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Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by johnnyanmac on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @12:05AM (#45652377)
So, as a non profit the other 55% or so (approximately 95m) goes to salaries? That's interesting considering how much work is performed by volunteers.
Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by nxobject on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @03:13PM (#45660290)
How so? I imagine there are many things involved with Wikipedia that volunteer editors don't do.
Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by johnnyanmac on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @09:02PM (#45663788)
Yeah, probably. I understand there's a lot if logistics I simply don't know about. I was inquiring about more details on what the paid staff need to do.
Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by kemayo on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @10:25PM (#45664262)
You can get a general sense of it from the org chart here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Organiz...

A lot of it is engineers who work on improving the software that runs Wikipedia, and keeping the site running, which you can see happening at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org -- outside of security issues, all the dev work is done in the open. There's constant ongoing work on making Wikipedia and all the related projects work better.

There's also people who do the fundraising, community management, legal defense, etc. Then there's general HR infrastructure around employing hundreds of people.

Basically, that "Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%." point gets brought up, and neglects to mention that you then need to pay for a bunch of people to manage those servers and facilities.

(Disclaimer: I'm an employee of the WMF. I'm just an engineer, so I'm not speaking authoritatively about financial details.)