[Foundation-l] Financial feedback (was "an article...")

Wed Apr 16 22:43:03 UTC 2008

Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
> 2008/4/14, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>:
> 
>> Grumble mumble grumble. This should not happen.
>>  WMF website: http://wikimediafoundation.org
>>  Then left bar link: "Finance report"
>>
>>  It is odd that they are not easy to find. Can you tell us more of what
>>  your search experience was ? Did you try to look for them on Wikipedia ?
>>   Did you know about the existence of WMF site ? Did you find this site
>>  ? Did you realise information was given through links on the left ?
>>  Should  more information be proeminently listed on the main page ? Would
>>  icons on the main page help ? (perhaps like the bottom bar listing
>>  projects at the end of the main page) ?
>>
> 
> I was trying recenlty to find out financial information about the
> Fundation due to preparing a presentation given at Warsaw Schools of
> Economics (http://www.sgh.waw.pl/en/ogolne-en/)
> 
> My idea was to find answer to the questions:
> *how much Foundation spent in 2004 - 2007 and for what - I needed
> information year-by-year, but also cumulativie for 2005-2007
> *how much and from what was Fundation income - similarly in the years
> 2004-2007 both cumulative nad year-by-ear
> 
> I just wanted to make a table comparing these numbers with numbers of
> articles in Polish and English Wikipedia + number of users and
> possition in Alexa ranks.
> 
> I think such kind of information is needed not only by my, but by many
> people trying to figure out the Foundation's financial effectivness.
> 
> For example, I was interested if the proportions of costs of network
> bandwith and servers are the same during this time vs. number of
> articles in Wikipedia, or they are changing and how. I was also
> interested to find out if proportions of the cost of bandwith and
> servers  vs. all other costs are going down or up from 2005 till 2007.
> 
> I started from "support Foundation" link in Polish Wikipedia, which
> pointed me to fundrising subpage on Foundation's website:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Dary_pieni%C4%99%C5%BCne
> 
> There, I found this nice cake-chart of planned spending, and direct
> link to 2006 financial report:
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf.
> Cake-chart was nice for my presentation but financial report not so
> much - as it is difficuilt to copy directly from pdf and all these
> numbers are not clear to find out what they are all about if you are
> not experienced in reading official US financial reports.

Correct.
Financial data is frequently posted in pdf because it is one way to make 
sure the data is not corrupted.
Putting the data directly on wiki is hard to imagine. It would take far 
too much time and energy to work one's way through the templates...

However, publishing in excel format might be good; The problem is that 
this is not the natural format for such data. I am not sure the 
accountant can easily publish such info on excel and I am pretty sure 
the audit report will be in pdf...

> 
> So, I switch to Fundation wiki and clicked on
> 
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Finance_report
> 
> and
> 
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_report
> 
> Well.. these pages are really big mess. First go to Finanse report:
> 
> Here you can find one screen of  long, boring letter with sentences  like:
> 
> ""Why the delay?" you might ask. We had originally hoped to post the
> statements a few months earlier, but more time was needed at the
> Foundation level to review finances and work with our Florida-based
> auditors.
> 
> And why did we need more time? It's fairly normal for audits to take
> longer to complete than was initially predicted. The Foundation's
> projects (and their popularity) grew significantly over the past year,
> which meant that spending (number of transactions) increased. That
> means there was more work to be done. Also, there had been some
> turnover in Foundation staff (e.g., the accountant), which resulted in
> some loss of institutional memory that made it harder to do the audit
> preparation. So it isn't really all that surprising that the audit was
> fairly time-consuming. It's complete, and that's what matters."
> 
> which I guess was written due to some criticism on this list, some
> time ago, but it is not really usefull if one is looking for exact
> numbers, or even might create of picture that something is going
> wrong.

It appears you did not like my blabla :-)
Yes, it was the content of the email sent to the list when we published 
the audit report. It is kinda outdated now...

> Why not to put here simple table showing  the expenditures and income
> of Foundation made in a way that everyone can understand ? + some nice
> charts ?
> 
> Anyway - if you go through this starting "bla, bla", you find links to
> several pdf's with formal documents, which again are difficuilt to
> read and retrive the information to the basic questions one may have.
> Finally there is "useflul links" of which I found really usefull this
> one:
> 
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Planned_Spending_Distribution_2007-2008
> 
> This is really, how it should be done - nice, clear chart and simple
> table - what a pitty this is only about the future expences - why not
> to do the same with former expences and incomes and put it on the
> first page?

Simple. There was no one to take the time to do it. Staff members were 
already not numerous enough to handle day to day operations. So, not 
available to spend hours doing such graphics.

Also, we could not have a clear planned spending distribution chart 
since the budget had not been done in the first place.

Why not do the same with former expenses and incomes ? Great idea; I am 
all for it. ANYONE can go to the previous financial reports and create 
these charts. And could even propose summaries of them in excel format.
We just need someone motivated !

Anyone ?

> OK, so now go to:
> 
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_report
> 
> Thanks God - no "bla, bla" now, but all these charts like this one:
> 
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Image:Majorsavgamtperday2006.png
> 
> are not very usefull, and there are too many of them. I guess they are
> usefull to investigate trends in indvidual fundrising tendencies, but
> this is internal problem of those who organise and maintains
> Fundrising - but now, I am looking just for numbers.

In these cases, a volunteer just took upon himself to create charts...

> So, I  clicked to:
> 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Report
> 
> and again were puzzled by 9 charts like this one:
> 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_dollars_per_donation.png
> 
> instead of just brief summary - how much exactly 2007 fundrising bring
> the money, what was everage donation, what are proportions of
> individual donations vs. other methods of fundrising (ie. donations
> from companies, grants, other kinds of Foundation's income) etc...

Correct. It would be much better if the Foundation website was proposing 
a short summary (what you said) and then a link to a more detailed 
report (as written by Erik).

I agree with you reports of all fundraisers have not been perfect by 
far. One might argue that primary necessity was to actually collect 
money. And that the type of report you are looking for might have been 
made by a focused group of 2-3 people.

Now, the good news is that Sue has planned to hire 2 people to take care 
of fundraising. So, I expect this area should nicely improve after the 
next fundraiser.

However, I will point out again that - contrariwise to other areas (eg 
legal or business) - the community members have many opportunities to 
help improve these reporting. It would be very nice if some volunteers 
would show up to try to fix these pages :-)

Ant