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Comment by tommi | Hacker News Reader

What caught my eye there was that they donated the $70,000 to Wikimedia foundation. I checked their financial report (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/68/Jul-D...) and the top five costs are:

  Salaries and Wages 7,468,743
  Outside Contract Services 1,791,275
  Internet Hosting 1,309,591 
  Other Operating Expenses 1,010,273
  Bank Fees 945,190

That is not the cost structure I expected. I thought the balance would be more on Internet Hosting. What are those ~10 million of salaries, contracts and other operating expenses? Besides, their expenses were 15 million and income 30 million, do they need more money?

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Holy misunderstood Accountancy Batman !

I thought you were quoting the accounts of Cards Against Humanity - 1mm usd on Internet hosting seemed a bit much.

Thanks for clarifying that. I was under the same (amusing) misapprehension.

Wikimedia employs a lot of people, I personally do not donate because I believe they employ way too many. Also pretty much all costs are already covered by corporate sponsors like Google.

50 employees is too many? (140k per person)

100 employees is too many? (70k per person)

* that 140k and 70k include things like healthcare and benefits too, I bet.

I remember reading though a page where they listed their employees and I remember it was 100+, I wanted to include the link in my comment, buy couldn't find it this time.

So they're getting paid less than the going rate, at least the software engineers are. Interesting.

Have you considered many of them that are on the payroll might have other jobs and so the volume is to make up for the fact that they're not all 40+ hours full time? I think this is much more complicated than we could first expect

You know, they probably need a couple people part time for every language that has a wikipedia version.

I doubt most of them would be engineers, or even technical people.

Without a breakdown of where the employees are located and their positions, you can't possibly say anyone at Wikimedia is getting paid more or less than the going rate.

Wikimedia's wikipedia page says they have 142 employees as of sept 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

'Sponsor' implies some sort of continuing relationship or cross-promotion or consideration received, so it's not very accurate to say Wikipedia has 'corporate sponsors'. The Wikimedia Foundation has received some corporate donations (including from Google), but those are a relatively small portion of their budget compared to tiny individual donations.

The cost of a single salary is the equivalent of dozens of servers in many situations.

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