There's not a good public breakdown of how much of those salaries are on people developing Wikipedia/mediawiki/moderation tools, and how much are on special projects. It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget.

Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has....

> a measly 2% on actual hosting costs

That's a good sign, isn't it? It means they are efficient and don't waste their budget on overpriced cloud services.

I'd be more pissed if a significant junk of the donations went straight to AWS.

I don't understand this kind of critique. 2% on pure hosting cost. The horror! And they spend things on salaries, like web admins, accountants, lawyers to defend against all the different legal threats the face, people to handle takedowns, spam attacks, botfarms, PR, write the obligatory reports like the one you quote from, etc etc ...

For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.

> and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs.

Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)

> Only 42% of donations are used to maintaining Wikipedia and it's related sites.

How do you square that with this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180736) that says only they only spend "2% on actual hosting costs."

100% of the work of actually maintaining Wikipedia is is done by unpaid volunteers, and much of the tooling they use also appears to be developed on a volunteer basis.