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A Mismatch Between Wikimedia's Pledge Drive and Its Cash On Hand?
Andreas Kolbe writes The latest financial statements for the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity behind Wikipedia, show it has assets of $60 million, including $27 million in cash and cash equivalents, and $23 million in investments. Yet its aggressive banner ads suggest disaster may be imminent if people don't donate and imply that Wikipedia may be forced to run commercial advertising to survive. Jimmy Wales counters complaints by saying the Foundation are merely prudent in ensuring they always have a reserve equal to one year's spending, but the fact is that Wikimedia spending has increased by 1,000 percent in the course of a few years. And by a process of circular logic, as spending increases, so the reserve has to increase, meaning that donors are asked to donate millions more each year. Unlike the suggestion made by the fundraising banners, most of these budget increases have nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free, and nothing to do with generating and curating Wikipedia content, a task that is handled entirely by the unpaid volunteer base. The skyrocketing budget increases are instead the result of a massive expansion of paid software engineering staff at the Foundation – whose work in recent years has been heavily criticised by the unpaid volunteer base. The aggressive fundraising banners too are controversial within the Wikimedia community itself.
That's the usual method of solving these problems. Wonder why no one is trying to do that if the fundraising is so controversial?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
An example of what they've done would be the recent Monuments project. They built a back end, complete with a Google maps API interface, to tell you exactly where they needed photos of which historic monuments, in relation to a given ZIP code. Based on that, I learned there was 200 year old farm house about a half a mile from my office, and I spent a productive lunch break driving over there and photographing it. Their website handled the upload, licensing, and then distributed the new photo to the Commons as well as the Monuments project. There were no errors during this entire process which means the entire thing was rigorously tested and properly coded. It was a painless user experience, if a bit dry because of the spartan aesthetics of Wikimedia, but my "generated content" was incorporated seamlessly into their project in about five minutes. That's good website engineering.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem.
You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
So what's the complaint here? Do you think someone is embezzling money, or that they're just stockpiling money for no reason? Do you think that they're spending money in the wrong places, and if so, where you do think they're spending money, and where do you think they should be spending money? I think you need to give me something before I can figure out how to be outraged at all of this.
That's because this is Slashdot and you haven't bothered to actually read TFA.
Improving Wikipedia’s content is not really in the budget. Nearly $20 million goes toward salaries and wages, despite the fact that none of the staff edit Wikipedia as part of their job function. Almost $6 million was spent last year on awards and grants which certainly help produce some content for Wikipedia,but the writers are not typically compensated with anything more than pizza, sandwiches, and soft drinks.
Less than 6% of the WMF budget is spent on Internet hosting even though most people probably believe it’s their biggest expense. Meanwhile, they spend almost as much money (about $2 million) on travel and conferences. There is also a huge bucket for “other operating expenses” totaling nearly $12.5 million — some of which certainly pays for expensive downtown office space in San Francisco.
The WMF staff busy themselves on things that rarely have anything to do with writing, organizing, or exercising editorial discretion over the actual written product of Wikipedia. Instead, the WMF now considers itself a software and technology organization, but ends up doing more harm than good with its software "innovations". The last two software roll-outs — Visual Editor and Media Viewer — were loathed by a wide swath of users. The WMF responded to the community’s rejection of its software by literally forcing it back on the community with a tool called “superprotect”.
It appears that the Wikimedia Foundation has nearly run out of legitimate ways to spend the donors’ money, because much of it ends up in the organization’s savings accounts and bonds, or pays for software programmers who don't really seem to be doing anything worthwhile.
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem. You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
Then you are a shining example of someone who has accepted the Wikimedia Foundation's spin.
Let me help you with some facts. In late 2005, all of the Wikipedias (in every language then supported) generated about 5 million edits per month. The WMF monthly budget then was $58,000. So, cost per edit was 1.16 cents. The current edit load is about 10 million per month. The WMF current monthly budget is $3,750,000. Current cost per edit is 37.5 cents.
Considering how hosting and bandwidth costs have decreased dramatically since 2005, how do you explain a 30-fold increase in spending per edit? Please don't say that it's accounted for by increased page views without edits, because I can give you those stats, too. The reason for the increase is that Sue Gardner built a staffing empire around herself, then told all of these programmers to do exciting new things with the software that nobody on the Wikipedia editing community had actually desired. Then, after years of literally a hundred programmers working on things like "Visual Editor" and "Media Viewer", when they rolled them out, they didn't work well at all, and the community literally wrote patch scripts to keep the software enhancements off Wikipedia, to which the Foundation responded with a hastily-written "superprotect" script that forces the terrible, disliked software enhancements back on the users.
This is exactly how you waste about $20 million per year.
Wikiwand is one of those engineering shops they are scared of, because WikiWand have been doing better work than their own programmers, and are presenting Wikipedia content in a prettier format. And if people migrate to Wikiwand, then as you rightly say, people don't see their fundraising banners.
... I want everyone to keep this in mind: If we don’t move faster and better than google, apple, and microsoft (and their ilk and kin), they will consume us and we will go away. It’s that simple.”
... As I see it, this is what this expansion is about, not about keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free. And that's not what they're telling the public.
Their new VP of Engineering, Damon Sicore (ex-Mozilla), spelt that fear out. According to Sicore, the WMF will have to “scale to a size that enables us to compete with the engineering shops that are trying to kill us. That means we need to double down on recruiting top talent, and steal the engineers from the sources they use because well they are REALLY GOOD.
Note well that what he's talking about going away there is the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia. The Wikipedia volunteers work for nothing; they are not reliant on donation money. And Wikipedia itself is also free, meaning it can be hosted by WikiWand, Google or anyone else who thinks they can present the content better than WMF. And if they managed to improve the content at the same time
It is true that some advertisers may pull their campaign if they don't like the content, but a popular site will always generate enough interest from someone to cover operating expenses. No pandering or user tracking needed.
In fact, why not focus on educational content, like books on the subject related to the page? There are few other opportunities to promote specialized science/history books, and it would be in line with the mission of educating the world.
"Ability fix things". The tiny midwestern town that I was born in has a Wiki page that states it was devastated by fire in the 1960s. This never happened but it was devastated by a major flood in 1937, which it barely mentions. I corrected it and it was reversed stating that I needed sources..How do you source something that didn't happen? There was never a major fire.
I tried again a few years later (2012ish) and it was again reversed. I quit trying.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me