
Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017) - wlkr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
======
ajxs
I think he raises a very important point regarding the enormous risk of WMF
being purchased by the current generation of tech-giants. I don't think there
is any reason to believe that new management of Wikipedia by a company such as
Google, Facebook or Amazon would be the least bit benevolent. The implications
that Wikipedia being co-opted would have on freedom of information on the
internet would be immense. I don't think that this is idle scare-mongering. Of
course, there is already a risk of misinformation being propagated on
Wikipedia by bad actors, I don't think that there is a very big gap to jump
before we lose control over the online record completely.

~~~
hlieberman
As a 501(c)(3), it would be illegal for the Wikimedia Foundation to be
purchased by any of the tech-giants -- or any other for-profit company, for
that matter. In addition, all the content is under freely available licenses.

The most realistic but still bleak scenario I can think of is Wikipedia
becoming infested with ads. Anything more extreme, we'd see a fork become
popular.

~~~
hdhgzwhegh
And what would sustain the fork? Every time there's talk about the potential
to fork a popular web product like Facebook or other social media all that
happens is the hobbyists and activists move to it while the mainstream
userbase carries on.

~~~
adventured
Besides, nobody can find the fork anyway. Google banishes such clones to SEO
purgatory immediately, from which you are basically guaranteed to never return
(especially as a pure clone).

That has been true for a decade now, since the days of Stack Exchange
complaining about the clones riding their CC licensed content to easy Google
ranking. You can put up a perfect clone of Wikipedia, you'll get nearly zero
traffic despite having millions of pages of high quality content.

~~~
onei
It's true that if you create a perfect fork that search engines will punish
you and not even display the results, but that's not to say you can't change
that. If the edit-base of a wiki moves with the fork (and this is essential),
you can continue to create new content that search engines will index. If you
also go back and make tweaks to existing pages, you won't get penalised. It's
not a quick process, nor is it simple, but it's possible for a fork can
survive, grow and even move above the original.

~~~
throwaway2048
If Google et all detect too much cloned content on a domain, its essentially
rank banned forever, for any pages whatsoever.

Having a few different pages isn't going to help.

~~~
yabadabadoes
Banned until manual override, so banned until you are substantial to either
the community at large or the tech community.

~~~
throwaway2048
See [https://marc.info](https://marc.info) , its by far the best mailing list
archive, popular in open source communities but it absolutely never appears on
Google because it has the same content as massively SEOed crap mailing list
archives like Nabble. Google has definitely manually unbanned it a few times
but it seems to expire after a while.

~~~
yabadabadoes
Yes, but AFAIK all these archives have nothing to do with their primary
source, so while we might all prefer no ads there is no objective way to say
marc.info is the authorative source over ad ridden sources.

With Wikipedia or stack overflow, I think whoever gets the majority of
participants going forward and keeps activity high could start claiming
authority in an objective enough sense, and engaged participants are more
mindful of organization ethics than random searchers.

------
opportune
Here's another view of the WMF's runaway spending:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_multilanguage.svg)

I don't donate to the WMF because they don't need my money, but I wish they
just kept Wikipedia running and made small incremental changes over time for
scaling/keeping up to date/adding helpful features. I would of course donate
if Wikipedia were at risk of failing (not that it would be that hard to rehost
and rebuild it), and they know that and exploit everyone who doesn't realize
how rich they are with the annoying begging.

As they say: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding
bureaucracy". If you keep giving a nonprofit money, it will keep growing, even
if it has more than enough it needs for its earlier charter.

~~~
threatofrain
But for how many years can Wikipedia run on that much money? IMO not having a
large endowment which comfortably lasts a decade is irresponsible for the kind
of resource Wikipedia presents to the world.

~~~
jessriedel
I have heard just the opposite: that having a decade-length endowment is
generally a sign of hording by the non-profit, and unlikely to be contributing
to the mission. What scenario is there where Wikipedia is still providing
value and fulfilling its mission but can't raise funds for a decade?

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Re: "I have heard just the opposite: that having a decade-length endowment is
generally a sign of hording by the non-profit, and unlikely to be contributing
to the mission."

That's only true of charities where there is no natural limit on how much they
can spend. If you are feeding orphans you can always do more until every
orphan is fed. The WMF isn't like that, They have one job; keep Wikipedia and
the sister projects like Wictionary online. That doesn't require ever-
increasing spending other than to cover actual increases in hosting expenses
and essential employees.

Imagine a future Wikipedia that is 100% funded by the endowment, which will
always be there even if nobody donates, and which has no fundraising banners,
just a small "donate" link. I think that is a goal worth pursuing.

~~~
btilly
There is no such exemption.

As evidence I point to _Boys Town_ , a philanthropy that quite literally
exists to take care of orphans. It amassed a large fortune that exceeded
anything justifiable by their core mission. In the 1970s, a tip from Warren
Buffett on this won _The Omaha Sun_ (which he owned at the time) a Pulitzer
for reporting on the resulting scandal. (He was also an investor in _The
Washington Post_ which won a Pulitzer in the same year for reporting on
Watergate.)

See [https://www.philanthropydaily.com/nonprofits-mission-
drift-b...](https://www.philanthropydaily.com/nonprofits-mission-drift-boys-
town-omaha/) for verification. And evidence suggesting that that particular
charity has continued down the same path.

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer". See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn't run out of
orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on
orphans.

A better charity to compare with Wikipedia would be the the Washington
Monument Restoration Project.

See
[https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc72.htm](https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc72.htm)

Once the Washington Monument is completely restored you can't spend any more
money restoring the Washington Monument. If donations keep coming in, you
shouldn't spend them on giving executives of the charity free ski vacations
(yes, the WMF actually did that) You should instead build up an endowment that
is eventually big enough that the interest covers all Washington Monument
maintenance forever. Then and only then should you tell donors "look, we don't
need any more money for restoring the Washington Monument. If you give us a
donation we will use it for other things, starting with restoring the Lincoln
Memorial".

~~~
btilly
_Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn 't run out of
orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on
orphans._

Do you have a source for that?

My understanding is that boys town did run out of orphans who met their
requirements. There simply aren't enough orphans in the USA with no family to
take care of them who slip through the cracks of the adoption system.

But that fact didn't slow their appeals for more money.

That said, my understanding is based on my memories of a book that I don't
presently have a copy of.

~~~
elect_engineer
Ah. I had no idea that they ran out of orphans. If they did, then it would be
a perfect analogy. Boys town takes care of all the orphans that it is their
mission to take care of, keeps collecting donations and spending on other
stuff. The Wikimedia Foundation does everything needed to put an encyclopedia
-- the thing that it is their mission to take care of -- keeps collecting
donations and spending on other stuff. Thanks for the great analogy, and I
apologize for misunderstanding and assuming that there would always be plenty
more orphans to take care of.

I am going to think about this, do some research, and see if I can turn it
into an essay on Wikipedia about collecting money after the job is done.
Thanks!

Didn't the march of dimes also keep taking in donations after polio was
eradicated?

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"

------
wortelefant
Wikimedia is contributing a lot of time and resources to other Open/Commons
projects as well, at least in Germany: Open Education, Open Science, Open
Glam, Open Access, Open Government etc. They also invest in advocacy (lobbying
for more Open Culture, Open Access etc), which is an important voice in the
political process, since most grassroots initiatives can not sustain this kind
of work for a long time. I don't see the expenses as necessary for the upkeep
of Wikipedia alone, but as an investment to keep the ecosystem of Open
Source/Open Access alive and growing, which benefits Wikipedia as well. While
I think it is important to question the distribution of Wikimedia support for
projects in the Commons (they probably could do more funding, e.g. a prototype
fund) , having a strong institution to foster digital participation and Open
Society is vital.

~~~
jiofih
Never heard of these Open * efforts, besides open science maybe - are they
supporting one of the free-access research publishing platforms?

------
jcrben
As someone who has edited since 2007 (pseudoanonymously, about 13k edits), I
appreciate the continued investments that Wikipedia has made into various
initiatives, most importantly technology. It's not cheap or easy to stay on
top of technical trends (e.g., upgrading to PHP 7) while shipping feature
improvements. For example, I use Visual Editor
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor))
all the time.

------
raz32dust
I am all for transparency in spending, but I don't support the author's
suggested guidelines for spending. Sticking to inflation-and page-view
adjusted growth in spending is a terrible requirement. It ties the hands of
the company to do any sort of innovation. I donate pretty regularly, and I am
happy that wikipedia is doing more with my money than to just keep the site
running.

~~~
xyzzyz
Can you name one thing that the foundation did with your money? This might be
a trick question, so be careful to not confuse things that Wikipedia does
without your money with things Wikimedia does with your money.

~~~
Camillo
IIRC they started a web search engine project that went nowhere.

~~~
_joe
You remember incorrectly. It was a plan from a past Executive Director that
never even started.

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

I do not believe that the above "It was a plan from a past Executive Director
that never even started" claim is accurate. See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-17/Special_report#knowledgeengine)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/Special_report#knowledgeengine)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/In_focus#knowledgeengine)

Key quotes:

"In May 2015, Risker observed that a team called 'Search and Discovery' was
'extraordinarily well-staffed with a disproportionate number of engineers at
the same time as other areas seem to be wanting for them'."

"We also know at some point it was an ambitious project to create a brand new
search engine as an alternative to Google."

------
HenriNext
Click-bait redirects here.

The figures don't look anything like growth rate of cancer, they look like
growth rate of a toenail.. 10-15% a year.

Then the author claims that "spending is growing at an ever-increasing rate"
like cancer. But it is not. Draw a trend-line over the spending graph, and
you'll see that the growth rate is actually damn linear (and well aligned with
revenue growth).

Rest of the article is reasons why spending should be reduced. Well maybe it
shouldn't. As long as there is revenue growth, maybe it is better to invest
the revenue on better tools. When revenue growth stops, you've got the better
tools you invested in, and can then reduce spending by not building further
new tools.

~~~
alexsideris
If that was the case then every company/startup that fails to raise another
round would survive on the "better tools" they developed with their previous
funding rounds.

But as we know, they die or sell instead.

~~~
HenriNext
Sorry, but that is a broken analogy. Wikipedia's revenue model and cost
structure is nothing like startup's.

~~~
alexsideris
I agree it's not a perfect analogy, Wikipedia's model is even worse. Startups
generate revenue as well. Wikipedia is nearly fully dependant on funding.

~~~
zanny
Wikipedia cannot "sell" their product, that's antithetical to it's purpose and
mission. Doctors without Borders is not a failure because they rely on
donations for disaster relief rather then profiting from it.

~~~
alexsideris
No one called Wikipedia or Doctors without Borders a failure. The article
states that relying on donations is risky by nature, let alone when increasing
expenses every year.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, do you think there is no way
donations may decline leaving Wikipedia in trouble with hundreds of people on
it's pay roll?

~~~
zanny
The risk is that WMF decides, as the article presents, to sell off rather than
downsize if donation revenue drops. Wikipedia itself can be sustained on 1% of
the donation revenue the foundation is getting each year, so the only threat
to Wikipedia is the foundation itself, not that there won't be enough money to
keep it maintained, independent, and unmonetized.

------
davidwitt415
As someone who has contributed regularly to Wikipedia over the years, I
stopped recently due to another cancer that Wikipedia has, called 'Philip
Cross.' Supposedly an individual, he has made roughly 150,000 edits since 2013
without taking a single day off.

Anybody who is not aware of 'Philip Cross' can read about 'him' here:

[https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross](https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross)

[https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-
philip-c...](https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-
affair/)

[https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-
philip-c...](https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-
msm-promotion-operation-part-3/)

"According to Craig Murray, whose Wikipedia page has been repeated edited by
Cross remarked that "the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is
systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are
prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative.
particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to
burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who
are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the
interests of Israel."

Wikipedia management, all the way up to Jimmy Wales are well aware of 'Philip
Cross' and yet 'he' continues to operate freely as an editor. Despite the
basic usefulness of Wikipedia for non-controversial topics, I decided that I
cannot and will not support an organization that allows this kind of
astroturfing.

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

First off, the above comment is an example of hijacking; using a discussion
about one thing to try to get attention for something else. You see this a lot
with Abortion, Gun control, and US presidential politics. I am not saying that
those aren't important topics, but do they really need to be inserted into a
discussion about how much money Wikipedia is spending?

I would strongly encourage the person trying to hijack this discussion to
start a new discussion

I would strongly encourage all HN readers to not give the poster the attention
he wants and to downvote any comments that are not about WMF finances

I also would strongly encourage all HN readers to not respond to this sort of
thing and to stay on topic.

For those who are interested, here is what Wikipedia has done about this
situation:

Per
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive240#Philip_Cross)

Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from post-1978 British politics,
broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed after six months
have elapsed, and every six months thereafter. This sanction supersedes the
community sanction applied in May 2018.

Passed 11 to 0 at 18:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Amended by motion at 20:08, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia's relevant policy states:

"The purpose of a topic ban is to forbid editors from making edits related to
a certain topic area where their contributions have been disruptive, but to
allow them to edit the rest of Wikipedia. Unless clearly and unambiguously
specified otherwise, a topic ban covers all pages (not only articles) broadly
related to the topic, as well as the parts of other pages that are related to
the topic, as encapsulated in the phrase 'broadly construed.'"

If anyone thinks Wikipedia should do more, they should bring it up at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests)
\-- not on hacker news.

Again, I encourage all HN readers to not respond to hijacking attempts.

~~~
davidwitt415
Extremely relevant to Wikipedia's finances, since my framing was why I am not
contributing to Wikipedia anymore. People deserve to know what they are
funding.

Also not helping your cause, you had to try to negate my argument with a false
assertion: Philip Cross HAS NOT, in fact, been been banned, and just last
month made 49 edits to James LeMesurier's page (clearly a post 1978 British
political figure):

[https://archive.ph/2019.11.14-204004/https://en.wikipedia.or...](https://archive.ph/2019.11.14-204004/https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Le_Mesurier&offset=&limit=500&action=history)

Although you may not agree, this is holistically part and parcel of
Wikipedia's ongoing funding saga. Plenty of people have tried to appeal to
Wikipedia about this, so it is disingenuous to state that option while
dismissing the topic here. We are on HN, not Wikipedia, so one man's
'hijacking' is another person's 'information.'

------
mastazi
> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005,but
> the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the number of pages and hosting
costs be linearly correlated? I can't think of any other scenario besides
Wikipedia where this would be expected to be true.

~~~
logifail
> Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated?

How _would_ one expect them to be correlated?

As an aside, a friend of mine relaunched an ecommerce site in March. Wordpress
+ WooCommerce, stripped of fluff.

His hosting plan costs him $3/month, including tax.

He told me his site took just over $60k in revenue in the first 6 weeks.

~~~
darawk
I assume the operative word for him was 'linearly' not 'correlated'. But
cost/pageview is _sublinearly_ correlated, so spending growth should be even
slower than a linear projection.

~~~
mastazi
I just wanted to point out that the article mentions the number of pages, not
pageviews, which is part of the reason why I find that statement so bizarre.

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

This is the first time I have seen any comment saying that I should have
listed page views instead of pages. I hadn't given it much thought until you
brought it up, but I don't see any reason which I shouldn't remove the pages
statistic and replace it with page views. I do want to make the essay as
accurate as I can, and criticisms/suggestions are a big help in doing that.
(you never see the flaws in your own writing).

Can anyone think of a downside to me changing it to pageviews?

~~~
Sacho
Sure - I would argue that bandwith costs are only a tiny fraction, and the
real cost is in stewarding all the existing content(page numbers) - e.g. more
servers = more admins, older content/tools need maintenance, etc.

I think what is happening here is that the server costs argument is weak as a
first argument. Maybe x33 expenditure is high, but I know WP has grown, and
it's hard to quantify how that growth translates into expenditure - it's easy
to imagine higher reliability, more accessibility, more need for maintenance
of established products and so on as WP matures. If I happen to like WP and am
willing to give them benefit of the doubt, why wouldn't I trust that their
engineering team knows what they're doing? You haven't established your
credibility as an SRE(or enough facts) to really shake that initial goodwill.

Once I view your initial argument as shaky, I am naturally more inclined to
view the rest of your arguments skeptically(or just outright ignore them).

From an outsider POV, your two strong arguments are: \- I want to donate to
just WP because I don't care about the rest; As the non-WP fraction of
expenses grows, there will be a tipping point where the "waste" will erode my
willingness to donate \- Even though there are growing development costs, WP
tools have stagnated, core problems aren't addressed, new features aren't
being used(another signal of "waste")

I think if you lead your essay with those arguments, the server costs argument
would be better received. It's much easier to comprehend "Out of $1 I donate,
only $0.50 goes to WP", and as an experienced WP user you speak from a
position of authority on the second point. From there, it's easier to convince
me that WP is _also_ being wasteful in server costs.

In general though, I think you need more evidence put forward to really
convince an outsider that WP is wasteful - more comparisons of overall
spending vs just-WP spending, more examples of development stalling or going
in the wrong direction. The essay may be convincing to an insider who already
is aware of the problems, but from an outside perspective it's light on
evidence.

~~~
Faark
Yes, calling out concrete examples of waste would make it a lot easier to
understand if this is about actual mismanagement or about a different ideology
were priorities are / how narrow the mission is supposed to be.

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

Calling out concrete examples of waste also has a downside. It usually results
in the discussion going off into the weeds about whether individual
expenditures are justified. There are many people who focus on individual
examples of waste. I chose to focus on the big picture -- overall spending
growth.

------
Randor
Well,

I'm not seeing any problems. The Annual Report is available here:
[https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-
report/fin...](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-
report/financials-leadership/)

~~~
mikekchar
From my perspective:

\- What is the $7 million for "Professional service expenses"? That's 8% of
the budget and I've got no clue what it might have been spent on. Salaries,
travel expenses and depreciation is already accounted for.

\- What is the $7 million for "Other operating expenses"? Again 8% of the
budget in "other" that doesn't include something that is depreciated and
doesn't include travel?

\- What is the $2.7 million for "In kind service expenses"? To me that sounds
like internal "funny money" where you are paying for one service with another
service you perform. But how are they calculating the loss and what account is
that money actually coming from?

I worry that millions of dollars are being spent on consultants who are
essentially just pocketing donations.

Also, I'd really like to see the operating costs broken down because it's
impossible to see what's going on here. You've got $3 million in depreciation,
but what is that paying for? Desks, computers, telephones? Do they pay rent,
or do they own a building?

The thing that's frustrating is that there may be nothing at all wrong. For
example, I can see $38 million for salaries and wages, with 300 employees. But
where are the other expenses? Is that the "other expenses" section? If so, how
hard would it be to break down that cost for me so that I can understand what
the money is being used for?

While I disagree with the approach the author of the page is taking, I
completely agree that their financial statements are as clear as mud. If this
was a company I was thinking of investing in, I would give it a really wide
berth based on the terrible financial reporting. As a non-profit operating on
public donations they should be doing a much better job.

~~~
lwf
The latter two of your questions are answered in
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2017-2018_-_frequently_asked_questions#Terms_and_Definitions)
.

>"In-kind service revenue” includes goods and services that the Wikimedia
Foundation would normally pay for, but have been donated to us at no charge,
such as bandwidth and hosting services and pro-bono legal services. Further
detail is available in ...

> "Other operating expenses” include expenses for facilities such as rent and
> office and non-office supplies, insurance, annual staff meeting, recruiting,
> staff development, property taxes and Wikidata project funding.

You can find a more detailed audit report at
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-18_-_Independent_Auditors%27_Report.pdf)

~~~
mikekchar
Thanks for that. I was scratching my head at the "in-kind service revenue".
For others that were likewise confused, there is a line item on _both_ sides:
it's income _and_ expenses and cancels out. So that makes sense.

The detailed audit report indicates that rent is about $1.5 million. The rest
is essentially computer purchases.

I'd still like to see a better explanation of the professional services. But
it definitely makes more sense.

~~~
realityking
I suspect that the majority of of professional services spending is on
accountants and lawyers. The Independent Audit report itself likely costs a
6-figure sum. Depending on how much accounting is done in-house vs outsourced,
some of it might also fall into professional services.

The bulk of it is likely going to lawyers. A lot of the in-kind donations fall
into the same bucket:

> In-kind service revenue and expenses recorded in the statements of
> activities consist of contributed legal services. The amounts of specialized
> contributed legal services as revenue and expenses are $2,748,512 and
> $156,191 for the years ended June 30, 2018 and 2017, respectively. The value
> of contributed internet hosting services for the years ended June 30, 2018
> and 2017 are $32,722 and $58,390, respectively.

------
save_ferris
> There has been zero actual effort by the WMF to increase transparency on
> spending.

Oof. Aside from compute costs, what could justify a more than 100% increase in
expenses from 2012 to the present? The platform has barely changed in terms of
functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective).

~~~
landryraccoon
> The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at
> least from my basic user perspective)

I’m curious, it sounds like you’re a casual Wikipedia user so - how do you
have any idea if this is true? What about editor features, community,
moderation, administrative improvements?

This kind of attitude frustrates me - it’s the sort of attitude that kills
nonprofit fundraising efforts unless they are for show in a way that laypeople
can understand. Surely you can see how inefficient it would be to run a non
profit if everything they spent money on had to be highly visible?

~~~
wyattpeak
Frankly, if a nonprofit can't justify to laypeople why they should have money,
they shouldn't have money.

My money is limited, the causes which can benefit from it are not. It seems to
me the height of self-absorption that an organisation should expect donations
over the many other worthwhile causes without justifying the benefit that
money would bring.

Changes to editor tools and processes don't cut it. All of those exist in
service of improving Wikipedia as a resource. If I can't see those changes as
an end-user, I question whether any of them really mattered. Is a fantastic
new user-friendly diagnostic machine justified in a hospital if treatment
rates don't go up?

~~~
DenseComet
Wikipedia's edits rates have been increasing very rapidly. Tools like those
must exist in order to vet them and ensure that Wikipedia remains a
trustworthy source. Its hard to see the benefits (nor am I sure how to ensure
it shows) as the expectation is Wikipedia is always correct, but without them,
the misinformation in Wikipedia would be much greater.

~~~
wyattpeak
Between 2004 and 2018, monthly edits grew from 500k to 40M, an 80x growth. [1]

In the same period, expenses have grown from 25k to 80M, a 3200x growth. [TFA]

[1] [https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-
projects/contributing/e...](https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-
projects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|all|~total|monthly)

~~~
mpalmer
Not claiming to know more than you about this but your point assumes that the
changing cost of maintaining the project at scale has some proportional
relationship to the number of edits.

As it has attracted global attention and ever more significant influence on
people worldwide, Wikipedia's threats are likely more varied and insidious
than they were in 2004. The cost of offsetting these threats may not relate to
the volume of edits.

~~~
wyattpeak
I certainly don't claim any domain knowledge, but the growth in expenses is so
vast that I'm disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not, by the way, suggesting that a 3200x growth in expenses is inherently
unjustifiable, just that it should in fact be justified.

~~~
mpalmer
Yes, agreed that it should be justified in the open.

------
mikl
Ugh, so is this was they’ve been doing with our donations, building some
massive behemoth that burns $100M a year on who-knows-what?

Their financial statements say very little about what they’re doing with it,
but it is an exorbitant amount of money to keep a website running, even one
the size of Wikipedia.

Other threads state that they’re funding all sorts of side-hustles with the
money. If so, that is fraudulent, since when they do fundraising campaigns,
they claim to be raising funds for _Wikipedia_. Really slimy of them to then
go and spend it on something else.

------
jeanvalmarc
So in summary Wikipedia is a responsibly run nonprofit that spends slightly
less than it takes in while providing a valuable service to millions (or
billions) of users?

~~~
joshuaissac
The summary is that the Wikimedia Foundation asks for and spends increasingly
large amounts of money in donations mostly on things that are unrelated to
Wikipedia. The writer seems to want the Foundation to use the money instead to
build up an endowment (like universities do) so that Wikipedia is not
eternally reliant on donations to survive. He also suggests that Wikipedia
itself is fairly well-run, but the Foundation is not.

------
ufo
> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it?

Honestly, I always felt that these kind of conparisons are insensitive, and
doubling down on it like the linked article does doesn't help.

~~~
misterdoubt
It doesn't even make sense with the data being presented.

> _After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for
> the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending_

Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in
exceeds money out year after year.

As a grad student I made a total $1,300 per month, but ten years later I'm
spending that on just housing costs. So what?

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Re: "Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in
exceeds money out year after year."

You missed the first part of what I wrote in my essay:

"Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that
causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal
(real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that
offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less
money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a
judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it WILL
happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has
never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover
fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that
the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but
instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves
and our endowment."

I made it clear that Wikipedia is not in trouble at the present time. But
there is a real possibility that there are bad times ahead, and we should
prepare for them now.

~~~
misterdoubt
I think you're reasoning about this backwards. They don't worry about setting
harder spending limits _because_ the revenue continues to increase. If the
revenue cut back, you call it "naive" to suppose that they could put 2 and 2
together and cut spending. So they should be fiscally conservative and think
of the future when they expect themselves to be... profligate and short-
sighted? Why?

You started this page in 2017. The revenue has continued to increase at as
steady a pace as expenses. And an argument along the exact same lines as yours
could have been made in 2009 or 2010 or 2011. Actually, your argument has
gotten weaker -- expenses used to be higher than the previous fiscal year's
revenue, but in recent years the growth has been much flatter.

There's no compelling reason to think that _now_ is the time to act to make
sure that it's not too late to act at some vague future point in time. Sure,
something can't grow forever. Granted. But are we at 127 grains of rice or
131,071? How can you tell?

------
g8oz
Like many successful foundations the Wikimedia Foundation has been taken over
by empire builders. These types expand non-core mandates to justify increased
headcount and gain clout & self-importance.

The tech requirements of Wikipedia are straightforward. The content comes from
volunteers. The software development could be handled via a community
development process like Debian's.

------
Causality1
Putting all the arguments aside, I had no idea Wikipedia was so far in the
black. The donation begging had me thinking they were desperately clinging to
life. I don't like that. From now on my annual Wikipedia donation will be
going to the Internet Archive.

~~~
eropple
The Internet Archive is also a profoundly worthwhile charity. But those of us
with a little understanding of the space would be remiss to not point out that
this article is dishonest and you're falling for it. It isn't uncommon for
nonprofits (and Wikipedia is not only a nonprofit but is functionally
_infrastructure_ at this point; its survival is important beyond its own self-
perpetuation) to try to build up an endowment in order to survive lean times.
This is normal. You're falling for an okeydoke. Please don't.

~~~
maehwasu
If their actual goal was to build up an endowment to survive lean times, their
spending profile would be quite different.

That may be an ancillary goal of theirs, but it’s demonstrably not close to
the primary one (in a revealed preference sense).

------
umvi
I do like his idea of building up investments and running wikipedia off of ROI
instead of begging for donations every year. Why is it that WMF hasn't done
that yet?

~~~
jcrben
It has been raising an endowment for several years:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment)

You can donate at
[https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...](https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage)

~~~
peteretep
I would like to see the Gates Foundation and co start investing in more media
endowments like this.

~~~
s1artibartfast
Seems like a terrible investment for the Gates foundation. It is highly
visible and has ample public funding. Additionally, it appears that it has no
budget control.

------
shubb
Looking at what they claim to be working on, maybe the money is just being
spent on stuff that americans don't see.

The last few years, the annual plans seem focussed on making Wikipedia
relevant in India, South America, and the Middle East.

When I was at EE school, the chip manufacturers gave the school devboards
students go to know their stuff. Matlab was cheap too.

I suspect Wikimedia is funding a bunch of journalism and research training in
these countries, so that every highschool kid gets pointed to wikipedia at
school.

~~~
LegitShady
If they are as a charity collecting money ostensibly needing it for their
online encyclopedia they should disclose all this explicitly with dollar
amounts.

~~~
shubb
Yes, unless there is a vital reason why not, I think charities should have to
disclose spending to quite a high resolution.

It seems the most recent business plan and accounts are less detailed than in
previous years. This is a backwards step.

------
Medicalidiot
If I remember correctly, the person that wrote this had quite the axe to grind
about Wikipedia and her/his major criticisms of it were actually what
nonprofits look to shoot for. Wikipedia has genuine issues, but not anything
this person says has much merit.

~~~
apsec112
This feels like a very empty response; it doesn't point out any specific
problem with the author's facts or reasoning. The basic argument is that, ten
years ago, Wikipedia ran a very similar service at a much lower cost, so the
current organization is therefore spending money ineffectively. You can say
you disagree with that, but why? It makes sense to me.

~~~
itsgrimetime
But Wikipedia is no where near the same service it was in 2012. Dozens (if not
hundreds) of features, increased traffic demands and higher availability, it
seems obvious that the platform would have to grow.

~~~
AbrahamParangi
The point is that while views have increased by 10x over the past 15 years,
expenses have increased by 1250x. That leaves a 125x increase in per-user
spending that does not appear to be reflected in commensurate increases in
user value.

------
nazgulnarsil
When you subsidize something you get more of it. Don't donate to WMF. If it
crashes and burns it is trivial for anyone else to host the existing material
with <10 employees and <100k year hosting costs.

~~~
elect_engineer
But who would pay the 137,201 active editors? Oh, wait, they are all unpaid
volunteers.

OK, who would pay the 1,149 administrators? Oh wait, they are all unpaid
volunteers too.

OK, who would pay the developers? Oh, wait, the software was originally
created by unpaid volunteers and it works well enough that having three
developers evaluating bug fixes submitted by volunteers would be enough. There
are plenty of Linux distributions and open-source projects that get by on one
or two developers.

What about the 924,632,645 edits, 49,122,961 pages of all kinds and 5,978,255
articles? Oh wait, those are free to copy over along with the software that
runs the encyclopedia.

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"

------
apsec112
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235)

------
loeg
(2017)? It seems the original article dates to 2016, but was updated for 2017
and 2018. (The trend holds, which is why it's on HN frontpage today.)

------
blackbrokkoli
I'm a bit astonished how here on HackerNews there are articles all day about
how sophisticated and surprisingly complicated and convoluted stuff like
hosting, IT security, people management, scaling, updating etc is and yet it
is somehow ultra suspicious that a page with massive growth had to _change in
a non-lineary way_ over the course of two decades with rapidly changing
culture...

Wow employing 300 people to keep up with a massively more popular internet on
much more differentiated devices in times of information platforms
manipulating national elections is not _exactly_ 300 times as expensive as
employing one dude to do odd jobs around the house?! Must be mismanagement!!

Wow administrating a site which went from changing slowly to changing at
inhumane pace and serving those pages with media formats which did not even
existed at the beginning to a growing global population does not just include
changing a checkbox on hostgator?! Must be scammers in their IT!!

I realize this comes off as very salty - I actually don't have much stake in
this personally but I despise the pseudo intellectual criticism here in this
otherwise very down-to-earth community.

PS: Comparing things to cancer is the Hitler-comparison of biology.

~~~
Veedrac
Page views have doubled since 2008, and decreased since 2015. This can't be
about hosting.

[https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombine...](https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm)

------
Ajedi32
Thought exercise: if the Wikimedia Foundation collapsed today and we had to
build a new version of Wikipedia without their assistance, how much would it
cost?

Data dumps of Wikipedia's databases, and the MediaWiki software itself are all
Freely and publicly available[1], so none of that would have to be rebuilt;
we'd only have to create a new organizational and operational infrastructure.

[1]: [https://dumps.wikimedia.org/](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/)

------
el_cujo
I'm sure WMF does some good stuff, but I'm sure the average donator just
thinks they're donating to keep Wikipedia alive and online and has no idea
about all of the extra stuff WMF does (and therefore needs money to fund). I'm
not necessarily saying WMF's stuff isn't worth funding, but it really seems
like they're tricking people into paying for it under the guise of keeping
Wikipedia running.

------
celerrimus
@elect_engineer: Well, as many here already pointed out, I do not see here
cancer grows. The 16,000,000,000 page views per month is something really
huge.

For some perspective, I run servers for a commercial company, and with such
traffic, we would pay about $7,000,000 per year. But of course, we run on the
latest and overprovisioned hardware for best performance and safety, and in
reputable, but a very expensive company. In this scenario, $2M for hosting
such a big infrastructure globally is not looking too bad. I assume that they
need a lot of sysadmins to manage such big infrastructure (maybe 500-600
servers?), and those needs to be paid well. I won't be surprised that this
would be much over $10M per year. Maybe this data is available somewhere,
those are only my pure estimates.

Anyway, with revenue of $100M and $20M of excess every year, dramatic mails
and notices I get from MediaWiki and Wales itself, how bad Wikipedia needs my
donation, looks now a little disgusting for me...

------
hollerith
How to avoid the fundraising banners on Wikipedia:

Dismissing them by clicking the X works only momentarily. Here is how to keep
them gone.

You have to have an account and be logged in. Go to Special:Preferences, click
on the "Gadgets" tab, then tick the box next to the statement "Suppress
display of the fundraiser banner."

------
elect_engineer
Hello. I am the author of the "Wikipedia has cancer" essay on Wikipedia. After
I finish writing this I I will confirm this with a post to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Macon#\[\[WP:CANCER\])]
on Hacker news I read HN pretty much every day, even though I don't post very
often.

I will be happy to discuss any aspect of my essay on Wikipedia, and I would
especially be interested in correcting any errors that may have crept in.

~~~
dahart
What is the cancer exactly? I have a hard time buying that spending by itself
is a cancer. Ignoring all the opinion commentary and looking at only the
numbers in your essay, they seem to demonstrate exactly the opposite of your
conclusion. The numbers are showing support and net assets are larger and
growing faster than spending. Isn't that the definition of a healthy business?
Spending increases are roughly linear for a decade, perhaps even slowing
slightly based on your plot, but Wikipedia usage and value has grown as it
becomes a global resource.

This just my take on it from a distance, I don't know the ins and outs of the
foundation or the web site, but all the commentary in your essay seems to
obsess hyperbolically on separating the absolute spending numbers from any
context. I'm failing to see evidence of an actual problem based on what you
wrote.

In a general sense, I can completely agree with the abstract idea that
spending should have transparency and a budget, that's always a good idea.

Wikipedia seems to me like it's still dramatically overperforming given its
expenditures, that its value currently outweighs its costs, when you compare
it to healthy for-profit websites of the same size & usage. Could all the
increased spending be a symptom of the fact that Wikipedia 10 years ago was
undervalued and managing by miracles to survive on a shoestring, and now that
it's enormous the costs are correcting to where they should be?

------
joshfraser
This actually looks like a healthy, growing organization. You want your
revenue to exceed expenses and have a bit of a nest egg to give you buffer for
an uncertain future.

------
praveenster
I usually check ratings for a charity by reviewing it on Charity Navigator
(which is itself a 501 (c) (3) and in need of donations as well). The rating
for the Wikimedia Foundation happens to be really good:
[https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=11212)

I use Wikipedia for reference on various topics on a daily basis and I know my
kids do it at school as well. Hence, I donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, the
approximate cost of my yearly Netflix subscription as they provide huge
amounts of valuable information without any ads and to everyone without
paywalls. There aren’t very many free services on the web that run without
ads.

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Charity Navigator is a fine organization, but they do have the flaw of having
to take the charities word on what the core mission is. If the WMF says they
need 350 employees -- or 350,000 employees -- to accomplish the core mission,
Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that flying people
to exotic locations for Wikimania meetings is needed to accomplish the core
mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that
building a search engine to compete with Google is needed to accomplish the
core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it.

My position is that Wikipedia was accomplishing that core mission just fine in
2008. I was an active editor in 2008 and I did not notice any pressing needs
that were not funded because we were spending 4.3% of what we are spending
now. What, exactly, are we doing now that we were not doing ten years ago that
justifies us spending 23 three times as much money to do essentially the same
job? I could see spending 5 times more, but 23?

------
Iv
In 2019, with a budget of 100+M, if the WMF was really devoted to keeping
wikipedia sustainably online, it would have found a way to store it in a P2P
fashion.

------
zelly
There's no need for Wikipedia to be a centralized entity. I do not want to
send checks to some foundation. I want to run a node.

------
agustif
Whit what's just happening with the .org sale, anything can happen, even a
sell-off of wikipedia is on the table I guess...

------
klyrs
> In 2008 Wikipedia had over 5 million registered editors, 250 language
> editions, and 7.5 million articles. Wikipedia.org was the 10th-busiest
> website in the world. We had already started Wiktionary, Wikibooks,
> Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity and Wikispecies, we had already opened
> chapters in multiple countries, and we had already moved from Florida to San
> Fransisco.

No neat charts showing trends on these numbers? I'd want to see that
comparison, at a bare minimum, before sounding alarms.

------
deevolution
The fact that wikipedia, the world encyclopedia, is centrally hosted is itself
a problem. Wikipedia should be censorship resistant, borderless, distributed
and resilient to disasters, similar to Bitcoin. So far it's none of those
things, so it doesn't deserve my money. If I could contribute by hosting
articles on my computer I would be more than happy to offer up a few gigs of
harddrive space in exchange for access to the world knowledge bank

~~~
viraptor
You can [https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-
wikipedia/](https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/)

~~~
deevolution
Oh wow, this is awesome! Also looks like there is an active proposal for
decentralizing wikipedia[1]. But IPFS seems to more or less offer a decent
solution.

1\.
[https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wik...](https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wikipedia)

------
ken
It's a symptom of the centralized nature of the web. To serve everybody, you
need a boatload of servers.

I recall hearing about this cool free editable encyclopedia in the early
2000's, but I could never get a single page to completely load. It was
unusably slow. It's nice to think Wikipedia only needs $50K a year in
operating expenses, but you can't reasonably develop and host a top-10 website
on that.

~~~
jfim
The hosting expenses associated with the Wikimedia foundation are, according
to their financial report [0], 2.3 million USD. Hosting their servers is
actually their smallest expense item, other than "Special event expense, net".
As a comparison, they spend 52.1 million on salaries, wages, awards, and
grants.

I'd disagree with your statement that they could not reasonably develop and
host a top-10 website with the amount of money that they're raising, and if
they needed to, they could significantly cut down on expenses and still keep
everything running.

[0] [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-
report/fin...](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-
report/financials-leadership/)

------
TrickyRick
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FUser%3AGuy_Macon%2FWikipedia_has_Cancer)

------
posterboy
they are a tech giantt already. There's no difference

------
ossworkerrights
Isn't this always the case with open source / "free" platforms? Loads of
volunteers put the effort in, while someone somewhere has enormous financial
benefits off of it?

------
jakobmi
Guy Macros: Okay, good. What do you suggest doing now?

~~~
loeg
The article says that.

> If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now,
> before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a
> detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any
> reasonable questions asking for more details. We should limit spending
> increases to no more than inflation plus some percentage (adjusted for any
> increases in page views), build up our endowment, and structure the
> endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times
> get bad.

------
commandersaki
I honestly don’t mind a world without Wikipedia.

------
thomascgalvin
Year-over-year, "revenue" and "profitability", or at least the not-for-profit
version thereof, have been increasing for Wikipedia.

Every company in the world is trying to be in that exact situation.

Economics is not biology. Stasis is very hard to maintain. Typically, a
business is either growing, or it is declining. Our current problems tend to
revolve around companies that are too big to fail, not companies that are too
big to succeed.

I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were
flat over the past decade.

~~~
CriticalCathed
>I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were
flat over the past decade.

Why? The thing of value in wikipedia is the encyclopedia that was Built off of
FREE LABOR by VOLUNTEERS. The increases in spending seem to be going to white
collar office jobs that aren't actually necessary for The Wiki to exist and
thrive. All wiki needs is servers. It shouldn't need to grow.

Wiki isn't a capitalist entity. It doesn't need to play by the rules of
capital. And that it _is_ mirroring the pattern of capitalist companies is
tremendously worrying for the future of the project.

~~~
elect_engineer
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has
cancer".

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

I think you hit the nail on the head. For a charity that is trying to feed
starving children, they can always use more money as long as there are any
starving children left. Same with most charities. But if a charity exists to
but an encyclopedia on the web, they don't need to keep increasing their
spending other than what is needed to cover any increases in the cost of
running the servers plus a reasonable amount for support staff.

Related:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Frequently_asked_questions#Why_will_it_require_up_to_US$2.5_million_to_develop_a_movement_strategy)?

