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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

From the PDF: "We expect to end the year with staff of 78" Which means people are receiving crazy high salaries. They spent $1.6MM on travel which seems crazy to me. Where is all this money going?

Almost 26% of the staff is admin/management (20/78) which also seems very high.

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As far as having lots of management, I know that QA is both outsourced and volunteer driven. I'm under the impression they have a lot of volunteers for various tasks (it is Wikipedia, after all).

Volunteers incur management, but they don't show up in the head count.

Keep in mind that Wikimedia is managing a lot of community volunteers as well as their direct employees. The travel expenses may include paying for some of their volunteers to visit them, for instance.

There are lots of reasons why their travel expenses could be so high - I don't think it moves the conversation forward to suggest arbitrary reasons without some specific proof.

It's also worth noting the foundation has had issues to expense irregularities in the past [1], and so if anything there is cause to have pessimistic assumptions rather than optimistic ones

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/05/jimmy_wales_and_dann...

I posted regarding the volunteers requiring additional management, since I felt this comment was downvoted for presuming volunteers == travel expenses greater than the travel expenses caused by the Board.

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