Wikimedia Foundation finances; Superprotect is gone: WMF funding and the death and life of a controversial feature.
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On October 30, the Wikimedia Foundation posted its financial statements for the year ended June 30, 2015, as audited by KPMG.
As expected, the figures show that the Foundation is in better financial health than ever. The growth in revenue (up 44.5% over the year before) and assets (up 45.5%) far outstripped growth in expenditure (up 14.6%).
Here is an overview of the most important figures (rounded):
As can be seen, the biggest expense item is salaries and wages, a reflection of the fact that the Foundation now has the money to employ over 280 paid staff (up from around 225 this time last year, and up from 11 in 2007). Staff grew by around 35% in 2014–15, 23% in 2013–14, 22% in 2012–13, 53% in 2011–12, and 56% in 2010–11.
Internet hosting, the Foundation's main expense item in its early years, now costs less than donations processing, and less than travel and conferences.
As the Foundation prepares for its year-end fundraiser, mailing-list debates about the appropriateness of "scary" fundraising banners asking readers of Wikipedia to donate money to "keep it online" continue, based on the fact that the Foundation is far better off today than it has been at any other point in its history, and most of the money spent serves other purposes than merely keeping Wikipedia online (see previous Signpost coverage: 1, 2). The Foundation has taken nearly a quarter billion dollars over the past five years.
Even so, the Foundation is concerned about its long-term financial prospects: the number of page views and unique visitors is in decline, as is Wikimedia projects' reach. Desktop views of the English Wikipedia, the main source of donations in the annual year-end fundraiser, are particularly strongly affected.
The Foundation's 2015–2016 annual plan calls for a 17% growth in budget and revenues of $73M (including $5M to start an endowment), with a "stretch goal" to exceed the fundraising target by 20%, equivalent to a revenue total of around $88M. AK
The Wikimedia Foundation announced on November 5 that the controversial "Superprotect" feature has been removed from Wikimedia servers.
| “ | Superprotect [1] was introduced by the Wikimedia Foundation to resolve a product development disagreement. We have not used it for resolving a dispute since. Consequently, today we are removing Superprotect from Wikimedia servers.
Without Superprotect, a symbolic point of tension is resolved. However, we still have the underlying problem of disagreement and consequent delays at the product deployment phase. We need to become better software partners, work together towards better products, and ship better features faster. The collaboration between the WMF and the communities depends on mutual trust and constructive criticism. We need to improve Wikimedia mechanisms to build consensus, include more voices, and resolve disputes. There is a first draft of an updated Product Development Process [2] that will guide the work of the WMF Engineering and Product teams.[3] It stresses the need for community feedback throughout the process, but particularly in the early phases of development. More feedback earlier will allow us to incorporate community-driven improvements and address potential controversy while plans and software are most flexible. We welcome the feedback of technical and non-technical contributors. Check the Q&A for details.[4] |
” |
As one thousand of us requested, Superprotect has been removed
11 November 2015
Wikimedia Foundation finances; Superprotect is gone
4 November 2015
Superprotect, one year later; a contentious RfA
12 August 2015
Media Viewer—Wikimedia's emotional roller-coaster
27 August 2014
Media Viewer controversy spreads to German Wikipedia
13 August 2014
Superprotect was a special level of protection designed to restrict editing of certain wiki pages (in particular software configuration files) to Wikimedia Foundation employees in the Staff global group. It was implemented on August 10, 2014, and used the same day to stop a volunteer administrator on the German Wikipedia from disabling the new Media Viewer feature, which, in its original form, had attracted widespread criticism on both the German and English Wikipedias.
This followed a similar power struggle between the Foundation and its volunteer community in September 2013, when Kww, a volunteer administrator in the English Wikipedia, successfully implemented community consensus to return another software feature much criticised at the time, the VisualEditor, to opt-in status in the English Wikipedia, overriding the Foundation (see previous Signpost coverage).
The introduction of the Superprotect feature, designed to prevent a repeat of this scenario in the case of the Media Viewer, elicited widespread community protest; an open letter to the Foundation condemning the measure was signed by nearly 1,000 Wikimedia volunteers, a record in Wikimedia history.
Speaking at the November 2015 WMF Metrics meeting, executive director Lila Tretikov said:
| “ | We wanted to remove Superprotect. Superprotect set up a precedent of mistrust, and this is something that was really important for us to remove, to at least come back to the baseline of a relationship where we're working together, we're one community, to create a better process. To make sure that we can move together faster, and everybody is part of that process, and everybody is part of that conversation, not just us here at WMF. | ” |
The move was widely welcomed by volunteers and Foundation employees.
Addressing a question as to whether Superprotect had been completely removed from the MediaWiki software underlying Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites, the Foundation's lead software architect Brion Vibber provided the following clarification on the Wikimedia-l mailing list:
| “ | There is no code specific to "superprotect"; it's the exact same MediaWiki permissions/protection system that lets users in the 'sysop' group override the ability of anonymous or regular users to edit particular pages. Technically nothing has changed – particular protection levels can be added and removed via configuration at any time if they are needed.
In other words – ignore the superprotect red herring! Please look at the documentation of the product process and give feedback on that, it's much, MUCH more important: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Product_Development_Process |
” |
AK
Discuss this story
Page view stats: Technical note
Note that a technical note has just been added to the Wikimedia Foundation page view stats, which reads as follows:
Also, the new data stream does exclude housekeeping traffic (mainly used for fundraising banners). As usage grew these so called HideBanner requests became far more numerous even than actual traffic on smaller Wikimedia projects (not on Wikipedia). We will update the reports soon, to make the impact of this 'pollution' visible, which affected much of 2014 and first four months of 2015.
Thanks for your patience.
While the decline in page views started well before May this year, this adjustment means it is less severe than the Foundation's figures and graphs show. 20:38, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
Donations processing expenses?
Why 2.6M??? Nergaal (talk) 21:48, 7 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Control expenses now!
The chart shows support+revenue, expenses, and net assets all rising exponentially with a growth rate much greater than the economy as a whole. This cannot and will not continue. Inevitably, donations will level off (or go down) in the not too distant future. If expenses continue to grow rapidly when that happens, then we will quickly go into the red and then go bust. The time to start limiting expenses is now before support levels off. JRSpriggs (talk) 13:15, 9 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]