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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

You're right. They don't use 50% on vanity projects. They use way more than that. Their donation income last year was around $150 million and their hosting costs were $2.4 million. Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate). That's >80% on BS.

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I think you misunderstand what Wikimedia is and does. It's not just Wikipedia and hosting. It is also a lot of research into their Wikidata free knowledge database (look it up) for instance.

It requires a lot of people and core knowledge to develop and run. To some extent Wikimedia is a research company too.

a semantic web holdover project that nobody has heard of or uses is tens of millions of dollars per year?

it is sad to say, but it is obvious that the general good name of the wikipedia project is parasitized by nonprofit sector careerists.

> Let's say their necessary engineering / admin cost was $20 million (a massive overestimate)

On this site, you will find many who will breathlessly insist that the only way to run a website at scale is through top tier engineering solutions developed by teams of highly paid engineers. I am not sure why the calculus changes so much for a non profit. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that they have $8 million in processing fees just for their donations.

I have no idea what is the right number they should be spending, but I know their costs are much higher than servers and bandwidth.

Their 2021 personnel costs were nearly $70 million, plus another $12 million for consulting. Their awards and grants budget was about $10 million.

Their engineering/devops/pm personal costs was $70M?

It is genuinely interesting to me[1]. Is there a better listing available somewhere else?

Programs totals are: $69,371,450 I was expecting to administrative totals to be higher: $11,531,675

[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

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