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.
In this case their program expenses are a mix of incredibly valuable things ("keep wikipedia online") and more borderline things ("redesigning the article editing UI"). When their fundraising talks about the former as if it's what the marginal dollar will be spent on, that's pretty misleading.
(I don't think this marketing is unusually misleading for a non-profit, and likely better than average; the bar for honesty in fundraising is depressingly low.)
I don't know how long ago they added the hover infoboxes, but I also noticed those. But that's a relatively small feature, at least from my perspective.
You keep harping on this, but improving the article editing UI seems like an absolutely valuable thing for wikipedia to invest in. Retaining existing and attracting new contributors is essential to wikipedia's future, and the editing experience is an essential part of that.
Sysadmins are paid to make sure wikipedia doesn't have random downtime. Time spent on bugfixing should only be noticed if someone screws up.
If you want to see what people are doing - the git repo is public. https://github.com/wikimedia
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".
In particular, "32% direct support to communities" was seen as complete pie in the sky. 32% of $163M revenue would be $52 million.
But once you deduct the $68M salary bill and $6M in donation processing expenses from the $112M expenses total, you only have $38M left!
So how can 32% of revenue be "direct support to communities"??
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
Wellll that's an interesting topic in and of itself. But OK I get what you mean.
"Direct support to communities", to me, is when you give something "directly" to a community member, such as a travel grant, or a grant for equipment, or pay for reference material.
The Wikimedia Foundation does things like that too, to be fair, but it accounts for about 3% of its expenditure, not 32%.
It's in the $9.8M "Awards and grants" item here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
However, $5.5M of that $9.8M is money the Foundation paid into its own Endowment (which, by the way, has never published audited accounts). So only a little over $4M are left for "direct support to the communities".
> 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.
I'm not sure what they intend to communicate with the word 'direct', either in "Direct support to communities" or "Direct support to websites".
Nobody has ever seen one in all the six years the Endowment has existed.
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.
When I donate to a charity I compare the altruistic benefit my marginal contribution will produce to the amount I'm donating. This doesn't work very well, because it's really hard to estimate the benefit to society. But it still worth doing, because there are a lot of really valuable things that aren't going to be funded unless we put up our money.
Where I have an issue (and I suspect many others do) is when Wikipedia phrases donation requests as "keeping the lights on" or something to that effect. I suspect there would be a lot less hate if the requests were phrased like "help Wikipedia grow" or something like that.
It's more of a framing issue than an issue with where money is being spent. If Slack was claiming that they needed my fee to "keep the lights on," I think most people would have issues with that language/framing.
Wikipedia provides a good service for the money it charges you. It doesn't charge you anything.
The thing about free things is that they aren't really free, someone is paying for it and the people doing the work to keep Wikipedia online are the best skilled and placed and experienced to decide these kind of spending decisions, not people with no personal investment orwho do not donate and don't even edit or do any work but somehow have opinions how other people should do their job for free.
If you use Wikipedia and getting value from it then you can't really complain, it's not positive.
That's where money should be going.
Nonprofits are cost centric and it’s both valid and essential to question the cost structure. $100M turnover seems like a lot of opex
I get a lot of utility from Wikipedia, but is my marginal dollar helping the mission or paying for dinner at a conference? Perhaps I’d be better off donating to an open source foundation for that part of the charity portfolio, which may actually have more impact on Wikipedia!
I think this org doesn’t communicate what it does well.
When deciding where to donate we should consider where our money will do the most good. "Keep Wikipedia online" is a candidate for one of the most important things, if that's actually what your money will help do. But other Wikimedia projects, while useful, are generally nowhere near as high priority, and there are a lot of other places we could be donating!
As charity funding is effectively a closed system, excessive contribution to Wikipedia is to the detriment of other charities, with minimal net benefit.
I can write using simpler language. It just doesn't come naturally--so perhaps, "re-write using simpler language" would be more correct. My apologies.
https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TCPB1...
In person conferences move open source projects forward. They build relationships and synergy between people who usually only see each other online. A cheap dinner is probably a lot of bang for buck when it comes to outcomes.
People may be excited to fund that other work too, but they should make the case for it instead of pretending there's a risk Wikipedia and their other sites will drop off the internet.
I'm guessing I'll end up either using an extension or writing something up in Greasemonkey. There might even already be a userscript out there I can use.
If you think one charity is more deserving your money than Wikipedia, then you are free to decide that with your resources.
You decide how to spend your money and Wikipedia decides how to spend theirs.
Resource allocation is not a solved problem and it is inherently political.
If you're working in the field, you have a perspective of what resources you need to do the job properly and it's always higher than what people outside the field believe.
Were the situations reversed (you were Wikipedia), would you believe what you do today?
If you could do it cheaper, why aren't you?
"I thought you were doing it"
If you want to give, then give and I recommend giving to charity, the world needs lasting regular investment.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, someone is ultimately paying. If everybody assumes everybody else will pay for it and nobody is willing to add funds, then that service shall pass away.
Look at any social good and the investment it receives and the state of repair of those same services.
Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) can be the best in its class without the Wikimedia foundation being beyond criticism. 99% of what makes Wikipedia great was already there a decade ago, with exponentially less cost.
I'm pretty sure there's a public roadmap somewhere, and you could always follow through their bug system or PRs. Everything is developed in the open, even the infrastructure (disclaimer: I founded wikimedia cloud services, and opened up the infrastructure development).