Hoi,
As you present your numbers in isolation, you can make up any argument and
not address any of the points made in the original post and subsequent
replies. When you mention salaries, you do not compare them to the common
practices for remuneration and only when you do, can you argue that it is
"too much". You can point to the growth of activities in particular teams
and only when this does not provide the service as required you may have a
point. You argue that there is no problem with our infrastructure.. I
pointed out that we have a potential disaster in the underlying engine of
Wikidata and you ignore that.. The presentation of our text based data may
seem quite robust and still we have problems with the presentation of all
the signed languages, the diacritics of Macedonian needs attention, the
software that we use for bots and tools is not supported by the WMF, WMF
lacks the necessary bandwidth. Commons search has a rate of false positives
that is over 50% and for you everything is fine.
Your complaint is about our fundraising and the urgency it expresses. As I
said earlier, we are to maintain a balance between private monies and
institutional monies in order to retain our independence. We are
underfunded as it is, essential functionality does not get the attention
that is required.
The only way I can understand your argument is when you look at it from a
"Wikipedia only" point of view and as a nuisance. English Wikipedia could
maybe survive in isolation. As it is Wikipedia consists of hundreds of
individual projects and for all of them Wikidata and Commons is essential
infrastructure. We could and should do better in our support, even when our
only aspiration is to share "the sum of knowledge that we have".
I dismiss your arguments for lack of merit.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Sat, 25 Sept 2021 at 15:28, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Comparing the Wikimedia Foundation's annual
revenue targets for the past
five financial years against actual revenue, I find that the Wikimedia
Foundation exceeded its revenue target (and also its actual expenditure) by
an average of $30 million per year.
The figures (all excluding Endowment revenue) are as follows:
REVENUE Target Actual
2016/2017 $63,0M $91,2M
2017/2018 $76,8M $104,5M
2018/2019 $93,1M $120,1M
2019/2020 $111,7M $129,2M
2020/2021 $110,5M $157,0M
TOTAL $455,1M $602,0M
Sources:
Planned revenue: Annual plans on Meta, available here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_annual_plans
Actual revenue: Audited financial statements as summarised and linked
here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics
The times when Jimmy Wales promised the public that the Foundation would
stop fundraising when its fundraising targets were met are clearly long
past.[1]
This being so, I wonder: the WMF Advancement team (including fundraising
tech) currently comprises around 50 people.
Are any of their salaries tied to their ability to increase revenue each
year? This kind of incentive would, of course, arguably put them in an
invidious position.
As far as I am aware, only one Advancement salary has been included in
recent Forms 990.[2] It increased from $168K in the year 2015 to $252K in
2019, the most recent year for which we have a Form 990 (both figures are
base compensation only).
That is an increase of exactly 50% in the space of just four years, and
far in excess of inflation. Was this increase based on the parallel
increase in WMF revenue over that time period?
At any rate, what we see here are not the financials of an organisation
struggling to maintain or update essential software, or struggling in any
other sense. It's the financials of an organisation committed to growth,
and testing how much growth is sustainable.
That is fine, of course, but then that is what the fundraising banners
should tell people.
I mentioned résumés the other day. It was on my mind because I had come
across Lila's profile page[3] on the Word Economic Forum website. This
tells readers that Lila "led Wikipedia’s rapidly expanded regional presence
to nearly 100 global organizations, doubled revenues and launched the
Wikipedia Endowment to support modernization and expansion of knowledge
access in perpetuity."
Again, doubling WMF revenues is all well and good, but then let's be nice
and upfront about it when asking people for their money.
Andreas
[1]
https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/16/jimmy_wales_wikipedia_fundraising_pr…
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_215#Once_upon_a…
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries and
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200049703
[3]
https://www.weforum.org/people/lila-tretikov
On Sat, Sep 25, 2021 at 12:29 PM Vi to <vituzzu.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
False urgency in fundraising has been a problem
for years, including the
years before the fiscal years I'm referring to.
Expenditure on infrastructure and software (both essential and
non-essential) development hasn't been the main inbalance item for many
many years.
There's nothing wrong with allocating more resources on "improving",
"growing" and "evolving" the projects, but this can be made clear to
donors, without being sold as a "struggle to survive".
I didn't yet check old banners but I perceived, in years, a shift in
fundraising from "help Wikipedia [with less frequent mentions of other
projects] grow" to "Wikipedia [alone] is gonna running out of funds".
Also, is there any formal commitment to "prevent Wikibase from
collapsing"?
Vito
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