zlacker

>>akolbe+(OP)
This is an extremely misleading take.

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.

>>dbingh+Ge
They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...

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...

>>jefftk+Eg
Seems a bit silly to me. Working on the UI that enables expanding and maintaining wikipedia feels like a reasonable top priority of the organization responsible for maintaining wikipedia. If they just "served" it, it would collapse.

>>spywar+tr
I agree it's a reasonable thing for them to work on, but not to fundraise for under the banner of "keep Wikipedia online".

>>jefftk+kI
I don't know. Here's where I start to break with some of the ways people are thinking about this.

When you pay a fee to a website - do you question how they spend that money to this level of detail? Do you ask, I dunno, lets go with Slack, to break down their fee by how much of it is necessary to keep Slack online "as is"?

I don't think I've ever seen someone do that. There's a level of entitlement that comes with donations that people just don't attach to services they purchase.

Wikipedia isn't a charity in the traditional sense - IE it's not taking those donations and redistributing them to those in poverty.

It's an organization building and maintaining a platform that provides pretty a vital service to society. Almost everyone who donates to it will have gotten far more value from Wikipedia than the cost of their donation. Maybe, instead of thinking of it as "donation", people should be thinking of their contributions as a "sliding scale fee".

On the other hand, I do believe Wikipedia should be open and should be accountable to its community. I just believe the community should be reasonable when exercising that accountability.

>>dbingh+hN
A nonprofit should always be held to a higher standard. Slack is a profit making concern valued by its utility, not its cost.

Nonprofits are cost centric and it’s both valid and essential to question the cost structure. $100M turnover seems like a lot of opex