Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed
Wikipedia has cancer
- NOTE: THIS OP-ED IS FROM 2016. THERE IS AN UPDATED VERSION AT WP:CANCER
In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless and exponential multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing exponentially forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Exponential spending increases can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations.
Consider the following example of runaway spending growth:
| Year | Support and Revenue | Expenses | Net Assets at year end |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2003/2004 | $80,129 | $23,463 | $56,666 |
| 2004/2005 | $379,088 | $177,670 | $268,084 |
| 2005/2006 | $1,508,039 | $791,907 | $1,004,216 |
| 2006/2007 | $2,734,909 | $2,077,843 | $1,658,282 |
| 2007/2008 | $5,032,981 | $3,540,724 | $5,178,168 |
| 2008/2009 | $8,658,006 | $5,617,236 | $8,231,767 |
| 2009/2010 | $17,979,312 | $10,266,793 | $14,542,731 |
| 2010/2011 | $24,785,092 | $17,889,794 | $24,192,144 |
| 2011/2012 | $38,479,665 | $29,260,652 | $34,929,058 |
| 2012/2013 | $48,635,408 | $35,704,796 | $45,189,124 |
| 2013/2014 | $52,465,287 | $45,900,745 | $53,475,021 |
| 2014/2015 | $75,797,223 | $52,596,782 | $77,820,298 |
| 2015/2016 | $81,862,724 | $65,947,465 | $91,782,795 |
| Based upon a table created by Simplicius on the German Wikipedia. | |||
In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told a TED audience:
So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly US$2 million a year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.
Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it? For those readers who were around three years ago, did you notice at the time any unmet needs that would have caused you to conclude that the WMF needed to increase spending by $30 million dollars? I certainly didn't.
From 2005 to 2015, annual inflation in the US was between 1% and 3% per year, and cumulative inflation for the entire decade was 21.4%—far less than the increase in WMF spending. We are even metastasizing the cancer by bankrolling local chapters, rewarding them for finding new ways to spend money.
Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. Whatever the reason is, it will happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment.
Although this op-ed focuses on spending, not fundraising, it could be argued that the ever-increasing spending is a direct cause of the kind of fund-raising that has generated a storm of criticism. These complaints have been around for years, leading one member of a major Wikimedia mailing list to automate his yearly complaint about the dishonesty he sees every year in our fundraising banners.
No organization can sustain this sort of spending on a long-term basis. We should have leveled off our spending years ago. Like cancer, WMF spending is growing at an exponential rate. Like cancer, this will kill the patient unless the growth is stopped.
The reason I have so little faith in the WMF's ability to adapt to declining revenues (note that I specified the WMF; I think Wikipedia has shown an excellent ability to adapt to multiple problems) is the horrific track record they have regarding adapting to other kinds of problems.
In particular, their poor handling of software development has been well known for many years. The answer to the WMF's problems with software development has been well known for decades and is extensively documented in books such as The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, yet I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones. This failure is almost certainly a systemic problem directly caused by top management, not by the developers doing the actual work.
After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending, followed by bankruptcy. At that point there are several large corporations (Google and Facebook come to mind) that will be more than happy to pay off the debts, take over the encyclopedia, fire the WMF staff, and start running Wikipedia as a profit-making platform. There are a lot of ways to monetize Wikipedia, all undesirable. The new owners could sell banner advertising, allow uneditable "sponsored articles" for those willing to pay for the privilege, or even sell information about editors and users.
If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now, before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details. We should freeze spending increases to no more than inflation plus a percent or two, build up our endowment, and restructure the endowment so that the WMF cannot dip into the principal when times get bad.
If we do these things now, in a few short years we could be in a position to do everything we are doing now, while living off of the endowment interest, and would have no need for further fundraising.
Discuss this story
Author's Note
About misleading communication
Nope, it's not cancer. It's exponential growth.\ Exponential growth can have the effect of a cancer, but not necessarily so. Cf. Moore's Law, which predicts exponential growth and held for decades with no ill effects (not for end users anyway), and even when it stopped being valid it didn't disrupt the end user's experience.\ There would be cancer if the growth disrupted the functioning of WP or WMF, but it does not - cancer kills by claiming space that other organs need, and possibly by claiming metabolic energy, but money in WMF does not do any of that. More money is merely an enabler, for positive as well as negative things, but that's all.\ Not all cancers are exponential in growth either, so the analogy breaks down both ways.\ That said, exponential growth does come with problems which do need to be addressed, so the concerns raised may be valid points. I have too little insight into the details; I am just objecting to using a misleading analogy, giving all the wrong memes and making people with not enough time to read all the details consider the wrong options, plus I am not too happy seeing that more time is invested in getting the data than in presenting it with the right analogies, it's a strong agenda-driven bias which is its own kind of misconduct, quite on par with the misconduct being attributed to WMF in this article.\ Joachim Durchholz (talk) 07:33, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Expenses and pageviews
Among the many things wrong with this piece is the insinuation (implicit in the cancer metaphor) that the growth in expenses was unplanned and uncontrolled. If one compares the five-year spending projection from the 2010-15 strategic plan, one finds that the actual development stayed pretty close to the plan, which had been developed in a collaborative process with extensive community involvement and lots of discussion about what to spend money on - and what not. And underspending compared to plan has actually repeatedly been an issue.
Software engineering
"I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles" - that might be because you did not bother to look. Quarterly goals are available for all engineering teams on mediawiki.org, and the product teams largely follow the principles of agile software development (in particular Scrum). Agile might not use the exact same elements as your favorite 1980s era formulaic software process specification, but it is pretty much the standard today. BTW, is it correct to assume that the consulting business which is mentioned in the article intro (as evidence for the author's alleged expertise about the topic) is not about software, but mainly about other forms of engineering?
At https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ , it's possible to follow along the work in detail, minute-by-minute. I would invite everyone to take a look in detail at the tasks that are being worked on right now - pick one at random from the "Activity Feed" or "Fresh tasks" boxes, for example, try to understand what its purpose is, what the downsides of ignoring the task might be, and then form an opinion about whether or not WMF should spend money on it. (Or, about how many of them could actually be imposed on volunteer developers, as the article tries to make use believe is possible for almost any useful software work for Wikimedia sites.)
The discussion about how much money WMF should spend, and on what, is of course absolutely legitimate and necessary. But simply defining growth as inherently bad is a fallacy. Obviously any organization has to grow from zero to its desired budget size, so with it will always be possible to cry "OMG 1000% growth!!". And yes, with all due respect to Jimmy, I think that that talk twelve years was dangerously mistaken about what would be needed even for the minimal goal of keeping Wikipedia online, stable and safe, without ever improving the interface, add new features etc.
Besides that, the amount of technical debt Wikipedia's software has accrued during those many underfunded years is enormous, and still felt today. (Just as a small example: To handle the rising traffic load, developers back then had to resort to very aggressive caching strategies, which succeeded in keeping Wikipedia available to readers at a bearable speed, but had the side effect of imposing a performance penalty on registered users - for which pages can't be cached - and anyone who edits a page. I.e. editors, who are the lifeblood of the project, were precisely those for whom it was the most sluggish. This only began to be mitigated a little over two years ago, when enough resources became available for seriously starting to work on performance.) And Wikipedia still has much less paid tech staff than basically any other website of its size.
(Personal comments, informed both by my experience as WMF employee and as community member since 2003, who for many years prior to joining WMF observed it from the outside, including writing about its activities and spending as former editor-in-chief of the Signpost.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:27, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Re: "is it correct to assume that the consulting business which is mentioned in the article intro (as evidence for the author's alleged expertise about the topic) is not about software, but mainly about other forms of engineering?", that is correct. I do a lot of work with software, but on chips that typically cost less than five cents, have 256 nybbles of RAM, and are not programmable -- meaning that we write raw assembly language code with no hardware to run it on other than a few crude simulation tools, then order masked-ROM parts (minimum order 50,000 chips with 6 to 8 weeks from code submission to chip arrival) and throw them all away if there is a bug. Clearly my experience isn't even close to the same as what the WMF developers do, and thus my opinions on this are suspect. Getting back to your main point, I remain 100% convinced that the WMF developers are doing the right thing and are using techniques that we who are in the business of producing 100,000 electronic toys per hour know nothing about. Nonetheless, the end result has been really, really awful. I have been around long enough to recognize the smell of good developers and good middle managers working hard and getting bad results because of bad top management decisions. So I may be completely wrong in defining what the solution is, but few would disagree that, as an organization, the WMF sucks at creating high-quality software.
--Guy Macon (talk) 06:04, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hosting
Exponential then linear?
Transparency
- I'm actually leery of WMF getting too big of an endowment. The problem is that Wikipedia already has a bit of the resource curse - we have a whole lot of traffic, and that is worth a lot of money, if corporations or lobbyists can insinuate themselves into key roles and take it over. Now because of that, a small endowment won't matter - but if the endowment is large enough that the WMF doesn't have to go back to the public at all, it could contribute to the curse and allow infiltrators to carry out an unrepentant subversion of the project's purpose. (The editors are also a check, of course, but the more resources are accumulated the smaller the relative power of new editing) If WMF sets up an endowment, they're basically telling donors look, we can be trusted to spend your money in the future more than you can be. People will tolerate that to a degree, since they can forget and exigencies come up, but I don't think that they should allow it to the point where WMF budgets everything out of interest income. Wnt (talk) 15:30, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The WMF actually makes a huge amount of information available; in terms of transparency, as a non-profit that is not a public corporation, it is already a leading model. So we can refer to some of the data it publishes when having factual discussions about how the WMF commits its resources and where its increases in spending have historically occurred. See this chart, which has a convenient breakdown of expense by category from 14-15 projected to 15-16 plan:Discovery
@Deskana (WMF): I'm pretty sure that prefix pipes worked well enough at the time it was implemented, as if it didn't I wouldn't have found this barnstar left on Rainman's talk page:
I spent more time researching the history of this than Cpiral did, see also User talk:wbm1058#Templates for deletion for deletion. {{Search deletion discussions}} and {{Search prefixes}} are broken templates and I guess I'll eventually have to put them up for deletion if they can't be made to work again. Can't we just WP:IAR a bit, I've already put a lot of time into this, and don't want to go to the trouble of starting what would likely be just another WON'T_FIX. Can you locate Rainman's source code, I'm sure you know your way around that stuff better than I do. If you can find the code, maybe this can be implemented quickly. Rainman's initial release of this was pretty fast. If you can't find the code, then I'll just initiate further cleanup and deletion of User:Stmrlbs' templates. Oh, yes, I understood you. This case is a variant of throwing out your own stuff, called "not invented here syndrome", and "can't take time to understand the retired developer's code, because I prefer greenfield development". I'm that oddball type of developer who actually enjoys working on, and perfecting, legacy systems. – wbm1058 (talk) 23:55, 1 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Bariatric surgery?
Reconsider the Title, Please
I have been asked by a current employee of the WMF who wishes to remain anonymous that the title of this article be reconsidered. They are a cancer survivor, and I can understand why they might prefer not to be declared equivalent to the thing that almost killed them.
Aside from that, inflammatory, low-rent article titles like this only help serve the idea that the Signpost has continued its relentless trek towards irrelevance. Keepin' it classy, I see. --Jorm (talk) 18:19, 1 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I would like second the request about the title, but for a completely different reason. Yes, it is an attention-grabber, but it also produces a knee-jerk overdefensive emotional reaction from the criticized side, rather than a thoughtful response to criticism. I remember a while ago something similar happened to some Signpost article where the author deliberately chose to use a foul language. As a result, AFAIR the talk was 80% discussion of the language rather than of content. (And today this is the only thing I remember from the article :-) Staszek Lem (talk) 19:28, 1 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have given careful consideration to this and am I will not agree to change the title.
Re: "I've asked the team to consider this request", No. The Signpost editorial team does not have my permission to change the title (unless of course someone puts forth a compelling argument and I agree to the change). Several changes were requested prior to publication, and I agreed to every change. Now that my words have been approved and published, you are free to delete the op-ed. You are free to write your own op-ed under your name and replace the one I wrote (including a note that you have done so and why would be appreciated). You do not have permission to change my words other than fixing obvious errors or formatting. Not while my name is on them.
BTW, I am a cancer survivor myself. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:07, 1 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I find the objection of this section by an "anonymous employee" to be at best overly sensitive and at worst manipulative. There is nothing wrong with using cancer as a metaphor, especially in the sense used by the author as a deep concern about the future of the project that could lead to its demise. The author wrote a well-thought out piece and gave a thesis that suggests the aptness of the metaphor. As many of us have dedicated a large chuck of our lives to the project, the very idea that the fruit of our volunteered labor could end up in the hands of a for-profit is abhorrent. Cheers to Guy for trying to bring attention to this issue. Tell the employee that despite their personal battle, the author clearly is not disparaging those who have battled a biological form of cancer and is therefore being too sensitive. The "I find your metaphorical use of cancer" angle is an easily abused appeal to emotion that can be used to censor an unwanted point of view; so I am not convinced there's negligible chance the employee's objection is without ulterior motive. Jason Quinn (talk) 06:53, 26 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
WMF Board
Signpost response to title request
In response to the request relayed by Jorm above, to change the title of this op-ed:
I am sad to learn that the title we ran pains a reader. It is never our intent at the Signpost to cause distress or ill feelings. While it may happen from time to time in the course of vigorous debate, it's never something we relish, and should be avoided whenever possible.
In this case, the article in question is an op-ed, and intended principally to allow the author to express a point of view, with no implication of endorsement or agreement of the Signpost team. Even so, there are lines we shouldn't cross, and causing needless harm or distress is one of them. The possibility of this outcome was discussed by others ahead of publication; I reviewed and considered what was said there prior to publication and, for better or worse, chose to heed the one comment that cited personal experience, which also happened to align with my own experience and instinct. I felt that the intent of the metaphor was clear, if stark; and that the biological underpinning of the point would outweigh any personal trigger for our readers.
If and when I face such a decision again, I will proceed with more caution. However, in this case, we will not be making the requested change. There are two reasons:
On the overall suitability of this piece for the Signpost: in general, we seek to run op-eds that stimulate worthwhile discussions, without regard to whether or not we agree with their positions. We should not do so, however, at the expense of anybody's well-being, or at the expense of fairness or accuracy. While I'm generally pleased by the depth of discussion above, I do find WereSpielChequers' point compelling; we hope never to exclude any voices due to a sense that the Signpost offers an unsuitably serious forum for discussion.
For anyone wishing to demonstrate that non-confrontational, newsworthy stories are worthy of discussion, might I suggest the current edition's Recent Research, which features reviews of several interesting studies about Wikipedia and education. Thus far, first post is up for grabs. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 08:02, 2 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
A word, if I may
Editors are perfectly within in their rights to criticize Pete Forsyth and the editorial board of the Signpost when they make a bad call, but please keep in mind that running the Signpost is a tremendous job and we should be grateful to anyone willing to take on that role. It is a role requires dozens of decisions every week, and they aren't going to get all of them right. Please remember that one article you do not like does not represent the entirety of their work and this publication, or even of a single issue of The Signpost. The editors working on Traffic Report or Recent Research, for example, didn't compare anyone to cancer and deserve acknowledgement for their hard work.
Guy Macon, considering that you compared an entire organization of people to cancer, I'm surprised the reaction has been as muted as it has been, and it was certainly much less than the reaction we got last year merely for putting some swear words in an op-ed. If you consider Jorm's mild rebukes to be personal attacks, then the op-ed business is not for you, you sweet summer child.
I am, as you know, a big fan of hyperbole and attention-getting gestures, so I am sympathetic (to a point) to the failed attempt here at message delivery. But flamboyant deliveries have to be coupled with reasonable, coherent messages and informed opinions. I don't expect everyone on the Signpost to know what a Form 990 is, but I do expect someone writing about WMF spending, salaries, and transparency to be aware of them, otherwise why am I reading their opinion on this topic? This is a very minor quibble compared to the counter-productive message here, which I think is just one example of many that I see in community forums by people who appoint themselves voices of that community. If someone came up to you on the street and called you a cancer, would you listen to them? No, because they would sound like a crazy person and you don't listen to crazy people. If you care about the WMF being responsive to the community, you should consider the effect of having community members respond to them in the manner of a crazy person. The WMF should, as stewards of a community resource, always be responsive and answerable to the community, but the organization is also full of human beings who will have a natural, human tendency to respond to crazy people as if they are crazy people. Crazy behavior has a deleterious effect on the relationship between the WMF and the community, discourages transparency and responsiveness, and encourages the WMF to write off the sane majority of the community based on the behavior of loud, attention-getting outliers. What do you care about more? Do you care about having a productive relationship between the WMF and the community, or do you just care about getting attention for yourself? Gamaliel (talk) 02:55, 3 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Frequently Unanswered Question
For those following along at home, try asking the following question:
In the following document...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_Report_-_FY_13-14_-_Final_v2.pdfhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/6e/FINAL_12_13From_KPMG.pdf
...on page
1012 (10th12th page of the document: they numbered it"8""10") it says "Furniture: 2013=$439,562, 2012=$277,312"Please provide a detailed accounting of how that $439,562 and $277,312 was spent.
Ask the question wherever you think best, using whatever wording you think best.
See if you get an answer, even a "no, we will not release that information" answer. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:25, 3 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Sigh... Here we are, having a calm reasoned discussion. There is some vigorous disagreement, as one would expect from the subject matter, but pretty much everyone on both sides wants what is best for Wikipedia, even as we disagree as to what that is. Suddenly, we get some racist trolling. I am not going to suggest completely ignoring the troll, but might I suggest that each editor react no more than once and then ignore him? I say we leave him shouting into an empty hall. Here is my only and last comment on this: Staszek Lem, I refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:40, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]cattlewordless slaves for them. Staszek Lem (talk) 03:33, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]I'm puzzled as to why nobody from (WMF) is defending themselves here, so I will try. It isn't that difficult to understand these financial statements if you've at least taken an Accounting 101 course. I've never worked as a professional accountant, but I did take several accounting courses as a college student. The first thing you need to understand is the difference between an income statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement. These are basic financial statements. When you ask the question in bold, "", you are exposing your lack of knowledge of basic accounting. You're implying that $439,562 was spent on furniture in 2013 and $277,312 was spent on furniture in 2012. This is wrong. These figures are provided as a more detailed supplement to the balance sheet line item "Property, plant, and equipment, net". So, as of June 30, 2013 the WMF had spent $439,562 on all of the furniture it owned as of that date. This is before accumulated depreciation. I don't have the figure for the number of employees on June 30, 2013 but assuming it was about 200, then the furniture per employee was $439,562 ÷ 200 or about $2200 per employee. Taking the difference between $439,562 and $277,312 I find that a net of $162,250 was spent on furniture in 2013. They may have spent more than this if some of the furniture owned on June 30, 2012 had been sold or discarded. The upgrade from a 1980s cubicle office to a semi-modern open floor-plan office seems like a reasonable explanation for this. I suppose it's reasonable to debate the need for this upgrade. As I type this, I'm sitting on furniture I bought in the 1980s. I don't think it's reasonable to speculate that a big chunk of the money went to redecorating executives' homes. I think we discussed earlier that roughly $2K wasn't a totally invalid figure for the cost of a professional workstation, and there's probably some office furniture for common areas, too. Regarding, "", these cash flow figures are for purchase of computer equipment and office furniture, and the vast majority of this is for computer equipment. Back to the balance sheet, $9,504,243 less $8,338,207 equals $1,166,036 net spending on computer equipment in the year ended June 30, 2013. $1,166,036 for computers plus $162,250 spent on furniture totals $1,328,286 net spent on computer equipment and office furniture. The cash flow statement shows $2,475,158 total spent on both computers and furniture – it doesn't break out how much on each. Presumably a lot of the computer equipment are servers that aren't even located in San Francisco. So I'm not sure about the difference between $2,475,158 and $1,328,286. Presumably that's old furniture and computers that were either sold off (would be included in the line "proceeds from sales" or donated to another charity or recycled or thrown out. wbm1058 (talk) 20:50, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Reconsidering the title
Is cancer the best analogy? Consider the alternative, "Wikipedia has a parasite".
The above was copied from Wikipedia's Parasitism article.
Consider this is relation to the Foundation's new interest in political advocacy for non-education-related causes, such as travel and immigration policies and climate change, which is in conflict with one of the Five pillars of Wikipedia, neutral point of view:
What kind of curve?
Sharing some additional information
Greetings - the Wikimedia Foundation wanted to address some of the points raised and share some additional information.
It is possible that one day our donors, for whatever reason, will not be as supportive as they are today. We have a "rainy day" fund that provides us with approximately 20 months of funding to make any necessary adjustments to our spending, should the situation happen unexpectedly. Additionally, we launched our endowment last year to eventually help cover the most basic expenses required to sustain access to the contributions of volunteers.
Any organization working in technology is going to face challenges and experience failures. The Wikimedia Foundation continues to analyze and learn from ours. Most recently, we have been drafting Technical Collaboration Guidance and a code of conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces. We also recently appointed Victoria Coleman to Chief Technology Officer. Coleman helped write some of the documentation on technical engineering best practices - including designing the software engineering and theoretical strands of the Royal Holloway undergraduate computer science program and creating the Masters program on Dependable Computer System.
The Wikimedia Foundation does mission driven programmatic work beyond hosting the projects, and we support wiki projects beyond Wikipedia. We have grown to support Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage, Wikidata, and many other projects. We also work with over 100 regional and thematic affiliates around the world, help support numerous community events, hundreds of community activities, and awareness efforts to grow our volunteer and reader communities. Using the metrics of this article, some of our projects have grown by factors of millions. However, the reality is that these are poor metrics to use when considering a starting point of 1-2 staff and startup nonprofit funding levels of thousands rather than millions. We are currently a small operation in comparison to nearly every other website with an audience of our size who also utilizes user-generated content.
Measuring and increasing impact remains an ongoing and important topic. We are publishing our quarterly check-ins, and recently completed our mid-year check-in to help provide insight into the impact of our programs this year. How we measure our impact in the future is a topic that we hope the community will engage with us on during the upcoming movement strategy discussions.
We look forward to these conversations continuing, and appreciate the efforts of others to help provide a more complete set of facts to help inform each other. --GVarnum-WMF (talk) 00:03, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
It has been 30 days, and still nobody at the WMF has answered the three specific questions I asked.[17] --Guy Macon (talk) 04:12, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure, don't know about Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage, Wikidata, and many other projects, but as far as Wikipedia is concerned the sooner, the better.--౪ • • • ౪• • • 99° ४ 10:17, 29 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
hacker news
If anyone cares, this op-ed was just linked from Hacker News and there is a long comment thread. I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the financial aspects of the op-ed. I would say that both the WMF and the editing community often seem to confuse Wikipedia with an internet startup, which is usually not appropriate. But, the ways in which this is less than ideal don't have anything to do with how much is being spent on furniture. FWIW, I've been in the WMF office and it looks like any other midsized tech company. It's not opulent but it's not like working out of someone's kitchen, which it shouldn't be anyway. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 02:44, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Another year later...
...and it looks a lot more like this essay was absolutely correct about the trajectory of WMF spending. The WMF 2018-19 draft annual plan has a further 20% increase in spending, reaching $92 million, a 40% increase since the 2015-16 plan mentioned in this op-ed. The 2018-19 draft is currently open for comments and feedback on its talk page. --Yair rand (talk) 21:40, 6 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Need help updating image for Wikimedia financials
At User:Guy Macon/Wikipedia has Cancer the table has been updated for 2017-2018 but the image at commons:File:Wikimedia Foundation financial development multilanguage.svg only goes to 2016-2017. Could someone with SVG editing skills please look at that table and update the image?
WP:CANCER is the original version of this page, and is the version that I keep updated. This page was edited (I agreed to the edits) by the Signpost editors. The main difference besides this version now being outdated is that I wanted to provide citations for all of my claims but the Signpost editors thought it worked better without them. This was not a major conflict; more of a friendly disagreement. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:05, 15 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]