[Foundation-l] Re: Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)

Wed Oct 26 12:34:20 UTC 2005

--- Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/26/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> 
> > I thought it was generally agreed upon though that rising costs on
> > hardware could be compensated for, since users are more than willing to
> > donate for hardware costs.  Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't
> > wikimedia just adjust their donation goals to cover that and thus cover
> > the cost of new hardware/repairs/upgrades, etc...?

So far, that is pretty much all we have been doing (although the foundation
also wants to do much, much more than that). But buying more hardware and
serving lots more people also increases overhead/administrative costs. So while
the percentage that overhead takes from the budget has been in the 20-30%
range, the total amount has grown in proportion to hardware and hosting costs. 

> Daniel made it clear, the curve for donations won't follow the curve
> for costs. Since our costs are growing so fast (I won't go back to all
> the explanations given here and elsewhere), I don't think that
> fundraising drives will be near enough to cover those costs.

Actually, I just said my gut feeling was that the donation curve would not
follow the cost curve forever. What is needed is a statistical assessment of
the two. However, looking *only* at two fund drive data points and two traffic
data points gives some reason to be optimistic. 

Q3 2004 Fund Drive grand total:                       $44,863.95 USD
September 2004 unique visitors to wikipedia.org: 3.2 million

Q4 2005 Fund Drive grand total:                         $243,930 USD
September 2005 unique visitors to wikipedia.org: 12.8 million 

So, there has been a 533% increase in donations for a 400% increase in traffic.
Throw in Moore’s Law and things look even better. However, the traffic numbers
are only for wikipedia.org and this only tracks unique visitors; those visitors
likely use Wikipedia more often today than they did last year. The other
projects, esp Commons, Wiktionary and Wikinews are starting to become popular
as well. So I’ll tend to be pessimistic until I’m able to analyze some hard
data for every one of our domains (data with consistent standards - esp for the
non-wikipedia.org domains - has been difficult to come by). 

> Small donations originated by fundraising drives are something we
> should *count* on, but not something we should *rely* on. We're not
> the only ones out there asking for money, and I believe that it is
> also our job to be looking elsewhere for hard cash.

Well, we kinda do have to rely on small donations. Small donations, not big
ones or grants, make up the vast majority of our income. Relying too much on
any one or select few big donors, grants or income from partnership agreements
puts us in jeopardy if any one or several of them pull their funding. But the
answer to that is to have *lots* of big donors, grants, and income streams from
partnerships. However, I think your point was that we should not simply rely on
donations in general as our sole income stream. Yep - I agree with that 100%.
We also need to diversity our income in general - we can’t be too reliant any
one source  

> In our case, I would say that all editors, by spending the time they
> spend providing content and making Wikimedia projects what they are,
> are already donating. I would not blame anyone who'd argue that they
> "don't have cash, but already give some time and knowledge". Except
> that time and knowledge, although they are indispensable, don't buy
> servers or cover operating costs.

I get several emails in the ORTS donation queue each week from people who
either don’t have cash or who want to donate in a currency that we don’t
accept. I tell each that their donation of time in either contributing content
or telling people about Wikipedia is just as important as giving money. That
Wikipedia would not exist without volunteer effort. 

-- mav

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