5 ms·

Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train. In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expens

by cm2012 28d ago

Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train. In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m The story of Wikipedia of the last 10 years especially is endlessly higher spending for a very stable number of monthly users (1.5b or so). You can make the case that 80% of this spend is not necessary to what the average users donating to Wikipedia think of as "wikipedia". It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag.

cubefox 28d ago
Exactly. The WMF spending growth is completely decoupled from its effect on Wikipedia. This only works because the donations pop-up makes people think they are donating to Wikipedia, not to a foundation which mostly does totally unrelated stuff. There is no feedback loop which would limit this spending toward the core aspects of Wikipedia.
MrBuddyCasino 28d ago
This is 95% of all NGOs and their ilk. Related: "We now have evidence of how at least $7.7 billion for homelessness was spent on salaries. They created a jobs program that grows at the expense of the actual homeless who need help instead of helping the homeless." https://x.com/Twolfrecovery/status/2095661343215141026 https://x.com/Twolfrecovery/status/2095661343215141026
- bluegatty 28d ago
  Levels of waste in NGOs are a fully fair subject for debate but without context an arbitrary number is only misleading and therefore sadly cynical. Also - you have no evidence for '95% of NGO's and their ilk'. This is not Twitter.
  - hunterpayne 28d ago
    Please remember that NGOs are not charities. And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do. I think most of the grips about NGOs comes from the selling of NGOs as charities which they very much are not. They are however, taxed in the same way as charities and donate significant amounts to political campaigns (mostly local and state level). So they get around centuries old restrictions on governments, get taxed like charities and donate heavily to political campaigns. That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. When you act like they are charities, it just makes you seem naive. If they were charities, they would call themselves charities.
    - bluegatty 27d ago
      " And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do" - no, they can serve many purposes, and there are tons of things governments should not be doing. They are entities that have a civic purpose, not for profit. Yes, they can in some cases support political causes, that is normal. You seem to have a narrow view of what 'community' is aka something is either a 'charity' or 'government' - the world is more complicated than that. " That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. " - no, the properties of fine. They can be scrutinized like any organizaition: charity, private company, ngo, government, etc.
      - MrBuddyCasino 27d ago
        Yours is the naïve view of someone who has never looked at how the sausage is made. There are hundreds of billions each year flowing through NGOs. Where do you think this money comes from. Hint: its not your friendly grandma.
        bluegatty 27d ago
        You should take some time to learn what NGO's are. America Medial Association, AARP (retired people) are NGOs, they advocate for their causes, that's perfectly reasonable and normal. They are not 'for profit' obviously, and they're not strictly charities. People can group together and organize as they please. Donations to NGOs are not tax deductible.
        hunterpayne 26d ago
        1) Its spelled Medical 2) We have different regulations for different types of institutions 3) NGOs specifically exist to get around those regulations 4) A lobbying group (AARP) should have specific rules around how it can function. Lumping them with a professional standards organization makes it impossible to have reasonable anti-corruption laws. That's why NGOs exist, to make it impossible to enforce corruption laws. There is literally no other reason for it to exist as a category. We already have categories for lobbying groups and professional groups and charities.
ksec 28d ago
>In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m Am I correct in understanding, the $200M annual spend include the salary of those workers. And in case of any mass layoffs incoming, they are forming an union to better bargain?
- 20after4 28d ago
  I don't think the union is motivated by fear of mass layoffs. Staff simply want some venue for solidarity and meaningful channels to have their grievances heard and by management without fear of retaliation. What I have gathered is that there have been some very questionable management decisions and arbitrary firings of people for reasons other than job performance. One specific case which appears to be reprisal for raising concerns about questionable/unethical behavior of certain senior management. Discussions of unionization have been ongoing for many years, they only gained momentum recently due to the some recent events that, AFAIK, have very little to do with overall job security or any threat from economic forces or AI eating Wikipedia's lunch.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 28d ago
Half of that goes to wages and salary for ~650 staff members. Of the ~114M that goes to wages, 90M goes to people working directly on projects, 15M goes to admin/management, and the other 9M goes to people in fundraising/financials. 9M goes to paying donation processing fees. 3.5M goes towards network infra. ~2M of in-kind services were donated (i.e. doing free work or donating goods) and that shows up as a dedicated expense. Professional Services (accounting, consulting, etc) make up another 15M (same as the total management/admin cost). General operating expenses (property, taxes, office software, office equipment, etc) make up 8M. Conference and Travel is 6M. And then 4.5M is expensed as depreciation and amortization of owned assets. ------- So to be entirely clear here. WMF projects make up 147M / over three quarters of the total expenses for the year. Fundraising makes up 20M all together (half being essentially fees and the other half is people running fundraising campaigns). And the remaining 21M / 11% is general admin. 11% is quite good for such a large foundation. And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra. https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annual-report/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annu... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2024-2025_-_frequently_asked_questions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025/Budget_Details https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
- next_xibalba 28d ago
  And all of that (along with the serious problems in how WMF/Wikipedia operate) is why I no longer donate to WMF. Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction.
  - Grombobulous 28d ago
    I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union? I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses. The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly?
rvba 28d ago
Worst is that there is zero interest to deal with sock puppet accounts, state actors or just typical cliques I saw a pair of an admin and other person (probably sock puppet) that were used for edit wars, the 2nd account was used to ban edits, especially from non registered users.
cyanydeez 28d ago
yea...200m is totally a gravey train. Do you live in the same universe where elon musk was work 1 trillion?
AnthonyMouse 28d ago
> It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag. That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing. If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation.
- Dylan16807 28d ago
  The infrastructure isn't that much. If they need to be less ambitious about other projects I'm not going to worry about it. A union isn't going to make them keep every single project. If they were paying each employee 10x as much, and that got locked in, and then they didn't have the money to pay them, there would be bad consequences. But that's not what's going on here.
  - AnthonyMouse 28d ago
    The infrastructure isn't that much is the problem, because labor costs are the largest single expense. When you take that off the table as something that can be cut, you're then stuck needing to make up the difference from the things that never cost that much to begin with, which means the cuts you have to make to them to make up the same amount of shortfall are deep. > If they were paying each employee 10x as much They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set?
    - Dylan16807 28d ago
      Labor expenses can still be cut. Just not by screwing up wages. A union doesn't force you to keep the same number of employees forever. And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.
nostromo 28d ago
> very stable number of monthly users Wikipedia has seen their traffic decline with AI eating more and more of their lunch. I imagine it’ll only accelerate from here. Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations. There will be a lot of belt tightening at the foundation in the coming years.
- PorciiVorbesc 28d ago
  >Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations. Irrelevant when donations from humans keep growing YoY way outpacing the actual expenses of running wikipedia. Half of people can stop donating tomorrow and they still would have enough money. Having internet on your PC and your phone on the go didn't kill off the library, people still go there. Similarly, LLMs won't kill online libraries like Wikipedia.
nswango 28d ago
So 1/40 of Reuters annual revenues, 1/1000 of Facebook annual revenues, is being wasted on ... lobbying governments against internet censorship and cross-subsidising translations into less popular languages? How dare the most useful human knowledge resource spend the money freely given to it in such a way! The 'Wikipedia is spending your donations on DEI' conspiracy has run its course I think.
cbeach 28d ago
> In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m The numbers are worse than that. FY2009-10 expenses were $10.3M. FY2024-25: $190.9M. 19x increase in fifteen years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics Salaries alone were $106.9M last year (from the Foundation's own Form 990 FAQ). And it's not as if the money is needed: the Foundation holds $296M in assets, plus a further $169M in a separate endowment. Wikipedia's own editors held an RfC in 2022 and found "broad, near-unanimous consensus" that the donation banners were misleading - the ones hinting the site might go dark without your £2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html The spending grew anyway. What do donors clicking those banners imagine they're funding?
deleted 28d ago
[deleted]

by cm2012 28d ago

cubefox 28d ago

Exactly. The WMF spending growth is completely decoupled from its effect on Wikipedia. This only works because the donations pop-up makes people think they are donating to Wikipedia, not to a foundation which mostly does totally unrelated stuff. There is no feedback loop which would limit this spending toward the core aspects of Wikipedia.

MrBuddyCasino 28d ago

This is 95% of all NGOs and their ilk. Related: "We now have evidence of how at least $7.7 billion for homelessness was spent on salaries. They created a jobs program that grows at the expense of the actual homeless who need help instead of helping the homeless." https://x.com/Twolfrecovery/status/2095661343215141026 https://x.com/Twolfrecovery/status/2095661343215141026

bluegatty 28d ago
Levels of waste in NGOs are a fully fair subject for debate but without context an arbitrary number is only misleading and therefore sadly cynical. Also - you have no evidence for '95% of NGO's and their ilk'. This is not Twitter.
- hunterpayne 28d ago
  Please remember that NGOs are not charities. And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do. I think most of the grips about NGOs comes from the selling of NGOs as charities which they very much are not. They are however, taxed in the same way as charities and donate significant amounts to political campaigns (mostly local and state level). So they get around centuries old restrictions on governments, get taxed like charities and donate heavily to political campaigns. That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. When you act like they are charities, it just makes you seem naive. If they were charities, they would call themselves charities.
  - bluegatty 27d ago
    " And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do" - no, they can serve many purposes, and there are tons of things governments should not be doing. They are entities that have a civic purpose, not for profit. Yes, they can in some cases support political causes, that is normal. You seem to have a narrow view of what 'community' is aka something is either a 'charity' or 'government' - the world is more complicated than that. " That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. " - no, the properties of fine. They can be scrutinized like any organizaition: charity, private company, ngo, government, etc.
    - MrBuddyCasino 27d ago
      Yours is the naïve view of someone who has never looked at how the sausage is made. There are hundreds of billions each year flowing through NGOs. Where do you think this money comes from. Hint: its not your friendly grandma.
      - bluegatty 27d ago
        You should take some time to learn what NGO's are. America Medial Association, AARP (retired people) are NGOs, they advocate for their causes, that's perfectly reasonable and normal. They are not 'for profit' obviously, and they're not strictly charities. People can group together and organize as they please. Donations to NGOs are not tax deductible.
        hunterpayne 26d ago
        1) Its spelled Medical 2) We have different regulations for different types of institutions 3) NGOs specifically exist to get around those regulations 4) A lobbying group (AARP) should have specific rules around how it can function. Lumping them with a professional standards organization makes it impossible to have reasonable anti-corruption laws. That's why NGOs exist, to make it impossible to enforce corruption laws. There is literally no other reason for it to exist as a category. We already have categories for lobbying groups and professional groups and charities.

ksec 28d ago

>In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m Am I correct in understanding, the $200M annual spend include the salary of those workers. And in case of any mass layoffs incoming, they are forming an union to better bargain?

20after4 28d ago
I don't think the union is motivated by fear of mass layoffs. Staff simply want some venue for solidarity and meaningful channels to have their grievances heard and by management without fear of retaliation. What I have gathered is that there have been some very questionable management decisions and arbitrary firings of people for reasons other than job performance. One specific case which appears to be reprisal for raising concerns about questionable/unethical behavior of certain senior management. Discussions of unionization have been ongoing for many years, they only gained momentum recently due to the some recent events that, AFAIK, have very little to do with overall job security or any threat from economic forces or AI eating Wikipedia's lunch.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 28d ago

Half of that goes to wages and salary for ~650 staff members. Of the ~114M that goes to wages, 90M goes to people working directly on projects, 15M goes to admin/management, and the other 9M goes to people in fundraising/financials. 9M goes to paying donation processing fees. 3.5M goes towards network infra. ~2M of in-kind services were donated (i.e. doing free work or donating goods) and that shows up as a dedicated expense. Professional Services (accounting, consulting, etc) make up another 15M (same as the total management/admin cost). General operating expenses (property, taxes, office software, office equipment, etc) make up 8M. Conference and Travel is 6M. And then 4.5M is expensed as depreciation and amortization of owned assets. ------- So to be entirely clear here. WMF projects make up 147M / over three quarters of the total expenses for the year. Fundraising makes up 20M all together (half being essentially fees and the other half is people running fundraising campaigns). And the remaining 21M / 11% is general admin. 11% is quite good for such a large foundation. And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra. https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annual-report/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annu... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2024-2025_-_frequently_asked_questions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025/Budget_Details https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

next_xibalba 28d ago
And all of that (along with the serious problems in how WMF/Wikipedia operate) is why I no longer donate to WMF. Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction.
- Grombobulous 28d ago
  I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union? I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses. The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly?

rvba 28d ago

Worst is that there is zero interest to deal with sock puppet accounts, state actors or just typical cliques I saw a pair of an admin and other person (probably sock puppet) that were used for edit wars, the 2nd account was used to ban edits, especially from non registered users.

cyanydeez 28d ago

yea...200m is totally a gravey train. Do you live in the same universe where elon musk was work 1 trillion?

AnthonyMouse 28d ago

> It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag. That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing. If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation.

Dylan16807 28d ago
The infrastructure isn't that much. If they need to be less ambitious about other projects I'm not going to worry about it. A union isn't going to make them keep every single project. If they were paying each employee 10x as much, and that got locked in, and then they didn't have the money to pay them, there would be bad consequences. But that's not what's going on here.
- AnthonyMouse 28d ago
  The infrastructure isn't that much is the problem, because labor costs are the largest single expense. When you take that off the table as something that can be cut, you're then stuck needing to make up the difference from the things that never cost that much to begin with, which means the cuts you have to make to them to make up the same amount of shortfall are deep. > If they were paying each employee 10x as much They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set?
  - Dylan16807 28d ago
    Labor expenses can still be cut. Just not by screwing up wages. A union doesn't force you to keep the same number of employees forever. And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.

nostromo 28d ago

> very stable number of monthly users Wikipedia has seen their traffic decline with AI eating more and more of their lunch. I imagine it’ll only accelerate from here. Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations. There will be a lot of belt tightening at the foundation in the coming years.

PorciiVorbesc 28d ago
>Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations. Irrelevant when donations from humans keep growing YoY way outpacing the actual expenses of running wikipedia. Half of people can stop donating tomorrow and they still would have enough money. Having internet on your PC and your phone on the go didn't kill off the library, people still go there. Similarly, LLMs won't kill online libraries like Wikipedia.

nswango 28d ago

So 1/40 of Reuters annual revenues, 1/1000 of Facebook annual revenues, is being wasted on ... lobbying governments against internet censorship and cross-subsidising translations into less popular languages? How dare the most useful human knowledge resource spend the money freely given to it in such a way! The 'Wikipedia is spending your donations on DEI' conspiracy has run its course I think.

cbeach 28d ago

> In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m The numbers are worse than that. FY2009-10 expenses were $10.3M. FY2024-25: $190.9M. 19x increase in fifteen years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics Salaries alone were $106.9M last year (from the Foundation's own Form 990 FAQ). And it's not as if the money is needed: the Foundation holds $296M in assets, plus a further $169M in a separate endowment. Wikipedia's own editors held an RfC in 2022 and found "broad, near-unanimous consensus" that the donation banners were misleading - the ones hinting the site might go dark without your £2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html The spending grew anyway. What do donors clicking those banners imagine they're funding?

deleted 28d ago

[deleted]