“Modest increase” lmao. Literally like ~10% year over year for 20 years.

its literally tracking inflation when i looked at the costs.

The graph is very much exponential.

it very much isnt. the only line items that were exponential were the professional services and grants. the rest tracked inflation or were linear. and inflation is not in their control. its why the graph looks exponential but thats not a factor wikipedia controls.

they would have annual expenses of less than 5 million dollars.

literally impossible to have that situation in an economic system where inflation exists and salaries are your dominating expense.

You need to normalize for inflation to see the increase accurately.

If their expenses were growing exponentially we wouldnt see the net assets line growing faster.

edit: just for the record, I'm just eyeballing their numbers. the signal that makes WMF's finances concerning is them fighting unionization. not the relative YOY changes, those mostly look reasonable.

what fighting the union means: they're underpaying their staff and most compensation is going to admin. thats the problem, and it wont be resolved unless the workers force organizational changes.

Why are they not trying to stabilize their expenses as a donation dependent foundation?

They do? financials are publicly reported. there is a modest increase each year in salaries and infrastructure costs. which can be explained via inflation adjustments. (not saying it is if workers are unionizing) but from the financials only concerning bit are the grants/professional services line items which are entirely discretionary and/or legal.

so why are they spending exponentiall increasing amounts of money on other stuff.

they arent. do you know what 'exponential' means?

Shouldnt they try to build up 10+ years of reserves to ensure wikipedia survives when the money dries up?

Thats literally what they're doing. see graphs net assets.

Because if people stopped donating right now, they would run out of money next year.

so stop. seems like the issue will resolve itself. but the only concerning bit here is admin's fighting union. not their financials

Link unreadable for me in Firefox.

Target:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-08-02/News and notes - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

I just did. If they want it back, they'll have to build my trust back. Oh well.

Its cool that people are donating, but they are doing it without knowing that the wikimedia foundation is actually receiving like 100 times the amount in donations that it needs to run Wikipedia. All the while the banners say something like "Wikipedia is fucking dying we need more donations NOW". Yes lots of the other projects of the foundation are probably good and they have more legal and quality control costs now than 20 years ago, but its not thaaat much and its just not what is being communicated to the users. And as this guy has pointed out, there is no such thing as infinite growth, so the question is what happens when that juicy donation income starts dropping? Or what if all the people working at the foundation want to unionize? And now we know...