Some quick highlights: of their >$150M of usable donations, they spent about 57% of it on "salaries," 10% of it on "awards and grants," 4% of it just on processing donations, and a measly 2% on actual hosting costs.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
Wikimedia foundation has cancer [1]. They've provided a huge value and reaped big rewards, but now they have built to grow, and the growth engine just keeps wanting to grow.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has....
This needs to be taken with the thought that not all projects necessarily end up good.
For most companies the main expenditure is HR, that's normal and certainly expected for an org focused mainly on knowledge and information.
That's a good sign, isn't it? It means they are efficient and don't waste their budget on overpriced cloud services.
I'd be more pissed if a significant junk of the donations went straight to AWS.
Just keep in mind, when you don't use AWS, lots of costs that would normally be hosting costs become salary costs instead (the data center doesn't set itself up)
How do you square that with this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180736) that says only they only spend "2% on actual hosting costs."
100% of the work of actually maintaining Wikipedia is is done by unpaid volunteers, and much of the tooling they use also appears to be developed on a volunteer basis.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annu...
Who knows? Is there any good investigative breakdown of exactly what Wikimedia Foundation spends most of its income on? Does it have a huge admin parasitical attachment sucking the money away? I'm not accusing, just wondering myself. Perhaps someone knows about this.