It would be nice if we had a "lot of lawyers", given how frequently we're sued to try and get content censored, or having to fight orders to hand over user data - and more generally, how massive these new laws we need to comply with are (see, e.g., the EU Digital Services Act, which even creates an entirely new annual independent audit process).
We even intervene in other court cases to try and prevent bad laws being created/interpreted in ways that would hurt the open internet (see, e.g., our amicus in the French Constitutional Court two weeks ago, our lawsuit against the US NSA, and our amicus briefs in the two US "Netchoice" US Supreme Court cases). We also operate the https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assis...
Sadly, we're a very tight team. The downsides of being a nonprofit...
People care about Wikipedia, not the Wikimedia Foundation. The criticism arises from misleading advertising. WMF fundraising conflates the two, implying that _Wikipedia_ needs money or it'll die. Meanwhile the 2023 budget shows $3.1m in hosting expenses versus $24.4m in awards and grants.
Firstly, there's less conflation these days - go see recent banner wording for yourself. Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should.
(And no, I'm not saying all legal work we do is a strict necessity for Wikipedia. Some is a strict necessity, and some is strategic e.g. an amicus, or the NSA lawsuit - but the latter does help secure a healthy environment for it and future projects that might want to take its place.)
> Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should.
From your phrasing (still) it seems like you might've confused me with the person you initially replied to.
I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs because most critics are going to view the former as essential and the latter as mission creep. I don't have any insight, nor do I have any inclination to criticize, your payroll.
> No, you were comparing a small part of technical infrastructure costs to grant cost.
I have no control over how WMF presents its expenses.
For years WMF foundation has run "we need money or Wikipedia will die" ads while spending a quarter of the budget on making grants. No one forced them to write that ad copy. It's progress that they've toned it down, but we shouldn't pretend that this criticism is surprising or completely unwarranted.
> I have no control over how WMF presents its expenses.
You have control over your reading comprehension. You called a number that was a very small portion of the technical infrastructure cost, the technical infrastructure cost.
You should also probably split out any of the grants related to technical infrastructure (i presume at least some of this grant money might have historically gone to wikimedia Deutschland to do technical infrastructure on wikidata, but im not sure off the top of my head)
I'm sure you could make many arguments that some of WMF's expenditures are not needed (i'd even agree). That doesn't mean it can survive on a few million dollars.
So you are saying that if people thought they were contributing to keep Wikipedia running because that is what the ads claimed, its their fault for not going through the financial reports to see where the money is going.
If you raise money saying it is for wikipedia, it should be spent only on wikipedia or IMO it is misleading.
Even "spent only on wikipedia" is a bit complicated -- bawolff's example was grants to Wikimedia Deutschland for work on wikidata, which sounds like it's some separate project. But really wikidata is used pretty extensively inside wikipedia, particularly for keeping facts synched up between the various project languages. Or money spent on Wikimedia Commons sounds like another random project, but actually it's the infrastructure for all the images you see on wikipedia.
It gets fuzzier as you go out to the promotion-of-free-knowledge stuff, for sure. You can argue its connection to keeping information being contributed to wikipedia, and the long term health of the community, but it's definitely less directly keep-the-lights-on.
That is an issue. There is a number of projects that the Wikimedia Foundation want to do or be involved in, because they align with the mission. These all costs money, but are frequently of little interest to anyone not involved directly. There is absolutely no way to fund these, which leads to the foundation pushing for donations via Wikipedia, because that's the only thing enough people actually care about.
For the most part Wikimedia could kill off everything but English, Germany, French, Russian and a handful of other wikis and most people would be just as happy.
Wikimedia absolutely suck at telling people why they need the money. Technically the budget is completely transparent, it's just communicated extremely poorly.
Don't forget true factual information disappearing due to things like the GDPR Right to be Forgotten. It's not just about creation of misinfo, but also about censorship of true info.
First, you take USD4-5 off that in tax. Then more for support, finance and and marketing. Then electricity, bandwidth and insurance. Then games licences. Then hw...
Corporate tax is a flat 21%, and that's on profit, not revenue. I don't believe Nvidia pays anything for "licenses" either. There's no way that overhead should make them unprofitable even at retail prices.
Historically it was always interesting and quite challenging legal work, reconciling some things a bit like this with privacy, lawful intercept and anti-remote-exploitation-tool (anti-trojan) laws, especially in Europe (think: the cookie rule, which goes beyond cookies and PII). Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
> Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
I think its possible that the laws are still being violated, but good luck suing companies like MS or Google as an individual. Governments won't go after them because their spy agencies love the constant stream of data they can collect from it.
Who knew? But that article indicates America has used the short scale (base ten) forever and the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion regarding the meaning of 'billion' and there's a different norm at work here.
> the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion
Anyone aged around 60 or older would have been learning these numbers before 1974, and that's a significant overlap with FT's audience. You are dismissing this as if it's Middle English. It's an entirely reasonable explanation, at least one that shouldn't be dismissed.
And there was a transition period where younger people need to know that the term could be ambiguous. It's not like they burned all the maths texts in 1974 and replaced them with newer literature. Older text books were probably in use into the 80s and perhaps the 90s.
From the writing of the era, it's clear this new definition for million was not popular, and many chose to continue using the "British meaning." So it was probably in colloquial use for quite a while, and the transitional term "1 thousand million" became the proper style.
>let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion
The FT has a big international audience. As a German reader where a "Billion" is still 10^12 it does sometimes trip me up a little. So I at least find it useful.
That's a decent point, but what I don't get is, when I do a Google Translate from English to German for "billion," I get "Milliarde." Is the concern that German readers, reading the article in translation to German, will be confused? It would seem like the German readers reading the English article would understand.
Not trying to argue any point (I mean honestly...), just trying to understand the German POV here, which is interesting.
You may not be aware that it's a false friend. The German word Billion exists, and it means trillion.
So the German reader will read the English article (in English, not auto-translated), see the word billion, think “oh that looks familiar” and might assume it means the same as the German word Billion.
Machine translation makes quite a few mistakes, so I think if you have some decent knowledge of a language, you might be better off reading the original rather than a machine translation. At least my point of view from a couple of years ago. But it's also possible that machine translation has gotten WAY better in the last couple of years, I'm not sure.
I disagree, as a native speaker of a language where "bilion" means 10^12, it's clear to me that "billion" means 10^9 when used in English text. So I disagree that is ambiguous. But maybe that's wiem that way to make sure foreigners with poor understanding of English don't read it incorrectly, because I guess it gets confusing (even journalists sometimes make a mistake of translating that wrong).
"Billion" meant 10^12 in England until... some time in the 1950s, I think? But 10^9 in the USA.
So there was confusion, even in the English-speaking world. Was. If I understand correctly, England has adopted 10^9, and so now there is no ambiguity.
