Comment by hobofan

7 hours ago

> WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects

According to [0], they intend to spend $18m on community projects total, out of their total $240m FY26-27 budget[1]. $330k of that go to the WikiPortraits project[2].

Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects). I would hardly call that deceptive.

[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Regions#Wikimedia_Com...

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Co...

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hobofan

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idoubtit  6 hours ago

> Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects)

That's a bit of a stretch. I couldn't find any up to date information, but for 2024-2025 WMF wrote: "Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Services."[0]

So "keeping Wikipedia up" is a very minor part (15%) of the "Investments in Technology" budget. It receives around 7% (15% of 48%) of the WMF total budget.

That not to say the rest of those "Investments in Technology" is useless. It's just that it's mostly about developing features, like updating the Wikipedia app, or creating functions and Wikipedia Abstract.

[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...