Comment by PragmaticPulp
3 years ago
> 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.
Total page views have been pretty stable since 2016. Presumably the number and size of articles has increased, but I don't know by now much. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/total...
Not sure if this is sarcasm.
They have had some marginal change in hosting fees, so a 1200% change in costs seems reasonable?
Induced demand and Parkinson's law.