[Wikimedia-l] WMF core and non core expenses

[Thomas Dalton]

On 10 October 2012 00:31, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed.  If we split movement-wide costs into "essential", "high
> priority", and "non-core", I think the FDC should grow to review most
> of the non-essential funds.  Which would include more than 10% of the
> WMF budget.

If you view it from a functional perspective, what "core" actually
means is "so much more important than anything any other eligible
entity does that there is no way the FDC could reasonably decide not
to fund it". Things like keeping wikipedia.org up and running clearly
fall into that category, as do a few other things, but there are
plenty of things the WMF is calling core that I don't think can
actually be described that way.

My preference would be to just send the whole lot through the FDC. If
it's so important, then why not trust the FDC to realise that? The
WMF's core budget should definitely be funded, but why should it be
the WMF that gets to decide what is core and what isn't? (The WMF has
a fair bit of revenue that doesn't come from the fundraiser, in the
same way most chapters do, so it would still be able to fund its basic
functions autonomously).