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_pro... 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@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