I guess I should note here as well that the Wikimedia Foundation does not write or curate any of the content of Wikipedia. All of this is done by unpaid volunteers.
When Wikipedia first became a top-ten website in 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation had just 11 employees. It has expanded to something like 600 employees now, paid from funds that have always been collected on the premise that Wikipedia required money to remain online (not that the Foundation required money to expand its organization and staff headcount).
Speaking as a 15-year Wikipedia volunteer, I don't think the general public is quite aware of this.
Wikimedia (the parent of Wikipedia) pays most people at Wikimedia very generously. The issue is most people involved, outside of tech, contribute little or nothing to Wikipedia which is the reason people are donating.
Just to clarify, there's no Wikipedia Foundation, there's Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia Foundation.
You can't donate to Wikipedia, the banners on Wikipedia lead to Wikimedia donations.
It is quite unethical:
1. They have enough donations to keep Wikipedia running for decades, yet each year banner gets more and more manipulative, pretending WP is on the brink of collapse.
2. IIRC less than 5% of money are actually used towards Wikipedia needs.
3. Not to mention that WP authors essentially work for free.
Why is it tolerated? Because most people don't even know you're not donating to Wikipedia. And the product is just too good to care.
The main questions for the foundation are: is its mission worthy, and is it spending money well in service to that mission?
This piece barely considers this, and instead just presumes there’s something wrong with Wikipedia successfully growing.
There are so many poor points in the article… let’s see:
* the $10M/year number was a base number for 2013. Running Wikipedia at that level assumes nothing costs more and services will revert to 2013 levels. If that’s what you think they would do, you need to explain why that is a good idea or even possible.
* the fact that fundraising from end-users is working is a good thing, not a bad thing. If end-users aren’t paying the bills then someone else will be - in which case you have to balance their needs against the users’ - or no one will be and Wikipedia will stop existing.
* implying WMF financial reporting is “disguising” the amount of money and characterizing it as “funneling” money is misleading and unfair. It’s all transparently there, in straightforward form.
* Non-profits need to raise funds so they need staff to do so. Large organizations need a CEO and some managers. It’s OK that they pay people normal amounts to do these jobs.
* The idea that it’s offensive or wrong to ask end-users for donations is bizarre. Who else do you think should be paying for Wikipedia?
The only legit point I see (buried among the vacuous ones) is that Wikipedia should stay far away from any for-profit business. Yes, they are leaving a clear revenue stream on the table, but I think it will make their primary mission harder. Content flows freely into Wikipedia because it is given freely to everyone else. Once you start charging for the information in some forms, that all begins to change.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit with only 27 full-time employees[1] (data for 2009) which runs, among others, the 7th most popular site on the web[2], and provides the world with an amazing source of knowledge. Of course the contents is provided by volunteers, but logistics of running a site and community of this size are far from trivial. I think that they spend the money wisely, so I donated myself and encourage you to do the same.
When it comes to the photo that you linked, what does it prove? That they work in an actual office, not a bike shed or a tent? Do you claim that it's a luxury for them to have an office?
I personally admire their spine and dedication to reject corporate money, and I'm surprised that even HN readers complain so loudly about the appeal. I guess Wikipedia already became a commodity that we got used to taking for granted. For better or worse.
It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]
The whole thing just feels skeezy. They may have a noble mission, and they may need a $300m endowment when previously $100m was the target[2], but they should make that case. Acting like the site is in trouble and desperately needs every penny all the time is just dishonest. It’s like a televangelist is running the place. Now matter how much you give they desperately and urgently need more more more.
The figures in that video are a little out of date. The Wikimedia Foundation last reported assets of $231 million, along with an additional $100+ million in its Endowment.
Salaries are quite high; comparing the Form 990 (lines 5 and 15 on page 1) for the Internet Archive with that of the Wikimedia Foundation, average salary costs per employee at Wikimedia are more than twice what they are at the Internet Archive (bear in mind that all Wikipedia articles are written by unpaid volunteers):
Fundraising banners are currently shown to Wikipedia users in India, Latin America and South Africa. US, UK and Germany will have theirs in December, as usual.
They are also lording it more and more over the volunteers who are writing the actual articles. The huge influx of money over the past decade or so attracts a corporate mindset that has very little to do with the volunteer culture that actually built Wikipedia.
People don't realize that Wikipedia actually existed BEFORE the Wikimedia Foundation which does the fundraising and collects the money today.
Wikipedia is... nuanced. Keep in mind that the entity doing the fundraising is the Wikimedia Foundation. They pay the hosting costs, but return nothing to the actual Wikipedians (editors, admins.) Instead, what's left is used to pay the salaries for hundreds of administrative employees, fund third-party charities, and so on. You can love Wikipedia but have misgivings about the Foundation.
Wikimedia spends like 95% of their money on stuff that isn’t Wikipedia. They’re a classic bloated NGO, where they have some initial mission they can do efficiently but they keep asking for money way down the diminishing returns curve.
I wouldn't donate to Wikipedia because I don't think they spend the marginal donation dollar very well. Here's a picture of the Wikimedia headquarters:
I'm not convinced that having a lot of foundation employees helps make the encyclopedia better. I'd like to see Wikipedia operate on a shoestring budget and stop collecting donations once they had enough invested to run their servers off of dividends and interest indefinitely.
A very small fraction of the money is going to keep the servers running. The editors of Wikipedia are unpaid.
The software projects ran by Wikimedia have not been very impressive. What happened to proper discussion pages, for example? That has been going on for more than a decade.
All that but I have yet to get what the foundation spends 155 MILLION dollars on - each year. Even with your arguments that number seems to be wildly inflated.
Also, the Wikimedia Foundation explicitly asks for funding for Wikipedia. As far as I know, no one asked the Wikimedia Foundation to perform anything past that. This seems to be comparable to Mozilla‘s situation, who try to grow past Firefox with ideas nobody asks for but they lose sight of what their main product.
50% of money goes towards staffing. WF just overhired and pays ludicrous exec salaries, so now they must pay the price.
You shouldn't write anyone a free license to collect as much money as they can by monetizing the Wikipedia brand. The money has to actually serve a need and be spent in a way that benefits the reader.
And there have been germane questions asked about that, even by Wikimedia's own outgoing director:
The reason most of the Wikimedia Foundation's expenditure goes on salaries these days is that they have vastly expanded their staff. Staff expansion isn't bad, but it shouldn't be an end in itself, and the staff hired should be qualified and deliver value for money. And here even Jimmy Wales admitted that their cost/benefit ratio needs a lot of improvement:
The main thing to bear in mind is that donations are not needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free, as the fundraising banners say. There is more than enough money for that; it's a very small part of the Foundation's expenditure today.
When Wikipedia first became a top-ten website in 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation had just 11 employees. It has expanded to something like 600 employees now, paid from funds that have always been collected on the premise that Wikipedia required money to remain online (not that the Foundation required money to expand its organization and staff headcount).
Speaking as a 15-year Wikipedia volunteer, I don't think the general public is quite aware of this.
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