This is not a poll, this is someone who is very critical how wikimedia spends its money putting out an "opinions welcome" box on what amounts to a public square.
I think, Wikimedia's fundraising message should include the amount of money they have, the expenses they expect for the coming years (with a basic breakdown of how it is going to be spent), as well as a link to a detailed report of how much money they got and how they were spent for the previous years. Basically be transparent, b/c someone might want to spend their money on a different web project they like.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but aren't non-profit organizations obligated to have much of this public? Because if they aren't, then the non-profit organization is incredibly ripe for fraud and I wonder how many have already chosen the NPO structure for ill intents.
The line, in some ways, is thin between a non-profit and a for-profit organization, when executives e.g. Mitchell Baker of Mozilla foundation, can command such large salaries and irresponsible spending. If abuse is as rife in non-profit structured organizations as it appears, IRS had better burnish its hammer and commit to resolutory action.
Anecdotally, most non profits I’ve encountered operate in this way. Someone who is already wealthy, runs the show and pays themselves an egregious salary. They then hire lots of idealistic folks who either have money already or are ok being exploited due to idealistic bias.
No one who “works” for the non profit gets paid reasonably except the executives, who are paid exorbitant wages.
Wikimedia (the parent of Wikipedia) pays most people at Wikimedia very generously. The issue is most people involved, outside of tech, contribute little or nothing to Wikipedia which is the reason people are donating.
I think, Wiki fundraising message should be more informational, not an emotional cry for help and money. I myself don't want to be manipulated, give me the numbers and what you want to do with my money.
Yes, all tax-exempt organizations in the US are required to publish a copy of IRS Form 990. This includes a breakdown of income, expenses (including executive compensation), and assets.
The Wikimedia Foundation also publishes audited financial statements and a plan for the coming year. All of this is available here [1], which is the first result when you Google "wikipedia financials".
> aren't non-profit organizations obligated to have much of this public?
Of course they are required to file tax returns with executive salaries that are public! Why would you not check it? This is how cynicism destroys a civilization. People let institutions die because someone told them they were already dead.
>The line, in some ways, is thin between a non-profit and a for-profit organization
No it isn't, it's very clear cut. To people in the industry, there's no connection between salaries and "profit". That's just not what the word means to them. Random people on the internet get confused about this because they (definitely not only you) don't have any specific idea of what "profit" means.
In fact, "profit" doesn't even mean "having extra money after paying expenses and salaries" in the non-profit business.
At a non-profit, when they have more money at the end of the year than at the beginning, it's called a "surplus" rather than a "profit", and it doesn't have to be paid out to pesky "shareholders" so the organization just keeps it and does whatever with it next year.
Instead of a triad of directors, executives and shareholders (theoretically) in charge, the directors and executives run it (or fight over it).
Isn't the usual collective decision-making process at Wikipedia to post somewhere to have a vote while exchanging arguments and counterarguments below?
> Then they get very argumentative when someone says the mails look fine
Are you referring to this?
> Thanks for commenting. Unfortunately though I have to disagree, The Land. In my view, getting people on very limited incomes to donate $2 they can't afford, by making them "believe that Wikipedia is in trouble and that they need to give money to keep it online", is unethical. All the more so if it's done in part to raise WMF executives' compensation to $350K and beyond (bear in mind that these salary figures are two years old). It's worth mentioning that some of those salaries have been rising steeply, even as the WMF claimed to be in urgent need of money. Compare the entries here in the 2020 Form 990 to the corresponding entries here in the 2018 form. As far as I can make out: the CEO's total compensation incl. benefits increased by 7% (to $423,318), the DGC's and GC's by 10%, the CFO's by 11%, the CTO's by 17%, the CAO's by 22%, the CCO's by 25%, the CT/CO's by 28%, and the CPO's by 32% – all over a two-year period when the annual inflation rate in the US was at 2%
$350K does not strike me as a lot of money for top executives at an organization as large as Wikimedia. In 2022, I've got startups (30 to 50 employees) offering me $225,000 to work as a software architect. At a larger organization I would expect $350k and I would expect the top executives to get paid more than me. If Wikimedia are hiring executives who could make $1 million a year somewhere, who then work for $300k-$400k, the question comes up how much charity and sacrifice is it okay to expect from these executives. Should they think of this as a business or a charity? If they are working for less than what they would get at a different organization, then they are also making something of a sacrifice for the sake of Wikimedia. Which is fine, but I also understand why they would push for more money. In the end, the big question is, how much should Wikimedia professionalize? How much should it exist just as an idealistic experiment, versus how much should it be put on the basis of a stable business?
What do they do though? Wikipedia is a product where volunteers edit content free of charge. Sure there are some infrastructure costs, but why does it need so many C-level executives? Looks like a gravy train to me
> How much should it exist just as an idealistic experiment, versus how much should it be put on the basis of a stable business?
Wikipedia is sustained by the volunteers, not the corporate bureaucrats. They existed before the c-level salary increases, but might flee as peak corporatism occurs.
I feel really sorry for these executives who have to decide whether to earn $300,000 or $1M. :))
Joking aside, a person in the US agreeing to earn $300,000 rather than $350,000 – to a very large extent off the value created by volunteer labour, and off the public's donations – is not what I would call "charity" or a "sacrifice".
I would remind you that some of this money is raised in India, South Africa and Latin America – by telling people there money is needed to "keep Wikipedia online" for them.
Now, a real sacrifice by an American is when a senior with $18 to his name promises to donate to Wikimedia as soon as his social security check clears, as this fellow did:
I wish he hadn't been pressured into making that promise!
Many of the small donations funding these salaries do actually come from people for whom donating that small amount really is a sacrifice. These phrases, about how it's "awkward" to ask, how Wikipedia has "no choice but to turn to you", they speak to them most of all, because they can relate to this situation.
This is from an unpaid Wikipedia volunteer on the Volunteer Response Team: "I can't go into the specifics, but as a VRT agent I've received numerous emails from people on limited incomes who are donating money they need because they believe that Wikipedia is in trouble and that they need to give money to keep it online. I'm absolutely disgusted by this, and I think it will catch up to us in the long-run, as people won't want to give once they realize how deceptive these campaigns are."
So, please, if it's a question of brownie points for "charity" and "sacrifice", these executives are hardly at the front of the queue.
There is not even any good reason for many of these staff positions to go to people in the US. Most of these are remote jobs. They could just as easily be done by someone in India, Poland or Singapore, and at a fraction of the cost.
Let the people who are after that $1M-dollar job go to a for-profit company. Wikipedia doesn't need them.
Wikimedia HQ is in San Francisco. There are many 25 year old code monkeys here making more than the Wikimedia executive team. Sure, as of the last few years the world has changed enough that I agree it makes sense for Wikimedia to defrag and go remote, but until COVID it made complete sense for a technology-focused nonprofit to make its HQ in the Bay Area. It still does, BTW - it's never as simple as just hiring a remote team in Poland or India to cut costs.
I don't think it would be bad per-se for the CEO to make up to $1M or for senior individuals to be making over $300k, or even for line developers to make up to around $200k. That is the cost of doing business, and I don't think Wikimedia should have to pay employees far below market rates just because it's a non-profit.
That said, I completely agree with you that Wikimedia is way overzealous in asking for donations and it's sickening how they make people think Wikimedia desperately needs the money to continue operating Wikipedia when they just don't. Wikimedia actually funds a lot of stuff that, as someone that mostly just cares about Wikipedia, seems completely unnecessary. I'd much rather they cut the fluff and stop freaking people out (maybe change their strategy to soliciting donations from whales or at least a less aggressive banner) but I'd have no problem if they raised individuals' comp, within reason.
> I completely agree with you that Wikimedia is way overzealous in asking for donations and it's sickening how they make people think Wikimedia desperately needs the money to continue operating Wikipedia when they just don't.
Before going further, I want to say that you and I agree. I just want to add a bit more context to some of the details in your response.
> Wikimedia HQ is in San Francisco. There are many 25 year old code monkeys here making more than the Wikimedia executive team.
This is true, but most Wikimedia employees don't live in SF. This page[1] says that half of the people working on teams based in the SF office were actually working remotely, and this sentence was added to the page in 2018.
> I don't think Wikimedia should have to pay employees far below market rates just because it's a non-profit.
Unfortunately this is already true. It looks like the average salary for a senior software developer at WMF is 132k[2]. When you consider that up to half of the employees live in SF, that is far below market rate.
Does Wikimedia need "best of the best" execs, or simply competent and stable leadership? Most of their value and lifeblood (content) comes from volunteers who would probably keep doing it even if a likeable monkey were on top.
The question is whether throwing money at the problem is the way to solve it.
I remember Damon Sicore's stint at the WMF. He'd been VPE for six years at Mozilla and then came to the WMF. He ended up working all of eleven months for Wikimedia. When he left he was given $100,000 in severance pay, for a total compensation of $292,258 for less than a year's work.
What do you know about American non-profit salaries? Or even German ones?
A sensible thing to do before proclaiming a knee-jerk opinion is to get some information from this wonderful global network we are all connected to. Isn't context useful?
Now, I have to admit, (because I just did it) that when you google something like "charity financial salary statements", you will get garbage hits, meaning "free" websites (and people referring you to them like nolo) that require you to sign up and jump through hoops.
One basic aspect of doing research on the Internet is knowing that (when) you don't have to play that game, because there are official sources.
Regarding this topic, there is something in the US called an IRS Form 990, and you can look them up at the unbelievably logical URL:
This is how you can look at any tax return for a non-profit and it says right at the top "Open to Public Inspection". How nice.
I used to volunteer with a state chapter of a mental health advocacy organization, so I looked up the national organization (which is separate but affiliated). The CEO makes ~$250K and the other executives are all around $150K. This for revenue in the range of a few tens of millions per year.
They also pay several contractors (not individuals, but business names) on the order of $200-300K per year.
Now of course, the state and local organizations that one might assume do most of the real work, do not pay anyone like that. I seem to recall that the leader of the state chapter was something like $70K or less, several years ago. And the director position would cycle in and out - I don't think they typically stayed for long. Everybody else was making a lot less and extremely overworked and sometimes burned out. They would have interns, but no budget to hire them.
In conclusion, whether or not $350K is obscene to Germans, you are completely wrong in your gratuitous comment about SV bros, as what I just read implies that people in the non-profit world in the US would at least not be shocked by such a salary.
>you are completely wrong in your gratuitous comment about SV bros
GP is wrong, yes. I'd extend it beyond SV bros to US middle class at large. US pay scales are ridiculously high compared to the rest of the world for a cost of living on average that doesn't seem as high unless it's really in the big expensive cities.
Total number of individuals employed in calendar year 2019: 291
Salaries, other compensation, employee benefits: $55.6 million
(In the 2020 Form, that latter amount has gone up to $68 million for Wikimedia, but the 2020 Form 990 for the Internet Archive isn't online yet, so this will have to do.)
So, going just by the information on that page (happy to go further into the details ...), Wikimedia has about twice the employees but more than five times the salary costs. And the Internet Archive is actually very important to Wikipedia (link rot).
Executive salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are about twice what they are at the Internet Archive:
Secondly, you seem to be completely and utterly oblivious to the question of salaries elsewhere in the world, such as India, South Africa or Latin America, which is where the Wikimedia Foundation has just been fundraising.
Don't you think it is shameful for a nonprofit to go panhandling in those countries, with misleading fundraising messages implying Wikipedia will disappear if they don't give money, in order to pay people in the US a salary that is like 500 times the median income in India?
I get your point in principle, but a startup doing whatever tf they want with their profits is a completely different kettle of fish from a charity doing whatever tf they want with donations.
Especially when said donations were donated under the impression they'd be used specifically towards the charity's cause, rather than inflating a c-suite executive's bonus for the umptieth time.
"rather than inflating a c-suite executive's bonus for the umptieth time."
The point is, if they are being paid 30% or 40% more than what I get paid when I am at a poorly funded startup (that is, if they are getting paid what I would be paid if I was working at a larger firm) then you cannot say their salary is inflated, unless you want to argue that everyone working in tech has an inflated salary -- and you can certainly make that argument, but you should do so clearly, and at that point your complaint is not about WikiMedia anymore.
True, but would you agree that the number of editors who take umbrage with the wording is a small minority of the tens of thousands who edit and thousands (hundreds?) who are aware of the fundraising messages?
It is worth noting that three of the six community-and-affiliate candidates currently standing for the Wikimedia Foundation board support the following statement:
"WMF fundraising is deceptive: it creates a false appearance that the WMF is short of money while it is in fact richer than ever"
(Two candidates "supported" the statement; one "strongly supported" it. A fourth opposed the statement, but added: "I do feel that the online campaign can be improved. See videos for more." In the videos, she said: "The one thing that I think we can improve is our on-wiki campaign. It is sometimes too aggressive to my taste.")
I understand the benefit of recurring supporters and of maintaining in the public conscience the reminder that this is a publicly funded resource of the commons.
There is no excuse though, to pleading for money in a way that suggests dire straits.
What if an organization made a deal with people, to get them subscribed for something like $2 a year with a 'burst' up to the cap set by the user that triggers at some funding floor?
$2/year until our endowment goes down to $30 million, then $10/year until it gets above $50 million.
> In 2007, the year Wikipedia first became a top-ten website serving the world, the Foundation reported total annual expenses of $2 million.
> The Wikimedia Foundation is richer than ever. Its assets and reserves [...] have increased fivefold since 2015, and stood at an estimated $400 million at the end of March 2022.
I'm sure the "mission" has expanded and costs are higher these days, but 200x baseline costs is pretty comfy.
I find it a bit “unethical and misleading” of the author to list 2007 expenses and 2022 assets. As a sibling comment points out, it’s really only <4x current annual expenditures, which, leaving aside disagreements on whether that level of spending is justifiable, doesn’t seem unreasonable.
I think they are using 2007 expenses to give a ballpark estimate for what "running basic Wikipedia" costs? That's back before the foundation dramatically expanded their activities.
At the moment, they have €250M in assets, and a further €100M endowment. Their assets have increased by double-digit millions every year for a decade.
In my opinion, the yearly fundraising campaign is highly disingenuous. Basically, they are begging for money, claiming it is to "keep Wikipedia running". In reality, Wikipedia-the-website is an unlimited cash cow used to fund tangentially related pet projects at the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2008, the expenses were €5.6M. 2021 expenses are up to €112M - and I can guarantee page views did not increase 20-fold!
At the moment, hosting costs are about €3M / year. Let's round that up to €10M for sysadmin and development salaries, and they currently have enough money to keep Wikipedia running for 35 years.
I'd be more than happy to donate to keep Wikipedia itself alive, but at the moment donating money to them is basically the same as throwing money in a bottomless pit.
And look at how the emails stress Wikipedia: in the “how your money is spent“ section, specifically using bold in the phrase suggesting Wikipedia, and dropping the bold to reference the other products.
It’s extremely misleading at best, given the numbers you cite.
Wikimedia does much more than just host Wikipedia. Even if they didn't host Wikipedia I would personally gladly donate to their legal and lobbying efforts.
Only in Sweden where I live they have greatly contributed to freedom of panorama and ensuring public domain material remains in the public domain when digitized. They work towards things like these all across the world.
That's fine, but I'm not interested in giving them money for anything other than making sure the website is running and has the support staff it needs. Their fundraising material makes it look like the money will be used for that when the reality is it will be used for other, practically unrelated things.
Thanks for pointing that out, but I see that as more evidence of deception. If I'm asked to donate to keep wikipedia free, I don't expect my donations to go to political lobbying on issues that I may or may not care about, and may or may not even agree with.
$67m is quite low for a tech organization. Wikimedia pays below market rate for every position. They have quite a lot of staff for that amount of money.
$67m is around 300 software engineers at a bay area company, only considering salary. If equity is included, it's probably closer to around 200 engineers. Of course, there's other employment costs, so in reality it's even fewer employees than that.
Just thinking of other non profits I've glanced at this does feel a little lopsided. $67m salary plus $12m professional expenses all to get $10m out the door on actual operations?
WMF's "operations costs" that don't count as salaries are probably basically just the costs of server hosting etc. They don't do charity work like prototypical non-profits.
Three of the six board candidates agreed Wikimedia fundraising is "deceptive". A fourth offered milder criticism. See the responses to statement #5 here:
To me the crisis is less about funding (since despite the traffic it can operate on a fairly lean budget), and instead more the range of people who will edit Wikipedia articles.
I’ll take that over advertising any day of the week. This isn’t remotely as misleading or damaging as half the ads I see on Facebook or Instagram every day.
It’s disingenuous and manipulative, which makes one wonder what else they are disingenuous and manipulative about. For an alleged nonprofit, it leaves a bad taste.
Seconding GP, I'd rather have a misleading plea message than them trying to extract money out of my attention or data through ads. That is manipulative, even though we as society are pretty used to it.
What annoys me the most is that I've been donating to Wikipedia for over a decade and I still got the plea message, but if I click that little X button I don't see it anymore. Big deal.
They’re disingenuous about claiming they need money for Wikipedia. They have way more than enough money for Wikipedia, they need more donations for their other random projects.
This is a bit misleading. The money is mostly going to projects to improve wikipedia. Which is different from just keeping the site up, but its not like the money is being spent on things totally unrelated.
Hmm, disagree. I feel like most ads are not manipulative or damaging. Most are just informing you about the product's existence in ways that attempt to be memorable. To the extent others are manipulative they're so in predictable ways that can be easily compensated for, like telling you the product is great when maybe there are other people who disagree. For more objective claims there are truth in advertising laws that seem to work well enough.
Wikipedia's tactics here have long been very scummy. They're a charity not a company, so people's guard is down due to the incorrect belief that charities don't have/care about profits. And the claims they're making aren't of the subjective type you learn to ignore in advertising - they tend to strongly create the impression that they're in dire poverty and Wikipedia might shut down if they don't raise enough money, which is just flat out untrue.
Frankly, I'd rather have advertising than this situation. Advertising can be annoying but it wouldn't create a culture of dishonesty at the Wikimedia Foundation, as relying on donations has apparently done. Especially for an encyclopedia organization, honesty and trustworthyness are some of their most important assets, and every time they do this they set it on fire.
Years ago, when PBS fundraising was less pushy than today, they had a segment where a KQED station manager said they understood many could not afford to donate and they were pleased to be able to bring their programming to everyone for free.
What is Wikimedia supposed to do? Only fundraise when they run out of money? That’s a recipe for failure and I quite hope Wikimedia… doesn't. If you donate to Wikimedia you are helping keep them free. The raw size of their endowment doesn't matter, nobody actively spends down their endowment on operating costs because it’s not sustainable. Operating costs come from at most like 3-6% of your endowment. The wording is not manipulative by any stretch of the imagination.
Wikimedia has plenty of whale donors that aren't making spur of the moment donations based on banner ads.
Wikimedia spends plenty of money on things that aren't growing their endowment or operating Wikipedia.
I don't think anybody is asking Wikimedia to stop fundraising, just to be less deceptive and less zealous. Especially if the money is going to things like grants to other nonprofits or developing less-familiar parts of wikimedia that donors likely don't care about.
The manipulation is in the lack of distinction between Wikimedia and Wikipedia. Wikipedia requires very little funding, but is also the most popular product of Wikimedia.
They are playing off the public appeal of Wikipedia --- Wikipedia dominates the branding and word usage of the emails. It implies, falsely, that Wikipedia is verging on needing to run ads or run out of funds shorty. It's Wikimedia that needs the funding to stay operational, largely for products that are not Wikipedia.
What are Wikimedia supposed to do? They could be honest in their communications, and be more clear what they are raising funds for.
This isn't true. Most of software dev work is still going to wikipedia or stuff that is generic. The other products do not get much love (other than wikidata)
"The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget ($33.75 million) to maintain according to Lisa Seitz Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia."
I'm not sure what the context of the original quote is. It really all depends on what is meant by "maintain" and how you define things that affect wikipedia.
To give a small example, if WMF pays for some swag for an event to promote minority groups to edit wikipedia - that's not what i would call "maintaining" wikipedia, but i also wouldn't say its money not going to wikipedia.
Unfortunately, we dont really have a fine grained public breakdown so its hard to really see.
Anyways, i'm mostly objecting to the idea that some other wikimedia project is getting more funding than wikipedia. By and large wikipedia is the favourite child and the other projects are ignored (except maybe wikidata, but wikipedia still way outweighs wikidata).
That is true if by project you mean the wikis online (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikiversity, Wikinews, Wikispecies and so forth, most of which the public is largely unaware of).
I am less sure how much money presently goes on other projects in the conventional sense of the word "project". Guillaume Paumier, Principal Program Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, once said:
-------------
And the fact is that, as a movement, we need as much money as we can get to advance our mission. Our vision is so ambitious and expansive that it is also bound to be inevitably expensive. This is something that the Board understood: shortly after endorsing the Strategic Direction in 2017, they directed the Foundation to prepare to raise more funds than usual, to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030. [2] My fellow members of the working group on Revenue Streams for movement strategy also understood the scope of the movement's ambitions: the first guiding question for our work was how to "maximize revenue for the movement".
People who attended the meeting of strategy working groups in Berlin in early 2018 might remember a thought exercise led by the Revenue Streams group. In it, we estimated that coming closer to our vision would probably require an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion dollars. There is nothing intrinsically outrageous about that amount, as long as the money advances the mission efficiently and equitably. The International Committee of the Red Cross had a global budget of $1.6 billion in 2016."
When he's talking about how we would like to have $1 billion a year, that seems to me to indicate that they envision a role for themselves that goes well beyond maintaining a few websites. And most of that money is supposed to come from Wikipedia fundraising ... yet there is not a word about this in the fundraising messages.
Fair enough. I guess being around wikimedia for so long has made me think of project to soley mean wikidata, wiktionary, etc.
And i fully agree that any talk of billions is ridiculous. However i suspect the tide is turning on that. Just look at how many of the current board election candidates are talking about stopping expansion and stabilizing current numbers.
Maybe, and I hope so. There are eleven seats on the board (just five of those seats are "community-and-affiliate-selected"), and as you say, two seats are currently up for grabs.
But even if the community manages to put someone like Kunal, Mike or Michał onto the board, it's one or two people against the inertia and groupthink of the nine incumbents, none of whom have said anything publicly to indicate their thinking has changed.
The WMF board had the option to add another community-and-affiliate seat this year and chose not to, because they did not like the idea of "on-boarding" three new board members right now.
You could also interpret that as being motivated by a desire to reduce the amount of change new members might bring.
Anyone else see stuff like this and think: "Yea but it's wikipedia, they deserve whatever funding they want"
I get they can probably be closer to perfect as an organization, but I'm still always left feeling that wikipedia was one of the top 3 things to come out of the invention of the internet
That's at the heart of the issue. From a distance, it always feels uncharitable to many people to criticise anything about Wikipedia at all.
But bear in mind this criticism comes from Wikipedians – some of the people who actually wrote the encyclopedia you love, and did so for free – and it criticises Wikimedia, not Wikipedia. They are not the same thing.
Most of the Wikimedia executives are recent arrivals who only came once there was money. They have never written a Wikipedia article. Some can't even figure out how to leave a talk page message, and they couldn't tell you which side of a diff shows the new version of an article and which the old.
>they have never written a Wikipedia article. Some can't even figure out how to leave a talk page message, and they couldn't tell you which side of a diff shows the new version of an article and which the old.
None of those things are necessary qualities of an organizational leader. This is like saying the CEO of Adobe should be competent in how to use Photoshop.
This criticism, like much of yours over the years, attempts to simplify a complex situation, of which you know very little given your limited perspective, into a soundbite to get attention and garner community affectation. Wikimedia needs better critics.
I’m actually kinda surprised that 2% of readers do give. That’s more than 5x the rate at which people click on banner ads, and we’re talking not just about people clicking but about them actually parting with real money.
Not a new thing. Also plenty of grants are probably for things you would consider supporting wikipedia, and parts of "support wikipedia.org" are probably for things you would think arent about wikipedia.
> 31% of your gift will be used to support the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day.
What exactly does this mean? I can't find any breakdown of how donations are allocated, so I don't know how this money is supporting the volunteers. I think this has been worded in a way that makes donators think the money is being paid to volunteers which I don't believe is the case for 99.9% of contributors (if not 100%?). Instead I think it's more likely that "supporting the volunteers" includes efforts that indirectly support them, like hosting in-person events.
> In fact, however, the Wikimedia Foundation is richer than ever. Its assets
and reserves (including an Endowment with the Tides Foundation now holding
well over $100 million) have increased fivefold since 2015, and stood at an
estimated $400 million at the end of March 2022.
Fucks sakes. I just made a very sizable donation to them based on the huge banner ad that popped up and the fact that I use Wikipedia on a pretty much daily basis. Fuck me for trying to do the right thing. I’m sorry for the language. Honestly I’m really pissed off about it. I work for a living and where I live there’s no taxable donation for this so it was just me trying to do something good. Well I guess when I calm down a bit I’ll try to learn my lesson.
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Thank you so much for this post. I am a person who is not used to ever asking for my money back. But I felt these banner ads were misleading and to be honest I felt cheated. I made the request and gave a link to the mailing list post and quoted a couple of lines from it in particular. I am grateful you were there to help me practice being assertive.
Imagine my surprise when I clicked your profile and saw the first word. That, combined with the quotes found in the post’s URL and the fact that it was posted in the first place lead me to believe the issue likely lies with the Wikimedia Foundation. I will continue to use Wikipedia as before and due to you taking the time to reply to me I will hold it in the same high regard.
I do love the place. It is profoundly human and the result of a tremendous amount of goodwill that has flowed into it and built what it is. But it's not perfect; and that is part of its appeal.
I've been complaining about the fundraising messaging since I was employed by Wikimedia (I left around 10 years ago). We used to have flamewars in the staff email lists about the messaging being deceiving. The reason they use the messaging is because it works, and they want to keep their fundraising timeline short, because it's also more effective when it's short.
I'd really like for them to use more honest messaging. That said, I think a lot of the general rhetoric here related to Wikimedia is off. Wikimedia actually uses its funds quite efficiently, especially in comparison to other non-profits.
They pay below market rate for salaries, primarily recruiting their staff from within the community. Like most non-profits they rely on people who are willing to take less salary because they love the cause. Also, a large percentage of their staff works fully remote, which helps keep costs down. Sadly, the poor executive pay tends to lead to absolutely mediocre leadership. I'd really like to see them increase the executive pay enough to hire qualified leaders.
They have an endowment, but the point of an endowment is to be able to continue running even if they aren't able to fundraise. They don't and can't live off of it. They do need donations, and the vast majority of their funds come from individual donations (not whales, as some here are suggesting), and primarily from small donation amounts.
The funds aren't solely to maintain the sites, but if you want them to continue existing, they can't solely spend money to maintain. They need ways to recruit new editors, and a lot of the spending being complained about here is being used to diversity the editor community, which is necessary for growth.
There also seems to be a lot of misinformation around how much it costs to maintain the sites. To maintain them, you need to pay for hosting, the hardware, and most importantly, the employees. Folks seem to be leaving out the salary costs. You also can't just consider engineers. Legal is a critical part of the organization. Also, you can't run an organization without HR, accounting, internal IT, etc. Most of the salary costs are necessary to maintain the sites.
This wasn't "necessary to maintain the sites"; US inflation averaged 2% during that period.
Moreover, "The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget ($33.75 million) to maintain according to Lisa Seitz Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia."
Also see the comments from a Wikimedia executive quoted above about how the Wikimedia Foundation's "working group on Revenue Streams" picked as its first guiding question how to "maximize revenue for the movement".
A vernacular translation of how to "maximize revenue for the movement" would be "How to get as much money from Wikipedia readers as possible."
The number of employees has nearly doubled in five years, which is why the cost of salaries has increased. WMF is consistently understaffed, so hiring is necessary for maintaining the sites. Note that when I say maintain, that I consider improvements to be part of maintenance, because part of maintaining the sites is keeping them modern, and supporting the community with necessary features.
The salaries have also increased over that period of time, but US inflation averaged 2% per year, not in total. Also, WMF has historically drastically underpaid employees, and their current salaries are definitely closer to (but still considerably lower than) industry standards.
The quote you're using is the cost of the sites, not including the salaries, which is exactly the misinformation I'm trying to correct. It's absolutely inaccurate in the way you're using it.
The revenue streams they're talking about is the enterprise API thing, which is basically just charging major users of the API for their cost. Your interpretation of this is needlessly misleading.
I'll repeat that quote from the WMF executive above:
"And the fact is that, as a movement, we need as much money as we can get to advance our mission. Our vision is so ambitious and expansive that it is also bound to be inevitably expensive. This is something that the Board understood: shortly after endorsing the Strategic Direction in 2017, they directed the Foundation to prepare to raise more funds than usual, to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030. [2] My fellow members of the working group on Revenue Streams for movement strategy also understood the scope of the movement's ambitions: the first guiding question for our work was how to "maximize revenue for the movement"."
The reason given for wanting to raise more funds and "maximize revenue" (Wikimedia had a $50 million surplus in 2020/2021, $88 million if you include endowment growth ...) was not a lack of staff or resources for maintaining Wikipedia, but the "Strategic Direction" and the desire "to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030" (which involves Wikimedia becoming "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge").
Frankly, a lot of the new employees appear to me to be producing a lot of high-faluting words – about the Universal Code of Conduct, the Human Rights Policy, the UN, knowledge equity, movement strategy, and whatnot. Around 50 people just work on Fundraising. I wish they prioritised the things volunteers are asking for more, but their sights often appear to be focused on far loftier aims.
In that vein, they recently created a $4.5 million fund to support organisations completely unrelated to both Wikipedia and Wikimedia:
The total sum of expenses other than salaries in 2020/2021 was about $43 million, which included –
* $9.8 million of grants ($5 million of which is the WMF paying into its own endowment at the Tides Foundation)
* $6.4 million donations processing
Once you deduct these amounts, that only leaves about $27 million of non-salary costs. And we know some of that $27 million was spent on PR consultants etc.
In other words, it's mathematically impossible for an estimate of $33.75 million to have excluded salaries of technical staff.
You're trying to calculate costs from an annual plan and match them directly to a quote from an executive, from an article that obviously has a bias against Wikimedia. The executive may not have properly quoted expenses. You may be reading the data incorrectly as well.
In either case, it seems that you have a bone to pick with specific programs the foundation is funding, which happen to be diversity related, which lets me know that I shouldn't be engaging with you.
The problem is not the type of causes funded, it's that the money was collected under the premise that it was urgently needed to "keep Wikipedia online", "ad-free" and "independent" - including from people in India and South Africa whom I'd rather see funding local causes, supporting people who are in real poverty, than have them sending money to a wealthy country like the US to support diversity causes there.
The diversity spending is also geographical, you realize? Most of the money that goes into the fundraising is from wealthy countries, and quite a bit goes into areas like India and South Africa.
I agree that their messaging is deceiving, but essentially everything you're discussing is misinformation, sourced from extremely biased sourced.
Two months ago, I looked at the Wikimedia Foundation's Form 990 for the Signpost (Wikipedia's volunteer newspaper) to see how much money the WMF actually spends in the developing world.
This was after an interview with a Wikimedia Foundation trustee in an Indian national daily claimed that "Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users."
– the WMF said that their trustee had been misquoted, and the Indian Express added a correction to the article a week later (see note at the bottom). It now says, "Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, a lot of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users."
Now, "a lot" is an elastic term. What I found, and you are welcome to check my numbers, is that the Wikimedia Foundation, according to its most recent Form 990, spent a total of $3.8 million (2.4% of revenue) in the Global South. That is less than it invested in the Knowledge Equity Fund, which primarily supports US organisations (three of the six grantees to date are in the US, and they account for well over half the money given out to date).
Of the $3.8 million the WMF spent in the Global South, "Grantmaking" accounted for $1,953,708, or 1.2% of the Wikimedia Foundation's $159 million revenue.
The "Grantmaking" total in all of South Asia, according to the Form 990, was $78,537 ($75,198 + $3,339 on the page following the one linked below):
Guess I'll stop donating once a year then! Had about a 5 year streak, but seems to me like they are in a good position now. And I'm buying a house soon! Gotta cut down ;)
I feel Wikipedia has one really good project that really doesn’t need that much money and have felt no need to throw swathes of cash at wikis administration. Wikimedia could have a tenth of the money it has now and still be functional.
Many years ago I was a fairly prolific contributor to many Wikimedia projects. I not only donated a lot of my time on wiki, I donated time IRL. Also I donated money.
Then I ended up working for the WMF for a time on contract. After seeing how "the meat is made" (as they say) from the inside. I stopped donating.
Good, I worked at WMF for a bit and the fundraising narrative was one of many reasons why I left. Wikipedia is doing just fine, but there are just way too many “special projects” that need to be reconsidered. Also way too much frivolous international travel for staff members.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadThen they get very argumentative when someone says the mails look fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVilla...
So yeah, not a poll.
The line, in some ways, is thin between a non-profit and a for-profit organization, when executives e.g. Mitchell Baker of Mozilla foundation, can command such large salaries and irresponsible spending. If abuse is as rife in non-profit structured organizations as it appears, IRS had better burnish its hammer and commit to resolutory action.
No one who “works” for the non profit gets paid reasonably except the executives, who are paid exorbitant wages.
The Wikimedia Foundation also publishes audited financial statements and a plan for the coming year. All of this is available here [1], which is the first result when you Google "wikipedia financials".
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
Yes, they are legally obligated to disclose their finances. OP’s point was it should be part of their fundraising message too.
Of course they are required to file tax returns with executive salaries that are public! Why would you not check it? This is how cynicism destroys a civilization. People let institutions die because someone told them they were already dead.
>The line, in some ways, is thin between a non-profit and a for-profit organization
No it isn't, it's very clear cut. To people in the industry, there's no connection between salaries and "profit". That's just not what the word means to them. Random people on the internet get confused about this because they (definitely not only you) don't have any specific idea of what "profit" means.
In fact, "profit" doesn't even mean "having extra money after paying expenses and salaries" in the non-profit business.
At a non-profit, when they have more money at the end of the year than at the beginning, it's called a "surplus" rather than a "profit", and it doesn't have to be paid out to pesky "shareholders" so the organization just keeps it and does whatever with it next year.
Instead of a triad of directors, executives and shareholders (theoretically) in charge, the directors and executives run it (or fight over it).
I fail to see how this is not a poll.
Are you referring to this?
> Thanks for commenting. Unfortunately though I have to disagree, The Land. In my view, getting people on very limited incomes to donate $2 they can't afford, by making them "believe that Wikipedia is in trouble and that they need to give money to keep it online", is unethical. All the more so if it's done in part to raise WMF executives' compensation to $350K and beyond (bear in mind that these salary figures are two years old). It's worth mentioning that some of those salaries have been rising steeply, even as the WMF claimed to be in urgent need of money. Compare the entries here in the 2020 Form 990 to the corresponding entries here in the 2018 form. As far as I can make out: the CEO's total compensation incl. benefits increased by 7% (to $423,318), the DGC's and GC's by 10%, the CFO's by 11%, the CTO's by 17%, the CAO's by 22%, the CCO's by 25%, the CT/CO's by 28%, and the CPO's by 32% – all over a two-year period when the annual inflation rate in the US was at 2%
Wikipedia is sustained by the volunteers, not the corporate bureaucrats. They existed before the c-level salary increases, but might flee as peak corporatism occurs.
Joking aside, a person in the US agreeing to earn $300,000 rather than $350,000 – to a very large extent off the value created by volunteer labour, and off the public's donations – is not what I would call "charity" or a "sacrifice".
I would remind you that some of this money is raised in India, South Africa and Latin America – by telling people there money is needed to "keep Wikipedia online" for them.
Now, a real sacrifice by an American is when a senior with $18 to his name promises to donate to Wikimedia as soon as his social security check clears, as this fellow did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Help_de...
I wish he hadn't been pressured into making that promise!
Many of the small donations funding these salaries do actually come from people for whom donating that small amount really is a sacrifice. These phrases, about how it's "awkward" to ask, how Wikipedia has "no choice but to turn to you", they speak to them most of all, because they can relate to this situation.
This is from an unpaid Wikipedia volunteer on the Volunteer Response Team: "I can't go into the specifics, but as a VRT agent I've received numerous emails from people on limited incomes who are donating money they need because they believe that Wikipedia is in trouble and that they need to give money to keep it online. I'm absolutely disgusted by this, and I think it will catch up to us in the long-run, as people won't want to give once they realize how deceptive these campaigns are."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fundraisin...
So, please, if it's a question of brownie points for "charity" and "sacrifice", these executives are hardly at the front of the queue.
There is not even any good reason for many of these staff positions to go to people in the US. Most of these are remote jobs. They could just as easily be done by someone in India, Poland or Singapore, and at a fraction of the cost.
Let the people who are after that $1M-dollar job go to a for-profit company. Wikipedia doesn't need them.
I don't think it would be bad per-se for the CEO to make up to $1M or for senior individuals to be making over $300k, or even for line developers to make up to around $200k. That is the cost of doing business, and I don't think Wikimedia should have to pay employees far below market rates just because it's a non-profit.
That said, I completely agree with you that Wikimedia is way overzealous in asking for donations and it's sickening how they make people think Wikimedia desperately needs the money to continue operating Wikipedia when they just don't. Wikimedia actually funds a lot of stuff that, as someone that mostly just cares about Wikipedia, seems completely unnecessary. I'd much rather they cut the fluff and stop freaking people out (maybe change their strategy to soliciting donations from whales or at least a less aggressive banner) but I'd have no problem if they raised individuals' comp, within reason.
Before going further, I want to say that you and I agree. I just want to add a bit more context to some of the details in your response.
> Wikimedia HQ is in San Francisco. There are many 25 year old code monkeys here making more than the Wikimedia executive team.
This is true, but most Wikimedia employees don't live in SF. This page[1] says that half of the people working on teams based in the SF office were actually working remotely, and this sentence was added to the page in 2018.
> I don't think Wikimedia should have to pay employees far below market rates just because it's a non-profit.
Unfortunately this is already true. It looks like the average salary for a senior software developer at WMF is 132k[2]. When you consider that up to half of the employees live in SF, that is far below market rate.
[Note, i used to work there many years ago. My opinions might not apply to the current leadership]
I remember Damon Sicore's stint at the WMF. He'd been VPE for six years at Mozilla and then came to the WMF. He ended up working all of eleven months for Wikimedia. When he left he was given $100,000 in severance pay, for a total compensation of $292,258 for less than a year's work.
https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/golden_handshakes_at_...
He was subsequently blamed for the Knowledge Engine fiasco that led to Lila Tretikov's demise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(search_engin...
Lila herself came in and was paid 1.75 times as much as Sue Gardner had been getting. That did not turn out so well either.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
More money does not neccesarily equal better people, just better options. We would still have to chose the right one.
As far as Damon goes, he writes in his blog about his time at wikimedia... its "interesting"
https://damon.sicore.com/wikipedia-search/
I see he links to one of my old Signpost pieces ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
A sensible thing to do before proclaiming a knee-jerk opinion is to get some information from this wonderful global network we are all connected to. Isn't context useful?
Now, I have to admit, (because I just did it) that when you google something like "charity financial salary statements", you will get garbage hits, meaning "free" websites (and people referring you to them like nolo) that require you to sign up and jump through hoops.
One basic aspect of doing research on the Internet is knowing that (when) you don't have to play that game, because there are official sources.
Regarding this topic, there is something in the US called an IRS Form 990, and you can look them up at the unbelievably logical URL:
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/tax-exempt-organiz...
This is how you can look at any tax return for a non-profit and it says right at the top "Open to Public Inspection". How nice.
I used to volunteer with a state chapter of a mental health advocacy organization, so I looked up the national organization (which is separate but affiliated). The CEO makes ~$250K and the other executives are all around $150K. This for revenue in the range of a few tens of millions per year.
They also pay several contractors (not individuals, but business names) on the order of $200-300K per year.
Now of course, the state and local organizations that one might assume do most of the real work, do not pay anyone like that. I seem to recall that the leader of the state chapter was something like $70K or less, several years ago. And the director position would cycle in and out - I don't think they typically stayed for long. Everybody else was making a lot less and extremely overworked and sometimes burned out. They would have interns, but no budget to hire them.
In conclusion, whether or not $350K is obscene to Germans, you are completely wrong in your gratuitous comment about SV bros, as what I just read implies that people in the non-profit world in the US would at least not be shocked by such a salary.
GP is wrong, yes. I'd extend it beyond SV bros to US middle class at large. US pay scales are ridiculously high compared to the rest of the world for a cost of living on average that doesn't seem as high unless it's really in the big expensive cities.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
Page 1 tells us:
Total number of individuals employed in calendar year 2019: 169
Salaries, other compensation, employee benefits: $10.9 million
Here is the 2019 Form 990 for the Wikimedia Foundation:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
Page 1 tells us:
Total number of individuals employed in calendar year 2019: 291
Salaries, other compensation, employee benefits: $55.6 million
(In the 2020 Form, that latter amount has gone up to $68 million for Wikimedia, but the 2020 Form 990 for the Internet Archive isn't online yet, so this will have to do.)
So, going just by the information on that page (happy to go further into the details ...), Wikimedia has about twice the employees but more than five times the salary costs. And the Internet Archive is actually very important to Wikipedia (link rot).
Executive salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are about twice what they are at the Internet Archive:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim... (2020 figures)
Secondly, you seem to be completely and utterly oblivious to the question of salaries elsewhere in the world, such as India, South Africa or Latin America, which is where the Wikimedia Foundation has just been fundraising.
Don't you think it is shameful for a nonprofit to go panhandling in those countries, with misleading fundraising messages implying Wikipedia will disappear if they don't give money, in order to pay people in the US a salary that is like 500 times the median income in India?
Especially when said donations were donated under the impression they'd be used specifically towards the charity's cause, rather than inflating a c-suite executive's bonus for the umptieth time.
The point is, if they are being paid 30% or 40% more than what I get paid when I am at a poorly funded startup (that is, if they are getting paid what I would be paid if I was working at a larger firm) then you cannot say their salary is inflated, unless you want to argue that everyone working in tech has an inflated salary -- and you can certainly make that argument, but you should do so clearly, and at that point your complaint is not about WikiMedia anymore.
Wikimedia does.
"WMF fundraising is deceptive: it creates a false appearance that the WMF is short of money while it is in fact richer than ever"
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
(Two candidates "supported" the statement; one "strongly supported" it. A fourth opposed the statement, but added: "I do feel that the online campaign can be improved. See videos for more." In the videos, she said: "The one thing that I think we can improve is our on-wiki campaign. It is sometimes too aggressive to my taste.")
There is no excuse though, to pleading for money in a way that suggests dire straits.
What if an organization made a deal with people, to get them subscribed for something like $2 a year with a 'burst' up to the cap set by the user that triggers at some funding floor?
$2/year until our endowment goes down to $30 million, then $10/year until it gets above $50 million.
When Wikipedia has cash reserves a hundred times its yearly expenses, I'll listen.
> In 2007, the year Wikipedia first became a top-ten website serving the world, the Foundation reported total annual expenses of $2 million.
> The Wikimedia Foundation is richer than ever. Its assets and reserves [...] have increased fivefold since 2015, and stood at an estimated $400 million at the end of March 2022.
I'm sure the "mission" has expanded and costs are higher these days, but 200x baseline costs is pretty comfy.
The vast majority is salaries, not operating costs.
At the moment, they have €250M in assets, and a further €100M endowment. Their assets have increased by double-digit millions every year for a decade.
In my opinion, the yearly fundraising campaign is highly disingenuous. Basically, they are begging for money, claiming it is to "keep Wikipedia running". In reality, Wikipedia-the-website is an unlimited cash cow used to fund tangentially related pet projects at the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2008, the expenses were €5.6M. 2021 expenses are up to €112M - and I can guarantee page views did not increase 20-fold!
At the moment, hosting costs are about €3M / year. Let's round that up to €10M for sysadmin and development salaries, and they currently have enough money to keep Wikipedia running for 35 years.
I'd be more than happy to donate to keep Wikipedia itself alive, but at the moment donating money to them is basically the same as throwing money in a bottomless pit.
It’s extremely misleading at best, given the numbers you cite.
Only in Sweden where I live they have greatly contributed to freedom of panorama and ensuring public domain material remains in the public domain when digitized. They work towards things like these all across the world.
That rounding up makes no sense and is unrealistic.
$67m is a lot of people!
$67m is around 300 software engineers at a bay area company, only considering salary. If equity is included, it's probably closer to around 200 engineers. Of course, there's other employment costs, so in reality it's even fewer employees than that.
What am I missing?
Software developers in the Bay Area are more expensive than other fields.
It would be nice if we’d stop deluding ourselves that “rule of law” is any better than “rule of theology”.
Distant caretakers expropriating communal effort of “free people” under law may as well be an unfalsifiable divine mandate.
and other surveys: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Editor_surveys
Edit: Wikimedia's surveys don't cover the issue in the OP, but it has been raised as a question for candidates in the ongoing Wikimedia Board community vote (until 2022-09-06): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
> 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way when we ask for an annual donation.
This is why I donated in the past: because it is a resource that gives freely to the world.
This wording shames non-doners and as a free resource for spreading knowledge to humanity I don’t think it is fair to shame the target audience.
What annoys me the most is that I've been donating to Wikipedia for over a decade and I still got the plea message, but if I click that little X button I don't see it anymore. Big deal.
Wikipedia's tactics here have long been very scummy. They're a charity not a company, so people's guard is down due to the incorrect belief that charities don't have/care about profits. And the claims they're making aren't of the subjective type you learn to ignore in advertising - they tend to strongly create the impression that they're in dire poverty and Wikipedia might shut down if they don't raise enough money, which is just flat out untrue.
Frankly, I'd rather have advertising than this situation. Advertising can be annoying but it wouldn't create a culture of dishonesty at the Wikimedia Foundation, as relying on donations has apparently done. Especially for an encyclopedia organization, honesty and trustworthyness are some of their most important assets, and every time they do this they set it on fire.
That's the way to phrase things.
Wikimedia spends plenty of money on things that aren't growing their endowment or operating Wikipedia.
I don't think anybody is asking Wikimedia to stop fundraising, just to be less deceptive and less zealous. Especially if the money is going to things like grants to other nonprofits or developing less-familiar parts of wikimedia that donors likely don't care about.
Read the emails yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVilla...
They are playing off the public appeal of Wikipedia --- Wikipedia dominates the branding and word usage of the emails. It implies, falsely, that Wikipedia is verging on needing to run ads or run out of funds shorty. It's Wikimedia that needs the funding to stay operational, largely for products that are not Wikipedia.
What are Wikimedia supposed to do? They could be honest in their communications, and be more clear what they are raising funds for.
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-t...
"The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget ($33.75 million) to maintain according to Lisa Seitz Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia."
To give a small example, if WMF pays for some swag for an event to promote minority groups to edit wikipedia - that's not what i would call "maintaining" wikipedia, but i also wouldn't say its money not going to wikipedia.
Unfortunately, we dont really have a fine grained public breakdown so its hard to really see.
Anyways, i'm mostly objecting to the idea that some other wikimedia project is getting more funding than wikipedia. By and large wikipedia is the favourite child and the other projects are ignored (except maybe wikidata, but wikipedia still way outweighs wikidata).
I am less sure how much money presently goes on other projects in the conventional sense of the word "project". Guillaume Paumier, Principal Program Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, once said:
-------------
And the fact is that, as a movement, we need as much money as we can get to advance our mission. Our vision is so ambitious and expansive that it is also bound to be inevitably expensive. This is something that the Board understood: shortly after endorsing the Strategic Direction in 2017, they directed the Foundation to prepare to raise more funds than usual, to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030. [2] My fellow members of the working group on Revenue Streams for movement strategy also understood the scope of the movement's ambitions: the first guiding question for our work was how to "maximize revenue for the movement".
People who attended the meeting of strategy working groups in Berlin in early 2018 might remember a thought exercise led by the Revenue Streams group. In it, we estimated that coming closer to our vision would probably require an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion dollars. There is nothing intrinsically outrageous about that amount, as long as the money advances the mission efficiently and equitably. The International Committee of the Red Cross had a global budget of $1.6 billion in 2016."
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
-------------
When he's talking about how we would like to have $1 billion a year, that seems to me to indicate that they envision a role for themselves that goes well beyond maintaining a few websites. And most of that money is supposed to come from Wikipedia fundraising ... yet there is not a word about this in the fundraising messages.
And i fully agree that any talk of billions is ridiculous. However i suspect the tide is turning on that. Just look at how many of the current board election candidates are talking about stopping expansion and stabilizing current numbers.
But even if the community manages to put someone like Kunal, Mike or Michał onto the board, it's one or two people against the inertia and groupthink of the nine incumbents, none of whom have said anything publicly to indicate their thinking has changed.
The WMF board had the option to add another community-and-affiliate seat this year and chose not to, because they did not like the idea of "on-boarding" three new board members right now.
You could also interpret that as being motivated by a desire to reduce the amount of change new members might bring.
I get they can probably be closer to perfect as an organization, but I'm still always left feeling that wikipedia was one of the top 3 things to come out of the invention of the internet
But bear in mind this criticism comes from Wikipedians – some of the people who actually wrote the encyclopedia you love, and did so for free – and it criticises Wikimedia, not Wikipedia. They are not the same thing.
Most of the Wikimedia executives are recent arrivals who only came once there was money. They have never written a Wikipedia article. Some can't even figure out how to leave a talk page message, and they couldn't tell you which side of a diff shows the new version of an article and which the old.
None of those things are necessary qualities of an organizational leader. This is like saying the CEO of Adobe should be competent in how to use Photoshop.
This criticism, like much of yours over the years, attempts to simplify a complex situation, of which you know very little given your limited perspective, into a soundbite to get attention and garner community affectation. Wikimedia needs better critics.
I’m actually kinda surprised that 2% of readers do give. That’s more than 5x the rate at which people click on banner ads, and we’re talking not just about people clicking but about them actually parting with real money.
That's not to say that Wikipedia is perfect, but it is certainly amazing.
* $44,963,013 53% Support for Wikipedia.org
* $39,162,136 46% Grantmaking and Program Development
The growth is in the non-Wikipedia operations.
What exactly does this mean? I can't find any breakdown of how donations are allocated, so I don't know how this money is supporting the volunteers. I think this has been worded in a way that makes donators think the money is being paid to volunteers which I don't believe is the case for 99.9% of contributors (if not 100%?). Instead I think it's more likely that "supporting the volunteers" includes efforts that indirectly support them, like hosting in-person events.
Fucks sakes. I just made a very sizable donation to them based on the huge banner ad that popped up and the fact that I use Wikipedia on a pretty much daily basis. Fuck me for trying to do the right thing. I’m sorry for the language. Honestly I’m really pissed off about it. I work for a living and where I live there’s no taxable donation for this so it was just me trying to do something good. Well I guess when I calm down a bit I’ll try to learn my lesson.
https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ
This says:
----------------
What is your refund policy?
If for any reason you wish to have your donation refunded, please contact us via email at donate@wikimedia.org[1] and include the following information:
Full name of donor
Date of donation — All refund requests must be made within 90 days of donation
Amount donated
Payment method used — Do not include credit card numbers in your email
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Imagine my surprise when I clicked your profile and saw the first word. That, combined with the quotes found in the post’s URL and the fact that it was posted in the first place lead me to believe the issue likely lies with the Wikimedia Foundation. I will continue to use Wikipedia as before and due to you taking the time to reply to me I will hold it in the same high regard.
I do love the place. It is profoundly human and the result of a tremendous amount of goodwill that has flowed into it and built what it is. But it's not perfect; and that is part of its appeal.
I'd really like for them to use more honest messaging. That said, I think a lot of the general rhetoric here related to Wikimedia is off. Wikimedia actually uses its funds quite efficiently, especially in comparison to other non-profits.
They pay below market rate for salaries, primarily recruiting their staff from within the community. Like most non-profits they rely on people who are willing to take less salary because they love the cause. Also, a large percentage of their staff works fully remote, which helps keep costs down. Sadly, the poor executive pay tends to lead to absolutely mediocre leadership. I'd really like to see them increase the executive pay enough to hire qualified leaders.
They have an endowment, but the point of an endowment is to be able to continue running even if they aren't able to fundraise. They don't and can't live off of it. They do need donations, and the vast majority of their funds come from individual donations (not whales, as some here are suggesting), and primarily from small donation amounts.
The funds aren't solely to maintain the sites, but if you want them to continue existing, they can't solely spend money to maintain. They need ways to recruit new editors, and a lot of the spending being complained about here is being used to diversity the editor community, which is necessary for growth.
There also seems to be a lot of misinformation around how much it costs to maintain the sites. To maintain them, you need to pay for hosting, the hardware, and most importantly, the employees. Folks seem to be leaving out the salary costs. You also can't just consider engineers. Legal is a critical part of the organization. Also, you can't run an organization without HR, accounting, internal IT, etc. Most of the salary costs are necessary to maintain the sites.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
This wasn't "necessary to maintain the sites"; US inflation averaged 2% during that period.
Moreover, "The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget ($33.75 million) to maintain according to Lisa Seitz Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia."
Source: https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-t...
Also see the comments from a Wikimedia executive quoted above about how the Wikimedia Foundation's "working group on Revenue Streams" picked as its first guiding question how to "maximize revenue for the movement".
A vernacular translation of how to "maximize revenue for the movement" would be "How to get as much money from Wikipedia readers as possible."
The salaries have also increased over that period of time, but US inflation averaged 2% per year, not in total. Also, WMF has historically drastically underpaid employees, and their current salaries are definitely closer to (but still considerably lower than) industry standards.
The quote you're using is the cost of the sites, not including the salaries, which is exactly the misinformation I'm trying to correct. It's absolutely inaccurate in the way you're using it.
The revenue streams they're talking about is the enterprise API thing, which is basically just charging major users of the API for their cost. Your interpretation of this is needlessly misleading.
"And the fact is that, as a movement, we need as much money as we can get to advance our mission. Our vision is so ambitious and expansive that it is also bound to be inevitably expensive. This is something that the Board understood: shortly after endorsing the Strategic Direction in 2017, they directed the Foundation to prepare to raise more funds than usual, to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030. [2] My fellow members of the working group on Revenue Streams for movement strategy also understood the scope of the movement's ambitions: the first guiding question for our work was how to "maximize revenue for the movement"."
The reason given for wanting to raise more funds and "maximize revenue" (Wikimedia had a $50 million surplus in 2020/2021, $88 million if you include endowment growth ...) was not a lack of staff or resources for maintaining Wikipedia, but the "Strategic Direction" and the desire "to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030" (which involves Wikimedia becoming "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge").
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...
Frankly, a lot of the new employees appear to me to be producing a lot of high-faluting words – about the Universal Code of Conduct, the Human Rights Policy, the UN, knowledge equity, movement strategy, and whatnot. Around 50 people just work on Fundraising. I wish they prioritised the things volunteers are asking for more, but their sights often appear to be focused on far loftier aims.
In that vein, they recently created a $4.5 million fund to support organisations completely unrelated to both Wikipedia and Wikimedia:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
And all these things may be fine things to do, but if they are fine things, then tell donors about them.
As for what Lisa meant, I genuinely don't know what she meant. That's why I asked above. If you've spoken to her, then fine, I'll take that on board.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
The total sum of expenses other than salaries in 2020/2021 was about $43 million, which included –
* $9.8 million of grants ($5 million of which is the WMF paying into its own endowment at the Tides Foundation)
* $6.4 million donations processing
Once you deduct these amounts, that only leaves about $27 million of non-salary costs. And we know some of that $27 million was spent on PR consultants etc.
In other words, it's mathematically impossible for an estimate of $33.75 million to have excluded salaries of technical staff.
In either case, it seems that you have a bone to pick with specific programs the foundation is funding, which happen to be diversity related, which lets me know that I shouldn't be engaging with you.
I agree that their messaging is deceiving, but essentially everything you're discussing is misinformation, sourced from extremely biased sourced.
My report is here, on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
This was after an interview with a Wikimedia Foundation trustee in an Indian national daily claimed that "Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users."
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...
After I complained on the Wikimedia mailing list –
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
– the WMF said that their trustee had been misquoted, and the Indian Express added a correction to the article a week later (see note at the bottom). It now says, "Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, a lot of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users."
Now, "a lot" is an elastic term. What I found, and you are welcome to check my numbers, is that the Wikimedia Foundation, according to its most recent Form 990, spent a total of $3.8 million (2.4% of revenue) in the Global South. That is less than it invested in the Knowledge Equity Fund, which primarily supports US organisations (three of the six grantees to date are in the US, and they account for well over half the money given out to date).
Of the $3.8 million the WMF spent in the Global South, "Grantmaking" accounted for $1,953,708, or 1.2% of the Wikimedia Foundation's $159 million revenue.
The "Grantmaking" total in all of South Asia, according to the Form 990, was $78,537 ($75,198 + $3,339 on the page following the one linked below):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
Those are the realities vs. the PR.
Then I ended up working for the WMF for a time on contract. After seeing how "the meat is made" (as they say) from the inside. I stopped donating.