zlacker

That "Where Your Money Goes" overview was particularly derided by Wikipedians in the Village Pump poll. It's so fuzzy it could mean anything.

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...

>>akolbe+(OP)
Sounds like most of the direct support to communities is the work of salaried Wikimedia employees? Which seems plausible to me!

>>jefftk+r2
Is that what most people would understand by the term "direct support"?

"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".

>>akolbe+v8
They list as examples "grants, projects, trainings, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors". I agree that it's a bit misleading to put 'grants' first if that's only a small part of what they do.

I'm not sure what they intend to communicate with the word 'direct', either in "Direct support to communities" or "Direct support to websites".