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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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"
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.
>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.
I suppose they meant relatively speaking. Taking into account how massive of a project Wikipedia is and hence how much responsibility the position has.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an extremely misleading take.
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.
They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...
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.
[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...
[2] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat... vs https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat...
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".
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That "Where Your Money Goes" overview was particularly derided by Wikipedians in the Village Pump poll. It's so fuzzy it could mean anything.
In particular, "32% direct support to communities" was seen as complete pie in the sky. 32% of $163M revenue would be $52 million.
But once you deduct the $68M salary bill and $6M in donation processing expenses from the $112M expenses total, you only have $38M left!
So how can 32% of revenue be "direct support to communities"??
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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So social good projects need to suck because we’re all misers? Try applying this logic to a for profit company and you’d laugh.
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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.
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> 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.
Bingo. You can't grow your revenue tenfold and still claim you are asking for money to ensure your bare survival.
Remember: the WMF less than ten years ago themselves said they could survive quite well on "$10M+/year".
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
Now they ask for $160M+.
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?
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Induced demand and Parkinson's law.
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).
The core of what they do needs maybe 2% of what they spend. That they spend more doesn't mean they need money, it means they are frivolous spenders.
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.
Someone could replace it with Wikipedia II for 5% the cost or less. A tiny fraction of spend is on hosting and site maintenance.
Oh please, they could slap “tasteful ads” on it tomorrow and pay for the critical operations without breaking a sweat. Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere.
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
$111 million operating budget
Where does it all go?
Thanks for the edit.
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.
> if they don't have independent revenue sources.
Nobody is saying wikipedia should have zero donations. Just that people piling on extra money should cool it.
> People wanting to get their treasure chest is not an existential threat.
For the organization, sure. For the content it may very well be.
More reason to have fewer employees.
Right, I've seen many, many projects in the for-profit sector fail because the budget was too high.
Not fail, but I have seen tons of for profit companies become shitty, expensive, and wasteful products once they had a monopoly and massive revenue
Wow, that almost sounds like "don't feed the dog, because it'll become a beggar".
This metaphor is broken. Dogs (and their appetites) don't grow exponentially.
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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.
Is it really true that their hoard is enough to keep the site running for decades? it seems their annual surplus is less than their annual expenses..
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.
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Please have a look at this table:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
Then read this 2013 post from a past Wikimedia VP:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
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.
"Decades" might be an exaggeration, but certainly several years if they got they spenditures under control.
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
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
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:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#S...
Actually, that sounds wrong. He is a wonderful man, but one that really should not have been put in this invidious position.
What about her?
https://twitter.com/tizzie/status/1570095249044967424
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.
Those are some of the "losers".
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"
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> guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser:
If Wikipedia didn't "guilt-trip" him into it I'm sure some Nigerian prince would have.
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> Who is the loser here?
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
> Who cares that Jimmy Wales drives a BMW instead of a Volkswagen?
Jimmy is not a wikimedia foundation employee (he is a board member, but that is unpaid). None of the donations are going to him.
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:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#S...
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.
Wikipedia should not beg for donations. They should sell ads.
Being envious of something doesn't make it cheaper.
Most in-demand, skilled labour is much more pricey than what the average person makes.
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>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.
$350k salaries _are_ lavish, though. It seems strange to me that people would argue otherwise.
In a sense they are, but comparable to executive salaries at companies with roughly comparable tech/services, those salaries are probably very low.
Probably any tech company of note is paying "executives" far, far more than that, at least in the US.
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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.
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I suppose they meant relatively speaking. Taking into account how massive of a project Wikipedia is and hence how much responsibility the position has.
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Sundar Pichai gets ~$250M. Parag Agrawal gets something like $30M.
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Not in SF. Maybe there is a case to be made to move Wikipedia operations outside Bay area.
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Uh, what?
SDEs with a few YOE are getting this no problem at top companies. Why wouldn't the CEO of the fifth biggest website on the internet?
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Its SF salaries. Why are these nonprofits based in SF anyway? Same goes for Mozilla.
Seems like anywhere else it would be pretty insane money for nonprofits.
that's a lot of salary for something that is going broke and needs donations now.
Is requesting donations better or worse than selling advertising?
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What do they do, though?
I wonder how much the contributors are being paid...
It's pretty lavish for a nonprofit.
It's lower than total comp of senior engineers in the bay area, just to give a point of reference.
It's about twice the salary of the Nordic prime ministers (not combined though) as another point of reference
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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.
Most of them are recent hires. They have built nothing. Wikipedia was built by volunteers.
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.
How else should they run the service?
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?
They've built several GUI editors, and a more forum like discussion experience (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Flow/Bac_%C3%A0...) which the community on larger wikis has pretty forcefully rejected
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Which reminds me: 3 of the 6 community candidates shortlisted for the Wikimedia board this year supported election compass statement #5:
"WMF fundraising is deceptive: it creates a false appearance that the WMF is short of money while it is in fact richer than ever."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
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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.
What are you talking about?
Single-page:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1570072717931552770.html
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?
My advice is:
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.
I do, and glad to hear it. :)
To ask questions, a good place to start is the Teahouse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse
Good luck!
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.
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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.
They already have an endowment of over $100M:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment
Hosting costs them $2.4M a year:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
Less than ten years ago, one of their VPs said they could sustain their mission on "$10M+/year":
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...
What he actually said in 2013 was this:
"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.
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OpenStreetMap:
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Annual_General_Meetings/...
I don't understand the point of this tweet. Is this a bad thing? If this is a bad thing, why?
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.
Do you just donate to places without looking into their finances and how they spend their money? It's not like wikipedia hides it. It's right on their website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances
I tend to only donate to places that seem to spend the money well and efficiently, for example.
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I think most people would agree that it's a bad thing to mislead people, yes.
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.
Sounds fine, if you don't use Wikipedia either.
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.
Obligatory link to "Wikipedia has Cancer:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... with slightly more historical context than a twitter thread.
Wikipedia is a dumpster fire and should be tossed into a black hole.
Wikipedia is a very effective medium for reinforcing the spread of false information and as such will never be "broke".
If you see false information on Wikipedia, go and correct it!
Who's got more time and capacity to play the wiki game, me or the PR firm hired to edit a politician's wiki page?
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Not gonna work. Has to be re-viewed first.
There is an entire industry of fact checkers and editors highlighting the side of the news their party like and hiding the opposite's viewpoint.
Wikipedia's bias is well known.
From the page on abortion: > When properly done, induced abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine.
Mind you, not too safe for the baby.
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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.