Right. And actually, expenses were only $112 million. So they had a tax-free surplus of over $50 million.

Over the same time period, their Endowment increased by another $40 million or so, for an overall surplus of about $90 million in a single year.

They're swimming in money. Even with this vast surplus they actually spent half a billion dollars in the last five years, far more than in the first fourteen years of their existence put together. And all this time they make people believe they are short of money to keep Wikipedia up and running.

There are no moderators or editors appointed by the WMF. Anyone making an edit to Wikipedia is a volunteer "editor". There are "administrators" but they too are exclusively elected by the volunteers; the WMF does not get involved in this at all (nor would their involvement be welcomed by the volunteer community).

The WMF by the way is quite clear about its lack of involvement in Wikipedia content creation: the Foundation [...] does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects.

Exactly.

The point is that Wikipedia should never have cited a trash source like "crimefeed" in the first place. It should cite authoritative sources that have an excellent reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, as one Wikipedia policy puts it. That is not "crimefeed". Moreover, the Wikipedia article falsely claimed the picture came from the New York State Department of Corrections.

An encyclopedia with global reach has absolutely no business citing a crappy source like that. Yet this topic area is full of people citing true crime trash. It's the equivalent of citing The National Enquirer or The Daily Express in an article on cancer. You end up spreading fake news. Wikipedia has over the years developed sourcing guidelines and policies for medical articles that are relatively well observed, but in other topic areas like this one anything goes.

No reason to assume he was even aware of it. He probably put all the hassle he experienced down to the TV programme. The latter actually only showed his picture for about a second – long enough for people who knew him to recognise him, but not long enough for people who didn't know him to memorise his face well. That is why Google and the Wikipedia page probably did more damage.

Wikipedia had no business getting its picture from a crappy source like that and then pretending to readers it came from the NY Department of Corrections.

Note that the WMF has another $200m in cash and both short-term and long-term investments, over and above the endowment.

The point is that the endowment has been built in half the time (it wasn't planned to reach $100m until 2026), reflecting a substantial annual revenue surplus that is at odds with the impression the fundraising banners are leaving readers with – that the WMF is struggling to keep Wikipedia up and running, as Trevor Noah put it.

Moreover, the year goal for the current financial year has already been substantially exceeded, according to internal WMF documents. They say they have taken $142m, while the annual plan envisaged $108m in expenditure (and they are likely to underspend, given that conferences etc. have been cancelled).

Yet people in what is the worst Covid hotspot in the world right now are told that money is needed today "to protect Wikipedia's independence". This doesn't seem right to me.

In fact, Wikipedia's edit rate has dropped significantly since its high-point in 2007. In May 2007, it took about 5 weeks for 10 million new edits to be added. Presently, it's 9 weeks; the number of edits per unit of time has approximately halved.

The rate of edits per article per unit of time is a fraction of what it used to be. Basically, many articles are fairly static compared to ten years ago, when new content creation was at its peak.

And you're right; the vast majority of old article revisions are never looked at.

Yes, and if you spend x% more each year, then naturally you must ask for x% more money next year, just to have a big enough reserve again. And then you can spend more again, and again, ad nauseam. :) That's exactly what's been happening. WMF asks for and spends about 30 times as much money now as they did ten years ago. If WMF follows that logic for another ten years, it will require 30 times as much money in 2027 as it does this year, just to keep the reserve high enough. That will be $2.4 billion. And after another ten years, $72 billion. I think something will give before then. :)

Wikinews is practically dead. (English Wikinews, at any rate; I don't think it's any different in the other languages.) So are many of the other Wikipedia language versions. A slide shown at Wikimania 2014 said that of 284 Wikipedia language versions, 12 were "dead" (locked), 53 were "zombies" (open, no editors), and 94 were "struggling" (open, less than 5 editors). 125 were described as "in good or excellent health" (that number included every Wikipedia language version that had 6 or more editors).

In my opinion, a Wikipedia language version that has 6 volunteers working on it could not be described as in "good health".

But Commons content has grown significantly, and it does have large files. As far as I recall, it doesn't account for very many pageviews though, compared to Wikipedia.

Pagecounts. Admittedly, traffic was somewhat less in 2008 (that's as far back as that graph goes), but it has more or less plateaued for the past four of five years (while annual revenue more than doubled over the same period).

Then you differ from many people. There are countless expressions of concern online from people who've seen the fundraising banners. Moreover, many Wikipedia volunteers over the years have expressed concern that the fundraising messages make it sound like there is a financial emergency when in fact there isn't. Over the years, it's been a recurrent topic of conversation on the Wikimedia mailing list, every December.

I am okay with that too, though I draw the line at severance payments of this magnitude. YMMV.

And all of that amazing content is brought to you by unpaid volunteers.

There is little need for money to fuel Wikipedia content production. Ten years ago, when content production was at its peak, the Wikimedia Foundation had 11 employees and a twentieth of the budget it has today. Wikipedia looked and worked much the same then as it does now ...

People, by and large, donate "to Wikipedia" (but in reality to the Wikimedia Foundation) because they believe there is a shortage of funds to keep Wikipedia up and running and, like you, would not like to see it disappear. But the Wikimedia Foundation isn't in financial trouble; it is swimming in cash, and has been less transparent about many things, including executive compensation, than it could be.

In my view the WMF could do more to demonstrate that it is spending these increasing amounts of money on things that actually benefit readers and volunteer contributors in some palpable way (including how much was spent on each of these). Cost/benefit statements, so people can see that their money has been put to good use.

There are many reader- and contributor-facing things the WMF could do, but doesn't, to my knowledge. For example, they could pay to provide volunteers with free access to paywalled sources, to enable them to cite better references, and create more reliable content (present initiatives in this area seem rudimentary). They could provide readers with tools enabling them to gauge the trustworthiness of an article, based on its sourcing, or how much healthy community involvement it has seen (what information there is now is so impenetrable that no casual reader can make sense of it). They could communicate more openly about known problems in Wikipedia projects that readers should be aware of. Example. Things like that.

Many volunteers – content writers – are quite jaded about the WMF, feeling the WMF get free money off the back of their volunteer work and spend it on stuff that doesn't really help. Spending money in ways that produce little benefit has been an acknowledged problem in the past.

It is difficult, because both contributors and readers are an amorphous mass, and the WMF has perhaps tried to listen more of late under the new CEO. But when I see managers with a checkered work history receiving six-figure windfalls, or wanting to spend $32 million of donated funds on building a Google competitor, or the WMF clamming up and being unresponsive to reasonable questions, or putting out misleading fundraising messages as they have in the past, I am not convinced that this does justice to the mission people gave money to support. The money given to the WMF is given to them in trust, and in my opinion they need to do more to earn it. That's what this is about, not whether Wikipedia is useful or not.