| ▲ | cm2012 3 hours ago |
| Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train. In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m The story of Wikipedia of the last 10 years especially is endlessly higher spending for a very stable number of monthly users (1.5b or so). You can make the case that 80% of this spend is not necessary to what the average users donating to Wikipedia think of as "wikipedia". It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag. |
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| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag. That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing. If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation. |
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| ▲ | cortesoft an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010, don't hire too many more people, and save all the donation money they brought in. Build that fund in the good years to pay for salaries in the lean years. | | |
| ▲ | PorciiVorbesc 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010 And what are the realistic chances of that actually happening long term? Same chance as governments keeping expenses, corruption and cronyism under control long term. |
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| ▲ | bitshiftfaced 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? What was the core reason that readers gave donations? Probably most donors want employees treated well and to ideally keep their jobs, and yet the main thing they probably had in mind was the existence and continuation of the service itself. | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The infrastructure isn't that much. If they need to be less ambitious about other projects I'm not going to worry about it. A union isn't going to make them keep every single project. If they were paying each employee 10x as much, and that got locked in, and then they didn't have the money to pay them, there would be bad consequences. But that's not what's going on here. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The infrastructure isn't that much is the problem, because labor costs are the largest single expense. When you take that off the table as something that can be cut, you're then stuck needing to make up the difference from the things that never cost that much to begin with, which means the cuts you have to make to them to make up the same amount of shortfall are deep. > If they were paying each employee 10x as much They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set? | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Labor expenses can still be cut. Just not by screwing up wages. A union doesn't force you to keep the same number of employees forever. And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent [-] | | They have the inherent incentive to inhibit you from doing layoffs, and the same incentive to stop you from replacing existing workers with different ones since the existing ones get a vote and the prospective replacements don't. > And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs. You can't make up a $35M shortfall exclusively from cutting infrastructure when you're only spending $3.5M on infrastructure, but you also can't make up a $35M shortfall by not cutting anything. And you can make up some of it from cutting infrastructure, so where does the money come from that didn't come from reducing headcount? |
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| ▲ | OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Half of that goes to wages and salary for ~650 staff members. Of the ~114M that goes to wages, 90M goes to people working directly on projects, 15M goes to admin/management, and the other 9M goes to people in fundraising/financials. 9M goes to paying donation processing fees. 3.5M goes towards network infra. ~2M of in-kind services were donated (i.e. doing free work or donating goods) and that shows up as a dedicated expense. Professional Services (accounting, consulting, etc) make up another 15M (same as the total management/admin cost). General operating expenses (property, taxes, office software, office equipment, etc) make up 8M. Conference and Travel is 6M. And then 4.5M is expensed as depreciation and amortization of owned assets. ------- So to be entirely clear here. WMF projects make up 147M / over three quarters of the total expenses for the year. Fundraising makes up 20M all together (half being essentially fees and the other half is people running fundraising campaigns). And the remaining 21M / 11% is general admin. 11% is quite good for such a large foundation. And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra. https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annu... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra. I do not believe it's possible to spend that much money on those things in an effective way. | |
| ▲ | serbuvlad an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 114M a year buys you only 650 people? Damn. I really should be moving to America at some point :) | | |
| ▲ | parineum an hour ago | parent [-] | | If anyone wanted to do the math, that's an average of 175k per person | | |
| ▲ | OneDeuxTriSeiGo 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's 175k per person including all benefits. Which is probably like 140-150k per year before the myriad of employer-paid payroll taxes and before the employer-side pay for insurance plans. | |
| ▲ | asadotzler 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's about half total comp of juniors at any FANG. | | |
| ▲ | brokensegue 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Also it includes insurance and such that doesn't appear in TC Disclaimer: I work for the wmf |
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| ▲ | Grombobulous 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Thank you for breaking this down. Every time Wikipedia comes up the exact comment parent to yours is posted in some form. This comment and all its flavors is posted by a contingent of people out there who: 1. Think that Wikimedia is a wasteful, corrupt organization full of greedy employees (I guess that could be true? Doesn't seem that greedy to me given that they've never run an advertisement or enshittified their product) 2. Think that Wikimedia should operate more similarly to a for-profit organization with investors (e.g., it should start downsizing and stop investing in its platform because it stopped growing in MAUs) 3. Think that Wikimedia is being financially irresponsible and will run out of money (even though their own data shows that donations have grown faster than expenses) I think we can just accept that Wikipedia gets a lot of donations and has the luxury of hiring people. And they really don't have that many employees given their traffic. I don't get upset that my local art museum can buy better art when they get more donations even though the same number of people visit the museum every year. The people who donate to Wikipedia want more money to go into Wikipedia. | |
| ▲ | next_xibalba 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And all of that (along with the serious problems in how WMF/Wikipedia operate) is why I no longer donate to WMF. Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction. | | |
| ▲ | Grombobulous 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union? I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses. The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly? | | |
| ▲ | next_xibalba 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I can't think of a single unionized organization that is run as well as or better than union-free organizations. Unionized companies all seem to be crippled by bureaucracy and unable to improve performance and output. | | |
| ▲ | Grombobulous 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The daycare my parent friends go to can’t retain a teacher for longer than a year or two. I hear stories all the time about the disruption and emotional distress abruptly losing a teacher with a 1-2 weeks notice causes. The PreK teacher at the local public school has been there over 10 years at the same school and has a masters degree. Union, of course. I’m sure the public school system is more expensive overall. You get what you pay for. |
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| ▲ | NoImmatureAdHom an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | My experience is that unions very often make things stupider and less efficient. I've been forced to give to two of them that were basically just political cosplay by children (well really the $ was taken without consent before it was even in my hands, so it was stolen) And I've had the displeasure of working in a factory environment that was unionized. Perhaps there was a time when this made sense, but I think those instances are rare now. See e.g. https://www.voanews.com/a/dockworkers-join-other-unions-in-t... Dockworkers deliberately making everything worse because they want to keep their employment exactly as it has been. | | |
| ▲ | Grombobulous 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I would submit the idea that a lot of union reforms that have been made to laws in the US have been specifically designed to make unions less attractive and less incentivized toward positive outcomes. | | |
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| ▲ | nostromo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > very stable number of monthly users Wikipedia has seen their traffic decline with AI eating more and more of their lunch. I imagine it’ll only accelerate from here. Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations. There will be a lot of belt tightening at the foundation in the coming years. |
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| ▲ | PorciiVorbesc an hour ago | parent [-] | | >Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations. Irrelevant when donations from humans keep growing YoY way outpacing the actual expenses of running wikipedia. Half of people can stop donating tomorrow and they still would have enough money. Having internet on your PC and your phone on the go didn't kill off the library, people still go there. Similarly, LLMs won't kill online libraries like Wikipedia. |
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| ▲ | nswango 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So 1/40 of Reuters annual revenues, 1/1000 of Facebook annual revenues, is being wasted on ... lobbying governments against internet censorship and cross-subsidising translations into less popular languages? How dare the most useful human knowledge resource spend the money freely given to it in such a way! The 'Wikipedia is spending your donations on DEI' conspiracy has run its course I think. |
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| ▲ | ksec 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m Am I correct in understanding, the $200M annual spend include the salary of those workers. And in case of any mass layoffs incoming, they are forming an union to better bargain? |
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| ▲ | cubefox 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Exactly. The WMF spending growth is completely decoupled from its effect on Wikipedia. This only works because the donations pop-up makes people think they are donating to Wikipedia, not to a foundation which mostly does totally unrelated stuff. There is no feedback loop which would limit this spending toward the core aspects of Wikipedia. |
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| ▲ | rvba 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Worst is that there is zero interest to deal with sock puppet accounts, state actors or just typical cliques I saw a pair of an admin and other person (probably sock puppet) that were used for edit wars, the 2nd account was used to ban edits, especially from non registered users. |
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| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is 95% of all NGOs and their ilk. Related: "We now have evidence of how at least $7.7 billion for homelessness was spent on salaries. They created a jobs program that grows at the expense of the actual homeless who need help instead of helping the homeless." https://x.com/Twolfrecovery/status/2095661343215141026 |
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| ▲ | bluegatty 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Levels of waste in NGOs are a fully fair subject for debate but without context an arbitrary number is only misleading and therefore sadly cynical. Also - you have no evidence for '95% of NGO's and their ilk'. This is not Twitter. |
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| ▲ | cbeach an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
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| ▲ | cyanydeez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| yea...200m is totally a gravey train. Do you live in the same universe where elon musk was work 1 trillion? |
