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.

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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 :)

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parineum 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

If anyone wanted to do the math, that's an average of 175k per person

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OneDeuxTriSeiGo 12 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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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 26 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.

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Grombobulous 25 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.

	▲	NoImmatureAdHom 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sounds plausible!