Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017)

Is there evidence the WMF has considered a sale of its assets?

I vote in these elections and count Dr. James Heilman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman) as a friend.

The most realistic but still bleak scenario I can think of is Wikipedia becoming infested with ads. Anything more extreme, we'd see a fork become popular.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Re: "Here's another view of the WMF's runaway spending", that same graph is part of my essay, but the version in my essay has links so you can see the sources used to create the graph.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

My essay says "We should limit spending increases to no more than inflation plus some percentage". It doesn't say how big that percentage should be. If the WMF limits themselves to not spending more than ten times what they spent last year they would have done what I ask. Right now there are no limits.

But as we know, they die or sell instead.

Wikipedia has been reading too much WebMD.

If toe nails grew like wikipedia expenses - with a doubling time of 5 years - they would grow at 7 meters a day by the time you're 80.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

First off, the above comment is an example of hijacking; using a discussion about one thing to try to get attention for something else. You see this a lot with Abortion, Gun control, and US presidential politics. I am not saying that those aren't important topics, but do they really need to be inserted into a discussion about how much money Wikipedia is spending?

I would strongly encourage the person trying to hijack this discussion to start a new discussion

I would strongly encourage all HN readers to not give the poster the attention he wants and to downvote any comments that are not about WMF finances

I also would strongly encourage all HN readers to not respond to this sort of thing and to stay on topic.

For those who are interested, here is what Wikipedia has done about this situation:

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from post-1978 British politics, broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter. This sanction supersedes the community sanction applied in May 2018.

Passed 11 to 0 at 18:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Amended by motion at 20:08, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia's relevant policy states:

"The purpose of a topic ban is to forbid editors from making edits related to a certain topic area where their contributions have been disruptive, but to allow them to edit the rest of Wikipedia. Unless clearly and unambiguously specified otherwise, a topic ban covers all pages (not only articles) broadly related to the topic, as well as the parts of other pages that are related to the topic, as encapsulated in the phrase 'broadly construed.'"

If anyone thinks Wikipedia should do more, they should bring it up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests -- not on hacker news.

Again, I encourage all HN readers to not respond to hijacking attempts.

How would one expect them to be correlated?

As an aside, a friend of mine relaunched an ecommerce site in March. Wordpress + WooCommerce, stripped of fluff.

His hosting plan costs him $3/month, including tax.

He told me his site took just over $60k in revenue in the first 6 weeks.

Could this be done in 2015 with $2500 / $1000 or even $500.

Organizations grow and morph over time. Assuming Wikipedia should be a barebones hosting platform like it was at it's start is probably dreaming.

> [The 2016-2017 report] has numbers for "Grants and awards" and "Professional service expenses" but there is no obvious way of finding out the details of those expenditures

- What is the $7 million for "Professional service expenses"? That's 8% of the budget and I've got no clue what it might have been spent on. Salaries, travel expenses and depreciation is already accounted for.

- What is the $7 million for "Other operating expenses"? Again 8% of the budget in "other" that doesn't include something that is depreciated and doesn't include travel?

- What is the $2.7 million for "In kind service expenses"? To me that sounds like internal "funny money" where you are paying for one service with another service you perform. But how are they calculating the loss and what account is that money actually coming from?

I worry that millions of dollars are being spent on consultants who are essentially just pocketing donations.

Also, I'd really like to see the operating costs broken down because it's impossible to see what's going on here. You've got $3 million in depreciation, but what is that paying for? Desks, computers, telephones? Do they pay rent, or do they own a building?

The thing that's frustrating is that there may be nothing at all wrong. For example, I can see $38 million for salaries and wages, with 300 employees. But where are the other expenses? Is that the "other expenses" section? If so, how hard would it be to break down that cost for me so that I can understand what the money is being used for?

While I disagree with the approach the author of the page is taking, I completely agree that their financial statements are as clear as mud. If this was a company I was thinking of investing in, I would give it a really wide berth based on the terrible financial reporting. As a non-profit operating on public donations they should be doing a much better job.

I’m curious, it sounds like you’re a casual Wikipedia user so - how do you have any idea if this is true? What about editor features, community, moderation, administrative improvements?

This kind of attitude frustrates me - it’s the sort of attitude that kills nonprofit fundraising efforts unless they are for show in a way that laypeople can understand. Surely you can see how inefficient it would be to run a non profit if everything they spent money on had to be highly visible?

That's a feature not everything needs to be tricked out with the JavaScript equivalent of spinners.

> After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending

Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year.

As a grad student I made a total $1,300 per month, but ten years later I'm spending that on just housing costs. So what?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

I carefully considered the above objection when I first wrote my essay, but I decided against removing the cancer analogy. I though that making an analogy that would be remembered was important. For what it is worth, I myself am a cancer survivor and even after 10 years of it not coming back I still sweat bullets every year when I do my annual cancer screening.

I highly recommend not donating to an entity that can't even be bothered to respect your time.

They hold just under 135 million in assets, so they'd need 12 times what they currently hold. That's why living off interest wouldn't work. They'll need the telethon til they can make that equation work, or at least come closer.

You can donate at https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...

OK, who would pay the 1,149 administrators? Oh wait, they are all unpaid volunteers too.

OK, who would pay the developers? Oh, wait, the software was originally created by unpaid volunteers and it works well enough that having three developers evaluating bug fixes submitted by volunteers would be enough. There are plenty of Linux distributions and open-source projects that get by on one or two developers.

What about the 924,632,645 edits, 49,122,961 pages of all kinds and 5,978,255 articles? Oh wait, those are free to copy over along with the software that runs the encyclopedia.

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombine...

This just my take on it from a distance, I don't know the ins and outs of the foundation or the web site, but all the commentary in your essay seems to obsess hyperbolically on separating the absolute spending numbers from any context. I'm failing to see evidence of an actual problem based on what you wrote.

In a general sense, I can completely agree with the abstract idea that spending should have transparency and a budget, that's always a good idea.

Wikipedia seems to me like it's still dramatically overperforming given its expenditures, that its value currently outweighs its costs, when you compare it to healthy for-profit websites of the same size & usage. Could all the increased spending be a symptom of the fact that Wikipedia 10 years ago was undervalued and managing by miracles to survive on a shoestring, and now that it's enormous the costs are correcting to where they should be?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Charity Navigator is a fine organization, but they do have the flaw of having to take the charities word on what the core mission is. If the WMF says they need 350 employees -- or 350,000 employees -- to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that flying people to exotic locations for Wikimania meetings is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that building a search engine to compete with Google is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it.

My position is that Wikipedia was accomplishing that core mission just fine in 2008. I was an active editor in 2008 and I did not notice any pressing needs that were not funded because we were spending 4.3% of what we are spending now. What, exactly, are we doing now that we were not doing ten years ago that justifies us spending 23 three times as much money to do essentially the same job? I could see spending 5 times more, but 23?

For example, what would happen to a distributed wikipedia in relation to say maps and borders or other controversial subjects like trump, scientology or vaccinations?

Maybe these are the same questions people had when wikipedia first started in relation to traditional encyclopedias, and we already have the answers?

And this should include resistance against deletionism.

To me, the idea of an open wiki died as soon as a group of people started bullying other contributors and telling that the thing they wrote about shouldn't be written about.

At $80,000,000/year, one penny buys them 25 pageviews.

Yeah, there's room for some efficiencies here.

I say this as someone who donated $1,000 a long time ago and then realized that the WMF, despite what it's begging appeals would have you believe, is doing just fine. It's just a matter of what they choose to spend donor money on.

I have no problem with them raising money and spending it, but I find their fundraising campaigns very misleading.

I'd disagree with your statement that they could not reasonably develop and host a top-10 website with the amount of money that they're raising, and if they needed to, they could significantly cut down on expenses and still keep everything running.

[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...

> If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now, before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details. We should limit spending increases to no more than inflation plus some percentage (adjusted for any increases in page views), build up our endowment, and structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad.

Why? The thing of value in wikipedia is the encyclopedia that was Built off of FREE LABOR by VOLUNTEERS. The increases in spending seem to be going to white collar office jobs that aren't actually necessary for The Wiki to exist and thrive. All wiki needs is servers. It shouldn't need to grow.

Wiki isn't a capitalist entity. It doesn't need to play by the rules of capital. And that it is mirroring the pattern of capitalist companies is tremendously worrying for the future of the project.