Comment by akolbe
3 years ago
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".