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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...

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...

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Redesigning the article editing UI is pretty darn important when the only thing that ensures the site stays up to date is attracting new editors to work on it. Nobody wants a dead Wikipedia with hopelessly obsolete and misleading information, even though it would be incredibly cheap to host. And the Wikipedia partner projects are just as important as Wikipedia itself to the broader ecosystem of open content and open knowledge. Wikipedia needs its sister projects, and money spent on them is in no way "wasted".

If they want to recruit new editors, the most urgent thing to do is fix the existing editor clique's reputation for being neophobic, vituperative, and ad hominem.

That's where money should be going.

Are you feeling vituperative because your edits got rejected for using obscure words?

I don't have a wikipedia account because of the reputation.

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.

Yes, Wiktionary, Commons, and the other sister projects are very useful, to various degrees integrated with Wikipedia in value-adding ways, and generally serve the foundation's mission and the few remaining vestiges of an open internet. If you want an example of an open source nonprofit wasting all their money on inflated salaries and pointless vanity projects no one uses, compare Mozilla.

I think the barriers for new editors are cultural rather than technical.

I agree that growth of the editor base is essential to the continuation of Wikipedia, but are the consumers(as the people I presume donate the most, tho I might be totally wrong) not just as important?

That "Where Your Money Goes" overview was particularly derided by Wikipedians in the Village Pump poll. It's so fuzzy it could mean anything.

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...

Sounds like most of the direct support to communities is the work of salaried Wikimedia employees? Which seems plausible to me!

Is that what most people would understand by the term "direct support"?

"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".

They list as examples "grants, projects, trainings, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors". I agree that it's a bit misleading to put 'grants' first if that's only a small part of what they do.

I'm not sure what they intend to communicate with the word 'direct', either in "Direct support to communities" or "Direct support to websites".

Seems a bit silly to me. Working on the UI that enables expanding and maintaining wikipedia feels like a reasonable top priority of the organization responsible for maintaining wikipedia. If they just "served" it, it would collapse.

I agree it's a reasonable thing for them to work on, but not to fundraise for under the banner of "keep Wikipedia online".

Why not?

Because it doesn't contribute to Wikipedia remaining online.

If they get more donations it does, though.

If we agree that a poorly designed experience will become obsolete over time, then how does this expenditure not increase Wiki’s chances of staying online?

The experience isn't and wasn't poorly designed, though. It could surely be improved, but we're incredibly far from "Wikipedia dies through neglect" territory.

So netflix should have only paid for DVDs and shipping?

Elaborate?

Not the GP, but I think they mean keeping an organization alive in the exact state it exists now vs. enabling it to change to adapt to a changing world portend opposite chances that an organization will remain around in the long term.

I don't know. Here's where I start to break with some of the ways people are thinking about this.

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 pay money for a service I compare the benefit I'm getting to the cost of the service and decide whether it's worth it. This works pretty well!

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.

I certainly think it's reasonable to donate money without a breakdown of where it's going to go. I also think that the things that Wikipedia is doing are perfectly reasonable.

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.

A nonprofit should always be held to a higher standard. Slack is a profit making concern valued by its utility, not its cost.

Nonprofits are cost centric and it’s both valid and essential to question the cost structure. $100M turnover seems like a lot of opex

Yeah, I think it's valid to ask whether Wikipedia's expenses are too high, or whether they are spending on the right things.

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.

The question to me is what donors are told. The Wikimedia Foundation built a $100 million endowment in five years, half the time it had budgeted:

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".

> 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".

Fair. I'm with you there. I would like clearer documentation of Wikimedia's organizational breakdown and where they are spending that budget.

I would also like to see public audited statements for their endowment, now holding about $115M.

Nobody has ever seen one in all the six years the Endowment has existed.

From your link: 25% overhead doesn’t really seem that bad? If those numbers are accurate, 75c of every dollar goes directly to hosting, development, and community support (things like grants and legal aid for editors). That’s probably on par if not better than most nonprofits.

25% overhead is what EU/EC project funds allow & provide. This is not a huge percentage. It’s pretty normal.

The important thing isn't how much of a project is "overhead", it's what you get for your donation. A project distributing lollypops might have 5% overhead, but I would still prefer to donate to one that distributed vaccines with 30% overhead.

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.)

> and more borderline things ("redesigning the article editing UI")

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.

Have you noticed any actual development on Wikipedia? Only thing that changes from the user perspective is that the donation request get more and more annoying every year.

I noticed the new editor. I can't say I'm a huge fan of it, but I did notice it.

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.

wikimedia labs built a world-class setup with many new services and tech, for one example

You shouldn't notice much of it.

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 have noticed some changes like in how they handle media, but most of their development must be backend work because for the most part you shouldn't notice a bunch of changes. The site should be kept as simple and unobtrusive as possible. The only feature I really want them to have that they don't is dark mode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dark_mode_(gadget)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dark_mode

I did find that, and I'm glad they have something, but I'd prefer not to sign up for or need to be logged into an account. I'd also rather not have to audit/edit an extension. Ideally they'd have a URL for it, like https://dm.en.wikipedia.org

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.

Ideally they made their site responsive and respected the prefers-color-scheme CSS media query. Having people share m.wikipedia.org links is annoying enough and there is no reason for it at all.

I've noticed that now the language selector is a two seemingly random places depending on ?? (the classical places is on the left, an exhaustive list ordered alphabetically; the new place that is sometimes there is on the top right, in a drop down list, ordered by some obscure relevance metric).

How does the donation request get more annyoing each year?

It’s bigger and harder to get rid of.

Most of the development isn't reader facing. It's editor facing (WYSIWYG editor/etc, toolforge), community developer facing (wikimedia cloud services/toolforge/etc), improvements to the infrastructure (CDN data centers/DR/etc), wikidata improvements (which you see as a reader, but don't know you see as a reader), and lots of other things.

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).

This would not rate as a well-run or top efficiency charity by CharityWatch. It would probably rank average at best. The best charities are in the 8-10% range.

I appreciate this kind of thinking being shared by someone who I recall from previous HN postings spends a lot of time thinking about how to give to charity effectively. I've been turned off from donating to Wikipedia for the better part of the last decade.

I think this kind of thinking is negative and an example of the free rider problem.

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.

Charitable giving is important to me personally, and I have a relatively limited budget to donate.

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.

Is paying for dinner at a conference of wikipedia editors really that bad a thing?

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.

The problem is a social one, if everyone expects everybody else to do something about a problem, it never gets done.

"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.

For a charitable/non-profit organization, providing them with funding way above their needs is counterproductive. As seen with Wikipedia, in the presence of excess money, costs proceed to grow uncoupled to the progression of their core mission.

As charity funding is effectively a closed system, excessive contribution to Wikipedia is to the detriment of other charities, with minimal net benefit.

I think their needs are genuine, if we want more of Wikipedia and more of Wikipedia services, it requires investment.

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?

Are you really suggesting it's not possible for an organization to misallocate funds, or that it is not possible to determine if an organization is misallocating funds without running the same organization or a substitutable replacement organization?

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.

So social good projects need to suck because we’re all misers? Try applying this logic to a for profit company and you’d laugh.

No; see my reply to dbingham above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32843394

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!

They are all hosted on the same group of servers using the same software. Its non-sensical to talk about money going to keep other wikimedia projects online instead of wikipedia. That's not how things work.

Sorry, that's not the part that bothers me. Instead, it's that everyone agrees that keeping the content serving is their highest priority, and they have far more money than they need just for that, which means additional money they raise is not "keep Wikimedia online" but funding their other work.

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.

Google had a 2021 operating cash flow of $92B, and they've decided to spend money on lots of things that aren't "serving ads". And yet nobody complains.

No-one donates to Google, nor does it ask for donations.

> No-one donates to Google

Wellll that's an interesting topic in and of itself. But OK I get what you mean.

Well, it doesn't ask.

Nor does Google solicit donations with misleading claims that it’s on the cusp of going defunct.

Im pretty sure a ton of people complain how Google spends their money, quite frequently. As well, one of the major complaints from people has nothing to do with their ad budget. It has to do with the fact they both host the marketplace for advertising and are a competitor in the same space. And they expert that market dominance by manipulating prices, perception, and their own products success.

Not to mention the fact that Google et al. do everything they can to avoid paying taxes in the countries they operate in, including developing countries. The global South loses billions of dollars that way that they could use to fund education and healthcare. The odd "philanthropic" project does not make up for that.

https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TCPB1...

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