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Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to: Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity. The foundation has over 500 sta

by ff317 5y ago

Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to: Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity. The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good use. Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The tech stack runs on its own bare metal (on the scale of a couple thousand servers) and its own CDN (to better protect against censorship and surveillance for the global audience, among many reasons), the total network currently has some physical presence in 7 different datacenter locations around the world, and there's all the redundant transport, transit, and peering network requirements that come with that. The live codebase gets new releases to production multiple times a week. There are many other side-services that run alongside the core MediaWiki codebase. There's constant network attacks on our infrastructure. There's all the infrastructure layer metrics and monitoring stuff. I could go on and on... On top of all that (which implies reasonably robust techie staffing): there's a Legal department that has to defend against threats to the org from businesses and governments around the world and in general does a ton of amazing work in many different directions (my favorite example was our past lawsuit against the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v._NSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v._NSA). There's all the usual corporate supporting functions, including finance, travel, talent and culture, etc. Can't fail to mention the Fundraising team itself, of course! :) The foundation has a big job keeping the soft and hard infrastructure of the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia going. The budget really isn't that unreasonable, and the endowment also isn't anywhere near big enough to replace our annual donation budget and ensure the org remains financially stable in the long run, yet. Usually when one of us goes to a conference and talks about our infrastructure, others are shocked to learn just how small our tech teams are for the jobs they're doing.

cyounkins 5y ago
OP here. Thank you for work on Wikipedia (seriously!). I can really appreciate that the Foundation has expenses and I think donations is really the best way to get the funds. My only qualm is with the aggressiveness and deception with which those donations are solicited.
bryans 5y ago
Except the organization already has liquid assets nearing twice its annual expenses, on top of the endowment, and >20% of the revenue is simply redirected to other organizations. It's also a little ridiculous to suggest that the infrastructure is substantial, given that the costs are only <2% @ $2.5 million. I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which the rest of us could learn from, but it's almost irrelevant in regards to the bottom line of the organization.
- ff317 5y ago
  I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of a robust and functioning organization, the total headcount still seems reasonable. Yes, the engineering "efforts" are exciting and interesting to learn from. They're also a continuous process that requires a heavy human investment in the form of staff (and staff retention!), and those salaries and benefits are relevant to the bottom line. On the parts about annual expenses: keep in mind this is a long-term movement and foundation with long-term aims. Being sufficiently financially stable to run another year or two isn't really a win. It still leaves a rather important institution and its projects subject to lots of short-to-medium term existential risk.
  - bryans 5y ago
    You seem to be suggesting that removing the aggressive fundraising from the equation automatically means the revenue goes to $0, and the organization runs out of reserves in one or two years -- except that's not how anything works, and you know it. Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for using aggressive tactics. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find another organization whose reserves are double both revenue and expenses. So it's rather silly to assert that Wikimedia is in a precarious position. If the organization is really concerned about not having enough cashflow or reserves, then maybe they should stop giving away 20% of their revenue. Charitable contributions are great, but that's not the proposition being made in the fundraising tactics, which all aim to convince us that Wikipedia is going to die any minute unless every user immediately donates. These are the same tactics that PACs use, and are based on classic social engineering methods with the sole intent of manipulating people into feeling concerned or even panicked. An organization like Wikimedia should not be engaging in these tactics, especially when they provably don't need to.

by ff317 5y ago

cyounkins 5y ago

OP here. Thank you for work on Wikipedia (seriously!). I can really appreciate that the Foundation has expenses and I think donations is really the best way to get the funds. My only qualm is with the aggressiveness and deception with which those donations are solicited.

bryans 5y ago

Except the organization already has liquid assets nearing twice its annual expenses, on top of the endowment, and >20% of the revenue is simply redirected to other organizations. It's also a little ridiculous to suggest that the infrastructure is substantial, given that the costs are only <2% @ $2.5 million. I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which the rest of us could learn from, but it's almost irrelevant in regards to the bottom line of the organization.

ff317 5y ago
I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of a robust and functioning organization, the total headcount still seems reasonable. Yes, the engineering "efforts" are exciting and interesting to learn from. They're also a continuous process that requires a heavy human investment in the form of staff (and staff retention!), and those salaries and benefits are relevant to the bottom line. On the parts about annual expenses: keep in mind this is a long-term movement and foundation with long-term aims. Being sufficiently financially stable to run another year or two isn't really a win. It still leaves a rather important institution and its projects subject to lots of short-to-medium term existential risk.
- bryans 5y ago
  You seem to be suggesting that removing the aggressive fundraising from the equation automatically means the revenue goes to $0, and the organization runs out of reserves in one or two years -- except that's not how anything works, and you know it. Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for using aggressive tactics. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find another organization whose reserves are double both revenue and expenses. So it's rather silly to assert that Wikimedia is in a precarious position. If the organization is really concerned about not having enough cashflow or reserves, then maybe they should stop giving away 20% of their revenue. Charitable contributions are great, but that's not the proposition being made in the fundraising tactics, which all aim to convince us that Wikipedia is going to die any minute unless every user immediately donates. These are the same tactics that PACs use, and are based on classic social engineering methods with the sole intent of manipulating people into feeling concerned or even panicked. An organization like Wikimedia should not be engaging in these tactics, especially when they provably don't need to.