[ff317]

Over the long term of many years you're /lucky/ if a stable very-low-risk investment can net ~3% when accounting for inflation. Thus $250M could maybe net you roughly $7.5M/year. Exactly how many network links, servers, and engineering staff do you think that buys? It's way under what it operates on today, which is way under what it ideally should be for site like Wikipedia. And that's /just/ the operational engineering of the sites on a technical level.

You also need HR, you need Finance, you need a lot of Lawyers, you need software developers, you need a travel department, a fundraising team, PR people, community relations people, grant-making for the extended open ecosystem around the Wikimedia movement, conference planning, and the list goes on.

You're off by enough to seem troll-ish at best.

[flipbrad]

It would be nice if we had a "lot of lawyers", given how frequently we're sued to try and get content censored, or having to fight orders to hand over user data - and more generally, how massive these new laws we need to comply with are (see, e.g., the EU Digital Services Act, which even creates an entirely new annual independent audit process).

We even intervene in other court cases to try and prevent bad laws being created/interpreted in ways that would hurt the open internet (see, e.g., our amicus in the French Constitutional Court two weeks ago, our lawsuit against the US NSA, and our amicus briefs in the two US "Netchoice" US Supreme Court cases). We also operate the https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assis...

Sadly, we're a very tight team. The downsides of being a nonprofit...

Anyhow, I'm going to assume people are just ignorant as to how much WMF does, not deliberately trying to undermine it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Assume_good_faith , as they say.

(disclosure: lawyer for WMF)

[bhickey]

It isn't a question of the good work you do.

People care about Wikipedia, not the Wikimedia Foundation. The criticism arises from misleading advertising. WMF fundraising conflates the two, implying that _Wikipedia_ needs money or it'll die. Meanwhile the 2023 budget shows $3.1m in hosting expenses versus $24.4m in awards and grants.

[tw04]

What are you talking about? The AVERAGE CD right now is 5%. My local CU is almost 6%. US bonds are currently ~4.5% - if you consider those unstable, I guess the US economy isn't stable - and if the US economy crashes, wikipedia will be the least of their or our worries.

Wikimedia's expenses are almost ENTIRELY going to staff. Their balance sheet for 2023 included $101m in expenses for salaries and benefits out of a total expense of $160m. Their hosting was $3m. So yes, I'm confident their network links and servers cost almost nothing, and they don't need anywhere near $101m in compensation to keep the lights on when the VAST majority of their content is contributed for free.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/W...

[bawolff]

> Their hosting was $3m

Its kind of unclear what this includes. Computer equipment is a separate line, and wikimedia owns its own servers, so presumably that is separate from server costs. You don't have to buy new servers every year so some servers might simply have been purchased in other years, although maybe that gets ammortized, i dont know.

Additionally when you host your own servers you need staff to operate them. When using something like AWS, this would be part of your AWS fees, but if you operate your own servers then you have to pay that part separately. Its probably cheaper overall in the end when you are wikipedia scale, but the costs break down differently.

[kemayo]

You may have missed them saying "when accounting for inflation". In the US at the moment that's around 3%. Thus your local credit union's savings account, a nice and stable investment, is effectively giving you around 3% appreciation in real-money each year right now. (I have no idea whether their broader point about the rate over-time is correct, admittedly.)

[yareal]

An engineer costs $500k a year. Salary, benefits, office space, equipment, hr, legal, and other overhead. The engineer will only see a fraction of that, of course.

If you told me it took a hundred engineers to run Wikipedia I'd say, that's not totally unreasonable. Features, design, api, scaling, moderation, there's a ton for engineers to be doing.

[ryan_lane]

Hosting means nothing without the staff. Hardware, networking, datacenters, etc are the cheap part because the staff are good at their jobs.

You and the other set of trolls that think that Wikimedia can run itself need to appreciate that just because you work for a non-profit doesn't mean you should work for slave wages, or that you should be forced to work with the bare minimum amount of staff to keep things running without being able to make improvements to the infrastructure, reader experience, editor experience, or data consumer experience.

In comparison to similar services, Wikimedia has a relatively small overall budget that's well spent.

[remus]

> What are you talking about? The AVERAGE CD right now is 5%. My local CU is almost 6%. US bonds are currently ~4.5% - if you consider those unstable, I guess the US economy isn't stable - and if the US economy crashes, wikipedia will be the least of their or our worries.

If you want to live off the interest you have to worry about inflation which essentially devalues your pot by x% per year, so if you really need y% for running costs you really need about x*y% to do it long term.