Comment by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | Hacker News Reader

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OneDeuxTriSeiGo

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.

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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 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.

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 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…

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.

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