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Comment by bhickey | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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