Comment by cm2012

Wikimedia foundation actually have a rather large endowment¹ set up from donated funds to help sustain the organization through a hypothetical future downturn. I'm sure it wouldn't sustain the current level of spending but it would theoretically cover minimal operating expenses.

There are a lot of things to criticize about Wikipedia but lack of financial planning probably isn't top of the list.

1. https://wikimediaendowment.org/

>One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010

And what are the realistic chances of that actually sticking long term?

Same chance as corporations and governments keeping spending, corruption and cronyism under control long term. So, virtually zero.

The infrastructure isn't that much is the problem, because labor costs are the largest single expense. When you take that off the table as something that can be cut, you're then stuck needing to make up the difference from the things that never cost that much to begin with, which means the cuts you have to make to them to make up the same amount of shortfall are deep.

> If they were paying each employee 10x as much

They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set?

You can see the breakdowns of what goes where in the links I included.

Half goes directly to engineering and support for infra. ~17% goes to equity projects. ~10% goes to safety & integrity. And the remaining 23% goes to "effectiveness" goaled projects.

The projects in the equity category are focused on supporting various smaller language Wikipedia communities get established and cross-translate articles.

The safety and integrity projects put a lot of work into protecting volunteers well being, general moderation stuff, legal compliance, etc.

The effectiveness category is a little weirder but it's mostly various "experimental" projects that attempt to address longstanding issues across the WMF without forcing them under a particular sub-org's budget potentially taking away funding from essential services.

NGL They could cut back across the board in various ways and save some money but if they have the money (and they do), I don't see anything outright wasteful that they are spending on. Everything seems pretty clearly like hedged bets to make things gradually better for the future.

And notably these are expenses. There's a gap between expenses and revenue and all that extra revenue gets invested into the endowment, etc to gradually support more and more of their operating expenses with time.

If anyone wanted to do the math, that's an average of 175k per person

This completely supports 1. The extremely useful website provides the funding for all the much less useful efforts.

And of course it’s not immoral greedy people. It’s ordinary greedy people who like comfort, security, and doing interesting work.

And yes the admins want more money so they can do more projects and have more people work for them. And that’s also a kind of greed for status and importance that people who work in admin typically have.

I doubt most people have put that much thought into it. However, a $100M a year for a website with an amount of traffic that isn't absurd, pages which are largely static, and doesn't have to secure financial transactions, seems a bit high to many people. Its that coupled with the constant requests for donations that doesn't match in most people's heads. For that amount of money, I expect most people think they can accomplish a lot more than the wiki foundation does. I expect that's most of where the criticism comes from, not the ideological attacks you are claiming.

It's for travel and conferences. IIUI this includes dedicated Wikimedia photographers that attend events and/or travel around the world to take royalty free/CC licensed photos for Wikipedia articles to use.

Long term it's far cheaper and gets you more, higher quality images than trying to hunt down images and negotiate license terms on each one.

I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union?

I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses.

The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly?

Please remember that NGOs are not charities. And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do. I think most of the grips about NGOs comes from the selling of NGOs as charities which they very much are not. They are however, taxed in the same way as charities and donate significant amounts to political campaigns (mostly local and state level).

So they get around centuries old restrictions on governments, get taxed like charities and donate heavily to political campaigns. That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. When you act like they are charities, it just makes you seem naive. If they were charities, they would call themselves charities.