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Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

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Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#41

Post by IshKebab »

Yeah I've looked into this before and it's basically true. They have way more money than they need. They justify it by saying "look at all the outreach projects we do!" but really nobody was asking for those. The people donating don't know they exist.

If they had spent wisely they could easily have a $0.5bn endowment by now and basically be self-sustaining without donations.

It also feels like a massive waste for one of the few open source organisations that is actually well funded. Where are the technical improvements to Wikipedia? The only thing I remember changing in the last 10 years is the link hover box which is very nice, but is that it?

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#42

Post by bawolff »

xyzzyz wrote: post #33
woodruffw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: 25% overhead doesn’t really seem that bad? If those numbers are accurate, 75c of every dollar goes directly to hosting, development, and community support (things like grants and legal aid for editors). That’s probably on par if not better than most nonprofits.

Have you noticed any actual development on Wikipedia? Only thing that changes from the user perspective is that the donation request get more and more annoying every year.

You shouldn't notice much of it.

Sysadmins are paid to make sure wikipedia doesn't have random downtime. Time spent on bugfixing should only be noticed if someone screws up.

If you want to see what people are doing - the git repo is public. https://github.com/wikimedia

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#43

Post by tus666 »

mcguire wrote: post #40
jefftk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe... Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keepin…

Google had a 2021 operating cash flow of $92B, and they've decided to spend money on lots of things that aren't "serving ads". And yet nobody complains.

No-one donates to Google, nor does it ask for donations.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#44

Post by hyperbovine »

mcguire wrote: post #40
jefftk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe... Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keepin…

Google had a 2021 operating cash flow of $92B, and they've decided to spend money on lots of things that aren't "serving ads". And yet nobody complains.

Nor does Google solicit donations with misleading claims that it’s on the cusp of going defunct.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#45

Post by mcguire »

JohnFen wrote: post #11
yupper32 wrote: post #3

Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.

$350k salaries _are_ lavish, though. It seems strange to me that people would argue otherwise.

Sundar Pichai gets ~$250M. Parag Agrawal gets something like $30M.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#46

Post by throw__away7391 »

orlp wrote: post #4

With the financial situation being how it is I, paradoxically, would currently consider donating to Wikipedia to be actively harmful to the future of Wikipedia. The larger its dragon hoard of money grows (which is already way beyond any sort of costs to keep up Wikipedia for decades), the larger the incentive for unscrupulous individuals to corrupt the Wikipedia mission to tap into this money for personal benefit. I…

Right, I've seen many, many projects in the for-profit sector fail because the budget was too high.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#47

Post by spywaregorilla »

jefftk wrote: post #13
dbingham wrote: post #9

This is an extremely misleading take. Wikipedia had a really good year in 20-21, their most recent financial report. They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget, and came out of the year with $240 million in assets.[1] So they had about half a year's surplus, and wound up with ~2 years worth of savings. And yes, that's a simplification, a good chunk of those assets are necessary to continue op…

They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe... Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keepin…

Seems a bit silly to me. Working on the UI that enables expanding and maintaining wikipedia feels like a reasonable top priority of the organization responsible for maintaining wikipedia. If they just "served" it, it would collapse.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#48

Post by bawolff »

akolbe wrote: post #8
yupper32 wrote: post #3

Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.

I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled by these heart-wrenching fundraising messages to donate. Here is a senior with $18 to his name promising to donate as soon as his social security check arrives: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#S... The Wikimedia Foundation has also just been fundraising in India and South Africa, again asking people there to donat…

Being envious of something doesn't make it cheaper.

Most in-demand, skilled labour is much more pricey than what the average person makes.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#49

Post by Hayarotle »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #25
avg_dev wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, I’m grateful for your message. (I did end up getting my refund. I hope you remember me.) On a completely unrelated note, I was looking at a somewhat complicated Wikipedia page yesterday and noticed a piece of text I would like to edit. It had some stuff (citations and references) I felt I didn’t understand how to edit without being sure I wouldn’t break anything. Is there a good forum or place where I cou…

not that I am aware of; and Wikipedia has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade on a more user-friendly UI with nothing to show for it to date. Which is a good reason to question how well they allocate their hundred million dollar annual revenue.

They're testing out the new UI in the other language Wikipedias. It adds a nice collapsible topic structure to the sidebar and sets a text width limit, but hides the available languages for the article behind a button on the header. This makes it harder to tell whether the article is available in specific languages, and to switch the language. It's a bit unwieldy as of now, as you now have to jump to the top of the page and click the "languages" button just to check if the article is available in your desired language, but they are showing some effort. They plan to make the header sticky and add direct links to the user's most frequently used languages. I just hope a sticky header doesn't take away much of the space dedicated to the page's content.

Here's a link to the ideas page discussing the change:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...

And a link to a page describing the changes:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#50

Post by mcguire »

coding123 wrote: post #6
yupper32 wrote: post #3

Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.

that's a lot of salary for something that is going broke and needs donations now.

Is requesting donations better or worse than selling advertising?
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