> Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text
Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text.
Wikipedia is not static text. It runs Mediawiki which runs on PHP and requires a database, plus all forms of caching. They also serve media (images/video) have users, discussions, comments, etc.
And at wikipedia's scale they're not trivial problems to solve and dont cost peanuts for hosting.
The salaries are much larger than what gets put in the "hosting" line, which merely covers things like leasing cage space in datacenters and paying for transit/transport/peering links.
I'm not gonna do another deep dive on the org structure, because I've done it before when these topics come up ( like this one half a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 ), but I'll provide my overall view as a 10 year engineering veteran at the WMF who has fought many battles in this org, which you can take or leave:
There are problems at the Foundation, like there are everywhere. Resources are not allocated as well as they should be, which is also common just about everywhere. However, by and large, the money is put to good use, and the employees of the Foundation are doing good and necessary work, and there's no way to run today's Wikipedia on today's Internet for anywhere close to $3M/year total organizational budget, so it's pretty disingenuous to use that as a comparison point.
Go look at budgets for any other org which runs a top-N important site on the Internet for comparison. Consider that we adhere to stronger values and principles around rights and privacy and open source, all of which /increase/ our operating costs.
WMF runs on a shoestring, relatively-speaking. WMF just had a ~5% layoff over budget reductions ( https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-lay... ) in response to a community outcry about our fundraising. We (the engineers) regularly run into budgetary and/or priority constraints pursuing new useful SRE-level projects that increase scalability, reliability, or directly improve user experience (e.g. latency for readers and editors, rendering speed, better APIs for various consuming parties, more edge caches, more hardware redundancy, etc). We also don't get paid industry equivalent rates, or get the stocks or bonuses that we'd get elsewhere.
You can make all the arguments you want about some past or present form of grift at some upper organizational levels, but I'll still contend that most of the money is going to good use, that it's very expensive to run Wikipedia responsibly and reliably, and that the foundation doesn't have the cash pile necessary to stop relying on donations for the long-term sustainability of its projects. Even if the budget we have was allocated perfectly, I'd still be arguing that we need more to do the job right.
Well, the 5% layoff is more than balanced by the 25% increase in headcount (from 570 to 711) that appears to have happened between March 2022 and December 2022:
The Foundation's cash pile (not all in actual cash, of course) is currently at around $350 million, $100 million of which is in a completely non-transparent fund held by the Tides Foundation:
There have been promises made for years and years that this fund would soon be converted into a standalone 501c3 and start filing an annual Form 990. Still has not happened. Even though the 501c3 has existed for almost a year now, the money is still with Tides and still nobody has ever seen an audited statement of what goes in and out.
This said, I agree with you that WMF engineers do a lot of good work (much of it not necessarily apparent to casual readers as opposed to editors). It is noticeable that the site is more cared for.
I too am working for the Wikimedia Foundation. I have a good example showing how much we run on a budget, to avoid outing someone against their will, I will replace technology terms with letters:
A new employee joined from one of the big tech players. They got hired for a role with X technology. Upon joining the thin team of 4 or 5 persons, including the double hat manager/engineer, the person legitimately though the whole team was SOLELY in charge of said X technology. That is how their previously larger employer operated with multiple such teams scattered around the world. To their demise, the person was now more or less the lone tech lead for X and Y, with a worldwide and leadership responsibility for both. With of course shared responsibility with other tech managed by their teammate.
Thankfully we have grown a little bit since then and the kind of position I described is less of an occurrence nowadays (but still is for some area). That is far from lavish for sure.
You mean for software features and the like? Some good work has been done there in the background – it's not stuff that readers would notice, but contributors do. It wouldn't be fair to say that all the money has been mis-spent – there are lots of people working at the Foundation who are doing good work and who are not getting rich – especially bearing in mind the cost of living in parts of the US (though this begs the question whether the work could not be done more cost-effectively elsewhere).
The last time Wikimedia Foundation released a new project website was WikiData in 2012, more than 10 years ago.
Okay well maybe that's not fair. They did recently update the CSS for Wikipedia itself ... I don't know how many millions of dollars they spent on that...
Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous. They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop, it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.
Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text so they pocket almost all of the money.