Wikipedia had a really good year in 20-21, their most recent financial report.
They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget, and came out of the year with $240 million in assets.[1]
So they had about half a year's surplus, and wound up with ~2 years worth of savings. And yes, that's a simplification, a good chunk of those assets are necessary to continue operating and cannot be liquefied to cover operating expenses.
In 19-20, they took in $120 million against a $111 million operating budget.[2]
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
[2]https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
So, yes, Wikipedia is doing well - as we should hope they would be. But no, they are not rolling in it, and yes they do depend on our continued support to continue doing well.
Edit: The article linked in the tweet asks valid questions and puts the stats in better context, but the twitter thread presents the numbers in a way that is very, frustratingly, misleading.
Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keeping the site serving is.
For example, in 2016 Wikipedia served a similar amount of page views as it does today [1] on an operating budget of about half [2]. Go farther back and my impression is it's much more dramatic, though I'm not finding good page view statistics for, say, 2010.
[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...
[2] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat... vs https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat...
But that tweet and thread are sensationalist and not doing it in a way that will lead to a reasonable dialog around that question. The linked article is better - but still sensationalist.
Compare that budget and the scale of Wikimedia foundation to the organizations that are running websites of a similar scale. Wikimedia is still tiny. And they are doing a ton of good.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
It's gone through a phase of planned, aggressive growth of its headcount. Its salary costs have increased tenfold over a decade:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
As you can see on that page, individual executives' salaries have risen by 20, 30 percent in the space of two years. And all the while people are told the Wikimedia Foundation needs money "to keep Wikipedia online", or "to protect Wikipedia's independence".
No. If you want to grow your headcount, tell people why. If you want ten times as much money from the public ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
... then say what you are going to do with it. Don't hide behind "keeping Wikipedia online".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
> ... then say what you are going to do with it. Don't hide behind "keeping Wikipedia online".
Fair. I'm with you there. I would like clearer documentation of Wikimedia's organizational breakdown and where they are spending that budget.
Nobody has ever seen one in all the six years the Endowment has existed.