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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

One of the comments states:

> Wikipedia's servers cost around £2 million a year. WMF's assets are over £230 million. See the 2021 Audit Report. If the existing assets are invested, then Wikipedia could run till the end of time and live comfortably off the investment returns with plenty to spare. However, WMF staff costs are nearly £68 million, and there's money thrown around in all directions, very little of which has anything to do with Wikipedia itself. The fundraising has nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia going, it is about making WMF richer and more powerful.

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Ok, but servers are a small minority of their expenses. They pay 6 million a year in donation processing fees, 88 million in wages and benefits, 12 million in operating expenses, 16 million in professional services (presumably contract work), and 3 million in depreciating assets.

All told their expenses are 145 million a year, of which 10% is "awards and grants".

Focusing on the server costs is like saying an engineer only writes code. It takes much much more than servers to make a site.

I think part of what people are upset about and pointing out is that these wages and operating expenses are far greater than they need to be, and have been inflating near exponentially.

Probably a huge amount of fat and bullshit jobs able to be cut without affecting the Wikipedia service at all.

The point I'm making is that they don't know that. It's all armchair CEOs. They don't have the information that WMF has, they aren't privy to the problems WMF faces.

You think if WMF could run with half the expenses they have today but not lower income they'd just choose to run the way they do? I guarantee you they are looking at cost cutting daily, like every other corporation.

> The point I'm making is that they don't know that.

We have a pretty strong indication though, since Wikipedia ran with significantly leaner staff not long ago, and Wikipedia wasn't fundamentally much less useful then compared to now.

If you look at the financial reports, in 2012[1] they paid almost exactly the same in internet hosting fees and other operating expenses as in 2022[2]. However the salary expenses ballooned to ~6.7x (adjusted for inflation).

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL...

[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...

Do you think WMF are actively trying to cut their own salaries? Or to increase them?

> You think if WMF could run with half the expenses they have today but not lower income they'd just choose to run the way they do?

Their own leadership has said, in as many words, that "demonstrably we are able to run with far less expenses than we have".

Hell, they employ nearly 50 people just to coordinate some of the fundraising.

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