5 ms·

After reading about the money they spend... no thanks. I'll find the link, but apparently they spend over $10,000,0000 a year and this year they're aiming for $

After reading about the money they spend... no thanks. I'll find the link, but apparently they spend over $10,000,0000 a year and this year they're aiming for $25,000,000. That to me is just ever so slightly ridiculous. Actually that was easy, here is their financial information: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports and a specific outline of what they want to make/spend is on page 12 of this PDF: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1... (Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/43973767/Untitled?secret_password=1vqtqaj7z4xw6ql5lcie http://www.scribd.com/doc/43973767/Untitled?secret_password=... ) Edit: To clarify, the issue I have is with the increase, not the costs for this year. They're going from 10m to 25m and I don't understand how, if there's an explanation somewhere please do link :-)

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
You're not very specific or constructive in your complaint. I assume that money is spent freely serving encyclopaedic content to the masses via the web on a nearly incomprehensible scale, which I assume donors already know about.
- tomerico 16y ago
  Their current annual spending is $9.2M. Of which $1M is spent on hosting. $3.5M on salaries. It seems they want to grow really fast - 185% growth in salary expenditures next year to $9M.
  - gritzko 16y ago
    Yep, they have huge expansion plans. At the peak of their growth (circa 2006) they had ~4 employees. Currently I think they have ~40, expanding to 80, projecting 180 in some future. The 40>80>180 plan was announced at Wikimania'10, I believe. What bothers me a bit, enwiki got into steady-state like 3 years ago and some people claim the activity slowly goes down. Meanwhile, the staff expands. I do not really understand the process.
    - riffraff 16y ago
      this is my same question, and others have voiced it. Why do they want to grow this way?
smanek 16y ago
Given the scale of Wikipedia, the fact that they can run it on only $10M/year is rather impressive. Glancing at the docs you reference, roughly $6M of their spending goes to straight operating expenses (servers, bandwidth, travel, etc). I don't think anyone would disagree that is completely reasonable for an organization Wikimedia's size with the amount of traffic they have (it seems quite lean, even compared to most startups). The other big chunk ($3.5M) is salary for people. There you have to take into account that they have ~70M unique users a month. Assuming $150K/engineer/year all told (office space, computers, salary, benefits, etc) and that all the salary were just going to engineering, that's only enough cash to hire about 23 engineers (or about 1 engineer for every 3M users). In practice, not all their employees are engineers, so it's probably closer to 5M users per engineer. As a point of comparison, Facebook brags about having only 1 engineer per million users. Wikipedia is being laudably frugal and efficient. I can't imagine running a site their size with much fewer resources.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  I understand that things cost a lot, I just don't see the justification in going from ~$10m costs to ~$25m costs. Unless I'm missing something, what does it offer me (as a person who is supposed to donate)? I don't see anything, although based on the other people like you saying they're expanding maybe I've missed something.
- danio 16y ago
  They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers. 10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism. 5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable. There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for? $380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel. Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.
vib 16y ago
How does it matter how much they're spending if they are indeed spending on something fruitful? It's not like they're wasting those $25m away. It's been properly invested in education. As you pointed out on those .pdf, they're transparent enough to make it clear what they're doing with the money. Specially on page 30, where they detail each top spending increase. It's very clear from visiting their site and the sister sites, that they are indeed improving. It's an important investment in education. For those of us who believe more investment in education is needed on a global level, but can't rely on your government for that. Donating to wikimedia is a great alternative. I donated and I'm sure it was a great move.
ErrantX 16y ago
The main reason is they are expanding to an additional data centre, so a lot of the increase relates to capital outlay, new staff and operating costs on the new facility.
fbailey 16y ago
That was pretty easy to find from the Link you provided http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2010-2011_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2010-2011_Annual_Plan_Qu... The top five spending increases for 2010-11 are: 1) An additional $3.8 million will be spent on technical operations. This will include funding to establish and maintain a new data centre, increased spending on bandwidth to support our growing readership, and five new positions supporting technical operations. 2) An additional $2.6 million will be spent on ten new (non-ops) technology positions such as a QA engineer and a community liasion position, annualization of salaries of existing tech positions including some positions that were previously paid under restricted grants as well as development of a database to track relationships with editors, readers, donors and others. 3) An additional $1.3 million will go towards administration supporting all Wikimedia Foundation activities. This will include rent for additional office space, plus nine new support positions to support the work of staff and community members. 4) An additional $1.1 million dollars will be spent on community outreach and volunteer convenings. In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been increasingly offering financial support for, and/or staged itself, volunteer convenings of various kinds, including for example the Berlin chapters/developer meetings, as well as paying some travel costs for volunteers, including more funding for Wikimania scholarships. We intend to do more of this in 2010-11 as key activities to grow and strengthen the movement. 5) In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to spend $400,000 on various forms of support for the chapters. This will include an expanded grants program for mission activities, staff positions supporting our chapters network, and a board-sponsored project designed to help the Wikimedia movement develop clarity around roles-and-responsibilities across the network.
fragmede 16y ago
> In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to increase revenue 28% to $20.4 million. From page 12 of said pdf.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

You're not very specific or constructive in your complaint. I assume that money is spent freely serving encyclopaedic content to the masses via the web on a nearly incomprehensible scale, which I assume donors already know about.

tomerico 16y ago
Their current annual spending is $9.2M. Of which $1M is spent on hosting. $3.5M on salaries. It seems they want to grow really fast - 185% growth in salary expenditures next year to $9M.
- gritzko 16y ago
  Yep, they have huge expansion plans. At the peak of their growth (circa 2006) they had ~4 employees. Currently I think they have ~40, expanding to 80, projecting 180 in some future. The 40>80>180 plan was announced at Wikimania'10, I believe. What bothers me a bit, enwiki got into steady-state like 3 years ago and some people claim the activity slowly goes down. Meanwhile, the staff expands. I do not really understand the process.
  - riffraff 16y ago
    this is my same question, and others have voiced it. Why do they want to grow this way?

smanek 16y ago

Given the scale of Wikipedia, the fact that they can run it on only $10M/year is rather impressive. Glancing at the docs you reference, roughly $6M of their spending goes to straight operating expenses (servers, bandwidth, travel, etc). I don't think anyone would disagree that is completely reasonable for an organization Wikimedia's size with the amount of traffic they have (it seems quite lean, even compared to most startups). The other big chunk ($3.5M) is salary for people. There you have to take into account that they have ~70M unique users a month. Assuming $150K/engineer/year all told (office space, computers, salary, benefits, etc) and that all the salary were just going to engineering, that's only enough cash to hire about 23 engineers (or about 1 engineer for every 3M users). In practice, not all their employees are engineers, so it's probably closer to 5M users per engineer. As a point of comparison, Facebook brags about having only 1 engineer per million users. Wikipedia is being laudably frugal and efficient. I can't imagine running a site their size with much fewer resources.

citricsquid 16y ago
I understand that things cost a lot, I just don't see the justification in going from ~$10m costs to ~$25m costs. Unless I'm missing something, what does it offer me (as a person who is supposed to donate)? I don't see anything, although based on the other people like you saying they're expanding maybe I've missed something.
danio 16y ago
They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers. 10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism. 5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable. There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for? $380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel. Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.

vib 16y ago

How does it matter how much they're spending if they are indeed spending on something fruitful? It's not like they're wasting those $25m away. It's been properly invested in education. As you pointed out on those .pdf, they're transparent enough to make it clear what they're doing with the money. Specially on page 30, where they detail each top spending increase. It's very clear from visiting their site and the sister sites, that they are indeed improving. It's an important investment in education. For those of us who believe more investment in education is needed on a global level, but can't rely on your government for that. Donating to wikimedia is a great alternative. I donated and I'm sure it was a great move.

ErrantX 16y ago

The main reason is they are expanding to an additional data centre, so a lot of the increase relates to capital outlay, new staff and operating costs on the new facility.

fbailey 16y ago

That was pretty easy to find from the Link you provided http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2010-2011_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2010-2011_Annual_Plan_Qu... The top five spending increases for 2010-11 are: 1) An additional $3.8 million will be spent on technical operations. This will include funding to establish and maintain a new data centre, increased spending on bandwidth to support our growing readership, and five new positions supporting technical operations. 2) An additional $2.6 million will be spent on ten new (non-ops) technology positions such as a QA engineer and a community liasion position, annualization of salaries of existing tech positions including some positions that were previously paid under restricted grants as well as development of a database to track relationships with editors, readers, donors and others. 3) An additional $1.3 million will go towards administration supporting all Wikimedia Foundation activities. This will include rent for additional office space, plus nine new support positions to support the work of staff and community members. 4) An additional $1.1 million dollars will be spent on community outreach and volunteer convenings. In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been increasingly offering financial support for, and/or staged itself, volunteer convenings of various kinds, including for example the Berlin chapters/developer meetings, as well as paying some travel costs for volunteers, including more funding for Wikimania scholarships. We intend to do more of this in 2010-11 as key activities to grow and strengthen the movement. 5) In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to spend $400,000 on various forms of support for the chapters. This will include an expanded grants program for mission activities, staff positions supporting our chapters network, and a board-sponsored project designed to help the Wikimedia movement develop clarity around roles-and-responsibilities across the network.

fragmede 16y ago

> In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to increase revenue 28% to $20.4 million. From page 12 of said pdf.