Wikimedia Foundation spent $88M for salaries in 2021-22 as a no profit
meta.wikimedia.orgThe term "nonprofit" is rather weird. It means that the organization doesn't have shareholders, so no person owns the money that the organization doesn't spend.
Salaries are a common thing that nonprofits spend their money on. That table shows some very comfortable salaries, but not at all out of keeping with an organization that size. There are many larger nonprofits with much larger salaries: a number of health care systems are incorporated as nonprofits, and their executives get well into the tens of millions.
You also get organizations like MITRE, a billion-dollar federal contractor that pays million-dollar salaries to its C suite. I'm honestly not sure how that's legal. The health care firms are dubious enough.
Still... the idea is that they're not trying to earn a profit for shareholders. They don't pay taxes on their profits because nobody owns that money. The employees who earn 7 and 8 figure salaries, they do pay ordinary income tax on that money, as anybody else does.
I really don't know how much actual work Wikimedia does and whether it's spending that $88M well or badly. But I can say that it is in keeping with the American tax system's use of the term "nonprofit", which is not really what people expect it to be from the word alone.
I don't know why it should even be that controversial.
It was never the government's intent to determine which nonprofits are truly noble and just. It's also not their job to govern how well they spend their resources, or how big they are allowed to be.
If they are lying or defrauding donors, there are existing legal remedies.
The government has an interest in preventing corporations from being used to avoid taxes. For example: I donate $50,000 to Jfengel Charities LLC, whose sole purpose is to purchase a car and then allow me to use it. I write off that $50k on my taxes, and still get the use of the car. Nobody is defrauded, except the IRS.
So they limit tax-deductible corporations to certain categories that have some kind of benefit. They don't police it very closely, but if you come to their attention, they'll force you to pay taxes and possibly penalties.
I do find the wikipedia donation nags annoying (they go away if you register), and it's wild how much money they have. But Wikipedia is also one of the best things on the internet, one of the best holdovers from the golden age of the web. I don't feel bad that the people working on it are well paid. The world would be much worse without Wikipedia.
A lot of the friction here is that the WMF (nonprofit who gets donations and runs servers) and the Wikipedia community (the unpaid people who write the content and run the project[0]) are separate entities. Many people in the community feel that the WMF is misleading donors into thinking the donations are for the latter.
[0] Including administrators. It's customary to say "btw I have never been paid to edit", completely unprompted, when accepting a nomination for adminship.
It's hard to imagine a world in which hiring full-time editors would not have much, much worse outcomes.
Wikipedia gives away an amazing product for free and people still find something to bitch about.
Wikipedia isn't creating the content, so that's not true. They give away a product that is donated to them by the editors who are not paid.
They do indeed pay editors, by awarding grants to hold article writing/editing marathons which they call "edit-thons".
Look up the awardees of those grants; it is clear that they largely go to organizations supporting specific political narratives.
Yes, you're referring to the Tides Foundation, the shady outfit that launders the Wikimedia donations into causes that the Wikimedia donors aren't aware of.> organizations supporting specific political narratives.That doesn't change the fact that the majority of content on Wikipedia was freely created by non-staff. So they're "giving away" something that was given to them for free, not something they created.
No, I am referring to monetary grants by Wikipedia themselves, which are only a Google search away, if you'd care to look.
Wikimedia is who you donate to, not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia, and Wikimedia gives money to a lot of shady causes, laundered via the donor advised funds set up by Tides Foundation.
I say laundered because of how donor advised funds work. You donate to Wikimedia, because you hope it goes to running Wikipedia. But that Wikimedia endowment is controlled by Tides Foundation. So you can see the money go in, but not necessarily where it comes out.
I had donated to Wikipedia almost every year before I saw this kind of thing and Wikipedia basically became an entity advancing US foreign policy.
Other than having more than $350M of founds, the Wikimedia Foundation has started selling Wikipedia data to private companies (like Google) via Wikimedia Enterprise [1]. The open knowledge created by the community worldwide is now sold for profit of a few.
From the FAQ: "All revenue from Wikimedia Enterprise goes towards the charitable mission of the Wikimedia Foundation."
Dig deeper and you will see the finances for the Wikimedia Foundation is run by a different, very partisan foundation called the Tides Foundation.
ITT: People who seem to think non-profit means 100% volunteer.
Honestly, the information being so easily available and transparent is pretty neat. Kudos.
These people are managing one of the few things that's actually good on the Internet, better they get these salaries instead of some FAANG director.
This and some of the other non-profits they donate to is why I won't give them a cent
Nonprofits such as?
The Tides Foundation controls the finances. They're a donor advised fund, which operates as a non-profit PAC that launders donations made to Wikimedia through Tides and into some very questionable (depending on your ideology) causes.
When you donate to those nag screens you're funding something very different than servers to run Wikipedia, and they're not super open about that.
would have never thought little banner ads begging for donations could be so lucrative.
Wikimedia Foundation has around $350M of founds while the website expenses has been estimated around ~$10M per year. It could be run for more than 25 years without any money.
The Wikimedia Foundation manager takes $400k as salary.
That seems fair to me honestly. He's doing a very important job and earning not much more than an average FAANG dev.
When you donate money to charity it must eventually end up in someones pocket. Maybe it's spent on salaries, or maybe it's spent on goods and services (which will in most cases also means spending on salaries indirectly). Some mercenary is always making the money you donate. It's an inescapable fact.
Please don't editorialize submission titles.
But Wikimedia seriously still needs your urgent help! /s Despite being bank-rolled by Google and Meta.