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Wikipedia Exceeds Fundraising Target, But Continues Asking For More Money (theregister.co.uk)
Reader Andreas Kolbe writes: The fundraising banners on Wikipedia this year are so effective that halfway through its December fundraising campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation has already exceeded its $25 million donations target for the entire month, reports The Register. A few weeks ago, Jimmy Wales promised that the Wikimedia Foundation would "stop the fundraiser if enough money were raised in shorter than the planned time". But there's no sign of the Foundation doing that. When asked about this more recently, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson remained non-committal on ending the campaign early. The most recent audited accounts of the Wikimedia Foundation showed net assets of $92 million and revenue of $82 million. None of this money, incidentally, pays for writing or checking Wikipedia content – that's the job of unpaid volunteers – and only $2 million are spent on internet hosting every year.
So the internet's cesspit of ill researched unfounded disinformation is pissed that one of the most successful projects of the last decade in advancing human knowledge has a healthy monetary buffer?
I sense jealousy.
But fair play to The Register, I frankly thought it was dead already, they've done well to keep such a useless publication going even this long.
Hosting is not Wikipedia's largest expense. Salaries are. They spent $32 million on salaries. Total expenses were $67 million.
Even considering all of the expenses, their net income was positive $16 million last year.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
For the amount of good that this foundation does for the public, making information and truth more accessible, and policing the content in an open and rigorous way, I say let them collect as much donations as people willingly donate. It's hard enough to get people to donate -- who would refuse if the donations kept coming in.
Sure, be transparent and honest about when you've exceeded the goal for the month (or set the goal higher), but frankly, I don't understand why you would criticize when one of the most valuable services on the internet today attempts to build more of a financial cushion for itself (and not through lying or deception or serving up users / others' content for cash, how refreshing).
Learn to understand who are your friends and who are your enemies in this world, people.
Well if the summary is to be believed, they have 45x their yearly costs. That's a bit more than protection from swings in donations.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
During the year ended June 30, 2016, the Foundation entered into an agreement with the Tides Foundation to establish the Wikimedia Endowment as a Collective Action Fund to act as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to ensure a base level of support for the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. The Endowment is independent from the Foundation. On June 29, 2016, the Foundation provided an irrevocable grant in the amount of $5 million to the Tides Foundation for the purpose of the Wikimedia Endowment. The amount is recorded in awards and grants expense.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Is this the math you used? $92M (net assets) / $2M (internet hosting) = 46x, then round down to 45x. I think "net assets" includes things that are not easily spent, like servers, and is not the same as "cash savings". I also suspect that "internet hosting" is not equal to "operating costs". Therefore, I really have no idea how far off your figure may be. (Not your fault--the summary lacks the details necessary to support its claims.)
So where does all of the money go??
200+ employees, who do nothing of value.
Expensive office space in San Francisco.
Giving away money in the form of "grants" which produce nothing of value.
$78.5 million of the $92 million of net assets are cash and short-term financial investments.
2016 Donations & Revenue (gross inflows)
$ 82 million
2016 Expenses (selected):
$ 32 million - Salaries
$ 11 million - Awards & Grants
$ 6 million - Professional Services
$ 4.8 million - Other Operating Expenses
$ 3.6 million - Donation Processing Expenses
$ 2.6 million - Travel, Conferences & Special Events
$ 2.0 million - Internet Hosting
2016 "Net Income" (increase in unrestricted net assets)
$ 15 million
See for yourself: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Wikipedia's fundraising activities seem to get more obnoxious every year. This year I got a nasty-gram from "Jimmy Wales" asking why I haven't given my annual donation yet.
I already did, dumb ass, but I submitted it from a different e-mail address this year. But, hey... if you're going to give me an attitude about it, I certainly won't bother donating next year.
$32M in SALARIES? to who?
It's the Jimmy Wales Junket Fund. Compare the cost structure for an Adam Sandler movie - quite similar.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Just add this line to the block list of your favorite ad blocker (uBlock origin, ABP, ...)
wikipedia.org###centralNotice
It is not included by default because EasyList doesn't consider self-promotion to be advertisement. I do.
$32M in SALARIES? to who?
Last time I heard, Wikipedia had about 200 employees (over 100 technical positions), and that figure may or may not have included people working for the wikimedia foundation. If not, that averages to about $160k each.
John
If we are to agree that wikipedia is usefull then we can ask our selfs why?
1 - its free
2 - works well
3 - info there has quality
4 - its huge
Do you realy think you can have a software that handles the bilions on views, edits, comments, in less then a sec, and never trows a error at you, just with good will and servers?
No!!!
You need a team of administradors, looking at logs of errors debuging the system, applying security patches, blocking hackers.
You need a team of developers fixing bugs, upgrading libs, patching security holes, adding features.
You need dev hardware and test hardware and a office for that team.
Then there are all those lawsuits, you need a team to deal with all the law crap trown at them.
And when all that is paid, you start thinking about next year, when ppl dont donate that much.
It works realy well and provides a great service, why the F are you complaing about!!!!
About ten years ago, Jimmy Wales said about Wikipedia (time code 4:35):
... We actually hired Brion [Vibber] because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.”
“So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that’s essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee
In 2008, when Wikipedia was already the world's number 8 website, the Wikimedia Foundation survived on $5 million (vs. $82 million last year). So, yes, you can have a top-ten website – written entirely by unpaid volunteers – for a fraction of the current cost.
Sorry but your comment is dangerously ignorant. Your comment undermines their fundraising drive yet is reprehensibly ignorant of the scale of expenses that the Wikimedia Foundation has. You act as if all that money is irrelevant which totally ignores *EVERYTHING* about what needs to be done to provide readers what the volunteer editors have written and created.
This points to the key problem with WIkimedia.
If you look at the Charity Watch score for Wikipedia you see that is pretty high, indicating a well run charity. This seems odd given that there is actually very little public information about the actual uses to which the money is put (no, spending by broad accounting category - "engineering", "advertising", etc. does not provide this).
Examining the matter more closely it appears that Jimmy Wales has broken new ground in "charity engineering", operating a charity in such a way that the various scoring factors for a well-run charity are met, without actually providing any real transparency.
For most charities, that exist to provide services to specific classes of people say, you can tell if they are well-run by the fraction of money actually being spent on those people. Take as an example "Doctors Without Borders". It exists to put medical teams in war-torn and otherwise troubled areas who have none. You can assess its effectiveness by counting its teams and staffers, and the money that goes directly to supporting them.
If the purpose of Wikimedia is to support Wikipedia (that's their pitch on every page view) then they are an abysmally run charity. The total cost of supporting Wikipedia is about $8 million it seems - a fairly generous estimate really, with hosting costing only $2 million of this. They do not provide any convenient break-out of this, BTW, they hide the actual figure (but enough data, historical and otherwise, is available to make a good estimate), only the hosting figure is actually provided. The Wikipedia support cost disappeared from view when the aggressive, highly profitable fund-raising started. Thus of the ~$100 million they are collecting this year, only 8% goes to the supporting the mission they use to promote the fund-raising. Perhaps another 10% is going into the newly created endowment (we will have to see reporting for this year), but they are not being transparent about this thus far. By normal standards this would put them in the tank as a scam charity.
But they do have pages and pages about expansive vague goals, from which it is impossible assess how effective they are being, or where most of the money they spend is really going and which is being used for covering literally unlimited fundraising. Sure they are paying a lot of staff high salaries. But why? The exploding staff and grants are unconnected with non-existent exploding Wikipedia costs, or usage, or quality.
Actually in a sense the transparency that does exist, getting them high charity ratings, provides us with key data to see that they are (mostly) running a scam. You see we know their over-all balance sheet and can see that it has currently (making adjustments for unreported recent months) $100 million or so in unspent money, free and clear, and are piling it up at a rate of at least $30 million a year. This is enough money right now to fully fund that endowment.
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