Comment by dbingham
3 years ago
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".
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.
That's where money should be going.
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I think the barriers for new editors are cultural rather than technical.
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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?
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...
Sounds like most of the direct support to communities is the work of salaried Wikimedia employees? Which seems plausible to me!
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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.
I agree it's a reasonable thing for them to work on, but not to fundraise for under the banner of "keep Wikipedia online".
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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.
The question to me is what donors are told. The Wikimedia Foundation built a $100 million endowment in five years, half the time it had budgeted:
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
It's gone through a phase of planned, aggressive growth of its headcount. Its salary costs have increased tenfold over a decade:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
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 ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
... then say what you are going to do with it. Don't hide behind "keeping Wikipedia online".
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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.
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.
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25% overhead is what EU/EC project funds allow & provide. This is not a huge percentage. It’s pretty normal.
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.)
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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.
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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.
No; see my reply to dbingham above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32843394
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!
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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.
No-one donates to Google, nor does it ask for donations.
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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.
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Nor does Google solicit donations with misleading claims that it’s on the cusp of going defunct.
> 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?
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.
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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.