If strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community, can we not increase the support to the community?

Simple summary: If the community is under threat and strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community, we suggest that a simple, straightforward strategy would be to increase the financial investment in the community. Given the importance of the volunteer editor community to Wikipedia and its mission, spending 25% on the community seems like a minimum, but looking at WMF financial documents reveals only 13% of donations go to the community in the form of grants and the average community leader salary is far below the average WMF gross gross salary. On its 25th birthday, WMF committing to spending 25% of donations to support the community would be a move toward equity and sustainability for the movement. We estimate affiliates or the community could hire over 100 people at the average WMF salary or about 250 at the US national average salary.

By the counting of the WMF, the Wikimedia movement is made up of approximately 265,000 volunteers each month (https://wikimediafoundation.org/). 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^[1]; Jemielniak, 2026^[2])

Here I suggest that in celebration of its 25th year and in the face of concerns about this community (which resulted in its being strategy point 1.1), the WMF spend 25% of its revenues on supporting its community. Not only to bolster what already works, but to try new things; in particular, to identify ways to make contributing sustainable and professionally valuable for contributors. In my opinion, the way to achieve multi-generational sustainability for the movement or mission is to help turn contributor's volunteer efforts into something that is professionally valuable and pays for their good living, similar to the way it is for WMF employees (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024^[3], Buttliere, Vetter, Rasberry, Pensa, Mietchen, & Mkrtchyan, 2025^[4])..

He who has the gold makes the rules.

How can we increase the support to the community? Well, in fiscal 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation brought in 208 million USD in revenue, mostly from donations, and spent approximately 191 million USD over the course of that year (Figure 2 below; Wikimedia Financial Statement 2025; page 6^[5]).

The good news is that 200 million USD is quite a substantial revenue and enough to solve any problem the WMF turns its attention to; a theoretical 25% spend rate would mean that up to 50 million USD could be used to support community actions or given as grants.

As you can see in Figure 2, the WMF gives out approximately 28.7 million USD, or about ~15% of the money it spends each year, as grants, which is the main mechanism the WMF supports the community through. This is lower than I—and I think many—expected, especially as the volunteer editor community is absolutely vital to Wikimedia and the upkeep of its projects.

For perspective, internet hosting costs about 4 million a year, other operating expenses in general cost about 8 million a year, and travel and conferences about 6.5 million a year. Salaries and benefits for WMF employees is 114 million.

So Wikimedia is spending significant money on the community, but actually, getting to a 25% spend rate would mean essentially doubling the amount spent currently. The upside is that this could double (13% to 25%) the support the community receives while staying within a reasonable limit. In my opinion, this is a layup easy move for an organization where strategy 1.1 is support volunteers. Even 25% of revenue sounds quite modest for such a community driven organization which strives to be an example, so I would suggest this be increased each year, to keep in line with how old Wikimedia is, up to perhaps 90%. This would require a very different mindset at WMF, one in which its mission is to facilitate the community, where as now perhaps they are trying to do things themselves.

If WMF has so much money, why do i always feel poor?

Many of the biggest problems for Wikimedia projects 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 themselves need to make a living. This also applies to most community leaders and people who put really a lot of effort into Wikimedia (e.g., administrators, users with extended rights).

Except for those who work at WMF or a few large affiliates, the people who work within the community of Wikimedia in many cases are doing it as a volunteer or as an un(der)paid community leader. These are exactly the people that WMF should be supporting, because they are doing it because they want to, not for the money and even sometimes at the cost of their own happiness, family, or career.

where does all of this money go? Well the salaries of the people who work at WMF make up the large bulk of the budget, at at 114 million per year. If one adds 'Professional service expenses' to salaries, 68% of the budget is going to salaries.

Making the mission about supporting volunteers

The suggestion that I would make for the next 25 years for the sustainability of the movement is that the WMF should transition to fostering the community and supporting it in achieving its mission, rather than unnecessarily trying to do everything itself. I have written extensively about the need to make contributing to Wikimedia valuable as professional activity (Buttliere et al., 2025/2026).

In general, the idea should be to free existing volunteers up to do more of the work that they already are, or want to be, doing. In our studies of Wikimedia academics (Buttliere & Vetter, 2024), we found that many academic contributors want to be doing more, and are even doing more at their own expense (e.g., in terms of publishing papers or 'doing the work their boss wants'). They’re contributing even though it is probably hurting their professional prospects, because their work for Wikimedia unfortunately does not translate that well into professional careers.

One of the themes Wikimedia has set out to achieve for 2026 is trying new things quickly (2026 annual plan^[6]). It is key to remember that increasing the budget spent on the community could mean both better supporting the ongoing successes and also funding new initiatives. I believe the act of committing larger funds to making contributing a valuable activity in itself is wise (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024).

Where would the extra 20 million come from?

If the target is to spend 25% of 190 million USD (WMF’s average operating expenses) on the community, the question is where could this extra ~ 20 million in funding for the community come from? We are essentially looking for about 10% of their budget, which, although not large overall, is again almost doubling the budget for the community.

Figure 2 shows the income (top) and operating expenses of the foundation (bottom). One can see that 20 million is not very large compared to some 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 do not give it to Wikimedia. Four percent seems at first glance quite high, and reducing this expense by 50% saves the community 4 million USD and still means that these middle people get to make 4 million on a system they can hopefully use for other clients as well. That 4 million is already 20% of the budget that we are looking for.

To make informed decisions, one would need a more detailed summary of the budget, but looking at the expenses of the 190 million dollars Wikimedia spent in 2025, almost 130 million (68.4%) of it was spent on salaries and professional services. Again, about 15.3% of it going explicitly to the community by way of awards and grants.

What is also interesting is that the foundation only reports having about 650 staff (Who we are^[7]), meaning WMF spends about ~177,000 USD per employee. This is a very good salary, approximately 2.25 times the national US average, and I believe that all Wikimedians deserve such a salary! My question is whether community leaders and contributors have such high salaries.

My suspicion is that this 177,000 USD is multiple times higher than the average salary of community members, and especially those very often part time community leaders who get e.g., 1,000 USD a month. This is a simple survey to do among administrators or other extended privileges users, simply asking them their salary and working to make it comparable to those at WMF. Looking at some of the grants awarded to even relatively large affiliates, my suspicion is that community salaries are far lower. The problem is that there’s just not enough money to go around; which is exactly why I think increasing the funding could be so useful. Thus, this increase in investment would be a move toward more equality in the movement.

What an extra 20 million could do.

Putting an extra 20 million toward the community, or giving the community control of this money, would allow it to hire 112 Wikimedians at the average salary as those working at WMF, and if we make it the average salary in the US (~75,000 USD), we could hire another 266 people full time. WMF reports that there are 179 affiliate groups in good standing^[8]. This would mean that every affiliate could hire another person (full time!), with a good salary, and there would still be at least 50 new initiatives that could be tried (if new initiatives have 2 half time people to start).

Investing in greater equality between the community and WMF would already be a worthwhile move. For a movement founded on equality and openness to knowledge, it is interesting that the average WMF employee earns ~2.25x the average salary in the US, which also puts them into the 1% worldwide ^[9].

Due to the law of large numbers, and also that so many Wikimedia volunteers are students, it is quite likely that the average community salary is similar to the US or worldwide average (it is extremely unlikely the 265,000 volunteer average salary is 2.25x the overall average). Some early readers of this post and long time contributors may be worried about the extrinsic motivations which making editing financially valuable could bring, but these are the same motivations that WMF is using to hire employees. Therefore, this is not a convincing argument.

Equalizing the salaries of WMF employees and average volunteer editors part of the community, or of community leaders, creates equality and truly empowers the community that actually makes up the Wikimedia movement. It allows us to get the best out of the people that we have, and also will go a long way toward making engaging with Wikimedia an attractive thing to do.

At minimum, in the face of accusations that the foundation is doing nothing, I believe this is a move that the foundation can make that few in the community would have a problem with.