[Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF

Fri Oct 9 23:41:03 UTC 2009

The ratio of overhead to other expenses isn't always a great meter
stick, as Erik mentions.  Nevertheless, one extraordinary aspect of
Wikipedia and siblings is how high the efficiency of its core project
work is by that measure: 100 billion views / 100 million edits a year,
for $3M in hardware and bandwidth and maintenance, and a fraction of
that in administrative costs.

We can drive down that fraction with an endowment dedicated to
perpetual support of this core work.  However, endowments and similar
investment to support future program work don't show up directly as
program expenses, though they are themselves low-overhead and improve
future efficiency and stability.

I'd also like to correct a myth about how Wikipedia is viewed by
teachers and other encyclopedias:

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
> (1) That the Wikimedia Foundation's "impact" is a favorable one.  (Many
> would disagree, at least according to Andrew Keen, the staff of Encyclopedia
> Britannica and World Book, and just about every high school teacher I've
> ever talked to about Wikipedia.)

I visited the offices of both Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book
back in June (at the American Libraries Association conference in
Chicago).  Both are favorable towards Wikipedia today.  I would
characterize their perspective as positive interest, respect for our
impact on the world, mixed with natural wariness.  They recognized
that the devoted contributors to our projects, as to theirs, are
driven by similar passions to improve access to knowledge.

EB actively use Commons as one potential source of images -- though
they have a much more stringent license-clearing process, so it take
them a while to decide whether they really have the rights to use an
image... something we could learn from.  And World Book's editor in
chief has been a supporter of the wiki concept since he gave a talk at
Wikimania in 2006.

In my experience, high-school teachers were 90/10 anti Wikipedia 3
years ago, and are slightly in favor of it today.  This sort of thing
would be a fascinating survey to run year after year.

SJ