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Comment by bryans | Hacker News Reader

Except the organization already has liquid assets nearing twice its annual expenses, on top of the endowment, and >20% of the revenue is simply redirected to other organizations. It's also a little ridiculous to suggest that the infrastructure is substantial, given that the costs are only <2% @ $2.5 million.

I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which the rest of us could learn from, but it's almost irrelevant in regards to the bottom line of the organization.

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I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of a robust and functioning organization, the total headcount still seems reasonable.

Yes, the engineering "efforts" are exciting and interesting to learn from. They're also a continuous process that requires a heavy human investment in the form of staff (and staff retention!), and those salaries and benefits are relevant to the bottom line.

On the parts about annual expenses: keep in mind this is a long-term movement and foundation with long-term aims. Being sufficiently financially stable to run another year or two isn't really a win. It still leaves a rather important institution and its projects subject to lots of short-to-medium term existential risk.

You seem to be suggesting that removing the aggressive fundraising from the equation automatically means the revenue goes to $0, and the organization runs out of reserves in one or two years -- except that's not how anything works, and you know it.

Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for using aggressive tactics. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find another organization whose reserves are double both revenue and expenses. So it's rather silly to assert that Wikimedia is in a precarious position.

If the organization is really concerned about not having enough cashflow or reserves, then maybe they should stop giving away 20% of their revenue. Charitable contributions are great, but that's not the proposition being made in the fundraising tactics, which all aim to convince us that Wikipedia is going to die any minute unless every user immediately donates. These are the same tactics that PACs use, and are based on classic social engineering methods with the sole intent of manipulating people into feeling concerned or even panicked. An organization like Wikimedia should not be engaging in these tactics, especially when they provably don't need to.

Sorry, I'm not suggesting anything about the fundraising methods or tactics. I'm just talking about the general idea, floated often in comments on threads like this one, that our budget and/or reserves and/or endowment are unjustifiably large already, as typified by comments of the nature "How much does it take to run a few servers?" and similar.

I get that the article and other comments are about the fundraising, but my comments are not trying to address anything particular about fundraising methods/tactics.

Thanks for the clarification, but you can't really remove the fundraising from a conversation about whether the financials are justified, because that is literally one half of the topic. This is especially true when it comes to criticisms of the financials that you're side-stepping, such as >20% of the revenue not even going to Wikimedia.

To boil it down, somebody asked "are their expenses really that high" and you responded with "yes" even though the evidence says otherwise. You can name all of the individual expenses you want, but their existence does not automatically equate to justification.

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