22 ms·

I was hoping someone could help me understand. The objective of the Wikimedia Endowment[0] is to invest until the profits fully fund Wikipedia, expenses, as is

by pugets 4y ago

I was hoping someone could help me understand. The objective of the Wikimedia Endowment[0] is to invest until the profits fully fund Wikipedia, expenses, as is the case with most endowments. According to Wikipedia’s financial statements[1], their spending balloons by tens of millions of dollars each year. 2015-2016: $66M 2019-2020: $112M 2021-2022: $146M Assuming a modest return of 5%, isn’t it the case they would need billions in their endowment to fully fund Wikipedia? 0: https://wikimediaendowment.org/ https://wikimediaendowment.org/ 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...

woofcat 4y ago
Wikimedia != Wikipedia The hosting bill is $2,704,842 per year, and the work is done by volunteers.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Editing Wikipedia is done by volunteers. The sysadmin/operations staff is paid, and so are the Mediawiki developers building out stuff specifically for WP.
  - neilk 4y ago
    There are paid administrators and developers, but also unpaid ones too. Yes, there are volunteer sysadmins, some with the exact same authorizations as WMF employees. With modern infrastructure as code, they can even contribute to how the site is deployed. Some projects have good crossover between paid and volunteer Wikipedians. But the WMF tends to do the heavier lifts, even if sometimes they are ideas the community isn’t interested in.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  As the sibling comment points out, assuming Wikipedia's endowment sees 5% returns, it needs to be $54 million just to cover Wikipedia's hosting expenses. That doesn't cover any other Wikipedia/Wikimedia expenses like their full time staff or other OpEx. If the endowment gets less than 5% returns it needs to be that much larger to cover expenses.
  - xu_ituairo 4y ago
    Yeah, and they already have a lot more than 54M in the bank
    - akolbe 4y ago
      Per this page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment the Endowment at the Tides Foundation held over $113 million in January of this year. That is the latest data available. The Wikimedia Foundation itself reported assets of $239 million in addition to that, as of June this year: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf&page=6 https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...
- ff317 4y ago
  The "Internet Hosting" line doesn't mean what some seem to think or imply it does. There's a ton of non-volunteer work that must happen to make any use of that hosting bill (software + infrastructure engineering teams, and obviously lots of other departments a functioning organization should have). There are valid debates to be had about how Wikipedia asks for and uses donations, but trying to imply that it only takes ~$3M/yr to "run" Wikipedia and the rest is useless bloat is hyperbolic fantasy and completely unhelpful.
  - dlubarov 4y ago
    While that's true, the majority of WMF's staff is not performing essential functions like IT. [1] shows lots of staff in fundraising, design, brand, marketing, communications, and advocacy type roles. I think WMF's budget history [2] also proves that it's possible to run Wikipedia with much less funding. E.g. they spent $2m in 2006-2007, vs $146m in 2021-2022. They were already a top 10 website in 2007 (per Alexa), so things like traffic growth wouldn't explain that much of their budget growth. [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
    - ff317 4y ago
      Of all the departments in the org structure of Wikimedia, the Technology and Product departments are the two with the highest individual headcounts. Combined Tech+Product staff is slightly over half of the entire org's headcount. Most of the employees in these departments are technical in nature (either engineers of some kind or direct supporting roles), and you can make a fair case that they're all necessary operationally for the sites (maybe only Tech is necessary on a day-to-day level, but you wouldn't make it much further into the future without Product's work as well). I would argue that the other departments/teams you listed are also necessary to the long-term health of the Foundation and the sites as well. However, even if we hypothetically decided that your whole list of "non-essential" org departments/teams/functions were a complete waste of resources (and again, they're not, IMHO!), those still don't comprise all the "other half" of the org's non-tech/product headcount, as you're still missing other essential teams like Legal, Talent&Culture (HR), etc, which are also significant chunks (Legal alone is a little over 10% of staff and extremely important and impactful!). As to your point about budget growth: it was a different site and a different Internet in 2006. The org is growing up and becoming more responsible. It's getting more resilient in the face of an increasingly hostile Internet, it's getting better at fighting technical and legal censorship battles around the world, and it's slowly replacing the externalities of burning out a handful of highly skilled and overworked staff with more robust and "normal" staffing where employees can have real work-life balance and vacation plans or departures don't cause undue risks, etc. We're also trying to reach out to and support the growth of underserved Wikipedian communities around the world (both in technical and non-technical senses) in ways that we couldn't even dream of in 2006. Increased costs and overhead are to be expected with all of this! Even at today's Tech headcounts, if you compare us to any other major sites of this importance, scope, or even traffic level on the Internet, we're still operating on relatively-shoestring tech staffing levels, especially considering we don't outsource core infrastructure to 3rd party services or clouds, mostly due to our strong user privacy and legal stances.
- baud147258 4y ago
  then to which the money donated go? I mean considering it's money raised using banners splattered all over Wikipedia, specifically saying Wikipedia and barely any mention of Wikimedia
- smsm42 4y ago
  A lot of work on software development is done by the paid staff. And Wikipedia - and also accompanying projects like Commons, Wikidata, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. - are complex pieces of software with long list of features requested by users. Even if it weren't so, running site of this magnitude requires an operations team that can not be volunteer. So, pretending that the hosting bill is the only (or the main) expense that goes into running Wikipedia is silly.
jjice 4y ago
Not sure where their spending goes so I'm not going to comment on that, but assuming a 5% rate of return (for example), they'd need 20 times their annual spending to be fully funded by their endowment. Ever million that's added is 20 million more needed. Conversely, every million saved is 20 million less that's needed. Ballooning is not the way, but maybe they'll level off? No idea - I don't run the business or care to dive into their expenses. Just wanted to highlight the double power of reducing their expenses in this case. I'm sure they understand that though.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

by pugets 4y ago

woofcat 4y ago

Wikimedia != Wikipedia The hosting bill is $2,704,842 per year, and the work is done by volunteers.

rippercushions 4y ago
Editing Wikipedia is done by volunteers. The sysadmin/operations staff is paid, and so are the Mediawiki developers building out stuff specifically for WP.
- neilk 4y ago
  There are paid administrators and developers, but also unpaid ones too. Yes, there are volunteer sysadmins, some with the exact same authorizations as WMF employees. With modern infrastructure as code, they can even contribute to how the site is deployed. Some projects have good crossover between paid and volunteer Wikipedians. But the WMF tends to do the heavier lifts, even if sometimes they are ideas the community isn’t interested in.
giantrobot 4y ago
As the sibling comment points out, assuming Wikipedia's endowment sees 5% returns, it needs to be $54 million just to cover Wikipedia's hosting expenses. That doesn't cover any other Wikipedia/Wikimedia expenses like their full time staff or other OpEx. If the endowment gets less than 5% returns it needs to be that much larger to cover expenses.
- xu_ituairo 4y ago
  Yeah, and they already have a lot more than 54M in the bank
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Per this page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment the Endowment at the Tides Foundation held over $113 million in January of this year. That is the latest data available. The Wikimedia Foundation itself reported assets of $239 million in addition to that, as of June this year: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf&page=6 https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWi...
ff317 4y ago
The "Internet Hosting" line doesn't mean what some seem to think or imply it does. There's a ton of non-volunteer work that must happen to make any use of that hosting bill (software + infrastructure engineering teams, and obviously lots of other departments a functioning organization should have). There are valid debates to be had about how Wikipedia asks for and uses donations, but trying to imply that it only takes ~$3M/yr to "run" Wikipedia and the rest is useless bloat is hyperbolic fantasy and completely unhelpful.
- dlubarov 4y ago
  While that's true, the majority of WMF's staff is not performing essential functions like IT. [1] shows lots of staff in fundraising, design, brand, marketing, communications, and advocacy type roles. I think WMF's budget history [2] also proves that it's possible to run Wikipedia with much less funding. E.g. they spent $2m in 2006-2007, vs $146m in 2021-2022. They were already a top 10 website in 2007 (per Alexa), so things like traffic growth wouldn't explain that much of their budget growth. [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
  - ff317 4y ago
    Of all the departments in the org structure of Wikimedia, the Technology and Product departments are the two with the highest individual headcounts. Combined Tech+Product staff is slightly over half of the entire org's headcount. Most of the employees in these departments are technical in nature (either engineers of some kind or direct supporting roles), and you can make a fair case that they're all necessary operationally for the sites (maybe only Tech is necessary on a day-to-day level, but you wouldn't make it much further into the future without Product's work as well). I would argue that the other departments/teams you listed are also necessary to the long-term health of the Foundation and the sites as well. However, even if we hypothetically decided that your whole list of "non-essential" org departments/teams/functions were a complete waste of resources (and again, they're not, IMHO!), those still don't comprise all the "other half" of the org's non-tech/product headcount, as you're still missing other essential teams like Legal, Talent&Culture (HR), etc, which are also significant chunks (Legal alone is a little over 10% of staff and extremely important and impactful!). As to your point about budget growth: it was a different site and a different Internet in 2006. The org is growing up and becoming more responsible. It's getting more resilient in the face of an increasingly hostile Internet, it's getting better at fighting technical and legal censorship battles around the world, and it's slowly replacing the externalities of burning out a handful of highly skilled and overworked staff with more robust and "normal" staffing where employees can have real work-life balance and vacation plans or departures don't cause undue risks, etc. We're also trying to reach out to and support the growth of underserved Wikipedian communities around the world (both in technical and non-technical senses) in ways that we couldn't even dream of in 2006. Increased costs and overhead are to be expected with all of this! Even at today's Tech headcounts, if you compare us to any other major sites of this importance, scope, or even traffic level on the Internet, we're still operating on relatively-shoestring tech staffing levels, especially considering we don't outsource core infrastructure to 3rd party services or clouds, mostly due to our strong user privacy and legal stances.
baud147258 4y ago
then to which the money donated go? I mean considering it's money raised using banners splattered all over Wikipedia, specifically saying Wikipedia and barely any mention of Wikimedia
smsm42 4y ago
A lot of work on software development is done by the paid staff. And Wikipedia - and also accompanying projects like Commons, Wikidata, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. - are complex pieces of software with long list of features requested by users. Even if it weren't so, running site of this magnitude requires an operations team that can not be volunteer. So, pretending that the hosting bill is the only (or the main) expense that goes into running Wikipedia is silly.

jjice 4y ago

Not sure where their spending goes so I'm not going to comment on that, but assuming a 5% rate of return (for example), they'd need 20 times their annual spending to be fully funded by their endowment. Ever million that's added is 20 million more needed. Conversely, every million saved is 20 million less that's needed. Ballooning is not the way, but maybe they'll level off? No idea - I don't run the business or care to dive into their expenses. Just wanted to highlight the double power of reducing their expenses in this case. I'm sure they understand that though.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]