241–250 of 252 posts
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…
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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.
I'm pretty sure there's a public roadmap somewhere, and you could always follow through their bug system or PRs. Everything is developed in the open, even the infrastructure (disclaimer: I founded wikimedia cloud services, and opened up the infrastructure development).
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What "treat" are you referring to? Employees need to be compensated for a company to be competitive. Speaking of manipulative your augment takes a complex situation and turns it into "poor people using the last of their money to pay for US employees extra benefits"
Treats mentioned here ... https://wantremote.com/company_for_remote_job/wikimedia-foun... ... include "reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, massages, cooking classes and much more" This is a fine thing I'm sure, but I wouldn't want it to be paid for by Indian or African donors worried Wikipedia will disappear, or start charging a subscription, if they don't donate. So fundrais…
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…
I'm really tired of your argument that hosting costs $2.4m a year. It's disinformation at best, because you're leaving out salaries of the folks who keep it running.
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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…
That particular VP wasn't very good at his job, and at the time he wrote that, the foundation was still considerably understaffed, and simply wasn't keeping up with the needs of any part of the community (readers, editors, volunteer developers). I'm really tired of your argument that hosting costs $2.4m a year. It's disinformation at best, because you're leaving out salaries of the folks who keep it running.
And they are saying this because hosting costs are subtly ...
https://www.wionews.com/science-technology/exclusive-wikiped...
("Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites, yet many people don’t know that it is hosted and operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Unlike other top websites, we rely on donations to support Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects ...")
... and not so subtly ...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/wiki...
("But why does the “Wiki” continually appeal for funding? ... the wheels keep turning, and it has massive bandwidth and hosting service costs.")
... alluded to in press reports designed to stimulate giving. So I think it is fair enough to point out that the scale of WMF expenses is not actually due to hosting costs.
Lastly, Erik's $10M+ estimate very clearly included the requisite salaries.
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That particular VP wasn't very good at his job, and at the time he wrote that, the foundation was still considerably understaffed, and simply wasn't keeping up with the needs of any part of the community (readers, editors, volunteer developers). I'm really tired of your argument that hosting costs $2.4m a year. It's disinformation at best, because you're leaving out salaries of the folks who keep it running.
And I am really tired of seeing people online saying, "Well, but they must have huge hosting costs. Think of all the traffic!" And they are saying this because hosting costs are subtly ... https://www.wionews.com/science-technology/exclusive-wikiped... ("Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites, yet many people don’t know that it is hosted and operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.…
Note that any site near Wikipedia's scale has at least 2-3x more software engineers (many of them have thousands of engineers), and much larger legal teams. Support roles grow in parallel with employee size. Wikimedia's overall salary cost is quite amazing for what they maintain.
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WMF is a company that's mostly engaged in maintaining a tech product, and much of its hiring needs are for people who'd otherwise be working in tech. If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.
> If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category. They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content. In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maint…
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> If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category. They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content. In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maint…
Neither Google nor Meta are tech companies, either. They're advertising companies.
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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…
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.