Optional: write a lede — not necessarily a WP:LEAD. Interesting > encyclopedic.

By the counting of WMF, Wikimedia is a community made up of approximately 265,000 volunteers each month (https://wikimediafoundation.org/). While this is amazing, there have been concerns about its community aging, flagging, and not being replaced. Upon Wikimedia’s 25th birthday and in the face of fewer readers and a tiring Wikimedia community, there have been calls for bold proposals and new directions (Schiste, 2026; Jemielniak, 2026)

Here I suggest that in celebration of its 25th year and in the face of concerns about this community, WMF spends 25% of its revenues on supporting its community, specifically to try new things and also to identify ways to make contributing sustainable and valu-able (Buttliere et al., 2024, 2025). Making contributing valu-able is key in my opinion. In 2024, the foundation brought in 208 million USD in revenue, mostly donations, and spent approximately 191 million USD in the year (Wikimedia Financial Statement 2025; page 6). The good news is that this is substantial revenue and should be enough to solve any problems. A 25% spend target on the community means between 48 and 52 million could be spent in support of the community (191 or 208 * .25). The somewhat bad news is that currently WMF only gives out approximately ~15% (28.7 million USD/ 191 million) of the money donated to it in grants to support the community. Increasing is essentially an ‘investment in the community’.

Thus, a 25% spend rate, while sounding rather modest given the importance of the community to Wikimedia’s mission, would mean nearly doubling the amount spent currently (25% is 47.7 million vs 28.7 million now), and should provide for nearly a doubling of the community support that is provided. Doubling the budget would double the support to the community.

Many of the biggest problems for Wikimedia are due to the limitation that Wikimedia has on being mostly a volunteer organization. This limits the amount of time that people can put in, because they also need to make a living. When people work within the community of Wikimedia, in almost all cases they are doing it as a volunteer or as an un(der)paid community leader. In fact, these are exactly the people that we should be hiring, because they are doing it because they want to, literally not for the money. The idea should be (in my opinion) to spend this money to free existing volunteers up to do more of the work that they already are or want to be doing. One of the new themes in Wikimedia for 2026 is trying new things quickly (2026 annual plan). Doubling the budget could mean both better supporting the ongoing successes and also funding new initiatives. Since grants are a generally inefficient way to disperse funds (high tax and indirect rates), the money can also be used indirectly, to make contributing in general a valuable activity. One way we are advocating to spend more funds is to make the activity of contributing valuable to other decision makers (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024). Recent work within WikiScience for instance, has worked on developing better metrics which universities and funders can use to see which edits are related to which grants or researchers and thus their impact. If we can make contributing to WikiMedia valuable to do, then organizations will pay their people to do it (Buttliere, Vetter & Ross, 2024). If we can get academics contributing consistently as a part of their open science work, they teach many of the other professions that we want involved and open knowledge becomes institutionalized, thus multigenerational (Buttliere et al., 2025). These programs can be cheap, for instance awards for individuals at organizations that are engaging (which in turn also rewards contributors indirectly).

If WMF is distributing 13.8% now, where could this extra 11.2% come from? The question is where could this extra funding for the community come from? The budget is obviously limited (at 208 million), and each dollar that goes to the community needs to come from somewhere else. We understand this is a discussion about redistribution of funds. Figure 2 shows the income (top) and operating expenses of the foundation (the bottom part). Targeting a 25% spend would mean looking for approximately 20 extra million in the general budget, which is again only about 10% of the overall budget. This is small compared to some other categories. For instance, donation processing expenses are more than 8 million USD. This means that ~3.9% of all the money that is donated to Wikimedia goes to middle people who take the money from the donor and give it to Wikimedia. Four percent seems awfully high and reducing this expense by 50% gives 4 million and still means that these middle people still get to make 4 million. That is 20% of the budget that we need to look for.

To make serious decisions, one would need a more detailed summary, but when looking at the expenses, by far the largest columns are basically for the salaries of people who work for WMF. Of the 190 million Wikimedia spent in 2025, almost 130 million (68.4%) of it was spent on salaries and professional services, with only 15.3% of it going to the community by way of awards and grants. What is also interesting is that the foundation only reports having about 650 staff, meaning WMF spends about ~ 177,000$ per employee, approximately 2.25 times the national US average, not counting additional costs like travel to conferences or technology. The next questions I want to ask are whether community leaders within Wikimedia and those extremely important administrators and users with extended rights who make the project work have a similarly high salary as WMF employees. My suspicion is that they are actually below average. To me, one clear and obvious next step would be to better equalize the salaries between WMF employees and community leaders, not only so that we can get the best out of the people that we have, but also so that we can attract real talent to the community.

Looking at it from the volunteer’s perspective, I could see how there would be frustration and even resentment toward WMF, which might also explain the persistent tension between the community and WMF. Equalizing WMF and community leader salaries seems like a good first step showing community true equality. Investing in the community probably means increasing the amount spent on them (currently about 108$ per volunteer; 28.7 mil/ 265,000). In the face of a lagging community, investing in the community is a good first step.