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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

#171

Post by presentation »

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…

I for one am worried that Wikipedia only has enough assets to survive a bit over a couple years of the fundraising climate dries up. That is not anti fragile.

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

#172

Post by akolbe »

tomrod wrote: post #114
yupper32 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those normal people should know that $350k is a steal.

Indeed.

Only if you insist on hiring in the US – while at the same time talking all the time about how you want to fix the fact that you're underrepresented in many parts of the world, by asking some really expensive US staff to fix it ...

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

#173

Post by presentation »

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…

So social good projects need to suck because we’re all misers? Try applying this logic to a for profit company and you’d laugh.

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

#175

Post by dougmwne »

presentation wrote: post #171
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…

I for one am worried that Wikipedia only has enough assets to survive a bit over a couple years of the fundraising climate dries up. That is not anti fragile.

Oh please, they could slap “tasteful ads” on it tomorrow and pay for the critical operations without breaking a sweat. Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere.

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

#176

Post by xyzzyz »

themitigating wrote: post #148
xyzzyz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does the donation request get more annyoing each year?

It’s bigger and harder to get rid of.

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

#177

Post by jefftk »

presentation wrote: post #173
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…

So social good projects need to suck because we’re all misers? Try applying this logic to a for profit company and you’d laugh.

No; see my reply to dbingham above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32843394

When deciding where to donate we should consider where our money will do the most good. "Keep Wikipedia online" is a candidate for one of the most important things, if that's actually what your money will help do. But other Wikimedia projects, while useful, are generally nowhere near as high priority, and there are a lot of other places we could be donating!

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

#178

Post by cuteboy19 »

loeg wrote: post #127
amelius wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that almost sounds like "don't feed the dog, because it'll become a beggar".

This metaphor is broken. Dogs (and their appetites) don't grow exponentially.

Whereas nonprofits are black holes for money

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

#179

Post by bawolff »

fluoridation wrote: post #145
bawolff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're answering a point no one made. It has nothing to do with "being envious". Then what is the relavence of saying "I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled ..."? The donors dont do work similar. The only reason i could possibly imagine bringing this up would be something to do with envy between the average person's salary vs the salary of a high skill position. If not that,…

The relevance is that some of those donors are donating the little money they have because they think there's a chance Wikipedia might cease to exist otherwise, not knowing that the WMF is actually using that money on gold water dishes rather than saving it for a rainy day. Simply put, if Wikipedia asks for donations to continue operating, 100% of those donations should go towards server costs. That can include the h…

But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.

I know people like to complain that managers are useless, but if they really were, every company would get rid of them.

The cost of managers is what is being complained about in this thread. There might be other superflorus things wmf might spend money on which i might agree with you on, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.

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

#180

Post by s1artibartfast »

musicale wrote: post #140
akolbe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure if this is sarcasm.

They have had some marginal change in hosting fees, so a 1200% change in costs seems reasonable?

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