I have to object to this. Wikimedia as of their audited 2019 financial statements (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...) already has ~$53m in short term investments, leaving ~$101m in "cash and cash equivalents", which notably often includes Treasury bonds, CDs, etc, anyways. So they are likely already investing all of their cash into safe, low-yield investments already.
Even if they weren't, the ~$154m they have free for investments, would only gross ~$1.2m in 10 year Treasuries, or at most $5-6m in relatively higher-yield investment grade corporate bonds.
Looking at their expenses in 2019, even if you cut donation processing expenses to $0, cut awards and grants to $0, cut travel and conferences to $0, strip out depreciation and amortization, and cut their $46m payroll in half to $23m (which at a fully loaded cost of $200k/employee, is only 115 employees for one of the most widely used websites in the world), you would still be looking at annual operating expenses of ~$45m.
There is absolutely no way that Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation could survive without any donations - they have $154m between cash and investments, and would need to support $45m in annual operating expenses, even with these fantastically high budget cuts. That means they'd need to net, after taxes, almost 30% return on their assets every year, just to tread water, and only after cutting their budget essentially in half.
Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?
On the flip side, the website hosting only costs $2.3 million annually [0] and the content creators work for free. Even if the Wikimedia Foundation could not survive like that, a lean Wikipedia operation clearly could.
I disagree. There is no such thing as a "lean" site that is as popular as Wikipedia (top 5-10 US depending on the day). I believe they are likely the leanest website in the Alexa top 30. The only site that I see that is leaner in the top rankings is Craigslist, currently at #38 in America, and Craigslist is a famously, fantastically, uniquely lean site (in some people's opinions, even to a fault).
Hosting costs for Wikipedia are "only" $2.3m, but imagine the legal expense they have, fighting likely millions of takedown requests, malicious lawsuits, complying with local laws and regulations in China, Russia, etc, paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime), a security threat model that includes nation-state actors, and the responsibility that if they fail (by being hacked, or sued, or DDOSd, or whatever), they will have let humanity's library be harmed.
I just can't understand how any casual bystander can complain about Wikipedia or their funding/organizational model. If you don't like it, just don't donate money.
> but imagine the legal expense they have, fighting likely millions of takedown requests, malicious lawsuits, complying with local laws and regulations in China, Russia
Wikimedia Foundation is not fighting any takedown requests. Wikimedia Foundation had exactly ten DMCA requests last year[1]. That’s a bit short of “millions” you believe it does. It does not comply with any local regulations in China or Russia, or elsewhere, because it does not operate in China or Russia (or really anywhere outside US, except caching servers in NL and Singapore). Wikipedia is actually completely blocked in China, and the fact that you did not know that signals your utter unfamiliarity with the realities of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation.
> paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime),
It was already a top visited site when its development team consisted of a single person, Brion Vibber. There have been very little significant development since then, and if there had been zero development since then, you’d probably not even notice.
Now, to be sure, at this scale, it needs some full time round the clock reliability engineers, but you can easily see that their headcount keeps growing, but their site and infrastructure is mostly unchanged.
> It was already a top visited site when its development team consisted of a single person, Brion Vibber. There have been very little significant development since then […].
The second member of the development team was hired in 2006 [0].
In these ~14 years, quite a few things happened.
Three projects joined the Wikimedia galaxy: Wikiversity in 2006, Wikivoyage adopted in 2012, and frickin’ Wikidata [1] in 2012 − which has deeply reshaped many aspects of the other projects, particularly Wikipedias and Commons.
On the multimedia side of things, we got InstantCommons in 2008 [3], thumbnailing infrastructure changes in 2013, various file format support (TIFF in 2010, FLAC and WAV in 2013, WebM, 3D formats in 2018 [4]) new upload wizard in 2011 [5]. The Graph extension [6] and Wikimedia Maps [7] in 2015. Structured Data on Commons in 2019 [8]. New default skin (Vector) in 2010 [9]. Unified login in 2008 [10]. 2013 brought OAuth [11], Echo notifications [12], Lua scripting [13], VisualEditor [14]. iOS and Android apps [15]. The Wikimedia Cloud Services starting 2012 [2].
(And in terms of size: article count went from ~5M to ~50M [16] ; Commons went from 1M files to 50M files [17])
And that’s just what I’m putting together in a few minutes (Besides my own memory, I’m indebted to [18], a curated timeline up until 2013).
Of course, these may or may not justify the staff size in your book ; but I’d say discounting all of that (and the rest) as “very little significant development” is a bit pushing it. :-)
(And fairly sure that “you’d probably notice” if Wikipedia was still using good’old Monobook skin ;-þ).
>Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?
But the donations don't go to the people who wrote those articles!
I'm personally very thankful for the library of knowledge that is Wikipedia. For a lot of searches on technical matters I usually bypass Google and go directly to Wikipedia. I find that you can often use the references and links to bypass the Ad infested web to some extent.
Even if they weren't, the ~$154m they have free for investments, would only gross ~$1.2m in 10 year Treasuries, or at most $5-6m in relatively higher-yield investment grade corporate bonds.
Looking at their expenses in 2019, even if you cut donation processing expenses to $0, cut awards and grants to $0, cut travel and conferences to $0, strip out depreciation and amortization, and cut their $46m payroll in half to $23m (which at a fully loaded cost of $200k/employee, is only 115 employees for one of the most widely used websites in the world), you would still be looking at annual operating expenses of ~$45m.
There is absolutely no way that Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation could survive without any donations - they have $154m between cash and investments, and would need to support $45m in annual operating expenses, even with these fantastically high budget cuts. That means they'd need to net, after taxes, almost 30% return on their assets every year, just to tread water, and only after cutting their budget essentially in half.
Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?