4 ms·

Their financials are public [1]. See page 4 of the document (6th page of the pdf) for their expenditure breakdown. Some quick highlights: of their >$150M of us

by bhaney 3y ago

Their financials are public [1]. See page 4 of the document (6th page of the pdf) for their expenditure breakdown. Some quick highlights: of their >$150M of usable donations, they spent about 57% of it on "salaries," 10% of it on "awards and grants," 4% of it just on processing donations, and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...

bawolff 3y ago
> and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs. Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)
GauntletWizard 3y ago
There's not a good public breakdown of how much of those salaries are on people developing Wikipedia/mediawiki/moderation tools, and how much are on special projects. It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget. Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has....
- lostmsu 3y ago
  > It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget. This needs to be taken with the thought that not all projects necessarily end up good.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Visual Editor is generally pretty popular with a significant portion of users (especially newer users) using it. If that's a failure WMF should have more failures.
  - newaccount74 3y ago
    Yeah, in retrospect it's easy to say that something was a waste of money. Much harder to tell ahead of time.
lock-the-spock 3y ago
I don't understand this kind of critique. 2% on pure hosting cost. The horror! And they spend things on salaries, like web admins, accountants, lawyers to defend against all the different legal threats the face, people to handle takedowns, spam attacks, botfarms, PR, write the obligatory reports like the one you quote from, etc etc ... For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.
- bhaney 3y ago
  What "critique" are you talking about?
newaccount74 3y ago
> a measly 2% on actual hosting costs That's a good sign, isn't it? It means they are efficient and don't waste their budget on overpriced cloud services. I'd be more pissed if a significant junk of the donations went straight to AWS.

by bhaney 3y ago

bawolff 3y ago

> and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs. Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)

GauntletWizard 3y ago

There's not a good public breakdown of how much of those salaries are on people developing Wikipedia/mediawiki/moderation tools, and how much are on special projects. It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget. Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has....

lostmsu 3y ago
> It doesn't matter, anyway, because impressive failed software projects like the awful visual editor are hard to parse out of the "real work" budget. This needs to be taken with the thought that not all projects necessarily end up good.
- bawolff 3y ago
  Visual Editor is generally pretty popular with a significant portion of users (especially newer users) using it. If that's a failure WMF should have more failures.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Yeah, in retrospect it's easy to say that something was a waste of money. Much harder to tell ahead of time.

lock-the-spock 3y ago

I don't understand this kind of critique. 2% on pure hosting cost. The horror! And they spend things on salaries, like web admins, accountants, lawyers to defend against all the different legal threats the face, people to handle takedowns, spam attacks, botfarms, PR, write the obligatory reports like the one you quote from, etc etc ... For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.

bhaney 3y ago
What "critique" are you talking about?

newaccount74 3y ago

> a measly 2% on actual hosting costs That's a good sign, isn't it? It means they are efficient and don't waste their budget on overpriced cloud services. I'd be more pissed if a significant junk of the donations went straight to AWS.