But who would pay the 137,201 active editors? Oh, wait, they are all unpaid volunteers.
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"
It sounds like some here are of the opinion that Wikipedia's revenue will never take a nosedive for any reason and that the bubble will never burst. Now where have I heard that kind of talk before?
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"
It has indeed been raising an endowment for several years, but every time I ask them to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad the answer is "maybe next year".
If the endowment is just one more account that can be drained at will we have no protection from a sudden drop in revenue while the WMF maintains the current spending levels in the hope that revenue will recover.
I also looked into whether the endowment is legally protected against a large payout as a result of a lawsuit. I am not a lawyer, but it looks like the WMF needs to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal to get that sort of protection.
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
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:
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.'"
Extremely relevant to Wikipedia's finances, since my framing was why I am not contributing to Wikipedia anymore. People deserve to know what they are funding.
Also not helping your cause, you had to try to negate my argument with a false assertion: Philip Cross HAS NOT, in fact, been been banned, and just last month made 49 edits to James LeMesurier's page (clearly a post 1978 British political figure):
Although you may not agree, this is holistically part and parcel of Wikipedia's ongoing funding saga. Plenty of people have tried to appeal to Wikipedia about this, so it is disingenuous to state that option while dismissing the topic here. We are on HN, not Wikipedia, so one man's 'hijacking' is another person's 'information.'
Re: "Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year."
You missed the first part of what I wrote in my essay:
"Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it WILL happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment."
I made it clear that Wikipedia is not in trouble at the present time. But there is a real possibility that there are bad times ahead, and we should prepare for them now.
I think you're reasoning about this backwards. They don't worry about setting harder spending limits because the revenue continues to increase. If the revenue cut back, you call it "naive" to suppose that they could put 2 and 2 together and cut spending. So they should be fiscally conservative and think of the future when they expect themselves to be... profligate and short-sighted? Why?
You started this page in 2017. The revenue has continued to increase at as steady a pace as expenses. And an argument along the exact same lines as yours could have been made in 2009 or 2010 or 2011. Actually, your argument has gotten weaker -- expenses used to be higher than the previous fiscal year's revenue, but in recent years the growth has been much flatter.
There's no compelling reason to think that now is the time to act to make sure that it's not too late to act at some vague future point in time. Sure, something can't grow forever. Granted. But are we at 127 grains of rice or 131,071? How can you tell?
Letting the endowment grow by at least inflation is already covered in my essay:
"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."
"If we do these things now, in a few short years we could be in a position to do everything we are doing now, while living off of the endowment interest, and would have no need for further fundraising. Or we could keep fundraising, using the donations to do many new and useful things, knowing that whatever we do there is a guaranteed income stream from the endowment that will keep the servers running indefinitely."
I'm just saying.