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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.
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.