Comment by flipbrad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipbrad | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It would be nice if we had a "lot of lawyers", given how frequently we're sued to try and get content censored, or having to fight orders to hand over user data - and more generally, how massive these new laws we need to comply with are (see, e.g., the EU Digital Services Act, which even creates an entirely new annual independent audit process).

We even intervene in other court cases to try and prevent bad laws being created/interpreted in ways that would hurt the open internet (see, e.g., our amicus in the French Constitutional Court two weeks ago, our lawsuit against the US NSA, and our amicus briefs in the two US "Netchoice" US Supreme Court cases). We also operate the https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assis...

Sadly, we're a very tight team. The downsides of being a nonprofit...

Anyhow, I'm going to assume people are just ignorant as to how much WMF does, not deliberately trying to undermine it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Assume_good_faith , as they say.

(disclosure: lawyer for WMF)

It isn't a question of the good work you do.

People care about Wikipedia, not the Wikimedia Foundation. The criticism arises from misleading advertising. WMF fundraising conflates the two, implying that _Wikipedia_ needs money or it'll die. Meanwhile the 2023 budget shows $3.1m in hosting expenses versus $24.4m in awards and grants.

That is an issue. There is a number of projects that the Wikimedia Foundation want to do or be involved in, because they align with the mission. These all costs money, but are frequently of little interest to anyone not involved directly. There is absolutely no way to fund these, which leads to the foundation pushing for donations via Wikipedia, because that's the only thing enough people actually care about.

For the most part Wikimedia could kill off everything but English, Germany, French, Russian and a handful of other wikis and most people would be just as happy.

Wikimedia absolutely suck at telling people why they need the money. Technically the budget is completely transparent, it's just communicated extremely poorly.

Firstly, there's less conflation these days - go see recent banner wording for yourself. Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should. (And no, I'm not saying all legal work we do is a strict necessity for Wikipedia. Some is a strict necessity, and some is strategic e.g. an amicus, or the NSA lawsuit - but the latter does help secure a healthy environment for it and future projects that might want to take its place.)

> Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should.

From your phrasing (still) it seems like you might've confused me with the person you initially replied to.

I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs because most critics are going to view the former as essential and the latter as mission creep. I don't have any insight, nor do I have any inclination to criticize, your payroll.

> I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs

No, you were comparing a small part of technical infrastructure costs to grant cost.

Is every dollar spent mission critical to running wikipedia? Obviously not. But that doesn't mean its runnable on 3 million dollars.

> No, you were comparing a small part of technical infrastructure costs to grant cost.

I have no control over how WMF presents its expenses.

For years WMF foundation has run "we need money or Wikipedia will die" ads while spending a quarter of the budget on making grants. No one forced them to write that ad copy. It's progress that they've toned it down, but we shouldn't pretend that this criticism is surprising or completely unwarranted.

> I have no control over how WMF presents its expenses.

You have control over your reading comprehension. You called a number that was a very small portion of the technical infrastructure cost, the technical infrastructure cost.

You should also probably split out any of the grants related to technical infrastructure (i presume at least some of this grant money might have historically gone to wikimedia Deutschland to do technical infrastructure on wikidata, but im not sure off the top of my head)

I'm sure you could make many arguments that some of WMF's expenditures are not needed (i'd even agree). That doesn't mean it can survive on a few million dollars.

So you are saying that if people thought they were contributing to keep Wikipedia running because that is what the ads claimed, its their fault for not going through the financial reports to see where the money is going.

If you raise money saying it is for wikipedia, it should be spent only on wikipedia or IMO it is misleading.

Even "spent only on wikipedia" is a bit complicated -- bawolff's example was grants to Wikimedia Deutschland for work on wikidata, which sounds like it's some separate project. But really wikidata is used pretty extensively inside wikipedia, particularly for keeping facts synched up between the various project languages. Or money spent on Wikimedia Commons sounds like another random project, but actually it's the infrastructure for all the images you see on wikipedia.

It gets fuzzier as you go out to the promotion-of-free-knowledge stuff, for sure. You can argue its connection to keeping information being contributed to wikipedia, and the long term health of the community, but it's definitely less directly keep-the-lights-on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com