, but they are a small minority of the staff.)
Salary costs don't need to be looked at as something to aggressively push down. You can treat your employees well while still being a non-profit.
(Though I'm not claiming wikipedia treats their employees well, I have no idea.)
You can just keep moving the goal posts every time you get proven wrong.
Also, you were complaining about Wikipedia being in the US/SF, when the Internet Archive is also in SF.
Seems like anywhere else it would be pretty insane money for nonprofits.
I remember looking at the vote history where they decided The Greyzone (one of whose journalists was called to testify at the UN on their investigative journalism) wasn’t a “credible source”, the very first vote I checked belonged to a unique username that was used on other sites for an anti-Palestinian think tank academic.
For completely uncontroversial topics it’s fine, for everything else you have to read all the dismissed/shut out outsiders complaining on the talk page to get any real sense of the topic.
Wikipedia has little legitimacy which is the purpose of an encyclopedia, I’ll never donate $1 to it and if it shut down tomorrow I wouldn’t care.
A UN committee is equipped to go beyond simply reciting what secondary sources say. It can conduct it's own research, and carefully compare different secondary sources. So it makes sense for them to want to hear from people that sometimes say interesting things but aren't always reliable.
I don’t know what “employees of the Russian government” you’re talking about (maybe RT articles?) but I’ve watched WaPo and NYT perpetually without criticism or follow up publish White House and State Dept. talking points.
If they had spent wisely they could easily have a $0.5bn endowment by now and basically be self-sustaining without donations.
It also feels like a massive waste for one of the few open source organisations that is actually well funded. Where are the technical improvements to Wikipedia? The only thing I remember changing in the last 10 years is the link hover box which is very nice, but is that it?
"Back in 2014, we had a very clear list of how to fix talk pages. Yet the mw:Talk pages project only started in 2019."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Which reminds me: 3 of the 6 community candidates shortlisted for the Wikimedia board this year supported election compass statement #5:
"WMF fundraising is deceptive: it creates a false appearance that the WMF is short of money while it is in fact richer than ever."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
It really feels like there is a fundamental disconnect between project contributors and the team making decisions at the foundation level. Of course, I expect to some degree that there will be disagreements, and that is why a foundation needs to exist, but the last couple of years its seemed a lot like people are just being stonewalled.
Ultimately, the communications gap is by far the most concerning part of it for me, even to the point where I would suggest the donation campaign is a symptom rather than the cause.
They bring management consultants' jargon that alienates volunteers because to them it sounds phony. They want to do things top-down, because that is what they are used to, and what they feel they have to do make "their mark" which will look good on their CV when they move on in a couple of years' time to another job that hopefully pays them more. Meanwhile, the volunteers are there year after year, observing fads coming and going while often not getting the services they would actually like.
Above all, there is a such a growth in talk fests and bureaucracy. Grand plans and strategies are developed over years ("By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us") and then everything moves at a glacial pace. "Strategy started 7 years ago and yet we still havent even reached the implementation of anything" said one long-time volunteer on the mailing list the other day who felt like the WMF is actually moving things backwards:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
Even editors usually loyal to the Foundation – former board members – are beginning to voice gentle complaints. "Bureaucracy is defeating us":
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
Their pleas are falling on deaf ears.
The most useful thing that a typical user can donate to WMF is their time. So edit a few articles and get involved with the process if you're so inclined. It's volunteer labor, over and above all else, that keeps the projects running. If you're a minor donor then you need to understand that your money goes to support the movement, not simply the service.
On a completely unrelated note, I was looking at a somewhat complicated Wikipedia page yesterday and noticed a piece of text I would like to edit. It had some stuff (citations and references) I felt I didn’t understand how to edit without being sure I wouldn’t break anything. Is there a good forum or place where I could ask for help with my edit?
Here's a link to the ideas page discussing the change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...
And a link to a page describing the changes:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...
1. preview changes until the result looks the way you think it should
2. have faith that if you broke something non-obvious, then the WikiGnomes will fix it (and then you can look at the page history and see the change and learn)
3. be bold! If you've never had an edit reverted you aren't contributing enough.
To ask questions, a good place to start is the Teahouse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse
Good luck!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment
Hosting costs them $2.4M a year:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
Less than ten years ago, one of their VPs said they could sustain their mission on "$10M+/year":
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
What he actually said in 2013 was this:
"WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it's _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring. But I would argue that an endowment, to actually be worthwhile, should aim for a significantly higher base level of minimal annual operating expenses, more in the order of magnitude of $10M+/year, to ensure not only bare survival, but actual sustainability of Wikimedia's mission. The "what's the level required for bare survival" question is, IMO, only of marginal interest, because it is much more desirable, and should be very much possible, to raise funds for sustaining our mission in perpetuity."
Total Wikimedia assets (Foundation + Endowment funds at Tides) stood at about $400 million in March 2022.
I'm really tired of your argument that hosting costs $2.4m a year. It's disinformation at best, because you're leaving out salaries of the folks who keep it running.
And they are saying this because hosting costs are subtly ...
https://www.wionews.com/science-technology/exclusive-wikiped...
("Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites, yet many people don’t know that it is hosted and operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Unlike other top websites, we rely on donations to support Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects ...")
... and not so subtly ...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/wiki...
("But why does the “Wiki” continually appeal for funding? ... the wheels keep turning, and it has massive bandwidth and hosting service costs.")
... alluded to in press reports designed to stimulate giving. So I think it is fair enough to point out that the scale of WMF expenses is not actually due to hosting costs.
Lastly, Erik's $10M+ estimate very clearly included the requisite salaries.
Note that any site near Wikipedia's scale has at least 2-3x more software engineers (many of them have thousands of engineers), and much larger legal teams. Support roles grow in parallel with employee size. Wikimedia's overall salary cost is quite amazing for what they maintain.
I tend to only donate to places that seem to spend the money well and efficiently, for example.
But guess what, maybe their faith that this organization is misplaced.
I'd say most people do, yes.
I'd say most people do, yes. Especially when it's something like $10.
The people who make editing wikipedia their identity have A LOT of time on their hands, and LOVE fixing these kinds of things because it makes wikipedia better, and look better.
Wikipedia's bias is well known.
From the page on abortion: > When properly done, induced abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine.
Mind you, not too safe for the baby.
Instead of pretending to be foolish, why not give a better example?
The issue is that in the world we live in every organization has as its primary goal to stay alive and grow - the primary goal of the WMF is to get more money, to pay themselves better. The knowledge curated by volunteers became merely a product they can use to profit from.
Not even 5% of their annual expenses are for hosting. It would be entirely possible for them to cap their donations to 50 million, and wikipedia itself would still be the same. But hundreds of people would stop receiving money for what is likely a privileged and secure job that doesn't require lots of effort. A secure bubble to live in and feel good about. Sadly, this is technically parasitic - others are doing the work, and these people leach on both the work of volunteers, and money of donors.
The sad truth is that emotionally manipulative messages are essential to the survival and growth of the WMF. It's simply a complacent strategy to get the biggest financial return with the least amount of work. If they published a message that said "This year we need 10 million to survive, everything extra is optional and you don't need to donate if you don't have spare money. No matter what happens, Wikipedia will stay online, because we will always manage to collect enough money to cover the hosting", then many privileged people at the WMF would lose their secure job.
And that's why the WMF will NEVER change the strategy, even though they pay lip-service to keep the volunteers in line.
If one day they get 500 million per year in donations, their expenses will rise accordingly, to something like 400 million, as putting away 100 million is in their best own interest. What's not in their own interest, though, is respecting the wishes of the volunteers and donors.
When we look at it from the outside, we can understand the donation campaigns as the work of a self-serving entity that takes the free knowledge of the world hostage for their own advantage.
Now, no one can blame them - in the system we live in, this is the only way how organizations can exist. They always try to survive and grow and sustain itself.
The bigger problem is that society hasn't yet figured out how to create structures that don't devolve into money-grabs, but continue to serve the public good.
The problem is with the incentives and lack of transparency. A traditional corporation has an incentive to be economical - at least small and middle sized companies do. If you have 10 employees, and one of them has 0% productivity, you have to fire him.
WMF has what to them likely feels like an endless money flow based on nothing but a banner. They can use as much money as they receive, and there won't be any negative consequences at all in the short-term.
What the WMF calls "expenses" is actually simply the decision to transfer most of the income immediately into the hands of the employees of the WMF.
In a world of ads, affiliate links and profit-driven journalism, Wikipedia, despite its faults, is essential, even in the state it's currently in. It should be scrutinized, but be kept in mind that it's still one of the best things that exist on the world wide web.