Thanks, Zack.

Does anyone know what interest rates the $56 million short-term and $6 million long-term investments earn?

Are the CFO and the Endowment benchmarking their performance against commercial institutional endowment-grade mutual funds? I recently wrote the below to regulators; I hope it helps explain this question:

--- excerpt ---

...Regarding the extent to which index funds may be siphoning wealth very sharply upward because of questionable inefficient practices in capital services, you know index funds comprise a huge portion of consumer savings and investment. I noticed that they have reliably been underperforming mutual funds such as institutional endowment funds which aren't required to rebalance, but follow the same general investment strategy....

https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rzeckhau/EndowmentsPaperPartII.pdf

https://institutional.vanguard.com/iam/pdf/EndowmentPerformanceResearch.pdf

https://personal.vanguard.com/pdf/s342.pdf

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 12:35 AM, Zachary McCune zmccune@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hello all-

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation received more than 6 million donations to support free knowledge. Today, we would like to share the Foundation’s 2016 - 2017 Annual Report which helps document how those donations were put to use. [1]

This Report is meant mostly for donors, but it may be of use to any audience looking to learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation, our activities, and our community support.

In (very) brief, last year:

• We worked on building safer communities with new tools like Abuse Filter

and Mute to reduce harassment on Wikipedia.

• We improved our services for mobile devices: making images smaller and

articles load faster, streamlining our apps to assist users.

• We partnered with international organizations to add missing languages

and knowledge to our sites.

Over 2017, our grants team disbursed 392 grants totaling more than 7 million dollars. More than half of these grants went to emerging communities. [2]

We also began to plan the future of our movement, holding months of discussions with thousands of volunteers. We were guided by a recurring phrase that has become the theme of this year’s Annual Report: Knowledge belongs to all of us.

Everything listed and linked above is possible because of you, the Wikimedia movement. Y’all are great.

So please take a look at the 2016-2017 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report, and if you are moved- share it with a friend.

Thank you,

• Zack McCune, Danny Kaufman, Lena Traer, Heather Walls, María Cruz, Ravi

Ayyakkannu, Caitlin Cogdill (the 2017 Annual Report team)

[1] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/

[2] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/community.html

-- Zachary McCune Global Audiences Wikimedia Foundation

zmccune@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Hoi, As a document targeting donors it is effective.

For me, it is indeed an accomplished selly thingie that does not connect. It is all Wikipedia and Wikipedia is not that shiny. It is a community where infighting is common, where external knowledge and tools are seen as problematic because they do not comply with Wikipedia hard fought "compromises". They do not entertain the thought that compromises are often sub optimal seen in a different light but that light is not considered in the "beauty" of all of Wikipedias accomplishments.

It takes an external organisation to come begging to bring us comparison between the facts offered in all the Wikipedias and, it compares them also with Wikidata.. We have a community that transcribes books but we do not care for their finished products. It is apparently not part of the sum of what we consider all knowledge.

We are so enthralled with the shine of Wikipedia that we do not consider our primary objectives. In a world where fake news is well established, we are postage stamp collectors as we do not consider what news is fake and how that effects the information we provide. When it has to do with nursing, the effect can be deadly in the first degree [1]. Then again, it is not part of the big plan and it is officially not considered that relevant. When we consider "biographies of living people" something that applies to Wikipedia, Wikidata has... data not biographies. We do not consider that comparison brings out the differences between what is stated in a Wikipedia article and is stated elsewhere. The point; when we concentrate on differences, we concentrate on what is problematic and that is where our effort has the most effect on what is wrong, problematic or even fake. We don't because of policies and we.. Wikipedia.. do not think others have anything to offer.

Usability is something that is seen as important but Wikidata is not seen as a project used by "end users" and consequently it is not even considered to bring a more informative display to Wikidata like Reasonator. What Reasonator brings is instant context to the data and an instant interface to add missing labels in *your* language.. I used it for Russian for this very Russian / American subject [2]. As an editor with over two million edits, many of them manual edits, I can tell you it is indispensable. When this type of functionality becomes standard, we will gain many more contributors to Wikidata.. Then again the WMF outreach officer cannot stand to be told how important usability is so it is unlikely to happen, him being considered the/a guru of Wikidata..

While this selly thingie is an accomplished product and it is, there is much more money to be made when you consider local fundraising. In the Netherlands people tend to give automatically with typically larger amounts of money. They tend to leave organisations like Wikimedia in their will and for some really big charities this is as much as 40% of their income. I am convinced that with one or two persona in the Netherlands raising funds for the WMF we would more start to grow income exponentially at first. One reason to do this is to make Wikimedia less reliant on USA money and consequently make it culturally easy to do more elsewhere and take a non USA point of view.

I do appreciate that it is almost impossible to write an acceptable annual report for us, the contributors. What is possible is to write a composite of different takes on Wikimedia projects and its place in the world. <grin> one award winning Wikimedian I would love to hear his opinion .. Egon Willighagen. </grin> I would also love to hear an external view on Wikisource for instance from the Internet Archive.. What I would seek in this composite is the use of our projects, our efforts and what it effectively means for them. I do not want us to dwell on what divides us, I want us to concentrate at what it is we achieve, our purpose. Thanks, GerardM

[1] https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2018/01/wikipedia- fiduciary-responsibilities.html [2] https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q47455696&lang=ru

On 19 January 2018 at 01:35, Zachary McCune zmccune@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hello all-

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation received more than 6 million donations to support free knowledge. Today, we would like to share the Foundation’s 2016 - 2017 Annual Report which helps document how those donations were put to use. [1]

This Report is meant mostly for donors, but it may be of use to any audience looking to learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation, our activities, and our community support.

In (very) brief, last year:

• We worked on building safer communities with new tools like Abuse Filter

and Mute to reduce harassment on Wikipedia.

• We improved our services for mobile devices: making images smaller and

articles load faster, streamlining our apps to assist users.

• We partnered with international organizations to add missing languages

and knowledge to our sites.

Over 2017, our grants team disbursed 392 grants totaling more than 7 million dollars. More than half of these grants went to emerging communities. [2]

We also began to plan the future of our movement, holding months of discussions with thousands of volunteers. We were guided by a recurring phrase that has become the theme of this year’s Annual Report: Knowledge belongs to all of us.

Everything listed and linked above is possible because of you, the Wikimedia movement. Y’all are great.

So please take a look at the 2016-2017 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report, and if you are moved- share it with a friend.

Thank you,

• Zack McCune, Danny Kaufman, Lena Traer, Heather Walls, María Cruz, Ravi

Ayyakkannu, Caitlin Cogdill (the 2017 Annual Report team)

[1] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/

[2] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/community.html

-- Zachary McCune Global Audiences Wikimedia Foundation

zmccune@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe