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Wikimedia Foundation spending
- rubatuga 10y agoHow true are his statements? I seriously don't know enough about the WMF or the fiscal policies in place to make even a guess.
- microcolonel 10y agoNone of these statements are surprising in the least to me. WMF needs to be austere or it is going to go bankrupt.
- dante821 10y agoThere's a list of references at the bottom of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
- rubatuga 10y agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12... A serious eye opener. I was under the impression WMF was struggling to survive
- cooper12 10y agoYou might have skipped over this part of the article: > “Based on guidance from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, our reserve amounts to one year of operating budget,” said Samantha Lien, a spokeswoman for the Wikimedia Foundation. “If there were circumstances that affected our ability to raise those funds during that period, we could end up in an urgent situation — the reserve is a safety net to protect Wikipedia against such a possibility.” It's prudent for any non-profit to have a suitable reserve in case of emergencies. The WMF was not financially stable and only recently has started moving towards that direction with its endowment. I agree that the banners were a bit too alarmist in tone, but they weren't that far from the truth and I'd rather Wikipedia overcommits rather than under to save face but instead be financially unstable.
- akolbe 10y agoThat "prudent reserve" argument is really a red herring the WMF loves to employ, because as long as you find ways to inflate your annual spending you can justify any reserve amount as "necessary". And that's exactly what's happened. Today WMF spend twenty times what they used to spend ten years ago, when Wikipedia was already a top-10 website. So naturally, the reserve they say is necessary today ($100 million) is twenty times the reserve they said was necessary ten years ago ($5 million). If that pattern continues, then in another ten years they will say that they need a reserve of $2 billion. Twenty years from now it will be $40 billion. You get my drift. I wouldn't mind if readers and contributors saw palpable value from that spending, but is Wikipedia's software really 20 times more useful for the reader and contributor than it was ten years ago? I don't think so.
- fictioncircle 10y ago> How true are his statements? I seriously don't know enough about the WMF or the fiscal policies in place to make even a guess. Its true in the sense any forecast is true. WMF operated in line with its projections, however, so its a question of differing strategic goals b/t the author and the WMF rather than a true "wrong" or "right". If you FIND for "Planned spending" you'll find a useful table that largely explains the numbers are in line with the planned budgets.
- jacques_chester 10y agoThey have published standard financial reports back to 2006-07, so you can check all the numbers yourself. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports
- aerovistae 10y agoFor anyone who hesitates like I did, WMF is Wikimedia Foundation, not World Monetary Fund-- there is no World Monetary Fund; it's the IMF -- International Monetary Fund.
- hn_throwaway_99 10y agoThis op ed is non-sensical. According to the author, every successful startup in history is "cancer". Wikipedia's costs have grown because their usage has grown exponentially (comparing costs to economy-wide inflation is particularly baffling). If anything, I got from this article that Wikipedia has kept costs well below revenue growth, which is normally the sign of a healthy organization.
- microcolonel 10y agoIf you read the article, you'll notice it says that the expenses are growing faster than the traffic, and faster than revenue. This is the exact opposite of what you would normally expect (due to economies of scale).
- openasocket 10y agoThe table of spending vs. revenue suggests revenue is growing just as fast as expenses. There's nothing here about the trends of the amount of traffic over time. And if there was, the cost of hosting and developing a system vs the amount of traffic is can take is not a linear relationship.
- microcolonel 10y ago> There's nothing here about the trends of the amount of traffic over time. Yes there is. 2005: > So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. 2016: > According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month.
- openasocket 10y agoMy mistake. What about revenue, though? It looks to be growing as fast as expenses if not faster
- microcolonel 10y ago
- antr 10y agoCan someone explain to me what assets worth $91m does WMF have? It seems like an awful amount of capex
- rcar 10y agoCash. It's the (mostly) the cumulative sum of revenue - expenses.
- lr4444lr 10y agoThat's pretty indefensible. Safe assets like US Treasuries could give them about 1% in one year maturity yield. And since they're non-profit, would probably have no tax to pay on it.
- jacques_chester 10y agoIt probably isn't cash in a bank account. Balance sheets typically list "cash and cash equivalents", which can include short-term investments of various sorts. The WMF balance sheet for 2015-16[1] shows that they held $46.7 million in cash and cash equivalents. Long term investments are listed as $11 million. Fun trivia from their Statement of Activities[2]: they spent more on processing donations ($3.6m) and conferences/travel ($2.3m) than on hosting costs ($2m). [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim... [2] What a for-profit company might call Income Statement or Profit & Loss.
- sparkzilla 10y agoIt is cash. IIRC, there was a fuss a couple of years ago when it was found out that the WMF was losing money on that invested cash.
- jacques_chester 10y agoIs it still cash? I'd be surprised if they held 40-odd million in a plain deposit account. It's not as though they need that much working capital.
- praneshp 10y ago> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years. Can someone analyze this? It sounds a lot like he has a negative feeling about WMF, and threw in numbers to validate his opinion. I'd expect non-linear spending (in terms of pages hosted) at some point (because other things related to pages like links probably grow non-linearly).
- weeks 10y agoAs a Wikipedia administrator (mostly inactive), this sentiment makes complete sense to me. The WMF seemingly spends the majority of its money on non-critical functions such as community outreach, local chapters, yearly conferences and other non-critical costs. Including a parade of highly paid, not very effective executives. One thing to keep in mind is the WMF != the Wikipedia community, it is very possible to truly support the Wikipedia mission without also supporting how the WMF is ran.
- smsm42 10y ago> on non-critical functions such as community outreach, local chapters, yearly conferences These are critical functions if you want to have live developing community. If you just want to have a site that answers http requests, sure, not critical. There are billions of those. Making sure Wiki projects work as communities and not just as IP address answering http requests is what makes it critical. > One thing to keep in mind is the WMF != the Wikipedia community, it is very possible to truly support the Wikipedia mission without also supporting how the WMF is ran. Absolutely. But in doing that one must not forget what the point is. If you declare chapters and and community development unnecessary, what is necessary? Just server maintenance? Nope. Google has tons of expertise in maintaining servers, still can't make communities. Their Freebase project is no more, Wikidata is alive and well. Something to learn from this?
- fiter 10y agoHow does WMF measure their community building success/failure?
- aaronharnly 10y ago> ...I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month was was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones. This part of the critique seems a little off, doesn't it? I don't know the state of WMF engineering, it very well may have problems, and a complete lack of documentation or planning is not a good sign, but the particular artifacts (requirements documents, schedules with milestones) mentioned here are more from the pre-Agile waterfall school of thought. Can anyone familiar with WMF engineering comment?
- exizt88 10y agoAgile approach doesn't mean that there are no requirements documents and no milestones. You're still supposed to write requirements in some form (e.g. user stories and test cases) and plan a few months ahead (while being ready to correct your course based on user feedback after every sprint).
- smacktoward 10y agoThat's the point; he's arguing that WMF engineering practices are so disorganized that not only don't they qualify as agile, they don't even qualify as waterfall (which predates agile by several decades). Waterfall methodologies are deeply un-hip today, of course, but when they first coalesced they were a big improvement over what came before them, which was essentially nothing: an absence of any formal project management methodologies, with people cobbling together projects from bits and pieces of expertise learned in other disciplines. (Note that I have no idea how WMF's software engineering practices work, so I have no idea if this assertion is accurate or not. I'm just trying to clarify what I think Macon is arguing here.)
- nathan_f77 10y ago> After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending, followed by bankruptcy. At that point there are several large corporations (Google and Facebook come to mind) that will be more than happy to pay off the debts, take over the encyclopedia, fire the WMF staff, and start running Wikipedia as a profit-making platform. There are a lot of ways to monetize Wikipedia, all undesirable. The new owners could sell banner advertising, allow uneditable "sponsored articles" for those willing to pay for the privilege, or even sell information about editors and users. I honestly wouldn't complain if Wikipedia was owned and monetized by Google. I think they would recognize the importance of Wikipedia and handle it very carefully. I also think there is a small and very vocal minority on Hacker News who would be outraged, but most of the world wouldn't think twice.
- funkyy 10y agoWikipedia would become even more sided by going this route. But Google or any other corp will not do that I think, as Wikipedia is website hated by many powerful people.
- angry-hacker 10y agoOut of interest, who are the powerful who hate Wikipedia?
- teamhappy 10y agoTurkey started blocking Wikipedia last week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_block_of_Wikipedia_in_Tur...
- arachnids 10y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
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- Fiahil 10y ago> If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now, before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details. I never search for it, but I'm really surprised the foundation has not yet made their spending transparent. Aren't they supposed to be non-profit ?
- davidgerard 10y agoIt's thoroughly transparent, see links in comments on the original article.
- skdotdan 10y agoMaybe a bit off-topic, but I don't think we should use the word "cancer" that way.
- jmcdiesel 10y agoWhy? its a valid analogy.
- watwut 10y agoIt is inflammatory tactic to make those who already agree with you clap - but it won't convince those who disagree. It turns rational argument into attention seeking.
- skdotdan 10y agoOkay, maybe it's just me.
- allengeorge 10y agoNope - not just you. I opened it thinking it'd be about how the WMF was preying on other organizations, but what I got was...very different.
- jmcdiesel 10y agoCancer isnt a predator... why would you expect that?
- VLM 10y agoIts imprecise in that I expected to see a story about the deletionist problem. They are why I refuse to donate, I know I'm not alone. Its interesting that expenses are out of control, but isn't what I expected. It is slightly above clickbait titles "top ten reasons you'll never believe ..." but not much better.
- gjm11 10y agoIt really isn't. What makes cancer special isn't just that it grows. It's that it grows and thereby kills its host: it consumes the resources the host needs to live, or blocks tubes that need to stay open, or squashes things that are damaged by squashing, or whatever. None of that seems applicable here. Wikipedia is getting more and more donation money, and spending it. That's only cancerous if it's spending the money on things that harm it, or if somehow this process is diverting resources away from things Wikipedia actually needs. There's no sign of any of that, so far as I can see, and to tell a scary story the article makes predictions of hypothetical future doom. If those predictions come true then OK, we can say that Wikipedia has cancer (or maybe some other ailment that's a better analogy). For now, so far as I can see the analogy just isn't there unless you take "cancer" to mean absolutely anything that grows. I don't think that's a helpful way to use the term.
- fictioncircle 10y agoFrankly, the problem with this Op Ed is there is a very simple solution available to anyone who is concerned about a "doomsday" scenario for Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Where_do_I_get_it.3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Wh... Mirror it and make it available read-only until that day comes as a separate "disaster recovery" organization and raise the minimal funding required for that function (1 employee + 1 dedicated server) would be sufficient to the task. More if you wanted to make it usable but at that point, you aren't really a dumb mirror. > pages-articles.xml.bz2 – Current revisions only, no talk or user pages; this is probably what you want, and is approximately 13 GB compressed (expands to over 58 GB when uncompressed). You just need to mirror this regularly and maintain a reasonable depth of the backup. (Say, once a month for the past 12 months) Then, whenever this terrible event destroys Wikipedia you are on the clear due to you operating under the past licenses for the data and people will need a new place to go if Wikipedia is genuinely destroyed.
- maxvu 10y agoI understand how this is valuable in offsetting load immediately but I think the graver threat here is the disbanding of the contributor community and resultant loss of network-effect value. I imagine the cost of the disorganization or loss of volunteer contribution effort in the splintering of WP spinoffs/mirrors is orders of magnitude larger than load offset from mirroring.
- fictioncircle 10y ago> I imagine the cost of the disorganization or loss of volunteer contribution effort in the splintering of WP spinoffs/mirrors is orders of magnitude larger than load offset from mirroring. I'm sure it would be but at the end of the day I'm not sure that would be, ultimately, bad if a monolithic entity failed because of mismanagement. Nothing stops them from sharing information/pages or linking to each other.
- maxvu 10y agoI understand what you mean. I also understand that we're reasoning in the abstract here but I don't think it's fair to apply traditional economic theory to a social mission (accessible information?) and I'm not convinced that failure here is a favorable outcome for it. You are right, though, that I might be overestimating the cost of coordination post-dissolution. It's interesting to think about how that might be done effectively.
- zby 10y agoThe cancer metaphor seems very artificial - it is only about the exponential growth with no underlying model. Without the model exponential growth means nothing - because you don't know how to extrapolate the current trend.
- peterwwillis 10y agoISPs use Wikipedia as a killer app (free access from mobile providers), so make them pay for it. Charge them for access, or demand they host an official mirror. In exchange you don't show begware to the ISP's customers. ISPs will end up competing to provide access, eliminating the bulk of hosting requirements.
- jmcdiesel 10y agoSo, basically, completely disregard the idea of net neutrality and the sentiment behind it?
- peterwwillis 10y agoYes. Or keep doing the same thing they're doing now and hope it gets better.
- jnicholasp 10y agoFalse dichotomy. Either/Or does not exhaust the set of plausible options.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10y agoBut then the WMF couldn't spend all the money on projects and conferences. Just running the site is such a small fraction of the expenses of the foundation, that it would easily be financed from donations without aggressive begging banners. The banners are just there to finance that the author of the article calls "cancer".
- systematical 10y agoI honestly wouldn't have a problem with them running ads as long as it was a single ad per-age and non-obtrusive.
- sparkzilla 10y agoBut the contributors would. Why would they put their effort into a free resource, for others to profit off of it. Oh wait...
- cnnsucks 10y agoI would, since the figures show that it's not necessary. If it becomes necessary it will be because WMF failed to control spending growth, something the cynic in me says is likely.
- lolc 10y agoI'm happy they don't go down that route. And I wish they don't waste energy on discussing ads. If we keep going with the cancer analogy: When I read about metastasis on Wikipedia, what kind of ads do you think I would be shown if they'd show ads? Benign ones?
- Girlang 10y agoGood riddance! It's the leading source for "Fake News" in the world.
- cs702 10y agoAlso known as "the institutional imperative." Quoting Warren Buffett's 1989 letter to shareholders:[1] "My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated. Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem." [1] http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html
- mycall 10y ago28 years ago, I wonder how much if this still holds true for Berkshire Hathaway.
- daviddumenil 10y agoNASA might offer a more salient comparison.
- mboto 10y agoThats a really interesting quote, I hadn't heard of it before today. Do you have any resources that talk of how to organise and combat this?
- rawland 10y agoAccording to the Wikimedia strategic plan summary [1], it seems the spending is indeed in line, with what was (mis?)planned: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/The_Resources_We'll_Need https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strat... And some salaries (from 990s): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie... -- Sources: [1]: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strat...
- easilyBored 10y agoNah, just companies that profit from Wikipedia (hello Google!) and non-profits should pony up. Why shouldn't a person doing great work to make sure Wikipedia runs smoothly get paid when there's so much money going around? Google should "adopt" 150 of their employees, MSFT 50, Facebook 50 and so on. It's tax deductible too...
- dahdum 10y agoWikipedia isn't spending more because of high costs of hosting, bandwidth and development. They are spending on executives, administration, grants, travel/conferences, and other mostly unrelated expenditures. I don't donate to them from an effective altruism standpoint, every year I've read their spending plan and decided there are far better places to give. If they only spent on the core Wikipedia platform and support - I'd donate every year.
- hackuser 10y ago> Wikipedia isn't spending more because of high costs of hosting, bandwidth and development. They are spending on executives, administration, grants, travel/conferences, and other mostly unrelated expenditures What is that based on?
- dahdum 10y agoIt's all public, so in their financial reports: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim... For 2016: 2.3M on travel/conferences 11.3M on grants (2x 2015 levels) 31.7M on salaries/wages Their plan is here: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan If you check the staffing plan: Engineering +9% Community Engagement +15% Advancement (fundraising) +35% Legal +35% HR/Finance +23% Communications +175% It's not a struggling organization. People are giving them barrels of cash so they expand their scope to spend it, then ask for even more the next year.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- avar 10y agoI was very actively involved in MediaWiki development & Wikimedia ops (less so though) in 2004-2006 back when IIRC there were just 1-4 paid Wikimedia employees. It was a very different time, and the whole thing was run much more like a typical open source project. I think the whole project has gone in completely the wrong direction since then. Wikipedia itself is still awesome, but what's not awesome is that the typical reader / contributor experience is pretty much the same as it was in 2005. Moreover, because of the growing number of employees & need for revenue the foundation's main goal is still to host a centrally maintained site that must get your pageviews & donations directly. The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as possible, the way OpenStreetMap operates is a much better model. Success should be measured as a function of how likely any given person is to see factually accurate content sourced from Wikipedia, and it shouldn't matter if they're viewing it on some third party site. Instead it's still run as one massive monolithic website, and it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it. This IMO should have been the main focus of Wikimedia's development efforts.
- jacquesm 10y ago> and it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it. Huh? https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ Doesn't that qualify?
- rspeer 10y agoThat gives you Wikitext encapsulated in XML. How do you get at the content of the Wikitext? I work on a Wikitext parser [1]. So do many other people, in different ways. Wikitext syntax is horrible and it mixes content and presentation indiscriminately (for example, it contains most of HTML as a sub-syntax). The problem is basically unsolvable, as the result of parsing a Wiki page is defined only by a complete implementation of MediaWiki (with all its recursively-evaluated template pages, PHP code, and Lua code), but if you run that whole stack what you get in the end is HTML -- just the presentation, not the content you presumably wanted. So people solve various pieces of the problem instead, creating approximate parsers that oversimplify various situations to meet their needs. One of these solutions is DBPedia [2], but if you use DBPedia you have to watch out for the parts that are false or misleading due to parse errors. [1] https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wikiparsec https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wikiparsec [2] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ http://wiki.dbpedia.org/
- lottin 10y agoIn short: despite the alarming headline, financially Wikipedia is doing very well.
- heydenberk 10y agoWikimedia publishes independently-audited financial statements. Here's the latest one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim... It's clear that salaries and awards and grants are driving the increase in cost. Maybe this is damning evidence of a decadent culture, which the author of this op-ed clearly presume, but I doubt it. I would expect that Wikipedia's employees have been working very hard for a long time to keep the site running and they've cultivated expertise in governing the site in a way that avoids controversy and maintains credibility. I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are. It seems that they've done that, and they've waited until the organization was financially stable to do so.
- weeks 10y agoWhere I feel a lot of the animosity from the Wikipedia community stems from is that the people who have "cultivated expertise in governing" are actually Wikipedia volunteers, not WMF employees.
- hackuser 10y agoI'd add: Let's not get caught in the trap of looking at good-paying jobs as a problem. Wikipedia employees shouldn't be expected to work for next-to-nothing or nothing and to make great sacrifices for the rest of us, which is what many open source leaders and contributors must do (a bad thing). Why shouldn't we pay then well?
- emmelaich 10y agoThat's a red herring; see jessriedel's comment above.
- saurik 10y agoWhen I say "I want to know where Wikimedia is spending its money", I don't mean "is it on people or on bandwidth or on equipment?"; I mean "is it on Wikipedia or Wiktionary? how much money did they burn into the finally-launched WYSIWYG editor that their own research shows is barely used and solves the wrong problem? how little time is being spent figuring out how to handle a world with decreasingly reliable second-party sources, given their adamant refusal to allow reliance on first-party material? do they have any resources at all dedicated to dealing with deletionism?". I do not care if the people there are being paid a million dollars a year: I want to know their time is being used in ways that makes sense, and as far as I can tell almost none of their resources are being spent on anything which seems to actually matter. If they explained "actually, we added an automated model for verifying the value of an edit that our metrics have shown decreased the amount of time moderators have to spend watching the site while having minimal effects on new user retention, a project which used twenty engineers for five years to build" I'd at least shrug and go "huh, OK"; but as of right now I am not seeing it... it isn't that they overpay their staff, it is that they fundamentally don't have anything useful to do with staff but seem to keep growing their staff and then allocating them towards dumb things while telling everyone if they stop donating to this cancerous staff growth the site will go offline, which is a situation for which I simply can't attach enough modifiers to the word "lie" to to express the level of active deception at play.
- idorosen 10y agoReproducing the table from the article with one extra column, the ratio of expenses to revenue for clarity, it looks like they're still operating with a very comfortable margin. Yes, the 19% margin is tighter than a 50% margin 12 years ago, and their existence depends on donations now more than ever ($23,463/yr is sustainable by a single engineer's salary, $65,947,465/yr is...not), but Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects also serve a much wider audience and broader purpose. This isn't scary in and of itself, especially if they've got cash reserves to give them time to tighten the belt later on if it becomes a problem and someone in a leadership position is monitoring their finances to act if their burn rate gets too high... I've seen plenty of nonprofits with tighter margins survive and succeed. Year Revenue Expenses Net Assets Expense Ratio (1-margin) 2003/2004 $80,129 $23,463 $56,666 29% 2004/2005 $379,088 $177,670 $268,084 47% 2005/2006 $1,508,039 $791,907 $1,004,216 53% 2006/2007 $2,734,909 $2,077,843 $1,658,282 76% 2007/2008 $5,032,981 $3,540,724 $5,178,168 70% 2008/2009 $8,658,006 $5,617,236 $8,231,767 65% 2009/2010 $17,979,312 $10,266,793 $14,542,731 57% 2010/2011 $24,785,092 $17,889,794 $24,192,144 72% 2011/2012 $38,479,665 $29,260,652 $34,929,058 76% 2012/2013 $48,635,408 $35,704,796 $45,189,124 73% 2013/2014 $52,465,287 $45,900,745 $53,475,021 87% 2014/2015 $75,797,223 $52,596,782 $77,820,298 69% 2015/2016 $81,862,724 $65,947,465 $91,782,795 81% How sure are we that these numbers are accurate, anyhow?
- masklinn 10y ago> it looks like they're still operating with a very comfortable margin. That's not the essay's concern, the essay's concern is that expenses grow much faster than the site's load.
- yomly 10y agoThe biggest ticket in the expenses is salaries. I wonder how much of the growing expenses is linked to growing developer salaries
- Whitestrake 10y agoI thought the essay's concern was that funding is growing too fast, allowing expenses to expand to fill the gap in a way that is unsustainable (because eventually the funding growth must come to an end).
- tuna-piano 10y agoAs I understand it, Wikipedia's software and content is completely open source. You could make a foundation called BetterWiki, and run it on $1M (if you get the SEO and volunteers to your side). Is that right? Now if the people donating (cards against humanity, mom+pops, etc) feel good supporting Wikipedia, and there are more people that want to feel good supporting Wikipedia than Wikipedia needs, maybe Wikipedia should invest money in more missions that go along with its general values? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_co...
- lossolo 10y agoThey are handling around 2.9k req/s. In april they had 7.6 billion page views. English articles: 5,400,448. English wikipedia download has size of 13 GB compressed (expands to over 58 GB when uncompressed).
- yellow103 10y agoPerhaps they view themselves as a charity, and that spending is the goal.
- VLM 10y agoThat's a good point, its like my local public library. The problem summarizes down to my local public library spends most of its money on the physical building and physical books. You could inaccurately think that is the only expense of running a library, but there are numerous "in the noise" expenses people don't talk about as much. You could replace my local public library with a completely non-physical website of ebooks. No physical building or books means that primary expense disappears. That means a ebook library, is completely free, right? Well it turns out that the "lost in the noise" expenses of running a public library still exist and would then be the primary expenses. At perhaps 5% of previous "brick and mortar" cost. And the city and county were happy to fund a brick and mortar public library at 100% of budget, but you're not getting a penny or at most 1% if you're a "free virtual library" and you need 5% to keep open... Maybe a corporate benefactor could be found? I mean that's how we got our brick and mortar library, thanks, steel monopoly... Note that my public library costs $3.5M/yr, and is one of the best in the state, if not the best, and serves 71K people in my city, that's about $50/yr per resident and I'm quite happy with it. It sounds like a public ebook library should round down to free. Amazon Kindle Unlimited is currently $120/year plus tax. Isn't that fascinating? The actual cost per user after all the financial hand waving is done implies the nicest newest largest most luxurious library in the state is less than half the cost of an inferior virtual replacement. It does make one wonder if "free" wikipedia is actually costing our civilization in total more than paper encyclopedias did in the 80s. Merely changing the billing model to trick people into thinking something is zero cost, when its actually more expensive to the overall civilization, isn't very innovative.
- darod 10y agoAs someone who's recovering from cancer, this is a horrible title.
- jmcdiesel 10y agoYou realize that cancer has meanings outside of biological cancer, right?
- ppod 10y agoI don't know much about wikipedia or WMF but the spending growth in that table is not exponential. And surely the correct way to measure the scale of the service provided is page views rather than number of pages.
- contingencies 10y agoAdministrator since 2003 here. I have contributed to Wikipedia in various languages, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. Three core points, particularly on Wikipedia: (1) Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. This is due to factors such as too much bureaucracy, too many subjective guidelines, too much content being deleted (exclusionism), and an overwhelming mess of projects and policies. (2) Not enough focus. By starting many projects the foundation has muddied its mission and public identity. In addition, it has broad and potentially mutually conflicting goals such as educating the public about various issues, educating the public about how to work with others to contribute to projects, asking the public for money, agitating governments and corporations for policy change and support, monitoring public behavior looking for evidence of wrongdoing, and engaging with education. Why not leave education to the educationalists, politics to the politicians, spying to the government and motivated contributors and fundraising to donors? (3) Non-free academic media is hurting the project. Given that only a small number of editors have true access to major academic databases, it is often hard for contributors to equally and fairly balance an article. Having said that, I still have tremendous respect for the project and comparing its costs to those of the prior systems necessarily incorporating manual preparation, editing, production and distribution of printed matter by 'experts', the opportunity costs for access alone justify the full expenditure. It's not a lot of money in global terms.
- cooper12 10y ago> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue. > Not enough focus. This is a valid point but I think you're being too scorched earth with it like saying that Wikipedia shouldn't do any political outreach at all. If its millions of viewers hadn't seen the SOPA blackout, would it have been as successful? If it didn't fight for freedom of panorama and other copyright issues, would it be able to exist in the same form as now? Your suggestion is like telling Japan to go back to isolationism. Sure it might work if you're self-sustaining, but it's no way to run a global project. > Non-free academic media is hurting the project. If you are part of a university, you likely have access to such media. Many public libraries also have such access. Lastly, there's the Wikipedia Library. [0] I'm not sure what you want Wikipedia to do here past what it's already doing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...
- fareesh 10y agoFrom an engineering point of view, would changing any part of their stack reduce the hosting burden? I did some tinkering with MediaWiki in late 2006, it was a bit convoluted at the time. I imagine it is a gigantic project now.
- kalleboo 10y agoHosting is a minority of their budget - $2 million out of a budget of $65 million
- _joe 10y agoTechops at WMF here: the TL;DR is "no", but I can get into details. MediaWiki accounts for the lion's share of the servers we run (between MW itself and the databases and the object storage for files/images, I think around 60%), but it's not really that inefficient, also because we aggressively cache content on our own CDN. Given the amount of traffic we handle, I don't think any sgnificant change could reduce the hosting burden much - and it's already a very small footprint at 2M/year. To give you some context, we have currently less than 2000 physical nodes across all of our datacenters; it's pretty hard to reduce that number further while guaranteeing stability and performance of the sites. I'm not saying we couldn't improve things - there is always room for it - but I doubt we could do something that reduces our hardware footprint by a significant amount. As a benchmark, moving from PHP 5.x to HHVM gave us more capacity and over two years we reduced by 15% the number of MediaWiki application servers, but that does not result in a huge change in the hosting bill.
- mycall 10y agoExpenses (2016/2015) [1] Salaries and wages 31,713,961 26,049,224 Awards and grants 11,354,612 4,522,689 Internet hosting 2,069,572 1,997,521 In-kind service expenses 1,065,523 235,570 Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765 Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105 Other operating expenses 4,777,203 4,449,764 Travel and conferences 2,296,592 2,289,489 Depreciation and amortization 2,720,835 2,656,103 Special event expense, net 311,313 266,552 Total expenses 65,947,465 52,596,782 [1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...)
- rawland 10y ago> Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765 > Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105 WTF?
- _nedR 10y ago> Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765 Might be payment-processing fees like credit cards and paypal? > Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105 Lawyers, Auditors, Consulting?
- erikb 10y agoHm? Have you seen the annoying "please sponsor us" ads over the last 5 or so years? And you didn't recognize the cancer back then when that started?
- cooper12 10y agoYour logic is that they're a cancer because they ask for donations? Would you rather they run ads?
- emmelaich 10y agoThe problem is the tenor of the pleading. I was sucked in.
- erikb 10y agoThe way they ask for donations was super annoying, nobody else does that. And they always asked as if they would die otherwise despite actually making more money each year! If you lie this way it is actually illegal in most countries, I think.
- cooper12 10y agoNobody else does that because they're not ad-free. Regarding the more money thing, they have to still ask for more because it's financially prudent for every non-profit to have a reserve in case of emergency or bad years. They make more because their costs increase as well, and you're also mixing cause-and-effect since it's quite likely they're only making more due to such tweaks to the fundraising message. Ads in Wikipedia would be much more annoying for me personally.
- erikb 10y agoNo ads afaik: https://git-scm.com/ https://git-scm.com/ (sponsored like wikipedia) https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/ (domain specific wikipedia) https://github.com/ https://github.com/ (free for everybody to use) And that's just from the top of my head. Let's also not forget that most ad based projects are not _that_ annoying and don't lie as much. Finally, I believe ads are also cancer. So no point taken, sorry.
- sparkzilla 10y agoGood on Guy for bringing this up at last, but others have been questioning Wikipedia's fundraising for some time now [1][2][3] Note: I wrote the last one. In the same way that many charities exist to line the pockets of their staff, while not giving to their cause, Wikipedia has become a bloated fundraising bureaucracy that happens to have an online encyclopedia. The emphasis on fundraising leads to corrupt actions, for example the fundraising banners that say the site is in imminent danger of collapse despite it having over $100 million in the bank. [1] https://www.dailydot.com/business/wikipedia-fundraiser-banner/ https://www.dailydot.com/business/wikipedia-fundraiser-banne... [2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/12/16/1631223/wikipedia-exceeds-fundraising-target-but-continues-asking-for-more-money https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/12/16/1631223/wikipedia-e... [3] http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/ http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/
- soheil 10y agoWhy were there so many sites that failed before Wikipedia took off? Looks like part of any search engine should be the service Wikipedia prodives, henece, the Google love affair. Can the same model be applied to other things, i.e. User created content + user curated content + indefinite feedback loop: the more users use it the more content is created/curated (a percentage of new users go on to creating/curating content)?
- ordinaryperson 10y agoPretty sure this article could have been called "Wikipedia's Costs Growing Unsustainably" instead of the clickbait headline. But overall this oped is misplaced. Running the leanest possible operation shouldn't be Wikipedia's focus at this stage in its lifecycle, it's improving the quality of its content. Back in 2005 Wikipedia had 438k articles and the focus was expanding the reach of its content to cover all topics; today the article count is 5.4 million it's quality that matters more. You can't improve quality just based on crowd-sourcing alone (see: Yelp, Reddit, etc), and the bigger it's gotten the more of a target it's become by disinformation activists. This attitude on budgets over value strikes me as a classic engineer's POV. The OP is nostalgic about a time when the site was run by a single guy in his basement, but could 1 guy handle the assault of an army of political zealots or Russian hackers? DDoS attacks? Fundraising? Wikipedia is arguably one of the most coveted truth sources the world over, protecting and improving its content is more important than an optimal cost-to-profit ratio. If the OP has specifics, by all means, share them, but this kind of generalized fearmongering about budgets isn't spectacularly useful, IMHO.
- EGreg 10y agoThis. It is worth it for people to figure out how to preserve truth and verifiability. Perhaps community guidelines is the state of the art, but how can software help prevent it from being gamed? IMHO if Wikipedia loses that, it costs dearly not just to Wikipedia but to society.
- JackFr 10y ago> Pretty sure this article could have been called "Wikipedia's Costs Growing Unsustainably" instead of the clickbait headline. That's not what I got at all. And that's why the article is interesting. Wikipedia's funding is what's growing unsustainably. It's higher funding that's pushing the costs higher. And that's what makes it interesting (and only a little click-baity.) It seems, having taken people's money for a charity, you have a moral obligation to spend the money on the charity, whether it needs it or not. And as a manager of said charity, it's very easy to believe (or to convince yourself) it needs the money. Or otherwise why were we making plaintive pleas for money? (And that happens in a world of good intentions. When fundraisers become cynical, you end up with the US political outrage machine, which operates simply to raise money rather than to effect political change....)
- Svekax 10y ago> It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. We have a winner. It's the same thing killing ESPN. It's not wise for companies to take political positions on the left or on the right that will alienate half your users. Just don't do it.
- cooper12 10y agoSorry, but sometimes companies do indeed need to take political positions if their existence is threatened. SOPA was a huge example of this and net neutrality is an upcoming partisan issue. If you'd rather they sit back and get shackled in the name of neutrality, you're not really for the project, you'd rather see it be at the mercy of other politicians without having any say or doing anything to counteract it at all. (it's also completely naive of the massive lobbying already going on. sounds like you just want your side to have a say and any opposition offends you)
- freshflowers 10y ago> I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month was was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones. This person appears to be completely ignorant of the changes in software engineering since, let's say, the mid 90s. (Which kind of discredits everything else he writes.) However, he's introduced as "He runs a consulting business, rescuing engineering projects that have gone seriously wrong." So basically this is just a consultant's sales pitch.
- smsm42 10y ago> So basically this is just a consultant's sales pitch. I think it may be more a particular mindset, where being in possession of a hammer (probably a very good hammer, nothing wrong with it) makes everything look like a nail. Even if in fact it is a complicated assembly line producing microprocessor chips, and bashing it with a hammer probably won't do any good.
- y1426i 10y agoNot surprising. It's quality has deteriorated and not dependable. It's high SEO ranking has led to it being exclusively used for pushing an opinion or agenda. Articles on popular topics eventually end up being biased towards a viewpoint rather than being factual and chronological.
- cooper12 10y agoIt's funny how you're using this post for soapboxing as the op-ed has nothing at all to do with what you said. This is why vitriolic titles like that shouldn't be allowed.
- eriknstr 10y ago>Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. Does the Archive Team backup Wikipedia? Probably they do but if not I guess they should.
- Hambonetasty 10y agoIt's a website not a person. Keep it clean, fool.
- jmcdiesel 10y agoCancer has definitions outside of biology that fit still... "Racism is a cancer" is a valid use of the term, as well...
- bootload 10y ago"The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall." Are there any comparable data on the costs for 11x( 16 billion PV/M) this? (I'm thinking google/amazon here) "their poor handling of software development has been well known for many years." So is the problem inefficiency in the code/HW setup? That is solvable. Any pointers to the hosting solution used?
- glasz 10y agothought i will be reading about the beginning of the end of political censorship and revisionism on wikipedia. anyway, wp is a business and money is to be made with all kinds of shit.
- brudgers 10y agoI am not sure I understand what problem am I supposed to see when I look at the table. It looks to me like Wikipedia has income in excess of expenses and a reserve to cover unforeseen events. Remembering what Wikipedia was like in 2005 when Wales thought it didn't need employees, made me think that Wales could not imagine the scale at which Wikipedia is an important asset of humanity today. It's similarly myopic to the criticism of Wikipedia's software engineering methodology further down the essay. There's a scale of project at which waterfall greatly increases the odds of success: without a plan, a pyramid doesn't get nice sharp corners or come to a point, the dam does not turn the turbine, and Armstrong does not boot print moon dust (never mind landing back in the vicinity of ships and helicopters and medical staff). A big Wikipedia changes slowly. That's good. One person's rant doesn't cause it to pivot on a dime. One person's rant doesn't suddenly turn it to ad funded. One person's rant doesn't suddenly remove a category of articles.
- maehwasu 10y agoThe problem isn't that there isn't enough income to cover expenses. The problem is that expenses have grown along with rapidly increasing income. The two best explanations for this are: a) Wikipedia has spent that money in ways that add commensurate value b) Wikipedia is adding projects that sound reasonable, but don't add tons of value, in order to soak up the increased revenue (possibly unintentionally; intentions are irrelevant in bureaucracies). It's not binary, of course. People who have a problem with that chart aren't saying Wikipedia has added NO value from the spend. They're just noting that (b) is a very very common failure mode of large organizations that have easy access to money. In fact, I'd argue that it's common enough as the failure mode that the burden of proof should always be on the party who asserts that it's NOT happening, rather than the other way around.
- profalseidol 10y agoWikipedia should transform into a blockchain dApp.
- davidgerard 10y agoSomeone is of course trying this https://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2017/04/25/wikipedia-right-but-on-the-blockchain/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2017/04/25/wikipedia-right-b... Wikipedia with micropaid contributors living on the Ethereum blockchain.
- nullc 10y agoIMO-- as someone who was directly involved at the time the big mistake was relocating to SF. That one decision was the beginning of a cascade of ever increasing spending which marked the end of an era of fiscally conservative operations. There were many positive outcome too: this increase in spending has resulted in many benefits but not at all proportional to the increase in costs.
- postit 10y agoI keep wondering how much money would Wikimedia save if they implemented web torrent and progressive loading.
- mastazi 10y ago> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting I stopped reading right there.
- vinceguidry 10y agoI have zero problems with Wikipedia's resorting to nagging the everloving fuck out of people who don't donate. I just wish I could get them to not nag the everloving fuck out of me. Every year when I see the donation banner, I donate perhaps $20. I would maybe double that donation if it could stop fucking nagging me.
- akolbe 10y agoA lot of people seem to have that reaction. And that's why WMF is swimming in cash.
- vinceguidry 10y agoAwesome, more power to them. If they can't work out how to stop nagging me, I'll find a technological solution to the problem. Ideally, I'd turn it on after I donate and it will turn off after the donation drive is done, so I can get reminded to again next year. But of course that's never going to happen. So I'll never get reminded and my donations are going to stop. Oh well.
- akolbe 10y agoWhy more power to them? The WMF often treats the volunteer community - the people actually writing Wikipedia - like shit. Many of their flagship engineering projects were disasters that required unpaid volunteers to clean up after them. The WMF operates in its own bubble, happy to ride its cash cow – a top-5 website to display its fundraising ads on, built by unpaid labour. This open letter for example, endorsed by more volunteers than any other Wikipedia initiative ever, never even got a response from WMF: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_Wikimedia_Foundation:_Superprotect_and_Media_Viewer https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_Wikimedia_Foundati... More background: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1275679-donate-to-wikipedia-and-pay-for-what-exactly/ http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1275679-donate-to-wikipedia-... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundation_money_in_wrong_place/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundatio... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12... https://www.dailydot.com/business/sue-gardner-log-rolling-corruption-wikimedia-chapters/ https://www.dailydot.com/business/sue-gardner-log-rolling-co... Be sure you know what you support and empower, and what role it does and doesn't play in creating and maintaining Wikipedia.
- xchip 10y ago"I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles [...]. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones. This failure is almost certainly a systemic problem directly caused by top management, not by the developers doing the actual work."
- xchip 10y ago"I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles [...]. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones. This failure is almost certainly a systemic problem directly caused by top management, not by the developers doing the actual work."
- roadbeats 10y agoThere are articles claiming Wikipedia is actually backed by some investors and corporate who want to control it. Wikiscanner results gives a hint about how. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia...
- devwastaken 10y agoOh I see it all the time. Random extraneous projects and really niche projects that don't fit well in the wikimedia ecosystem, built ontop of the tech debt ridden remains of Mediawiki while the core devs are tasked with making helper tools when they should be paid to work on continually improving core functionality of Mediawiki so anyone other than Wikipedia can use it.
- rayiner 10y agoAlmost all growth you see in the real world is exponential in its early stages. The numbers the article points to show revenues exceeding costs and a growing surplus. There is no story here other than Wikipedia is a rapidly growing organization and is doing it while running in the black.
- grandalf 10y agoIs this a case where the HN story originally appeared with a title matching the essay and was subsequently changed to a more descriptive title? Quite the opposite of the typical pattern :)
- anc84 10y agoI really wish the rules were better. Titles should not be edited after a submission was on the frontpage for X hours. And this title was quite descriptive in my opinion...
- grandalf 10y agoIt's just odd because so often a tantalizing but highly descriptive title is reverted to whatever the author opaquely titled the article and I feel a tinge of annoyance... Then this time I see the clickbaity title and double-check to see what the actual essay is titled and they match... then a few hours later the HN title is changed.
- sctb 10y agoYes, in this case the condition applies: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- elect_engineer 10y agoI am the author of this op-ed, which I will prove by posting a comment on my Wikipedia talk page [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon#Hacker_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon#Hacker_New... ] before saving this. I am open to any questions, criticism, or discussion. BTW, as I noted in the op-ed. At the request of the editors of The Signpost, the version linked to at the top of this thread has fewer citations and less information in the graphic. The original version is at [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... ]
- reilly3000 10y agoHave you compared the growth of costs with similar sized organizations?
- forrestthewoods 10y agoWhat was 81 million dollars spent on in 2016? Employee cost has grown 300. How many employees are there? What do they work on?
- kenrick95 10y agoHe was comparing that back then, they have 1 employee and now the foundation have 300-ish employees.
- Faark 10y agoHis argument seems to boil down to "growth must be cancer" and "wikipedia/wmf shouldn't have expanded it's scope", with the conclusion "this must fail". But don't most organizations do? Are non-profits not allowed? Otherwise I also would like some more specific criticism about how money is wasted.
- Dwolb 10y agoThe key financial metric I'd look at is "months to cash out". Basically someone reasonable needs to decide "if no other money comes in to this organization, how long should it need to operate?" From there you can get more specific on what "operate" means (i.e. will layoffs occur before scaling back hosting costs). Has there been any such analysis?
- theprop 10y agoWoah, nearly $100 mn per year. Did they start paying all the "volunteers" who create all their content?
- wauzars 10y agoThis is one of the reasons I hated working there. They waste money and every year beg for more. Why do they even need an office in a prime San Francisco location? On top of that, they work on stupid projects, and internally the organization is run by imbeciles.
- cwyers 10y agoIt just... really bothers me that Wikipedia has grown into this massive thing, with $60 million in cash reserves and $31 million in salaries a year... and the people who aren't getting paid are the ones actually writing an encyclopedia. For that kind of money, you'd think they could actually pay people to write an encyclopedia, like Britannica used to. Now Britannica is circling the drain, Wikipedia is raking in money, and instead of paying the writers, there's this whole bureaucracy slurping up the cash and not giving it to the people doing the actual work. I hate all this digital sharecropping. I hate all these businesses based on paying millions of amateurs nothing or next to nothing for large volumes of low quality labor, making it up on volume, and paying a handful of people large sums of money to "administer" it. You'd think for that kind of money you could pay some writers.
- soniman 10y agoIt's the digital version of college football except nobody ever makes it to the pros.
- aquadrop 10y ago60 millions in spending, but that's for top5 site in the world, serving knowledge to billions of people, and is a phenomenon of modern society, is it that much? Of course they probably could spend less, like 20 millions if they were perfectly effective. But who is perfectly effective all the time? Sure, it's needed to keep an eye on effectiveness and try to improve it, and increase transparency, evaluate what all those people are doing etc But I wouldn't say that situation is awful or anything. Original article is using imagination and projection a lot. And I think there's big problem with idea paying writers. The moment you start paying your writers become not just people who want to help and share their knowledge because of goodness, but they (or some part, which you can't distinguish) also become people who want money. And it's hard to manage it, people can start bickering who's got how much, etc. You might end up with thousands of people willing to write anything just to get some money and some good writers leaving because they don't want to compete with money grabbers.
- cwyers 10y ago> You might end up with thousands of people willing to write anything just to get some money and some good writers leaving because they don't want to compete with money grabbers. Okay, but why isn't programming held to the same standard? Why do they have, what, four scrum coaches on payroll? Can't they rely on scrum coaches who want to help and share their knowledge because of goodness, too?
- a_imho 10y agoI'm very conflicted about the donate me guilt tripping. On one hand these companies need cash to operate and they do a world of good, but on the other reading their financial reports I'm just not convinced they are efficient with the money.
- dandare 10y agoDo you know if Wikimedia Foundation releases detailed spending data? The financial reports are too top level. I would like to visualize Wikipedia's budget using wikiBudgets.org - something like this: https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Markoff 10y agoTLDR: Wikipedia doesn't need your money, don't donate anytime soon
- fasteo 10y ago>>> We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details Isn't this an obligation for foundations ?
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