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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train.

In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m

In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m

The story of Wikipedia of the last 10 years especially is endlessly higher spending for a very stable number of monthly users (1.5b or so). You can make the case that 80% of this spend is not necessary to what the average users donating to Wikipedia think of as "wikipedia".

It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag.

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> It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag.

That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing.

If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation.

The infrastructure isn't that much. If they need to be less ambitious about other projects I'm not going to worry about it. A union isn't going to make them keep every single project.

If they were paying each employee 10x as much, and that got locked in, and then they didn't have the money to pay them, there would be bad consequences. But that's not what's going on here.

The infrastructure isn't that much is the problem, because labor costs are the largest single expense. When you take that off the table as something that can be cut, you're then stuck needing to make up the difference from the things that never cost that much to begin with, which means the cuts you have to make to them to make up the same amount of shortfall are deep.

> If they were paying each employee 10x as much

They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set?

Labor expenses can still be cut. Just not by screwing up wages. A union doesn't force you to keep the same number of employees forever.

And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.

They have the inherent incentive to inhibit you from doing layoffs, and the same incentive to stop you from replacing existing workers with different ones since the existing ones get a vote and the prospective replacements don't.

> And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.

You can't make up a $35M shortfall exclusively from cutting infrastructure when you're only spending $3.5M on infrastructure, but you also can't make up a $35M shortfall by not cutting anything. And you can make up some of it from cutting infrastructure, so where does the money come from that didn't come from reducing headcount?

> you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left?

What was the core reason that readers gave donations? Probably most donors want employees treated well and to ideally keep their jobs, and yet the main thing they probably had in mind was the existence and continuation of the service itself.

One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010, don't hire too many more people, and save all the donation money they brought in. Build that fund in the good years to pay for salaries in the lean years.

>One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010

And what are the realistic chances of that actually sticking long term?

Same chance as corporations and governments keeping spending, corruption and cronyism under control long term. So, virtually zero.

Wikimedia foundation actually have a rather large endowment¹ set up from donated funds to help sustain the organization through a hypothetical future downturn. I'm sure it wouldn't sustain the current level of spending but it would theoretically cover minimal operating expenses.

There are a lot of things to criticize about Wikipedia but lack of financial planning probably isn't top of the list.

1. https://wikimediaendowment.org/

The US government has been targeting endowments. Wikipedia is far too entrenched in a single country to survive a real attack.

> It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing

Non-profits get corrupted through spending on well-connected vendors.

Half of that goes to wages and salary for ~650 staff members. Of the ~114M that goes to wages, 90M goes to people working directly on projects, 15M goes to admin/management, and the other 9M goes to people in fundraising/financials.

9M goes to paying donation processing fees.

3.5M goes towards network infra.

~2M of in-kind services were donated (i.e. doing free work or donating goods) and that shows up as a dedicated expense.

Professional Services (accounting, consulting, etc) make up another 15M (same as the total management/admin cost).

General operating expenses (property, taxes, office software, office equipment, etc) make up 8M.

Conference and Travel is 6M.

And then 4.5M is expensed as depreciation and amortization of owned assets.

-------

So to be entirely clear here. WMF projects make up 147M / over three quarters of the total expenses for the year. Fundraising makes up 20M all together (half being essentially fees and the other half is people running fundraising campaigns). And the remaining 21M / 11% is general admin.

11% is quite good for such a large foundation.

And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annu...

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports...

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

And all of that (along with the serious problems in how WMF/Wikipedia operate) is why I no longer donate to WMF.

Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction.

I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union?

I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses.

The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly?

My experience is that unions very often make things stupider and less efficient.

I've been forced to give to two of them that were basically just political cosplay by children (well really the $ was taken without consent before it was even in my hands, so it was stolen)

And I've had the displeasure of working in a factory environment that was unionized. Perhaps there was a time when this made sense, but I think those instances are rare now.

See e.g. https://www.voanews.com/a/dockworkers-join-other-unions-in-t...

Dockworkers deliberately making everything worse because they want to keep their employment exactly as it has been.

I would submit the idea that a lot of union reforms that have been made to laws in the US have been specifically designed to make unions less attractive and less incentivized toward positive outcomes.

Sounds plausible!

Which laws? And why?

Here's a big paper on the subject: https://files.epi.org/pdf/215908.pdf

I'm not sure it touches on the exact concept I said, though. I've read about it somewhere else that I can't find right now.

Thanks for the reference. I am interested in your specific perspective as opposed to someone else's (much less else the received opinions from The Experts).

I can't think of a single unionized organization that is run as well as or better than union-free organizations. Unionized companies all seem to be crippled by bureaucracy and unable to improve performance and output.

The daycare my parent friends go to can’t retain a teacher for longer than a year or two. I hear stories all the time about the disruption and emotional distress abruptly losing a teacher with a 1-2 weeks notice causes.

The PreK teacher at the local public school has been there over 10 years at the same school and has a masters degree. Union, of course.

I’m sure the public school system is more expensive overall. You get what you pay for.

Professional sports is probably a good counter example. Major League Baseball, for example, treats the players better than any other baseball league around the world and most of the gains were achieved through collective bargaining.

Or how about Hollywood writers? The Writers Guild of America writers are responsible for most of the most successful movies and TV of the past decade or two (maybe longer). WGA writers are treated better than just about any other screenwriters around the world.

Kaiser Permanente, Fire Sprinkler Pipe Fitters, HVAC Tin Knockers many others…

Thank you for breaking this down. Every time Wikipedia comes up the exact comment parent to yours is posted in some form.

This comment and all its flavors is posted by a contingent of people out there who:

1. Think that Wikimedia is a wasteful, corrupt organization full of greedy employees (I guess that could be true? Doesn't seem that greedy to me given that they've never run an advertisement or enshittified their product)

2. Think that Wikimedia should operate more similarly to a for-profit organization with investors (e.g., it should start downsizing and stop investing in its platform because it stopped growing in MAUs)

3. Think that Wikimedia is being financially irresponsible and will run out of money (even though their own data shows that donations have grown faster than expenses)

I think we can just accept that Wikipedia gets a lot of donations and has the luxury of hiring people. And they really don't have that many employees given their traffic.

I don't get upset that my local art museum can buy better art when they get more donations even though the same number of people visit the museum every year. The people who donate to Wikipedia want more money to go into Wikipedia.

This completely supports 1. The extremely useful website provides the funding for all the much less useful efforts.

And of course it’s not immoral greedy people. It’s ordinary greedy people who like comfort, security, and doing interesting work.

And yes the admins want more money so they can do more projects and have more people work for them. And that’s also a kind of greed for status and importance that people who work in admin typically have.

I doubt most people have put that much thought into it. However, a $100M a year for a website with an amount of traffic that isn't absurd, pages which are largely static, and doesn't have to secure financial transactions, seems a bit high to many people. Its that coupled with the constant requests for donations that doesn't match in most people's heads. For that amount of money, I expect most people think they can accomplish a lot more than the wiki foundation does. I expect that's most of where the criticism comes from, not the ideological attacks you are claiming.

> And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra.

I do not believe it's possible to spend that much money on those things in an effective way.

You can see the breakdowns of what goes where in the links I included.

Half goes directly to engineering and support for infra. ~17% goes to equity projects. ~10% goes to safety & integrity. And the remaining 23% goes to "effectiveness" goaled projects.

The projects in the equity category are focused on supporting various smaller language Wikipedia communities get established and cross-translate articles.

The safety and integrity projects put a lot of work into protecting volunteers well being, general moderation stuff, legal compliance, etc.

The effectiveness category is a little weirder but it's mostly various "experimental" projects that attempt to address longstanding issues across the WMF without forcing them under a particular sub-org's budget potentially taking away funding from essential services.

NGL They could cut back across the board in various ways and save some money but if they have the money (and they do), I don't see anything outright wasteful that they are spending on. Everything seems pretty clearly like hedged bets to make things gradually better for the future.

And notably these are expenses. There's a gap between expenses and revenue and all that extra revenue gets invested into the endowment, etc to gradually support more and more of their operating expenses with time.

114M a year buys you only 650 people? Damn. I really should be moving to America at some point :)

If anyone wanted to do the math, that's an average of 175k per person

That's about half total comp of juniors at any FANG.

Also it includes insurance and such that doesn't appear in TC

Disclaimer: I work for the wmf

FANG juniors make 350k+/year?

After factoring in employer taxes, employer side benefits costs, etc yeah that wouldn't surprise me.

Making = what employees earn gross, not the extra burdens on the employer that the government takes

It's 175k per person including all benefits. Which is probably like 140-150k per year before the myriad of employer-paid payroll taxes and before the employer-side pay for insurance plans.

6 million dollars in conferences sounds like a lot? Are they holding the conference?

It's for travel and conferences. IIUI this includes dedicated Wikimedia photographers that attend events and/or travel around the world to take royalty free/CC licensed photos for Wikipedia articles to use.

Long term it's far cheaper and gets you more, higher quality images than trying to hunt down images and negotiate license terms on each one.

I bet volunteers would do this for free and do.

Exactly. The WMF spending growth is completely decoupled from its effect on Wikipedia. This only works because the donations pop-up makes people think they are donating to Wikipedia, not to a foundation which mostly does totally unrelated stuff. There is no feedback loop which would limit this spending toward the core aspects of Wikipedia.

> very stable number of monthly users

Wikipedia has seen their traffic decline with AI eating more and more of their lunch. I imagine it’ll only accelerate from here.

Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations.

There will be a lot of belt tightening at the foundation in the coming years.

>Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations.

Irrelevant when donations from humans keep growing YoY way outpacing the actual expenses of running wikipedia. Half of people can stop donating tomorrow and they still would have enough money.

Having internet on your PC and your phone on the go didn't kill off the library, people still go there. Similarly, LLMs won't kill online libraries like Wikipedia.

Worst is that there is zero interest to deal with sock puppet accounts, state actors or just typical cliques

I saw a pair of an admin and other person (probably sock puppet) that were used for edit wars, the 2nd account was used to ban edits, especially from non registered users.

So 1/40 of Reuters annual revenues, 1/1000 of Facebook annual revenues, is being wasted on ... lobbying governments against internet censorship and cross-subsidising translations into less popular languages?

How dare the most useful human knowledge resource spend the money freely given to it in such a way!

The 'Wikipedia is spending your donations on DEI' conspiracy has run its course I think.

>In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m

Am I correct in understanding, the $200M annual spend include the salary of those workers. And in case of any mass layoffs incoming, they are forming an union to better bargain?

I don't think the union is motivated by fear of mass layoffs. Staff simply want some venue for solidarity and meaningful channels to have their grievances heard and by management without fear of retaliation. What I have gathered is that there have been some very questionable management decisions and arbitrary firings of people for reasons other than job performance. One specific case which appears to be reprisal for raising concerns about questionable/unethical behavior of certain senior management.

Discussions of unionization have been ongoing for many years, they only gained momentum recently due to the some recent events that, AFAIK, have very little to do with overall job security or any threat from economic forces or AI eating Wikipedia's lunch.

This is 95% of all NGOs and their ilk.

"We now have evidence of how at least $7.7 billion for homelessness was spent on salaries. They created a jobs program that grows at the expense of the actual homeless who need help instead of helping the homeless."

https://x.com/Twolfrecovery/status/2095661343215141026

Levels of waste in NGOs are a fully fair subject for debate but without context an arbitrary number is only misleading and therefore sadly cynical.

Also - you have no evidence for '95% of NGO's and their ilk'.

This is not Twitter.

Please remember that NGOs are not charities. And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do. I think most of the grips about NGOs comes from the selling of NGOs as charities which they very much are not. They are however, taxed in the same way as charities and donate significant amounts to political campaigns (mostly local and state level).

So they get around centuries old restrictions on governments, get taxed like charities and donate heavily to political campaigns. That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. When you act like they are charities, it just makes you seem naive. If they were charities, they would call themselves charities.

" And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do" - no, they can serve many purposes, and there are tons of things governments should not be doing.

They are entities that have a civic purpose, not for profit.

Yes, they can in some cases support political causes, that is normal.

You seem to have a narrow view of what 'community' is aka something is either a 'charity' or 'government' - the world is more complicated than that.

" That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. " - no, the properties of fine.

They can be scrutinized like any organizaition: charity, private company, ngo, government, etc.

Yours is the naïve view of someone who has never looked at how the sausage is made. There are hundreds of billions each year flowing through NGOs. Where do you think this money comes from. Hint: its not your friendly grandma.

You should take some time to learn what NGO's are.

America Medial Association, AARP (retired people) are NGOs, they advocate for their causes, that's perfectly reasonable and normal.

They are not 'for profit' obviously, and they're not strictly charities.

People can group together and organize as they please. Donations to NGOs are not tax deductible.

1) Its spelled Medical

2) We have different regulations for different types of institutions

3) NGOs specifically exist to get around those regulations

4) A lobbying group (AARP) should have specific rules around how it can function. Lumping them with a professional standards organization makes it impossible to have reasonable anti-corruption laws. That's why NGOs exist, to make it impossible to enforce corruption laws. There is literally no other reason for it to exist as a category. We already have categories for lobbying groups and professional groups and charities.

"They are entities that have a civic purpose, not for profit."

If they had a true civic purpose, they would call themselves charities. The specific reason they don't is because an audit of their spending wouldn't meet the standards of a charity. Remember, charities can take government money. They just can't do it in exchange for a service. NGOs can. That's not about civic purpose. Its about different administrative standards. Standards that allow abuse. That's the entire point of them using the term NGO instead of charity.

You're failing to convey what an NGO is, and fail to provide any evidence that either NGOs, Charities or Public / Private companies are structurally more inclined to fraud.

NGOs are not charities, they exist for a different reason.

The American Medical Association is 'civic purpose'.

> In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m

The numbers are worse than that. FY2009-10 expenses were $10.3M. FY2024-25: $190.9M. 19x increase in fifteen years.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics

Salaries alone were $106.9M last year (from the Foundation's own Form 990 FAQ). And it's not as if the money is needed: the Foundation holds $296M in assets, plus a further $169M in a separate endowment.

Wikipedia's own editors held an RfC in 2022 and found "broad, near-unanimous consensus" that the donation banners were misleading - the ones hinting the site might go dark without your £2.

  https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html

The spending grew anyway. What do donors clicking those banners imagine they're funding?

yea...200m is totally a gravey train.

Do you live in the same universe where elon musk was work 1 trillion?

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