Wikipedia had a really good year in 20-21, their most recent financial report.
They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget, and came out of the year with $240 million in assets.[1]
So they had about half a year's surplus, and wound up with ~2 years worth of savings. And yes, that's a simplification, a good chunk of those assets are necessary to continue operating and cannot be liquefied to cover operating expenses.
In 19-20, they took in $120 million against a $111 million operating budget.[2]
So, yes, Wikipedia is doing well - as we should hope they would be. But no, they are not rolling in it, and yes they do depend on our continued support to continue doing well.
Edit: The article linked in the tweet asks valid questions and puts the stats in better context, but the twitter thread presents the numbers in a way that is very, frustratingly, misleading.
Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keeping the site serving is.
For example, in 2016 Wikipedia served a similar amount of page views as it does today [1] on an operating budget of about half [2]. Go farther back and my impression is it's much more dramatic, though I'm not finding good page view statistics for, say, 2010.
Redesigning the article editing UI is pretty darn important when the only thing that ensures the site stays up to date is attracting new editors to work on it. Nobody wants a dead Wikipedia with hopelessly obsolete and misleading information, even though it would be incredibly cheap to host. And the Wikipedia partner projects are just as important as Wikipedia itself to the broader ecosystem of open content and open knowledge. Wikipedia needs its sister projects, and money spent on them is in no way "wasted".
Yes, Wiktionary, Commons, and the other sister projects are very useful, to various degrees integrated with Wikipedia in value-adding ways, and generally serve the foundation's mission and the few remaining vestiges of an open internet. If you want an example of an open source nonprofit wasting all their money on inflated salaries and pointless vanity projects no one uses, compare Mozilla.
If they want to recruit new editors, the most urgent thing to do is fix the existing editor clique's reputation for being neophobic, vituperative, and ad hominem.
I agree that growth of the editor base is essential to the continuation of Wikipedia, but are the consumers(as the people I presume donate the most, tho I might be totally wrong) not just as important?
Is that what most people would understand by the term "direct support"?
"Direct support to communities", to me, is when you give something "directly" to a community member, such as a travel grant, or a grant for equipment, or pay for reference material.
The Wikimedia Foundation does things like that too, to be fair, but it accounts for about 3% of its expenditure, not 32%.
However, $5.5M of that $9.8M is money the Foundation paid into its own Endowment (which, by the way, has never published audited accounts). So only a little over $4M are left for "direct support to the communities".
They list as examples "grants, projects, trainings, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors". I agree that it's a bit misleading to put 'grants' first if that's only a small part of what they do.
I'm not sure what they intend to communicate with the word 'direct', either in "Direct support to communities" or "Direct support to websites".
Seems a bit silly to me. Working on the UI that enables expanding and maintaining wikipedia feels like a reasonable top priority of the organization responsible for maintaining wikipedia. If they just "served" it, it would collapse.
I don't know. Here's where I start to break with some of the ways people are thinking about this.
When you pay a fee to a website - do you question how they spend that money to this level of detail? Do you ask, I dunno, lets go with Slack, to break down their fee by how much of it is necessary to keep Slack online "as is"?
I don't think I've ever seen someone do that. There's a level of entitlement that comes with donations that people just don't attach to services they purchase.
Wikipedia isn't a charity in the traditional sense - IE it's not taking those donations and redistributing them to those in poverty.
It's an organization building and maintaining a platform that provides pretty a vital service to society. Almost everyone who donates to it will have gotten far more value from Wikipedia than the cost of their donation. Maybe, instead of thinking of it as "donation", people should be thinking of their contributions as a "sliding scale fee".
On the other hand, I do believe Wikipedia should be open and should be accountable to its community. I just believe the community should be reasonable when exercising that accountability.
I certainly think it's reasonable to donate money without a breakdown of where it's going to go. I also think that the things that Wikipedia is doing are perfectly reasonable.
Where I have an issue (and I suspect many others do) is when Wikipedia phrases donation requests as "keeping the lights on" or something to that effect. I suspect there would be a lot less hate if the requests were phrased like "help Wikipedia grow" or something like that.
It's more of a framing issue than an issue with where money is being spent. If Slack was claiming that they needed my fee to "keep the lights on," I think most people would have issues with that language/framing.
When I pay money for a service I compare the benefit I'm getting to the cost of the service and decide whether it's worth it. This works pretty well!
When I donate to a charity I compare the altruistic benefit my marginal contribution will produce to the amount I'm donating. This doesn't work very well, because it's really hard to estimate the benefit to society. But it still worth doing, because there are a lot of really valuable things that aren't going to be funded unless we put up our money.
If we agree that a poorly designed experience will become obsolete over time, then how does this expenditure not increase Wiki’s chances of staying online?
The experience isn't and wasn't poorly designed, though. It could surely be improved, but we're incredibly far from "Wikipedia dies through neglect" territory.
Not the GP, but I think they mean keeping an organization alive in the exact state it exists now vs. enabling it to change to adapt to a changing world portend opposite chances that an organization will remain around in the long term.
Yeah, I think it's valid to ask whether Wikipedia's expenses are too high, or whether they are spending on the right things.
But that tweet and thread are sensationalist and not doing it in a way that will lead to a reasonable dialog around that question. The linked article is better - but still sensationalist.
Compare that budget and the scale of Wikimedia foundation to the organizations that are running websites of a similar scale. Wikimedia is still tiny. And they are doing a ton of good.
As you can see on that page, individual executives' salaries have risen by 20, 30 percent in the space of two years. And all the while people are told the Wikimedia Foundation needs money "to keep Wikipedia online", or "to protect Wikipedia's independence".
No. If you want to grow your headcount, tell people why. If you want ten times as much money from the public ...
From your link: 25% overhead doesn’t really seem that bad? If those numbers are accurate, 75c of every dollar goes directly to hosting, development, and community support (things like grants and legal aid for editors). That’s probably on par if not better than most nonprofits.
Have you noticed any actual development on Wikipedia? Only thing that changes from the user perspective is that the donation request get more and more annoying every year.
I noticed the new editor. I can't say I'm a huge fan of it, but I did notice it.
I don't know how long ago they added the hover infoboxes, but I also noticed those. But that's a relatively small feature, at least from my perspective.
Most of the development isn't reader facing. It's editor facing (WYSIWYG editor/etc, toolforge), community developer facing (wikimedia cloud services/toolforge/etc), improvements to the infrastructure (CDN data centers/DR/etc), wikidata improvements (which you see as a reader, but don't know you see as a reader), and lots of other things.
I'm pretty sure there's a public roadmap somewhere, and you could always follow through their bug system or PRs. Everything is developed in the open, even the infrastructure (disclaimer: I founded wikimedia cloud services, and opened up the infrastructure development).
I've noticed that now the language selector is a two seemingly random places depending on ?? (the classical places is on the left, an exhaustive list ordered alphabetically; the new place that is sometimes there is on the top right, in a drop down list, ordered by some obscure relevance metric).
I have noticed some changes like in how they handle media, but most of their development must be backend work because for the most part you shouldn't notice a bunch of changes. The site should be kept as simple and unobtrusive as possible. The only feature I really want them to have that they don't is dark mode.
I did find that, and I'm glad they have something, but I'd prefer not to sign up for or need to be logged into an account. I'd also rather not have to audit/edit an extension. Ideally they'd have a URL for it, like https://dm.en.wikipedia.org
I'm guessing I'll end up either using an extension or writing something up in Greasemonkey. There might even already be a userscript out there I can use.
Ideally they made their site responsive and respected the prefers-color-scheme CSS media query. Having people share m.wikipedia.org links is annoying enough and there is no reason for it at all.
The important thing isn't how much of a project is "overhead", it's what you get for your donation. A project distributing lollypops might have 5% overhead, but I would still prefer to donate to one that distributed vaccines with 30% overhead.
In this case their program expenses are a mix of incredibly valuable things ("keep wikipedia online") and more borderline things ("redesigning the article editing UI"). When their fundraising talks about the former as if it's what the marginal dollar will be spent on, that's pretty misleading.
(I don't think this marketing is unusually misleading for a non-profit, and likely better than average; the bar for honesty in fundraising is depressingly low.)
> and more borderline things ("redesigning the article editing UI")
You keep harping on this, but improving the article editing UI seems like an absolutely valuable thing for wikipedia to invest in. Retaining existing and attracting new contributors is essential to wikipedia's future, and the editing experience is an essential part of that.
This would not rate as a well-run or top efficiency charity by CharityWatch. It would probably rank average at best. The best charities are in the 8-10% range.
I appreciate this kind of thinking being shared by someone who I recall from previous HN postings spends a lot of time thinking about how to give to charity effectively. I've been turned off from donating to Wikipedia for the better part of the last decade.
I think this kind of thinking is negative and an example of the free rider problem.
Wikipedia provides
a good service for the money it charges you. It doesn't charge you anything.
The thing about free things is that they aren't really free, someone is paying for it and the people doing the work to keep Wikipedia online are the best skilled and placed and experienced to decide these kind of spending decisions, not people with no personal investment orwho do not donate and don't even edit or do any work but somehow have opinions how other people should do their job for free.
If you use Wikipedia and getting value from it then you can't really complain, it's not positive.
Charitable giving is important to me personally, and I have a relatively limited budget to donate.
I get a lot of utility from Wikipedia, but is my marginal dollar helping the mission or paying for dinner at a conference? Perhaps I’d be better off donating to an open source foundation for that part of the charity portfolio, which may actually have more impact on Wikipedia!
I think this org doesn’t communicate what it does well.
The problem is a social one, if everyone expects everybody else to do something about a problem, it never gets done.
"I thought you were doing it"
If you want to give, then give and I recommend giving to charity, the world needs lasting regular investment.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, someone is ultimately paying. If everybody assumes everybody else will pay for it and nobody is willing to add funds, then that service shall pass away.
Look at any social good and the investment it receives and the state of repair of those same services.
Is paying for dinner at a conference of wikipedia editors really that bad a thing?
In person conferences move open source projects forward. They build relationships and synergy between people who usually only see each other online. A cheap dinner is probably a lot of bang for buck when it comes to outcomes.
For a charitable/non-profit organization, providing them with funding way above their needs is counterproductive. As seen with Wikipedia, in the presence of excess money, costs proceed to grow uncoupled to the progression of their core mission.
As charity funding is effectively a closed system, excessive contribution to Wikipedia is to the detriment of other charities, with minimal net benefit.
I think their needs are genuine, if we want more of Wikipedia and more of Wikipedia services, it requires investment.
If you think one charity is more deserving your money than Wikipedia, then you are free to decide that with your resources.
You decide how to spend your money and Wikipedia decides how to spend theirs.
Resource allocation is not a solved problem and it is inherently political.
If you're working in the field, you have a perspective of what resources you need to do the job properly and it's always higher than what people outside the field believe.
Were the situations reversed (you were Wikipedia), would you believe what you do today?
Are you really suggesting it's not possible for an organization to misallocate funds, or that it is not possible to determine if an organization is misallocating funds without running the same organization or a substitutable replacement organization?
Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) can be the best in its class without the Wikimedia foundation being beyond criticism. 99% of what makes Wikipedia great was already there a decade ago, with exponentially less cost.
When deciding where to donate we should consider where our money will do the most good. "Keep Wikipedia online" is a candidate for one of the most important things, if that's actually what your money will help do. But other Wikimedia projects, while useful, are generally nowhere near as high priority, and there are a lot of other places we could be donating!
They are all hosted on the same group of servers using the same software. Its non-sensical to talk about money going to keep other wikimedia projects online instead of wikipedia. That's not how things work.
Sorry, that's not the part that bothers me. Instead, it's that everyone agrees that keeping the content serving is their highest priority, and they have far more money than they need just for that, which means additional money they raise is not "keep Wikimedia online" but funding their other work.
People may be excited to fund that other work too, but they should make the case for it instead of pretending there's a risk Wikipedia and their other sites will drop off the internet.
Google had a 2021 operating cash flow of $92B, and they've decided to spend money on lots of things that aren't "serving ads". And yet nobody complains.
Im pretty sure a ton of people complain how Google spends their money, quite frequently. As well, one of the major complaints from people has nothing to do with their ad budget. It has to do with the fact they both host the marketplace for advertising and are a competitor in the same space. And they expert that market dominance by manipulating prices, perception, and their own products success.
Not to mention the fact that Google et al. do everything they can to avoid paying taxes in the countries they operate in, including developing countries. The global South loses billions of dollars that way that they could use to fund education and healthcare. The odd "philanthropic" project does not make up for that.
> They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget,
The giant operating budget is what people take issue with.
People see these banners on the website and assume that their donations are going to fund the website. However, the Wikimedia Foundation has been inexplicably expanding their budgets to match whatever amount of money comes in each year, leading them to this endless cycle of needing ever-increasing amounts of donations because they're doing ever-increasing amounts of spending on various activities unrelated to serving the website.
At some point the message has to change. It has to become something a little more like: Look, so far we've done this which you thought was cool. Now we want to do X, Y and Z. Will you support us?
At some point the message has to change. It has to become something a little more like: Look, so far we've done this which you thought was cool. Now we want to do X, Y and Z. Will you support us?
I think this is a perfectly valid idea and would encourage you to lead with this sort of approach in trying to get the Foundation to change strategy. It's straightforward and constructive. Pointing out all the ways the fundraising is bad is not nearly as useful as suggesting ways to approach it differently and improve it.
(I normally don't talk about Fundraising stuff as a volunteer, but the Meta thread where I was pinged led me here).
Well $10M in 2012 would be more like $13M today, so their budget has only expanded 12x in constant dollars, and they probably have more articles and users than they had in 2012.
There has been an explosion in expenses without any substantial improvement to the site or really anything that the people who actually use Wikipedia would notice. Is there any reason why they needed $50 million more dollars in 2021 than they needed in 2016? For the most part it’s still the same old Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikitravel etc. And please don’t tell me making the new editor cost that much (many people are not fans of it either).
I for one am worried that Wikipedia only has enough assets to survive a bit over a couple years of the fundraising climate dries up. That is not anti fragile.
It’s not misleading. If you look at their past decade, they’re doing really well, and yet the banner begging for money now takes up most of my screen. I gave once and I regretted it after looking at how much profit they’re tunneling away. It’s scammy
With the financial situation being how it is I, paradoxically, would currently consider donating to Wikipedia to be actively harmful to the future of Wikipedia. The larger its dragon hoard of money grows (which is already way beyond any sort of costs to keep up Wikipedia for decades), the larger the incentive for unscrupulous individuals to corrupt the Wikipedia mission to tap into this money for personal benefit. I can't help but conclude that if you love Wikipedia and what it does... don't give them any more money for the time being.
It is clear the foundation has been corrupted by the professional non-profit class. These are the same kinds of people who staff up a "housing foundation" in San Francisco, burn money for 10-15 years, and never build a single unit of housing.
The organization becomes a parasite that exists only to perpetuate itself. Hiring and spending expand to fill all available space which becomes its own justification to increase fundraising further. If any actual work for the public good gets done that's just a side benefit.
If WMF had simply held spending constant (adjusting for inflation) for just a few years they could have had an endowment big enough to ensure Wikipedia is able to run independently forever. If they were being responsible they'd also have spun it into a subsidiary non-profit that owned Wikipedia along with that endowment with a charter to focus exclusively on running Wikipedia and developing the software. Then their octopus of random spending programs could be operated as a sister subsidiary without any risk of destroying Wikipedia itself.
Honestly at this point if they proposed that plan I'd be willing to donate to get it done. Instead they hold Wikipedia hostage to justify their expanding empire.
The bigger threat to Wikipedia is people who want to corrupt its information content. People wanting to get their treasure chest is not an existential threat. The existing employees and collaborators are more likely to get corrupted by nefarious actors if they don't have independent revenue sources.
It's completely normal for a successful nonprofit to have an endowment that grows in good years and can be spent when needed. They don't pay dividends or anything like that so it sits in a cash reserve.
You can't just look at the total expenses, you need to look at what the necessary expenses are. It's easy to create new expenses when you have available money to spend.
So there is a difference between keeping the Wikimedia Foundation organization going and keeping Wikipedia going. Keeping the Wikimedia Foundation going at its current size costs about 10 times as much as just keeping Wikipedia going, under the assumptions of that 2013 post.
You can't use "keep Wikipedia online" indefinitely as a justification for raising ever more money in order to expand. The Wikimedia Foundation should talk far more in its fundraising about what those hundreds of additional people are actually doing, including projects other than Wikipedia, instead of projecting this image of a small raft of people struggling to hold Wikipedia together with duct tape.
Anyone remember cost disease[1]? My favorite hypothesis for one of the major causes is an excess of funding/resources/money without pressure to efficiently make use of those resources - which includes not siphoning them off for personal gain, as you point out here
I might be too simple of a person, but I donate €10 per year to Wikipedia which is nothing. In return, I get immediate access to a veritable wealth of accurate and up to date knowledge on more or less everything.
It’s such an amazingly great deal that I honestly think, who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way? Who cares that Jimmy Wales drives a BMW instead of a Volkswagen?
Who is the loser here? Do we really need to get this level of angry online because an already amazing situation isn’t perfect?
Arguably, Wikipedia is the loser, because you are rewarding a management mindset that thinks manipulating the public for financial gain is okay.
Wikipedia is the most widely read reference source on the planet. Wouldn't you rather it was stewarded by an organisation that was honest with the public?
There are other losers. This man, guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser:
There are other losers still. People in India and South Africa are scared into donating to Wikipedia by emails that raise the spectre of a subscription fee, or of Wikipedia blinking out of existence for lack of funds.
There are other charitable causes they could have donated to in their own country, rather than sending money to the US, money that might have saved lives in their own country, rather than added another treat to a US employee's benefits package.
What "treat" are you referring to? Employees need to be compensated for a company to be competitive.
Speaking of manipulative your augment takes a complex situation and turns it into "poor people using the last of their money to pay for US employees extra benefits"
... include "reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, massages, cooking classes and much more"
This is a fine thing I'm sure, but I wouldn't want it to be paid for by Indian or African donors worried Wikipedia will disappear, or start charging a subscription, if they don't donate.
So fundraising appeals in the developing world in particular should be dialed right down:
That's what it means in Silicon Valley. It's not what it means in India, South Africa, Brazil, nor even Europe I think. These are all places where the WMF has just been fundraising. Nobody is forcing the WMF to hire in America.
True. Though all C-suite execs are US-based and US salaries make up the vast majority of all salary costs, as well as the vast majority of total staff costs if you include contractors.
Unless things changed, the wellness budget was quite low, and funny enough, probably costs the foundation nothing, because companies in the US get a discount on insurance for having them.
When you have big money then you think like big money. What people are angry about is WMF becoming too big and the heads managing this budget becoming independent of the actual foot soldiers. It's not about starving wikipedia, it's about not making it bigger than it needs to be, because the bigger you are, the more problems you have.
> who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way?
It's not about optimizing stuff, it's about not growing into a monster.
I don't see what's wrong with the outrage considering it's fleecing people's good will. Once upon a time when Wikipedia was the only service of its kind maybe there was more reason to ignore this kind of behavior but YouTube does more to bring knowledge to people these days so I think it's fair to have some kind of bar for behavior
Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.
I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled by these heart-wrenching fundraising messages to donate. Here is a senior with $18 to his name promising to donate as soon as his social security check arrives:
The Wikimedia Foundation has also just been fundraising in India and South Africa, again asking people there to donate so Wikipedia stays online for them, ad-free, subscription-free and independent.
None of these executives have anything do with the Wikipedia content. All of that is written by unpaid volunteers in their spare time. When Wikipedia first became a top-10 website, the Wikimedia Foundation had less than a dozen staff, and annual expenses of $2 million. I am not saying lets go back to that; I'm only saying this to make the point that the success of Wikipedia was not dependent on highly paid executives. It happened when there weren't any. The main value of the site comes from the volunteers.
You're answering a point no one made. It has nothing to do with "being envious".
Imagine you were asked to donate to "keep the animal shelter open", and went you went there you found that they were using gold water dishes for the little critters. You would be within your right to complain. You thought you were donating to keep it operating, but now you find that they're using funds on frivolous expenses. Is there something a dish made out of gold does that one made out of plastic doesn't, to justify the expense? Is there something a $350k executive does that a minimum wage one (or even none at all) doesn't?
Any organization that asks for donations would be subject to criticism if it doesn't optimize its operations as much as possible.
> You're answering a point no one made. It has nothing to do with "being envious".
Then what is the relavence of saying "I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled ..."? The donors dont do work similar. The only reason i could possibly imagine bringing this up would be something to do with envy between the average person's salary vs the salary of a high skill position. If not that, what was this sentence trying to say?
> Is there something a $350k executive does that a minimum wage one
350k executives exist. Minimum wage one's don't.
Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.
The relevance is that some of those donors are donating the little money they have because they think there's a chance Wikipedia might cease to exist otherwise, not knowing that the WMF is actually using that money on gold water dishes rather than saving it for a rainy day.
Simply put, if Wikipedia asks for donations to continue operating, 100% of those donations should go towards server costs. That can include the hardware costs, the power, the bandwidth, and the people who maintain those servers. Using the money that was raised to keep it running for any other purpose is at least deceptive.
>Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.
Now imagine that the shelter spends only 10% of its donations on dog food and other dog-related costs, and the rest goes to salaries for people who aren't caring for the dogs and to awareness campaigns. (I'm not implying this is the breakdown in Wikipedia's case; it's just an example.) Even if you think these are worthwhile uses for those funds, don't you think donors should know that their donations will be spent this way before they donate?
But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.
I know people like to complain that managers are useless, but if they really were, every company would get rid of them.
The cost of managers is what is being complained about in this thread. There might be other superflorus things wmf might spend money on which i might agree with you on, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.
This was two years ago. Some of these salaries rose by over 20 or 30 percent in the space of two years, when annual US inflation was at 2%. I fully expect to find even greater salary rises since – once the Form 990 for this year is published sometime in 2024 – as US inflation went up during the pandemic.
>But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.
you were raising an irrelevant point, because the salaries of the direct managers of the operations team is not what's under discussion here. They wouldn't need such a deep organizational structure if they weren't paying a bunch of people that take no part in running the site.
What do you think an appropriate number of people is to run the sixth most popular website in the world?
Even if you cut everyone doing software development (which would in itself probably cause a collapse since that is critical to keeping wikipedia running), cut all the lawyers (also pretty important), cut the trust and safety people, etc - you are still left with quite a lot of sysadmins, more than can reasonably be handled by a single manager.
Even if you had multiple operations teams, you could still get away with a fairly flat organizational structure. Not every organization needs to be a top-down hierarchy, and a flat organization makes sense if your funds come from donations and you don't want to pay for too many people who won't directly produce anything.
Now, if your primary objective is not to run a website but something else entirely, then it does make sense for your infrastructure and the salaries of the people maintaining it not to be the largest part of your budget.
I honestly question the value added by these execs. The other day, you and I discussed some of the expensive C-Suite disasters Wikimedia has bought. They actually set Wikimedia back by years. Dozens of valuable, experienced staff left.
And Wikipedia became a top-10 website in 2007, when there was no C-Suite. There seems to be little awareness these days that the main value of the site to the public was and is built and maintained by unpaid volunteers.
Whether or not a particular set of executives (who have all left at this point) are shit at their jobs is a totally different question to what is a reasonable salary for an executive.
As far as early days of wikipedia. I agree the community is what provides value. But at the same time i think there is a lot of rose coloured glasses for that era. I remember there being a lot of downtime and slowness on the site in that era.
Sure. And I complained about how ArbCom volunteers had to deal with child protection issues etc. A lot has become better. But there seems to be an automatic assumption that any executive has to be someone in SF, with the salary costs that go along with it. If they work remotely what does it matter? Wikimedia wants to become more global. Why then not a European, Asian, African, Australian, South American ...? None of them will have salary expectations like someone in SF.
>Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange.
It's not, really. It's about how you frame things, and the follow-up tweets touch on that:
>You wouldn't think so from the fundraising emails currently being sent out, telling people to donate "to keep Wikipedia online", saying it's "awkward to ask", etc. A recent poll of Wikipedia volunteers condemned these emails as unethical and misleading
>If people want to throw money into a bottomless pit, fine; but let's not pretend that the money is needed "to keep Wikipedia online".
>And that story is not the story told to prospective donors. Wikipedia and its unpaid volunteers – the people who actually write and curate Wikipedia – deserve better.
I'm not disagreeing with the overall premise of the tweet chain. I'm just saying that $350k is pretty cheap for an exec at one of the most viewed/important websites on the planet.
It may be lavish, but if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap.
Of course, judging performance like that is very difficult, and predicting it in advance is even harder, so it's possible that the highly paid executive would actually perform worse than a volunteer (or a random number generator), but if the complaint about "lavishness" is really about inequality (i.e. the executive's standard of living being much higher than they need / the median citizen's) then that criticism should probably be directed at the tax policies of the relevant governments.
> from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap
But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive.
The difference is who is in control and what are their priorities and influences. Since "the organization" is making the decisions - and, completely incidentally, "the CEO" is the head of "the organization" - it just so happens that "the organization" finds that "the CEO" should be paid lavishly.
> But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive.
Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?
The normal person knows that just having big paycheck does not make an executive more competent. We have all seen people with huge paychecks fail spectacularly.
There's no direct correlation, yes. If you took two executives (or really two people in any profession), one making 10x as much as the other, and swapped their positions, you would not see one position dropping to 10% performance and the other rising to 1000% performance. In all likelihood, they would both drop to 50-70% for a while and then stabilize to their original values.
Individual persons are not orders of magnitude more productive on their own, they're just in environments that allow them to be more productive, for example by giving them control over more resources.
Only if you insist on hiring in the US – while at the same time talking all the time about how you want to fix the fact that you're underrepresented in many parts of the world, by asking some really expensive US staff to fix it ...
> if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap.
True, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's a realistic hypothetical at all.
I don't see any reason for an executive to be less likely to make a mistake. And considering that the core business is rock solid and didn't change much in last many years, I don't even see a potential for such mistake.
> It may be lavish, but if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap.
They're not though. Especially not multiple of them providing the same service.
I suppose they meant relatively speaking. Taking into account how massive of a project Wikipedia is and hence how much responsibility the position has.
Apples and oranges, you should instead compare it with other non-profits. According to top links in search for 'non profit ceo salary' give me average salary numbers about $150k
I'd say it's still a tricky comparison because the WMF is (reductively) a tech company, and tech sector salaries remain pretty high. For a lot of roles they need to fill, they're competing with other tech companies for those employees, not just other nonprofits. A salary that's fantastic by average-nonprofit standards might be vastly underpaying someone who's deciding between a job at the WMF or Google.
WMF is a company that's mostly engaged in maintaining a tech product, and much of its hiring needs are for people who'd otherwise be working in tech. If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.
> If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.
They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content.
In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maintaining some sort of technology, then pretty much every company would be a tech company nowadays. In that scenario the category would be truly meaningless.
The easiest way to spot a tech company is looking at their R&D spending: a tech company is constantly exploring instead of just maintaining.
Less than twice the US employees, more than five times the salary costs. (Both orgs also have some non-US employees included in the salary costs total, but they are a small minority of the staff.)
Well, ask yourself which org needs donations more urgently. (Last I looked the Internet Archive were being sued for lending scans of books – books they had physically bought – to one user at a time online.)
Please focus on one thing at a time. I think you're starting to come around to the idea that maybe Wikipedia has an appropriate amount of funding and is spending an appropriate amount of money?
You can just keep moving the goal posts every time you get proven wrong.
Also, you were complaining about Wikipedia being in the US/SF, when the Internet Archive is also in SF.
Yes. OTOH, United states has one of the best free speech protections in the world. It would make sense, to have the key people and data centers in the US. EU, however, has better privacy protection initiatives.
But that's apples and oranges. People who work at those companies are presumably being paid that because they are (or at least believed to be) making more in profit for the company than they are being paid. It's the same reason why professional football players and movie actors make so much. But consider ballet dancers or stage actors -- they may be just as athletic or as good actors as the football players or movie actors are, but they are in a far less profitable field. So they make less. The people in these jobs are just motivated by their passion rather than by salary.
How about they start spending their money wisely instead of growing infinitely? That way they can keep Wikipedia up and running for the next decade or so without bothering us with these solicitations.
Is the PM's salary before- or after-tax? Do they get free housing as the prime minister? How's the housing market in their cities? In SF, where Wikipedia is based, it's completely whack. What else does a PM get? Household staff, personal assistants, drivers etc?
100% agreed. $350k salaries for people that have basically built and maintained the modern-day Library of Alexandria is a pittance. These people deserve it.
I’ve come to see Wikipedia as the enemy in many cases, where its editorial policies, intentionally or not, result in entrenching corrupt establishment political narratives propagated by the White House, State Dept, corporate media, etc.
I remember looking at the vote history where they decided The Greyzone (one of whose journalists was called to testify at the UN on their investigative journalism) wasn’t a “credible source”, the very first vote I checked belonged to a unique username that was used on other sites for an anti-Palestinian think tank academic.
For completely uncontroversial topics it’s fine, for everything else you have to read all the dismissed/shut out outsiders complaining on the talk page to get any real sense of the topic.
Wikipedia has little legitimacy which is the purpose of an encyclopedia, I’ll never donate $1 to it and if it shut down tomorrow I wouldn’t care.
Is it the case that other encyclopedias handle controversial topics well? If school textbooks are an example, we taught all sorts of historical nonsense as facts that are now completely debunked.
A single article by a "reliable source" is enough to include something in a Wikipedia article, because Wikipedia can't do primary research. Grayzone sometimes publishes articles by employees of the Russian government. One of those articles wouldn't be sufficiently reliable on its own, so Grayzone isn't a reliable source for Wikipedia's purposes.
A UN committee is equipped to go beyond simply reciting what secondary sources say. It can conduct it's own research, and carefully compare different secondary sources. So it makes sense for them to want to hear from people that sometimes say interesting things but aren't always reliable.
Greyzone isn’t a reliable source because some Wikipedia editors voted they weren’t. I’m pointing out that the motivations of those participating in that are highly questionable to put it charitably.
I don’t know what “employees of the Russian government” you’re talking about (maybe RT articles?) but I’ve watched WaPo and NYT perpetually without criticism or follow up publish White House and State Dept. talking points.
Yeah I've looked into this before and it's basically true. They have way more money than they need. They justify it by saying "look at all the outreach projects we do!" but really nobody was asking for those. The people donating don't know they exist.
If they had spent wisely they could easily have a $0.5bn endowment by now and basically be self-sustaining without donations.
It also feels like a massive waste for one of the few open source organisations that is actually well funded. Where are the technical improvements to Wikipedia? The only thing I remember changing in the last 10 years is the link hover box which is very nice, but is that it?
Gee, Flow was awful. :) The little "Reply" button they've made now is cool, but as Kunal Mehta (User:Legoktm) pointed out the other day, they knew even then that was all that was required:
"Back in 2014, we had a very clear list of how to fix talk pages. Yet the mw:Talk pages project only started in 2019."
That is a fascinating thing to me - I have noticed that a lot of people arguing that the WMF is out of control and needs to cool it are editors.
It really feels like there is a fundamental disconnect between project contributors and the team making decisions at the foundation level. Of course, I expect to some degree that there will be disagreements, and that is why a foundation needs to exist, but the last couple of years its seemed a lot like people are just being stonewalled.
Ultimately, the communications gap is by far the most concerning part of it for me, even to the point where I would suggest the donation campaign is a symptom rather than the cause.
The culture war aspect of it, sure. On the one hand you have people coming into the Wikimedia C-suite who have had little to no affinity with the "encyclopedia" part of Wikipedia at all in their professional lives – people coming from pure tech, political, government or NGO backgrounds who wouldn't dream of volunteering their time on Wikipedia. They often stay only a year or two and are replaced by others like them. So the culture of the places they come from defines them much more than the culture of Wikipedia as built over twenty years.
They bring management consultants' jargon that alienates volunteers because to them it sounds phony. They want to do things top-down, because that is what they are used to, and what they feel they have to do make "their mark" which will look good on their CV when they move on in a couple of years' time to another job that hopefully pays them more. Meanwhile, the volunteers are there year after year, observing fads coming and going while often not getting the services they would actually like.
Above all, there is a such a growth in talk fests and bureaucracy. Grand plans and strategies are developed over years ("By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us") and then everything moves at a glacial pace. "Strategy started 7 years ago and yet we still havent even reached the implementation of anything" said one long-time volunteer on the mailing list the other day who felt like the WMF is actually moving things backwards:
I think there's a disconnect in what people believe is the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation. The WMF is an ideologically-driven movement. It is much more than simply a benevolent public service. The WMF has social-justice based goals in the world, and the public-facing Wikipedia projects are simply the friendly face of this movement. They're building an endowment to keep the movement alive, not merely to keep the lights on for their server racks.
The most useful thing that a typical user can donate to WMF is their time. So edit a few articles and get involved with the process if you're so inclined. It's volunteer labor, over and above all else, that keeps the projects running. If you're a minor donor then you need to understand that your money goes to support the movement, not simply the service.
Once again, I’m grateful for your message. (I did end up getting my refund. I hope you remember me.)
On a completely unrelated note, I was looking at a somewhat complicated Wikipedia page yesterday and noticed a piece of text I would like to edit. It had some stuff (citations and references) I felt I didn’t understand how to edit without being sure I wouldn’t break anything. Is there a good forum or place where I could ask for help with my edit?
1. preview changes until the result looks the way you think it should
2. have faith that if you broke something non-obvious, then the WikiGnomes will fix it (and then you can look at the page history and see the change and learn)
3. be bold! If you've never had an edit reverted you aren't contributing enough.
not that I am aware of; and Wikipedia has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade on a more user-friendly UI with nothing to show for it to date. Which is a good reason to question how well they allocate their hundred million dollar annual revenue.
They're testing out the new UI in the other language Wikipedias. It adds a nice collapsible topic structure to the sidebar and sets a text width limit, but hides the available languages for the article behind a button on the header. This makes it harder to tell whether the article is available in specific languages, and to switch the language. It's a bit unwieldy as of now, as you now have to jump to the top of the page and click the "languages" button just to check if the article is available in your desired language, but they are showing some effort. They plan to make the header sticky and add direct links to the user's most frequently used languages. I just hope a sticky header doesn't take away much of the space dedicated to the page's content.
Here's a link to the ideas page discussing the change:
I'd really like to seem them get an endowment for keeping the servers up and running, then let them fund raise to cover the UI improvements, community grants, and whatever else. I think those are important and useful but it should really be a different pot of money.
"WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it's _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring. But I would argue that an endowment, to actually be worthwhile, should aim for a significantly higher base level of minimal annual operating expenses, more in the order of magnitude of $10M+/year, to ensure not only bare survival, but actual sustainability of Wikimedia's mission. The "what's the level required for bare survival" question is, IMO, only of marginal interest, because it is much more desirable, and should be very much possible, to raise funds for sustaining our mission in perpetuity."
Total Wikimedia assets (Foundation + Endowment funds at Tides) stood at about $400 million in March 2022.
That particular VP wasn't very good at his job, and at the time he wrote that, the foundation was still considerably understaffed, and simply wasn't keeping up with the needs of any part of the community (readers, editors, volunteer developers).
I'm really tired of your argument that hosting costs $2.4m a year. It's disinformation at best, because you're leaving out salaries of the folks who keep it running.
("Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites, yet many people don’t know that it is hosted and operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Unlike other top websites, we rely on donations to support Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects ...")
("But why does the “Wiki” continually appeal for funding? ... the wheels keep turning, and it has massive bandwidth and hosting service costs.")
... alluded to in press reports designed to stimulate giving. So I think it is fair enough to point out that the scale of WMF expenses is not actually due to hosting costs.
Lastly, Erik's $10M+ estimate very clearly included the requisite salaries.
Erik's estimates were not good, which is one of the many reasons he wasn't good at his job. The current staffing at Wikimedia is considerably more in-line with their needs, and their salaries are much closer to what the industry pays (but is still considerably lower). Wikimedia's salaries are much higher than $10 a year currently, which kind of shows how off he was on his estimates.
Note that any site near Wikipedia's scale has at least 2-3x more software engineers (many of them have thousands of engineers), and much larger legal teams. Support roles grow in parallel with employee size. Wikimedia's overall salary cost is quite amazing for what they maintain.
The point is lots of people (including myself until about a year ago) were under the impression that Wikipedia was on the verge of bankruptcy, and would likely either stop existing or be purchased by Microsoft or Google if it wasn't for our donations, so I gave every time they asked. Learning that they are swimming in money makes us seem like we've been fooled.
Not OP, but probably a lot of people had faith that if the foundation behind Wikipedia says they need money to keep the servers online, they just believed them without trying to find details behind a "Beware of the Leopard" sign. It'd be similar to if a trusted family member said they needed some help.
But guess what, maybe their faith that this organization is misplaced.
The Wikimedia foundation has a ton of money, the constant badgering is a bit much. I got turned off by Jimmy Wales early on and swore I’d never give a dime to Wikipedia.
Thank you to all those that donate to the Wikimedia Foundation. Your donations help fund my local public schools, fire department, sheriff department, etc through Wikimedia's payment of local property taxes.
ever expanding spending for a site that, while big, probably has the same traffic patterns (for mostly static content while at that) year by year, and with no visible software improvements in the past few years (so they are not spending a fortune in developers) leads me to think that it’s just political money being channeled through them.
All you have to do is find a bored wikipedia nerd "editor". They will gladly take on the bureaucratic battle to get that PR firm banned from editing wikipedia content.
The people who make editing wikipedia their identity have A LOT of time on their hands, and LOVE fixing these kinds of things because it makes wikipedia better, and look better.
The reason Wikipedia is so important is because a project like this could likely never be created again from scratch in our current times. It is a relic from a kinder past, that can still serve for generations to come if we take care of it. It will be a dark day for humanity when Wikipedia shuts down for good. Just donate, they don’t even ask for much. $5 or $10 is enough for your part.
The issue is not whether Wikipedia is important or not. It is indeed very important, despite it's many faults, and that's exactly why many donate even if they struggle financially.
The issue is that in the world we live in every organization has as its primary goal to stay alive and grow - the primary goal of the WMF is to get more money, to pay themselves better. The knowledge curated by volunteers became merely a product they can use to profit from.
Not even 5% of their annual expenses are for hosting. It would be entirely possible for them to cap their donations to 50 million, and wikipedia itself would still be the same. But hundreds of people would stop receiving money for what is likely a privileged and secure job that doesn't require lots of effort. A secure bubble to live in and feel good about. Sadly, this is technically parasitic - others are doing the work, and these people leach on both the work of volunteers, and money of donors.
The sad truth is that emotionally manipulative messages are essential to the survival and growth of the WMF. It's simply a complacent strategy to get the biggest financial return with the least amount of work. If they published a message that said "This year we need 10 million to survive, everything extra is optional and you don't need to donate if you don't have spare money. No matter what happens, Wikipedia will stay online, because we will always manage to collect enough money to cover the hosting", then many privileged people at the WMF would lose their secure job.
And that's why the WMF will NEVER change the strategy, even though they pay lip-service to keep the volunteers in line.
If one day they get 500 million per year in donations, their expenses will rise accordingly, to something like 400 million, as putting away 100 million is in their best own interest. What's not in their own interest, though, is respecting the wishes of the volunteers and donors.
When we look at it from the outside, we can understand the donation campaigns as the work of a self-serving entity that takes the free knowledge of the world hostage for their own advantage.
Now, no one can blame them - in the system we live in, this is the only way how organizations can exist. They always try to survive and grow and sustain itself.
The bigger problem is that society hasn't yet figured out how to create structures that don't devolve into money-grabs, but continue to serve the public good.
The problem is with the incentives and lack of transparency. A traditional corporation has an incentive to be economical - at least small and middle sized companies do. If you have 10 employees, and one of them has 0% productivity, you have to fire him.
WMF has what to them likely feels like an endless money flow based on nothing but a banner. They can use as much money as they receive, and there won't be any negative consequences at all in the short-term.
What the WMF calls "expenses" is actually simply the decision to transfer most of the income immediately into the hands of the employees of the WMF.
In a world of ads, affiliate links and profit-driven journalism, Wikipedia, despite its faults, is essential, even in the state it's currently in. It should be scrutinized, but be kept in mind that it's still one of the best things that exist on the world wide web.
Wikipedia had a really good year in 20-21, their most recent financial report.
They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget, and came out of the year with $240 million in assets.[1]
So they had about half a year's surplus, and wound up with ~2 years worth of savings. And yes, that's a simplification, a good chunk of those assets are necessary to continue operating and cannot be liquefied to cover operating expenses.
In 19-20, they took in $120 million against a $111 million operating budget.[2]
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
[2]https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
So, yes, Wikipedia is doing well - as we should hope they would be. But no, they are not rolling in it, and yes they do depend on our continued support to continue doing well.
Edit: The article linked in the tweet asks valid questions and puts the stats in better context, but the twitter thread presents the numbers in a way that is very, frustratingly, misleading.