Wikipedia collects more money than it needs, but fees continue

Why it happens? After all, Jimmy Wales , in theory, should stop the campaign to raise funds required for the work of Wikipedia as soon as the necessary amount is collected. In December, the Wikimedia Foundation has already reached the planned amount of $ 25 million. And by the end of the month more than a week is left. On December 3 of this year, the founder of Wikipedia promised that once the goal was completed, the fundraising campaign would be stopped.

"If we collect the planned funds faster than expected, we will stop the campaign," said Wales. But for now, there are no signs that the Wikimedia Foundation is really going to stop saving donated funds, now or in the distant future.

On December 16, the Wikimedia Foundation managed to raise $ 25,530,943.01 - this is more than planned. What are the funds going to? To ensure the operation of servers and staff (yes, not only volunteers work here). It should be noted here that none of the Wikipedia employees on the contract deal with the text. Writing and checking the text material involved volunteers. This is known to many, which is confirmed by a former employee of Wikipedia, Andreas Kolbe.
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Jimmy Wales says that ten years ago Nazal Wikipedia was a well-known resource with a minimal amount of funds required to maintain the site. Over time, maintaining the resource and the entire infrastructure required more and more resources. But, as Wales says, if everyone reading a message about the need to raise funds for a Wiki would share two pounds sterling (about $ 2.5), this would be enough for a long time. “Yes, this is so, we only need an amount equal to the cost of a cup of coffee, we do not require more,” he said.

And how much is needed?

The exact amount of the fundraising is sometimes difficult to name the head of Wikipedia. For example, he could not give an exact answer to the question “how much money must be collected this year,” although one of the Wiki users asked him about this, who was tired of seeing the request for a cup of coffee every time he visited a resource. The logical question “how many cups of coffee are needed to keep servers running” did not receive an answer.

Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation receives more donations from its users than in previous years. On average - $ 3 million more each year.



For almost 8 years since 2009, Wikipedia has collected about 300 million US dollars, accepting donations from its readers. If before the funds were spent only on the work of servers, now they have to be distributed among the staff members of the organization - there are already about 300 people. People who perform the most important work, adding new and editing existing materials, do not receive anything.

In addition, Wikipedia began to practice "compensation". For example, the former executive director of the organization, Sue Gardner (Sue Gardner) received after her resignation about $ 100,000.

Costs are high, but more money

Now the Wikimedia Foundation has begun investing in funds, plus the organization has set aside the remaining funds, leaving a reserve. The head of the Wiki and his staff claim that the organization now has about a year's supply of funds for work, which is the standard for the non-profit sector.

However, we can see that the costs of an organization are increasing every year. This is just normal - we all know that the number of pages is increasing in the Wiki, more and more users visit the encyclopedia every year. In other words, the reserve that the company needs for normal operation during the year is constantly increasing.

10 years ago, the situation was somewhat different. Below is a video where Wales talks about the low cost of a job that has become a very popular resource for the online encyclopedia, proud of it.


Then the number of page views per month reached 1.4 billion. In a month, the organization required about $ 5,000 to maintain its infrastructure - and this is almost all of the costs. Wales then said that the staff of the organization is not needed, everything can be done on its own. And almost all the funds that the organization received, she spent on technical needs.

Last year, $ 82 million was collected, and only a small percentage of these funds were spent on hosting. If you focus only on the online encyclopedia itself, then the funds collected on bank accounts will last for about 30 years.

Nevertheless, the Wikimedia Foundation has third-party projects that require attention and funds. In addition, the work of the organization is accompanied, at times, by lawsuits. Need legal protection, which requires a large amount of funds . Thanks to them, Wikimedia won the courts of Brazil, Germany, France and India.

So what's the problem?

The fact that such a large resource, as Wikipedia, is equal, as third-party projects of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) spend a lot, doesn’t cause any special questions. Yes, it is quite true that large amounts of money are required to service the IT infrastructure of a company. Lawsuits are also the answer to the question of where the money goes, this was already mentioned above.

But, unfortunately, the expenditure of funds collected through donations from readers can not always be called targeted. For example, WMF pays its staff members to cook courses, massages and gyms. At the same time, thousands of volunteers who spend a lot of time working with content (recall that full-time employees with the text practically do not work) do not receive anything. As a result, the “bourgeois” class was formed - full-time employees who receive a lot of money for relatively simple administrative work. And the class of "laborers" - editors who invest their strength and spend their time to ensure high quality content. At the same time, editors get nothing.

Yes, all these people voluntarily agreed to help the resource. People donate funds to the organization, too, voluntarily. But the majority believes that the money will go to work Wikipedia, and only. And as mentioned above, for several years the organization’s costs of providing the encyclopedia itself amount to only a fraction of the total costs.

Meanwhile, WMF representatives spent more than $ 2,000 on business cards in 2012. In 2013, 81 thousand euros went to some photographers who were supposed to get the images of various politicians. And then a grant of 81,720 euros was allocated for research, the purpose of which was to study text editing. And this is almost 4 years ago. Now, when the organization’s funding amounts have grown, and very significantly, it can be expected that spending on such projects has also increased.

Perhaps at a time when the number of Wikipedia editors is declining, the organization that manages the online encyclopedia should think about where the donations of readers go. After all, resource users have pockets not bottomless, and patience is not iron. However, at any time you can find out where exactly our donations were spent, the company keeps open statistics, for example, such .