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Ask HN: Where exactly does wikimedia spend $28M+ this year?

23 points by WilhelmJ ↗ HN
I was looking at wikimedia's projected spending for current financial year and was quite surprised to see it is $28.3 Million. I have uploaded a screenshot here:

http://i.imgur.com/WvBlY.png

Original here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf

I understand the server/bandwidth cost, but thats quite low as compared to the total spending for the year. I can't find any details on each type of spending... e.g. $13.3 Mil on employee wages alone, how many employees? What salaries?

I trust HN that somebody here would know better. Can somebody help me understand what are the expenses, considering its a non-profit org after all?

10 comments

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madiator
Note for others: the numbers are USDs in thousands. -- The same document says "In 2011-12, we plan to grow staff 50% from 78 to 117", so the salary turns out to be $114k
dakotasmith
The top number is for salaries, wages, and benefits.

That doesn't just mean what people take home, but payroll taxes, the employer's typically more expensive side of the benefits contribution toward health care, and retirement or 401K matching.

I would presume the take home salaries before taxes are about 60% of the 114k average cost per employee.

Edit: I meant 65%, but then changed to 60%. As I'm in Texas, I didn't even consider state taxes they might have to pay in California.

driverdan
From the PDF: "We expect to end the year with staff of 78" Which means people are receiving crazy high salaries. They spent $1.6MM on travel which seems crazy to me. Where is all this money going?

Almost 26% of the staff is admin/management (20/78) which also seems very high.

duskwuff
Keep in mind that Wikimedia is managing a lot of community volunteers as well as their direct employees. The travel expenses may include paying for some of their volunteers to visit them, for instance.
dotBen
There are lots of reasons why their travel expenses could be so high - I don't think it moves the conversation forward to suggest arbitrary reasons without some specific proof.

It's also worth noting the foundation has had issues to expense irregularities in the past [1], and so if anything there is cause to have pessimistic assumptions rather than optimistic ones

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/05/jimmy_wales_and_dann...

dakotasmith
I posted regarding the volunteers requiring additional management, since I felt this comment was downvoted for presuming volunteers == travel expenses greater than the travel expenses caused by the Board.
dakotasmith
As far as having lots of management, I know that QA is both outsourced and volunteer driven. I'm under the impression they have a lot of volunteers for various tasks (it is Wikipedia, after all).

Volunteers incur management, but they don't show up in the head count.

itsnotvalid
Just a comparison, Mozilla Foundation spent 62.8 million US dollars for software development, unclear for how much is spent on staff.

ref: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/fa...

castewart
Can we assume that Mozilla's software development is more technical than Wikimedia's software development? I think the only thing they have in common is that they're both non-profits.
itsnotvalid
I think Wikimedia would have a harder time to justify their spending.