Comment by jefftk
3 years ago
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.
Are you feeling vituperative because your edits got rejected for using obscure words?
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I think the barriers for new editors are cultural rather than technical.
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!
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%.
It's in the $9.8M "Awards and grants" item here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
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".
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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".
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.
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Why not?
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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".
> 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".
Fair. I'm with you there. I would like clearer documentation of Wikimedia's organizational breakdown and where they are spending that budget.
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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.
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.
You shouldn't notice much of it.
Sysadmins are paid to make sure wikipedia doesn't have random downtime. Time spent on bugfixing should only be noticed if someone screws up.
If you want to see what people are doing - the git repo is public. https://github.com/wikimedia
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).
How does the donation request get more annyoing each year?
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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.
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wikimedia labs built a world-class setup with many new services and tech, for one example
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.)
> 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.
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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.
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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!
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.
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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.
> No-one donates to Google
Wellll that's an interesting topic in and of itself. But OK I get what you mean.
Well, it doesn't ask.
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.
https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TCPB1...
Nor does Google solicit donations with misleading claims that it’s on the cusp of going defunct.