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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

#81

Post by akolbe »

jefftk wrote: post #69
akolbe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "Where Your Money Goes" overview was particularly derided by Wikipedians in the Village Pump poll. It's so fuzzy it could mean anything. In particular, "32% direct support to communities" was seen as complete pie in the sky. 32% of $163M revenue would be $52 million. But once you deduct the $68M salary bill and $6M in donation processing expenses from the $112M expenses total, you only have $38M left! So how can…

Sounds like most of the direct support to communities is the work of salaried Wikimedia employees? Which seems plausible to me!

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".

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

#82

Post by jokethrowaway »

feoren wrote: post #63
bool3max wrote: post #53

Wikipedia is a very effective medium for reinforcing the spread of false information and as such will never be "broke".

If you see false information on Wikipedia, go and correct it!

There is an entire industry of fact checkers and editors highlighting the side of the news their party like and hiding the opposite's viewpoint.

Wikipedia's bias is well known.

From the page on abortion: > When properly done, induced abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine.

Mind you, not too safe for the baby.

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

#83

Post by akolbe »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #75
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 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-i…

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?

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

#84

Post by dbingham »

akolbe wrote: post #54
dbingham wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think it's valid to ask whether Wikipedia's expenses are too high, or whether they are spending on the right things. But that tweet and thread are sensationalist and not doing it in a way that will lead to a reasonable dialog around that question. The linked article is better - but still sensationalist. Compare that budget and the scale of Wikimedia foundation to the organizations that are running websites of…

The question to me is what donors are told. The Wikimedia Foundation built a $100 million endowment in five years, half the time it had budgeted: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... It's gone through a phase of planned, aggressive growth of its headcount. Its salary costs have increased tenfold over a decade: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie... As you can see on…

> No. If you want to grow your headcount, tell people why. If you want ten times as much money from the public ...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...

> ... then say what you are going to do with it. Don't hide behind "keeping Wikipedia online".

Fair. I'm with you there. I would like clearer documentation of Wikimedia's organizational breakdown and where they are spending that budget.

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

#85

Post by jefftk »

akolbe wrote: post #81
jefftk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like most of the direct support to communities is the work of salaried Wikimedia employees? Which seems plausible to me!

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 h…

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".

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

#86

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

Redesigning the article editing UI is pretty darn important when the only thing that ensures the site stays up to date is attracting new editors to work on it. Nobody wants a dead Wikipedia with hopelessly obsolete and misleading information, even though it would be incredibly cheap to host. And the Wikipedia partner projects are just as important as Wikipedia itself to the broader ecosystem of open content and open knowledge. Wikipedia needs its sister projects, and money spent on them is in no way "wasted".

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

#87

Post by matheusmoreira »

mcguire wrote: post #50
coding123 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How about they start spending their money wisely instead of growing infinitely? That way they can keep Wikipedia up and running for the next decade or so without bothering us with these solicitations.

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

#88

Post by jefftk »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #47
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…

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.

I agree it's a reasonable thing for them to work on, but not to fundraise for under the banner of "keep Wikipedia online".

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

#89

Post by yupper32 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #39
dane-pgp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be lavish, but if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap. Of course, judging performance like that is very difficult, and predicting it in advance is even harder, so it's possible that the highly pai…

> from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive. The difference is who is in control and what are their priorities and influences. Since "the organization" is making the decisions - and, completely incidentally, "the CEO" is the head of "the organization" - it just so happens that "the organization" finds that "the CEO" should be paid lavishly…

> But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive.

Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?

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

#90

Post by akolbe »

dbingham wrote: post #84
akolbe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question to me is what donors are told. The Wikimedia Foundation built a $100 million endowment in five years, half the time it had budgeted: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... It's gone through a phase of planned, aggressive growth of its headcount. Its salary costs have increased tenfold over a decade: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie... As you can see on…

> No. If you want to grow your headcount, tell people why. If you want ten times as much money from the public ... > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial ... > ... then say what you are going to do with it. Don't hide behind "keeping Wikipedia online". Fair. I'm with you there. I would like clearer documentation of Wikimedia's organizational breakdown and where they are spending that budget.

I would also like to see public audited statements for their endowment, now holding about $115M.

Nobody has ever seen one in all the six years the Endowment has existed.

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