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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

#131

Post by akolbe »

elil17 wrote: post #18

I'd really like to seem them get an endowment for keeping the servers up and running, then let them fund raise to cover the UI improvements, community grants, and whatever else. I think those are important and useful but it should really be a different pot of money.

They already have an endowment of over $100M:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment

Hosting costs them $2.4M a year:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

Less than ten years ago, one of their VPs said they could sustain their mission on "$10M+/year":

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...

What he actually said in 2013 was this:

"WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it's _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring. But I would argue that an endowment, to actually be worthwhile, should aim for a significantly higher base level of minimal annual operating expenses, more in the order of magnitude of $10M+/year, to ensure not only bare survival, but actual sustainability of Wikimedia's mission. The "what's the level required for bare survival" question is, IMO, only of marginal interest, because it is much more desirable, and should be very much possible, to raise funds for sustaining our mission in perpetuity."

Total Wikimedia assets (Foundation + Endowment funds at Tides) stood at about $400 million in March 2022.

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

#132

Post by Eleison23 »

I think there's a disconnect in what people believe is the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation. The WMF is an ideologically-driven movement. It is much more than simply a benevolent public service. The WMF has social-justice based goals in the world, and the public-facing Wikipedia projects are simply the friendly face of this movement. They're building an endowment to keep the movement alive, not merely to keep the lights on for their server racks.

The most useful thing that a typical user can donate to WMF is their time. So edit a few articles and get involved with the process if you're so inclined. It's volunteer labor, over and above all else, that keeps the projects running. If you're a minor donor then you need to understand that your money goes to support the movement, not simply the service.

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

#133

Post by netsharc »

yupper32 wrote: post #95
jhbadger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is lots of people (including myself until about a year ago) were under the impression that Wikipedia was on the verge of bankruptcy, and would likely either stop existing or be purchased by Microsoft or Google if it wasn't for our donations, so I gave every time they asked. Learning that they are swimming in money makes us seem like we've been fooled.

Do you just donate to places without looking into their finances and how they spend their money? It's not like wikipedia hides it. It's right on their website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances I tend to only donate to places that seem to spend the money well and efficiently, for example.

Not OP, but probably a lot of people had faith that if the foundation behind Wikipedia says they need money to keep the servers online, they just believed them without trying to find details behind a "Beware of the Leopard" sign. It'd be similar to if a trusted family member said they needed some help.

But guess what, maybe their faith that this organization is misplaced.

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

#135

Post by llbeansandrice »

akolbe wrote: post #119
leokennis wrote: post #118

I might be too simple of a person, but I donate €10 per year to Wikipedia which is nothing. In return, I get immediate access to a veritable wealth of accurate and up to date knowledge on more or less everything. It’s such an amazingly great deal that I honestly think, who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way? Who cares that Jimmy Wales drives a BMW instead of a Volkswage…

Arguably, Wikipedia is the loser, because you are rewarding a management mindset that thinks manipulating the public for financial gain is okay. Wikipedia is the most widely read reference source on the planet. Wouldn't you rather it was stewarded by an organisation that was honest with the public? There are other losers. This man, guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser…

> guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser:

If Wikipedia didn't "guilt-trip" him into it I'm sure some Nigerian prince would have.

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

#136

Post by Macha »

IshKebab wrote: post #41

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…

They've built several GUI editors, and a more forum like discussion experience (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Flow/Bac_%C3%A0...) which the community on larger wikis has pretty forcefully rejected

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

#137

Post by yupper32 »

akolbe wrote: post #126
yupper32 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to compare it based on the people working for each company: Parag has around 3900 employees. Wikipedia has around 550. Around 7x multiplier. $30m / 7 = ~$4.3mil Sundar has around 135k employees. 245x multiplier. $250m / 245 = ~$1mil. $350k seems like a steal no matter how you put it.

How about comparing it to the Internet Archive (2019)? 169 employees, $11M salary costs: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943... Wikimedia Foundation (2019): 291 employees, $56M salary costs. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200... Less than twice the US employees, more than five times the salary costs. (Both orgs also have some non-US employees included in the salary c…

$11mil / 169 = ~$65k / employee. So average pay at Internet Archive is barely over the median salary in the US? That's not good.

Salary costs don't need to be looked at as something to aggressively push down. You can treat your employees well while still being a non-profit.

(Though I'm not claiming wikipedia treats their employees well, I have no idea.)

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

#138

Post by tuatoru »

zozbot234 wrote: post #86
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…

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…

If they want to recruit new editors, the most urgent thing to do is fix the existing editor clique's reputation for being neophobic, vituperative, and ad hominem.

That's where money should be going.

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

#139

Post by Miraste »

zozbot234 wrote: post #86
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…

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…

Yes, Wiktionary, Commons, and the other sister projects are very useful, to various degrees integrated with Wikipedia in value-adding ways, and generally serve the foundation's mission and the few remaining vestiges of an open internet. If you want an example of an open source nonprofit wasting all their money on inflated salaries and pointless vanity projects no one uses, compare Mozilla.

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

#140

Post by musicale »

akolbe wrote: post #83
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well $10M in 2012 would be more like $13M today, so their budget has only expanded 12x in constant dollars, and they probably have more articles and users than they had in 2012.
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