Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-11-28/News and notes

News and notes

English Wikipedia editors: "We don't need no stinking banners"

By Adam Cuerden, Andreas Kolbe, Bri, and Helloheart

Auditing the fundraising banners

Last month, we reported on discontent with fundraising on Wikipedia. It all came to a head this month, as a widely-participated "Request for Comment" survey rejected the current plans for the fundraising campaign. Luckily for us, given this all happened three days before publication, the closing admin, Joe Roe, provided a thoughtful, nuanced summary of the dispute and decision:

“

This was a request for comment (RfC) on whether the fundraising banners planned to be shown on the English Wikipedia in December 2022 were appropriate, and if not what changes needed to be made. Based on the samples provided by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), there was a broad, near-unanimous consensus that these fundraising banners should not run on the English Wikipedia in their current form.

Nearly all participants agreed that the banner texts are at least partly untruthful, and that soliciting money by misleading readers is an unethical and inappropriate use of this project. Specifically, participants clearly identified that banners that state or imply any of the following are not considered appropriate on the English Wikipedia:

Wikipedia's existence is under threat or dependent on donations
Donated funds are used primarily to support Wikipedia and/or its volunteer editors
Readers should feel obliged to donate regardless of their means ("guilt tripping")

A significant minority of participants objected to running banner campaigns at all. In my view beyond the scope of this RfC – arguably out of the scope of local discussions on this project entirely. Similarly, there was substantial discussion of the WMF's fundraising model and financing in general which, as several participants noted, is probably better taken up in other venues (e.g. Meta). In any case, no consensus was reached on these issues.

Few participants explicitly supported the banners. Many of those that did acknowledged the problems summarised above, but concluded that the banners were acceptable because they were effective (at raising money), comparable to similar campaigns by other organisations, and/or are an improvement over the WMF's campaigns in previous years. A number of members of WMF staff and the WMF Board of Trustees were amongst the most vocal in support of the banners. It is worth noting that, though their participation is welcome as anyone else's, it also carries no more weight than anyone else's. Their comments (understandably) tended to focus on the potential ramifications that changes to fundraising on the English Wikipedia, which constitutes a significant portion of the Foundation's income, could have on the rest of the movement. Like critical comments from opposers on movement finances in general, I considered this discussion largely irrelevant in assessing consensus on the questions posed by this RfC. To the extent that they engaged with the specific objections summarised above, a number of supporters, including several Board members, acknowledged that there were problems with the fundraising text that the WMF has placed on the English Wikipedia, though they disagreed on whether this is a fit topic for discussion on this project.

There was also significant discussion of how this consensus should be enforced, if the WMF chooses not to modify the banners before running them. This is a fraught topic given that our policies state that authorised acts of the WMF Board take precedence over consensus on this project, but that attempts to actually apply this principle have historically proved controversial. No consensus was reached on this issue, which is also strictly speaking outside the scope of this RfC. But taking off my closer's hat for a moment, I would like stress that this needn't come up – the preferred outcome for almost all participants, I believe, is that the English Wikipedia community and relevant WMF staff can come to an agreement on the content of fundraising banners.

”

Maryana Iskander, Chief Executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, gave a detailed response to this, quoted below:

“

I've been the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation for nearly 11 months now. I am posting here as a follow up to the Request for Comment to change fundraising banners.

I agree that it is time to make changes at the Wikimedia Foundation, including more direct community input into fundraising messaging. We have taken the guidance provided by the close of the RfC to change banners on the English Wikipedia campaign as early as Tuesday. The fundraising team welcomes your help and ideas on the specifics.

The task at hand in responding to the guidance provided by the RfC is that Wikipedia's existence is dependent on donations. Donated funds are used primarily to support Wikipedia. I think what we heard is that while this may be true, how we say it matters. We need banners that better recognize the real stake our communities have in how we communicate to our donors.

In the next few months, the fundraising team will work more closely with local communities to guide future campaigns. The Foundation will measure the financial results of using new banners in this year's English campaign, and we will share this information when the campaign is completed.

I will briefly address a few other areas of concern that were raised about the future direction of the Wikimedia Foundation, and commit to writing again in January after we finish this campaign. I believe some things at the Foundation can in fact be different, because they already are:

I agree that the Foundation has grown very rapidly over the past years and that the budget should be stabilized. In my first six months, I did two things to act on this: first, I informed the Board that we would dramatically reduce hiring until we were sure that we were getting the maximum benefit from the resources we already had. Second, I started reversing the trend of prior growth by setting this year's budget to account mainly for year-on-year costs like inflation.
I brought in a Chief Product & Technology Officer, @SDeckelmann-WMF:, who has experience supporting online communities and collaborating with technical contributors. She has been on the job for 17 weeks and has already directly responded to community concerns on New Pages Patrol and Wikimedia Commons. In March 2023, Selena will be ready to host forums on- and off-wiki with what she thinks are needed improvements to the Foundation's processes, including technical support and collaborative product development. We collectively have to respond to decades of growing technical debt, poor processes for maintaining software, and staying relevant in a world where technology keeps going faster.
I have already started frank conversations with the Board and Foundation staff about what roles the Foundation should grow (like support for technology), and what activities we should hand over to others or stop altogether. Looking ahead, the size of our budget should be driven by what the Foundation should be doing, and can actually do well. I think the 2030 movement strategy provided guidance (and motivated much of our historic growth), but was short on the specifics. I await the Movement Charter for further clarity, but believe we'll need to make some decisions sooner.

None of these things may happen as quickly as those of you who have been very frustrated for many years would like. I think we are heading more in the right direction, and I am sure you will tell me if we aren't.

I will write again in January with more information. In the meantime, you can reach me on my talk page or by email. MIskander-WMF

”

I'm sure we'll have an update of some sort next month as well. It's a bit inevitable once the fundraising campaign starts. Hopefully, though, it'll be entirely positive. – AC

WMF releases Fundraising Report and audited financial statements for 2021–2022 year

In related news, the Wikimedia Foundation this month published its –

Fundraising Report for 2021–2022
Consolidated Financial Statements for 2021–2022, complete with an Independent Auditors' Report by KPMG

Note that the Wikimedia Foundation's financial year runs from July 1 to June 30.

Fundraising Report

In 2021–2022, the Wikimedia Foundation took $165,232,309 USD from over 13 million individual donations, an increase of more than $10 million over the year prior. $58 million, or 35.1% of the donations total, was brought in by banner campaigns on Wikipedia. The breakdown was as follows:

2021–2022: Donations breakdown. — **2021–2022:** Donations breakdown.

For comparison, the donations total in 2020–2021 was $154,763,121 raised from over 7.7 million donors (a different way of counting was used this year), with banner campaigns bringing in $57.3 million, or 37% of the total.

As in 2020–2021, the Wikimedia Foundation ran a fundraising campaign in India this financial year (see previous Signpost coverage; note that while the 2021 Indian fundraising campaign was cancelled, the 2020 campaign was not held in the spring but in August, thus falling into the 2020–2021 financial year).

Consolidated Financial Statements

The Financial Statements reported an unusual situation: for the first time in its history, the Wikimedia Foundation reported a negative investment income: –$12 million. Investment income had been positive at +$4.4 million in 2020–2021 and +$5.5 million in 2019–2020. At the time of writing, the Wikimedia Foundation had not responded to questions about the precise circumstances responsible for the negative result.

Total support and revenue was $155 million (a decrease by $8 million compared to the year prior, with the negative investment result cancelling out the increase in donations).
Total expenses were $146 million (an increase of $34 million, or 30.5%, over the year prior). Some key expenditure items:
- Salaries and wages rose to $88 million (an increase of $20 million, or 30%, over the year prior).
- Professional service expenses: $17 million.
- Awards and grants: $15 million.
- Other operating expenses: $12 million.
- Internet hosting: $2.7 million.
Net assets at end of year increased by $8 million to $239 million (net assets increased by $51 million in the year prior). Interestingly, the third-quarter (January–March 2022) Tuning Session presentation published by Finance & Administration in May 2022 still forecast a net asset increase of $25.9 million for the year.

For the 2022–2023 financial year, the Annual Plan envisages an increase in both income and expenditure to $175 million, representing a planned increase in revenue by $20 million and a planned increase in expenses by $29 million (20%, more than twice the rate of inflation) compared to the year prior (total expenses in 2021–2022 were $146 million).

According to the minutes of the June 2022 Wikimedia Foundation board meeting, WMF board members and executives looking ahead at the 2022–2023 financial year now underway anticipated "moderate growth in terms of staffing. Next year, the fundraising team will be increasing targets in each of their major streams, with a particular focus in Major Gifts." – AK

Brief notes

The results of the Wikimedia Summit 2022 participant feedback survey are available on Commons.

Wikimedia Summit event report: Wikimedia Deutschland has published further reports on the 2022 Wikimedia Summit: the Event Report including financial info (overall cost was a little over 500,000 euros) and the participants' feedback report (the hybrid format appears to have been a success this time). Further documentation of the event is available here.
Page views: Page views in September for all wikis have been up in relation to the past months with 23,657,615,038 views in comparison to 23,033,712,122 in August. Wikipedia has been growing in popularity since January of 2016, when page views were 20,865,413,322. According to Wikimedia Statistics, the number of page views seems to be growing steadily.
Administrators: TheresNoTime voluntarily relinquished their Checkuser and Oversight permissions after remedies revoking these privileges in the "Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block" arbitration case reached 5 to 1 in favour and also resigned as an admin; they remain a Steward and later reclaimed their admin status here on the English Wikipedia as well.
Milestones: Chechen Wikipedia reached 500,000 articles; the traditional orthography Belarusian Wikipedia reached 80,000 articles; Banjar Wikipedia and Hakka Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles; and Dagbani Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, and Maltese Wikipedia reached 5,000 articles. In Wiktionaries, Sango Wiktionary reached 40,000 entries; Shan Wiktionary reached 30,000 entries; and Lombard Wiktionary reached 20,000 entries.
Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Medjed, followed by Human history (starting 5 December), then Telephone line (beginning 12 December). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
BernsteinBot disabled: HaleBot has been updating the List of Wikipedians by number of edits since mid-October. We thank BernsteinBot for its service.
Easy, automatic journal access for editors: The Wikipedia Library has made Taylor & Francis academic journals automatically available for anyone with a Wikimedia unified login, using OCLC EZproxy (via T&F press release)

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28 November 2022 (all comments)

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== Page views item is misleading ==

This note is very misleading:

Page views in September for all wikis have been up in relation to the past months with 23,657,615,038 views in comparison to 23,033,712,122 in August. Wikipedia has been growing in popularity since January of 2016, when page views were 20,865,413,322.

As the small print under the linked chart warns: By default, this data shows page views from automated traffic as well as human traffic. To focus on human user page views, please use the Agent type filter.

Filtered to human page views, there is no such "growing in popularity since January of 2016". In fact the October 2022 number (16,043,576,424) is lower than the October 2016 number (16,573,593,158). And this view shows that there has been an increase of over 2.7 billion in monthly "Automated" views from March to October 2022.

(In fairness to Helloheart, this is easy to overlook. It's a common fallacy to go with the default view of https://stats.wikimedia.org/ , I've seen several other people make the same mistake. The Foundation's team who maintains this tool should have fixed this and other usability issues years ago.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:21, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Fundraising

Not really a comment on the discussion, but a datapoint: every year there are a lot of complaints in the Archive of Our Own community about fundraising to support the website & its staff. Enough complaints that a defense of fundraising for that website has been posted every year on Tumblr. This leads me to wonder if complaints about fundraising are common at other community-based projects (such as, for example, Internet Archive), & if not how they avoided this blowback. In some ways, we Wikipe[d|m]ians can be very provincial in our outlook. -- llywrch (talk) 18:47, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This might be of interest. --Firestar464 (talk) 10:21, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Llywrch: I've seen the complaints on Tumblr as well, though I don't think they're close to the same very specific objections to fundraising methods and the doling out of said funding. Some objections definitely seem to be in the "don't donate to people who support/host insert-thing-here I find objectionable!" camp, and the list of things that are 'objectionable' (on a website where you can really specifically tag content for what's in it and then...avoid that stuff) and 'shouldn't be allowed' are invariably silly (some people apaprently can't separate fiction and reality in their head). Those complaints, I don't think AO3 worries about; they're not based on anything reasonable to worry about.

But I have seen some that genuinely wonder what they do with all that money. It's true that they generally go over their donation goals, but it's worth noting that their owner, the Organization for Transformative Works, has some large main avenues that money goes down: legal advocacy (necessary for copyright-derived works, hello Anne Rice), archival services (the open doors project imports fanfic collections that can no longer be supported independently), an academic journal, as well as their own wiki and a directory of resources.

I don't think they have the same problems that we do, and I don't remember them ever having had to make a post about criticism with their funding; for a website that hosts derivative works of non-free content, providing solid legal support that doesn't leave creators trying to figure out a cease and desist themselves is incredibly necessary work. There's a writeup of a reddit post on the subject here on fanlore.org that does a pretty good rundown of all the arguments.

What probably helps also is that AO3 doesn't write their fundraising banners like we do...—Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 12:41, 30 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

From what I've seen of the AO3 banners, they are indeed very different from the Wikipedia ones, and it seems like the complaints they get are not generally about the form or content of the banners. The Internet Archive is an interesting example because their banners are like ours—indeed, they frequently appear to be virtual copy-and-pastes (their current banner starts with "Please don't scroll past this" and talks about "the one in a thousand users that support us financially"). But IA is not primarily based on user-generated content the way AO3 or Wikipedia is, so the "why do they need my money?" question is more obviously answered.

Also, fan fiction is a traditionally social and participatory medium, and the stereotypical fan fiction consumer is extremely online; wank is not unexpected. I'm not sure who the (stereo)typical IA user is.

Finally, tangentially related, the Organization for Transformative Works (which is a membership nonprofit) just had their board elections. Some interesting comparisons to be drawn. —Emufarmers^(T/C) 22:27, 1 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Re: "We don't need no stinking banners"

I'd just like to note that the meme phrase "We don't need no stinking ...." has it own Wikipedia page. Philh-591 (talk) 21:41, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Quoted audit report data in the Notes section is mis-representative, misleading

Hi, I’m from the Foundation’s Finance team. I want to note that the meaning of the “investment income (loss), net” section of our annual financial audit is explained in the audit report FAQ section. In essence, the $11,665,241 number in the audit report represents the value of the assets we held as of June 30, 2022 vs June 30, 2021, which did indeed go down; this was a period of global economic downturn that affected most people. Most of this number is an unrealized loss, meaning that we held onto most of our assets and will continue doing so until markets improve, rather than selling at a loss.

In the article, this data is presented as unexplained, with implied questions about whether Foundation finances are mismanaged or wrongly reported. Neither implication is correct.--SLangan (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@SLangan (WMF): Thanks for your note. However, all it says at the place you link to is this:

"Investment income (loss), net" is primarily interest, dividends, realized gains/losses, and unrealized gains/losses earned on the Wikimedia Foundation's cash and investment portfolio. During this audit period, some of the Foundation's cash was invested in mortgage backed securities, U.S. Treasury securities, corporate bonds, and stocks (Note 3). It is the Foundation’s investment intention to preserve capital, income and liquidity over‎ capital appreciation, which has higher volatility."

This is completely generic and hardly likely to enable the average community member to understand what caused the loss, all the more so as there was an economic downturn in 2020 as well, and WMF investment income remained several million in the black.

What I actually say in the article above is "At the time of writing, the Wikimedia Foundation had not responded to questions about the precise circumstances responsible for the negative result." This is indisputably true. I asked on the mailing list on Nov 10:

Dear WMF Finance staff, I inquired over a week ago on Meta-Wiki why the WMF is reporting a negative investment income (–$12 million). There has been no answer to date.[1] I am a layperson, but how can an investment income be negative? Would you mind sharing what this is about? I was also surprised to find that the reported increase in net assets for the 2021–2022 financial year was "only" $8.2 million. The third-quarter F&A tuning session published in May (based on data as of March 31) forecast a far higher surplus, with an increase in net assets of $25.9 million.[2] Would you mind sharing what happened in the fourth quarter to reduce the surplus by so much?

And I asked a week before that (twice) on Meta whether more information could be shared, and received no reply in either place.

You replied on Meta today, which is greatly appreciated, but frankly I am still none the wiser as to which of your assets specifically went down by so much, and why and how a projected $25.9 million increase in assets at the end of the year (I am reading that right, aren't I?) was reduced to just an $8 million increase in the space of three months.

I am not implying anything. I am asking you to help us understand. Regards, --Andreas JN 466 21:28, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Please also note my reply on Meta. Best, Andreas JN 466 13:56, 30 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No you are not reading it correctly. The projected $25.9 million and $8 million you quoted represent very different calculations, across different types of reporting and different periods of time. They should not be compared directly. We have answered more fully on the audit report talk page. --SLangan (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 30 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Taylor & Francis

"The Wikipedia Library has made Taylor & Francis academic journals automatically available for anyone with a Wikimedia unified login" – Anyone? Even if you don't meet the criteria? Nardog (talk) 04:58, 10 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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