Comment by akolbe
3 years ago
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".
They list as examples "grants, projects, trainings, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors". I agree that it's a bit misleading to put 'grants' first if that's only a small part of what they do.
I'm not sure what they intend to communicate with the word 'direct', either in "Direct support to communities" or "Direct support to websites".