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Wikimedia Executives Receive Six-figure Golden Handshakes (theregister.co.uk)
Andreas Kolbe writes: The Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) recently released Form 990 shows that the organisation has developed a practice of handing outgoing managers six-figure severance payments, The Register reports. The foundation, which relies entirely on unpaid volunteers to generate the content of its websites, has taken around $300 million dollars over the past five years through fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia. The WMF says it is "committed to communicating with our volunteers, donors, and stakeholders in an open, accountable, and timely manner", but has long been criticised for providing little transparency on the salaries of its executives, limiting itself to the legally required Form 990 disclosures that only become public two years after the event.
Actually, internet hosting costs them only $2 million a year. See page no. 3 in this document. Total support and revenue, for comparison, stood at $81.9 million last year. So 2.5% of the fundraising income is spent on hosting.
Much the same traffic? Does it have much the same content?
Every article retains its full history, from its creation to present state. Every edit. That means their database must handle an enormous amount of data, ever-growing, edit after edit. It never changes; it adds.
In 2007, Wikipedia's english site had 1.5 million articles; in 2015 it had 4.6 million. That's three times as many individual articles, with every edit to every article stored forever. The number of pieces and sheer amount of data stored and indexed is a complex, temporal function. For the number of articles, it's (time x rate[article creation]); for the number of pieces of data created, it's (time x rate[edits per article] x articles). Because the number of articles is increasing over time, you're looking at an exponential growth function. Note that it's exponential and not geometric because the rate of edits is related to a polynomial exponent of t, since the number of edits per time increases with time thus (t*(t*r)).
WMF also runs Wikinews, which carries news articles in dozens of languages. It runs Wikipedia in many languages all over the world. Every time it adds a new language, there's a new regional user base. If each language Wikipedia grows as above, then you have cubic growth until the rate of new Wikipedia languages slows.
The volume of data managed, the computer power required to manage that data, back-ups, administration costs, all of that is growing. It's growing faster every day.
As for the "unstable donation-based revenue stream", revenue has been on the up and up for every year of the foundation's existence
As per IRS NPO rules, the organization must show stability in the face of reasonable risks. Revenue streams from donations are not predictable; a sudden recession can slow the revenue stream while not slowing the expenses. As such, Wikipedia is legally required to maintain cash reserves some degree beyond their yearly expenses. When those expenses increase, they need to carry bigger cash reserves.
It looks to me the spending is not driven by need, but by the availability of cash, including cash to pay managers the payments disclosed in the Form 990
Out of $83 million, managers get less than $1 million. Product manager ~$100k, software engineer ~$144k. Management? Executive director $344k; General Counsel (lawyer) $258k; Deputy Director $302k; VP of Engineering $282k; Chief Operating Officer $250k. The executive compensations total about $2 million.
They also spent $3 on a post-it note pad, because that's included in spending of course.
whenever revenue has increased, spending has increased proportionally
From a legal perspective, IRS NPO rules require retention of a certain risk buffer, as well as limits to the amount of cash holding. You can't have revenues that much larger than your expenses.
That's not why spending increases with revenue, though, is it?
Revenue comes from donations. WMF gets donations from users. Users only donate so much. More users means more donations--also, more load, more costs in running the service. Being driven entirely on donations from people looking right at your site, revenue would be directly tied to how much load is on your site and, thus, the cost to support that load, wouldn't it?
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