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