Over the long term of many years you're /lucky/ if a stable very-low-risk investment can net ~3% when accounting for inflation. Thus $250M could maybe net you roughly $7.5M/year. Exactly how many network links, servers, and engineering staff do you think that buys? It's way under what it operates on today, which is way under what it ideally should be for site like Wikipedia. And that's /just/ the operational engineering of the sites on a technical level.
You also need HR, you need Finance, you need a lot of Lawyers, you need software developers, you need a travel department, a fundraising team, PR people, community relations people, grant-making for the extended open ecosystem around the Wikimedia movement, conference planning, and the list goes on.
It would be nice if we had a "lot of lawyers", given how frequently we're sued to try and get content censored, or having to fight orders to hand over user data - and more generally, how massive these new laws we need to comply with are (see, e.g., the EU Digital Services Act, which even creates an entirely new annual independent audit process).
We even intervene in other court cases to try and prevent bad laws being created/interpreted in ways that would hurt the open internet (see, e.g., our amicus in the French Constitutional Court two weeks ago, our lawsuit against the US NSA, and our amicus briefs in the two US "Netchoice" US Supreme Court cases). We also operate the https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assis...
Sadly, we're a very tight team. The downsides of being a nonprofit...
People care about Wikipedia, not the Wikimedia Foundation. The criticism arises from misleading advertising. WMF fundraising conflates the two, implying that _Wikipedia_ needs money or it'll die. Meanwhile the 2023 budget shows $3.1m in hosting expenses versus $24.4m in awards and grants.
Firstly, there's less conflation these days - go see recent banner wording for yourself. Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should.
(And no, I'm not saying all legal work we do is a strict necessity for Wikipedia. Some is a strict necessity, and some is strategic e.g. an amicus, or the NSA lawsuit - but the latter does help secure a healthy environment for it and future projects that might want to take its place.)
> Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should.
From your phrasing (still) it seems like you might've confused me with the person you initially replied to.
I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs because most critics are going to view the former as essential and the latter as mission creep. I don't have any insight, nor do I have any inclination to criticize, your payroll.
> No, you were comparing a small part of technical infrastructure costs to grant cost.
I have no control over how WMF presents its expenses.
For years WMF foundation has run "we need money or Wikipedia will die" ads while spending a quarter of the budget on making grants. No one forced them to write that ad copy. It's progress that they've toned it down, but we shouldn't pretend that this criticism is surprising or completely unwarranted.
> I have no control over how WMF presents its expenses.
You have control over your reading comprehension. You called a number that was a very small portion of the technical infrastructure cost, the technical infrastructure cost.
You should also probably split out any of the grants related to technical infrastructure (i presume at least some of this grant money might have historically gone to wikimedia Deutschland to do technical infrastructure on wikidata, but im not sure off the top of my head)
I'm sure you could make many arguments that some of WMF's expenditures are not needed (i'd even agree). That doesn't mean it can survive on a few million dollars.
So you are saying that if people thought they were contributing to keep Wikipedia running because that is what the ads claimed, its their fault for not going through the financial reports to see where the money is going.
If you raise money saying it is for wikipedia, it should be spent only on wikipedia or IMO it is misleading.
Even "spent only on wikipedia" is a bit complicated -- bawolff's example was grants to Wikimedia Deutschland for work on wikidata, which sounds like it's some separate project. But really wikidata is used pretty extensively inside wikipedia, particularly for keeping facts synched up between the various project languages. Or money spent on Wikimedia Commons sounds like another random project, but actually it's the infrastructure for all the images you see on wikipedia.
It gets fuzzier as you go out to the promotion-of-free-knowledge stuff, for sure. You can argue its connection to keeping information being contributed to wikipedia, and the long term health of the community, but it's definitely less directly keep-the-lights-on.
That is an issue. There is a number of projects that the Wikimedia Foundation want to do or be involved in, because they align with the mission. These all costs money, but are frequently of little interest to anyone not involved directly. There is absolutely no way to fund these, which leads to the foundation pushing for donations via Wikipedia, because that's the only thing enough people actually care about.
For the most part Wikimedia could kill off everything but English, Germany, French, Russian and a handful of other wikis and most people would be just as happy.
Wikimedia absolutely suck at telling people why they need the money. Technically the budget is completely transparent, it's just communicated extremely poorly.
What are you talking about? The AVERAGE CD right now is 5%. My local CU is almost 6%. US bonds are currently ~4.5% - if you consider those unstable, I guess the US economy isn't stable - and if the US economy crashes, wikipedia will be the least of their or our worries.
Wikimedia's expenses are almost ENTIRELY going to staff. Their balance sheet for 2023 included $101m in expenses for salaries and benefits out of a total expense of $160m. Their hosting was $3m. So yes, I'm confident their network links and servers cost almost nothing, and they don't need anywhere near $101m in compensation to keep the lights on when the VAST majority of their content is contributed for free.
Its kind of unclear what this includes. Computer equipment is a separate line, and wikimedia owns its own servers, so presumably that is separate from server costs. You don't have to buy new servers every year so some servers might simply have been purchased in other years, although maybe that gets ammortized, i dont know.
Additionally when you host your own servers you need staff to operate them. When using something like AWS, this would be part of your AWS fees, but if you operate your own servers then you have to pay that part separately. Its probably cheaper overall in the end when you are wikipedia scale, but the costs break down differently.
You may have missed them saying "when accounting for inflation". In the US at the moment that's around 3%. Thus your local credit union's savings account, a nice and stable investment, is effectively giving you around 3% appreciation in real-money each year right now. (I have no idea whether their broader point about the rate over-time is correct, admittedly.)
An engineer costs $500k a year. Salary, benefits, office space, equipment, hr, legal, and other overhead. The engineer will only see a fraction of that, of course.
If you told me it took a hundred engineers to run Wikipedia I'd say, that's not totally unreasonable. Features, design, api, scaling, moderation, there's a ton for engineers to be doing.
An engineer doesn’t cost $500k/yr. An engineer who lives in one of the highest cost-of-living places on earth costs $500k/yr. There’s absolutely no reason Wikimedia needs to pay that much.
It doesn't. Even with insurance, etc. I doubt they spend this much. They pay below market for most positions I've seen (though their benefits are on a good level) so even with taxes, overheads and all I don't see where 500k would come from.
You’ve mildly annoyed me with that banner each of the thousands of times I’ve used your free world-library over these decades, and I’m done putting up with it!
> Hire only the lowest cost employees, I demand it!
Nobody said that. There’s a difference between “don’t hire the top 1% most expensive developers in the world” and “hire only the lowest cost employees”. Wikipedia can comfortably avoid the extremes on either end of the spectrum.
There’s more talented developers outside of high CoL places than inside. The comparison is not with one other place, the comparison is with the entire world.
Hosting means nothing without the staff. Hardware, networking, datacenters, etc are the cheap part because the staff are good at their jobs.
You and the other set of trolls that think that Wikimedia can run itself need to appreciate that just because you work for a non-profit doesn't mean you should work for slave wages, or that you should be forced to work with the bare minimum amount of staff to keep things running without being able to make improvements to the infrastructure, reader experience, editor experience, or data consumer experience.
In comparison to similar services, Wikimedia has a relatively small overall budget that's well spent.
> What are you talking about? The AVERAGE CD right now is 5%. My local CU is almost 6%. US bonds are currently ~4.5% - if you consider those unstable, I guess the US economy isn't stable - and if the US economy crashes, wikipedia will be the least of their or our worries.
If you want to live off the interest you have to worry about inflation which essentially devalues your pot by x% per year, so if you really need y% for running costs you really need about x*y% to do it long term.
You also need HR, you need Finance, you need a lot of Lawyers, you need software developers, you need a travel department, a fundraising team, PR people, community relations people, grant-making for the extended open ecosystem around the Wikimedia movement, conference planning, and the list goes on.
You're off by enough to seem troll-ish at best.