
Stop giving Wikipedia money - sparkzilla
http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/
======
davidgerard
[http://newslines.org/about-newslines/](http://newslines.org/about-newslines/)

"We are the only direct competitor to Wikipedia ..."

------
shutupalready
So you're bellyaching about Wikipedia having $51 million in the bank and
spending $684,000 on furniture (if true)?

Don't you realize how tiny those numbers are compared to the incredibly
wasteful spending by any governmental agency at any level of government, or by
any organization or company with monopoly status, or hell, just any really
large company?

For something I use every single day for free (unless I choose to contribute),
I think Wikipedia is astonishingly great value.

I think it would be great value even if it had the budget of, say, the US
Department of Labor ($13 billion -- billion with a "B").

Why do you pick on Wikipedia when there are things 250 times worse?

~~~
sparkzilla
I am "bellyaching" about the call for donations when none are needed, and
those that have been given in the past have not been used appropriately. I am
also against government waste.

------
ericnolte
215 employess x Avg tech-based salary ( $85,000) = 18, 275, 000 / yr. Add the
6, 000, 000 to awards and grants and the 2, 500, 000 in server hosting (which
seems awfully slim) = 26, 775, 000 / yr. Their cash reserves just barely cover
a year of operating costs at LAST year's expenses. If they wish to continue
expanding their reach year over year, as any well minded business should,
their yearly expenses from just these 3 items would most likely eclipse their
cash reserves within the one year period. Zero cash reserves would halt all
investments, meaning their current state wouldn't cover two years of these
three liabilities without donations. So, now what?

~~~
sparkzilla
Wikipedia doesn't need the money. Here's what a WMF insider has to say:
[https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-Decem...](https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-December/075766.html)

Every year we get promises that they'll work on making the banners better.
However, it seems when they say better, they mean more effective from the
perspective of generating revenue. The message from the fundraising staff and
Lila is more of the same.

This year I've started having people I know worry that Wikipedia is in
financial trouble. It makes me feel ashamed when I have to tell them Wikipedia
is in fact fine, but that the foundation uses this messaging to more
effectively drive donations. It makes them angry to hear it.

------
D_Alex
No, I will not stop. The amount of value I receive from Wikipedia _directly_
is hundreds of dollars a year (subjectively of course). And I suspect the
value I receive _indirectly_ , through better access to information for the
current and future engineers, doctors, scientists etc is many times greater.

------
spitcode
You article really had me going until that end part where you shamelessly
tried to sell yourself, its not that what you wrote about does not have merit,
its just the end part felt like the whole thing is just a ploy to promote
yourself

------
akolbe
The simple story is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff has massively expanded
over the past six or seven years; both the revenue and their spending have
risen exponentially (from 2 million in 2006/2007 to over $40 million in
2013/2014). Most of this increase in spending has funded the expansion of
software engineering staff. It doesn't help that some of their flagship
projects have been acknowledged failures (VisualEditor) or extremely
controversial and divisive (Media Viewer, Flow). That's partly why Lila
Tretikov was hired: to sort that mess out. And some spending was profligate,
as Sue Gardner herself acknowledged, with gravy trains forming and supporting
previously penniless Wikipedians. And as the spending increases, so of course
the reserve has to increase too, to the point where there are now shooting for
more than $50 million a year (compare to $5 million in 2007/2008).

The Foundation feel they have to expand because Wikipedia content is free, and
is increasingly hosted elsewhere. Wikipedia could survive that, but the
Wikimedia Foundation could not. Damon Sicore, the new VP of Engineering
Tretikov hired, said the Foundation would have to

“scale to a size that enables us to compete with the engineering shops that
are trying to kill us. That means we need to double down on recruiting top
talent, and steal the engineers from the sources they use… because… well… they
are REALLY GOOD. I want everyone to keep this in mind: If we don’t move faster
and better than google, apple, and microsoft (and their ilk and kin), they
will consume us and we will go away. It’s that simple.”

Now he may very well be right there. The problem with the current fundraising
campaign though is that it tries to manipulate donors into donating, by making
it sound there is a financial emergency and the Foundation can not afford to
keep Wikipedia "online and ad-free for another year" without people donating.
When in fact they have just reported having more money in the bank than ever
before in their entire history.

That, and the obtrusiveness of the banners, is what is rubbing people the
wrong way. You have long-term, committed Wikipedians now telling Wikimedia
management that the campaign is deceptive, manipulative and damaging to the
brand, and that they are ashamed to answer their friends and colleagues when
they ask him about the financial problems of Wikipedia.

That discussion is here: [http://www.gossamer-
threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/532701](http://www.gossamer-
threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/532701)

Some quotes:

A Wikimedia staffer:

I agree that the urgency and alarm of the copy is not commensurate with my
(admittedly limited) understanding of our financial situation. Could we run a
survey that places the banner copy alongside a concise statement of the
Foundation's financials, and which asks the respondent to indicate whether
they regard the copy as misleading.

An ex-staffer:

The messaging being used is actively scaring people. This isn't the first
person that's asked me about this. When they find out there's not a real
problem, their reaction quickly changes. They become angry. They feel
manipulated.

A Wikipedia admin:

Secondly I'm alarmed about the content. That should come to no surprise to the
fundraising team, because I can't imagine this content hasn't been written to
evoke the maximum amount of alarm. But it crosses the line towards dishonesty.
Yes the WMF can use the donations, and yes they generally spend it well. But
the lights won't go off next week if You don't donate.

A Wikipedia admin, and past president of Wikimedia Australia:

Lila, the concern is not that the fundraiser is working, which your soundbite
confirms, but that it is deceiving people, or at least manipulating them 'too
much' to be consistent with our values.

Ex-Wikimedia staffer:

You have a community that's upset because they believe the fundraising banners
are causing long-lasting harm to Wikimedia's brand.

This year I've started having people I know worry that Wikipedia is in
financial trouble. It makes me feel ashamed when I have to tell them Wikipedia
is in fact fine, but that the foundation uses this messaging to more
effectively drive donations. It makes them angry to hear it.

------
PhantomGremlin
This is a quick read. It's a screed about Wikipedia periodically begging for
money. Good food for thought.

~~~
gohrt
And written by a self-styled competitor.

~~~
dalke
Others have written similar things, like
[http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-
fr...](http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-
pay-us-our-salaries/) .

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Wow. Quite informative. I urge anyone interested in the politics of Wikipedia
to read it.

I didn't know about "affiliate entities". But most surprising was the
breakdown of employees. I certainly wouldn't have expected this:

    
    
       the Foundation’s paid staff and contractors
       page lists 215 people ... They comprise
       2 people in the Office of the Executive
       Director Lila Tretikov,
       18 in Grantmaking,
       17 in Fundraising,
       14 in Legal and Community Advocacy,
       4 in Communications,
       17 in Finance and Administration,
       and 11 in Human Resources.
       The remaining 132 ... work in ...
       Engineering and Product Development
    

They have 11 HR people out of 215 paid employees???

Finally, to keep it all in perspective, remember what Michael Scott said:

    
    
       "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in
       the world can write anything they want about
       any subject, so you know you are getting the
       best possible information." - Michael Scott

------
xnull2guest
Let's go through his line-by-line line-by-line:

> > DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: This week we ask our readers to help us. To
> protect our independence, we’ll never run ads.

> What is the point of a site saying they don’t want to show ads, then
> covering up 50% of the screen with a request for money? No serious for-
> profit site would consider giving up 50% of the page to an ad. It’s insane.
> At least this year’s fundraising banners don’t have Jimmy Wales staring out
> at the reader like Big Brother. Now I respect Wikipedia’s non-ad stance.
> They can’t very well make money on a site that was created through the free
> labor of its contributors, but for God’s sake show some decorum.

The substantive objection here is that ads are annoying because they take
screen real estate and Wikipedia's drive for donations is annoying because it
also takes real estate. He draws an absurdity here from a false equivalence,
however - ads are something much more insidious. Ads would track what you are
reading on Wikipedia (the modern version of a library) and build a profile of
what subjects you are interested in. They would send this data to third
parties and those third parties would have the right to sell this data at
their discretion. Furthermore ads would run continuously year round. The
donation banner is not equivalent to ads, and can not be snubbed for taking up
screen real estate because its somehow contradictory to the value position of
not running ads.

> > We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If
> everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within
> an hour.

> Money is not an issue of survival for Wikipedia. According to its latest
> annual report, The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the charity that controls
> Wikipedia, has $51 million in cash reserves ($28 million) and investments
> ($23 million). No-one can seriously claim that an organization that has $51
> million in the bank is in “survival” mode.

Now for some numbers. Wikipedia alone costs several million dollars (~45
million) a year to run (it has been increasing each year as it is getting more
traffic; also remember that servers and storage fail and that architectural
changes like switching to ElasticSearch serve the world better).

This breaks down into roughly $20m for salaries and wages (~93k on average,
does seem high). $13m operating expenses. $5.7m in awards and grants. $2.5m in
web hosting and the same in depreciation of capital investments. $2m for
travel and conferences (they do these globally, single events can cost an
individual $10k or more, so this seems reasonable IMO). $150k for special
events.

I don't need to spell it out but $51m can only afford one year of operating
costs. Even if you cut the salary number in half and drop the conferences the
author seems to hate, we're still not to two years.

> > Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee.

> Note the focus on programmers. But programmers don’t make Wikipedia.
> Wikipedia’s core software is essentially unchanged since 2001 when the
> project started. Since then Wikipedia’s programming efforts have been a
> disaster. The Visual Editor (a tool that would allow WYSIWYG editing) was a
> failure. Editors still edit using tags and arcane code to create their
> edits. The recently introduced Media Viewer is universally hated. The people
> who really make Wikipedia are the unpaid volunteers, but hey get nothing
> from donations. Nothing, while programmers who don’t have a clue get paid.
> Is that really where your money should go?

The author reads a lot into the sentence, which I took to mean 'cost of a cup
of coffee'. Agreed that programmers are just one role at TWF, but why the ire?
Furthermore it's fundamentally untrue what he says about Wikipedia being
essentially the same since 2002. This is true on the client side but not on
the server side. The transition to ElasticSearch as one example.

> > We’re a small non-profit

> This is a flat-out lie. The WMF is not a small non-profit. It raised $46
> million in donations last year and has 215 staff, over 130 of whom work in
> the Engineering and Product Development department. Yet all of the money
> spent on programmer salaries has produced no measurable change to the site’s
> quality. These programmers take up a huge amount of the foundation’s $20
> million spent on salaries, salary payments that rose $4 million since 2103.

> The closest WMF gets to creating content is the almost $6 million was spent
> last year on awards and grants — mostly funding international and regional
> staff and workshops to celebrate Wikipedia, such as Wikimania. These grants
> have been described as “corrupt” by the WMF’s ex-director Sue Gardner. who
> said, “I believe the FDC [Funds Dissemination Committee] process, dominated
> by fund-seekers, does not as currently constructed offer sufficient
> protection against log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices.”
> Oh dear.

I wholeheartedly agree that TWF is no longer a small nonprofit and has entered
the range of medium sized. As for the Wikimania mention and the accusation of
corruptness - I don't see that as relevant to the small non-profit claim but
merely chosen because there wasn't much else for the author to say. I do not
know much about Wikimania or associated corruptness, so I will refrain from
commenting on that. I would think that if indeed donations are being spent in
a corrupt self-serving way this would be a reason to scale back or refrain for
donating to TWF.

> > with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs.

> The same KPMG report says that Wikipedia spent $2.5 million of its budget on
> hosting, almost unchanged since 2013. A closer look at the reports line
> items shows that the WMF spent almost $684,000 on furniture. That’s almost
> $3200 per employee. Your donations are going to golden chairs.

Furniture for the past 5 years: 45k, 200k, 200k, 400k, 600k (this year).

Maybe there's another reasonable explanation (outside golden chairs?) Is
Wikipedia furnishing a new office? Anyone who has worked on something like
that will know how expensive even simple things (like carpeting) are.

Here is a link to the report.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_Report_-
_FY_13-14_-_Final_v2.pdf)

The selective use of quotation of figures and partial sharing of information
reads more like an indictment than a thesis. Please, if you are considering
not donating to Wikipedia look at the finances and find the rest of
Wikipedia's expenses (some shared above).

> > Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park
> where we can all go to think and learn.

> I guess parks and libraries would be a lot less popular if you had
> panhandlers at the doors. Especially panhandlers who have more in the bank
> than you.

Given that Wikipedia can survive approximately one year without donations, is
it really fair to call them a panhandler?

No, it's more like paying taxes with public money to keep a public space open.

Oh wait...

> > If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-
> free another year. Thank you.

> More weasel words. Wikipedia is already useful without the extra donations,
> and even if donations stopped tomorrow it would still be able to stay
> online, continue on cash reserves for years (with some salary cuts).

Covered before. If they cut __all __salary and __all __travel and __all
__conferences and __all __awards they would last at _most_ two years.

No weasel words there.

It turns out it does take millions of dollars to run an operation as large and
as often visited as Wikipedia.

~~~
sparkzilla
Way to miss the point.

>I don't need to spell it out but $51m can only afford one year of operating
costs.

False.

>If they cut all salary and all travel and all conferences they would last at
most two years.

False. Salaries alone are $20 million. Awards are $6 million. $2 million for
conferences.

>It turns out it does take millions of dollars to run an operation as large
and as often visited as Wikipedia.

It doesn't. The cost of hosting has remained steady over the past few years at
$2.5million, despite traffic rising. The vast majority of the increase of the
use of funds is for staff, most of whom do not contribute to the content or
product in any meaningful way.

>Maybe there's another reasonable explanation (outside golden chairs?)

I'd like to hear it.

~~~
not_kurt_godel
> The cost of hosting has remained steady over the past few years at
> $2.5million, despite traffic rising. The vast majority of the increase of
> the use of funds is for staff, most of whom do not contribute to the content
> or product in any meaningful way.

Do you understand how insanely difficult it is to operate a website at
Wikipedia's scale, which has increased exponentially over time? The cost of
hosting is negligible compared to the engineering effort needed to design &
maintain systems that keep things functional. Here's a quick summary from
their blog on the types of things they work on in a given month:
[https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/10/18/engineering-report-
aug...](https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/10/18/engineering-report-
august-2014/#Technical_Operations) . If you think Wikipedia is just a simple
deployment of MediaWiki sitting on a few DO instances, you are sorely
mistaken.

~~~
dalke
Could you quantize the exponential growth?

The number of new pages is not growing exponentially (see
[http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/en/articles/full](http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/en/articles/full)
and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_traffic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_traffic)
).

The number of active editors is decreasing (see
[http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-
dec...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-
wikipedia/) ).

Looking at the breakdown at
[http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm](http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)
, and if I read it correctly, the doubling period for the number of articles
is no faster than 6 years (2.4M in Jul 2008 and 4.7M now).

[http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/#](http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/#) suggests
that the doubling period for the number of unique users is also no faster than
6 years, though that excludes mobile.

By comparison, their IRS documents report $3.5 million in spending in
2007/2008 and $45 million for 2013/2014, which has a doubling time of about
1.5 years.

I don't see how a doubling of services (or even quadrupling) across 6 years
requires 10x more money. Could you explain why they don't have an economy of
scale in their favor?

~~~
not_kurt_godel
I was referring to traffic, not total number of articles or users (although
both of those were clearly exponential for a number of years as well):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awareness_statistics...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awareness_statistics#mediaviewer/File:Alexa_traffic_ranking_for_wikipedia.png)

> I don't see how a doubling of services (or even quadrupling) across 6 years
> requires 10x more money

Then you clearly have not done serious at-scale software development.

> Could you explain why they don't have an economy of scale in their favor?

Complexity increases exponentially (or worse) as traffic scales and the site
matures, as you can clearly see in the blog post I linked. There is no
'economy of scale' when you simply need more engineers to manage that
complexity.

~~~
dalke
The graph you showed is from 2003 to 2006. At that time Wikipedia's expenses
were something like $100K/year, and they had one employee.

I don't see how it's relevant for this discussion.

I searched for a similar graph for the last decade, but failed to find it.

No, I haven't done at-scale software development. But every single report I've
read about at-scale work says Google, Amazon, Wal-mart, etc. did not need 10x
engineers in order to provide 2x content or 2x EC2 machines, at least not once
they reached a certain threshold. Instead, the additional staff was used to
provide more services.

Given that it's true, I would like to know if it continues to be so. If
increasing the Wikipedia traffic by another 2x causes the number of support
staff to increase by another 10x then clearly it's unsustainable, and there is
a serious problem in the immediate future.

However, as the various reports on the topic have pointed out, at least part
of the development cost have gone towards developing tools which had not had
uptake by the Wikipedia developers.

Hence why I would like to know what numbers you are using to draw your
conclusion. What is the relationship between traffic and required engineering
staff? Why doesn't it have the same cost savings that other organizations have
reported?

