Increasing WMF spend on the community to 25% could go a long way toward supporting a struggling community.

By the counting of WMF, the Wikimedia movement is 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^[1]; Jemielniak, 2026^[2])

Increase support to the struggling community. If the problem is a struggling community, increasing spending on the community is an obvious solution.

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Here I suggest that in celebration of its 25th year and in the face of concerns about this community which result in its being strategy point 1.1, 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 for contributors (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024^[3], Buttliere, Vetter, Rasberry, Pensa, Mietchen, & Mkrtchyan, 2025^[4]).

In fiscal 2025, the foundation brought in 208 million USD in revenue, mostly donations, and spent approximately 191 million USD in the year (Figure 2 below; Wikimedia Financial Statement 2025; page 6^[5]).

The good news is that 200 million is substantial revenue and enough to solve any problems. The first step though is to see how the money is being spent, so we looked at the Wikimedia Foundations financial documents. A theoretical 25% spend rate would mean that up to 50 million could be used to support community actions or given as grants.

As you can see in Figure 2 that 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 WMF supports the community through. This is a lower than one might expect, especially as the volunteer community is extremely important, even central, to Wikimedia.

Increasing the amount directly spent on or granted to the community to 25% is essentially an ‘investment in the community’ and a gesture of goodwill, as well as an equity and equality making move, from WMF to the community (for, 'he who has the gold makes the rules'^[6]) - there is a separate discussion to be had about how to realign WMF and the community.

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Thus, a 25% spend rate, while sounding rather modest given the importance of the volunteer community to Wikimedia’s mission, would mean actually nearly doubling the amount spent currently, and could provide in turn for nearly a doubling the support the WMF is able to offer to the community. This should be an easy move to get behind for an organization where strategy 1.1 is support volunteers.

A commitment to supporting volunteers needs to go beyond strategy initiative pictures and into the finances of the business.

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 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 almost all cases they are doing it as a volunteer or as an un(der)paid community leader. But in fact, these are exactly the people that WMF should be supporting, because they are doing it because they want to, literally not for the money and even at the cost of their own e.g., happiness, family, or career.

Making the mission about supporting volunteers

If I can make a suggestion for the next 25 years on the sustainability of the movement, WMF should transition to fostering the community and support it in achieving its mission, rather than necessarily 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 Wiki 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'). That is, they are contributing even though it is probably hurting their professional prospects, because their work for Wikimedia does not translate that well into the coin of the realm, papers and citations.

One of the new themes in Wikimedia for 2026 is trying new things quickly (2026 annual plan^[7]). 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. Again, i believe committing some funds to making contributing a valuable activity in its self is wise (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024).

Where would the extra 20 million come from?

If the target is to spend 25% of 190 million (WMF 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% in the 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 (the bottom part). 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 give it to Wikimedia. Four percent seems at first glance quite high and reducing this expense by 50% saves the community 4 million 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 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^[8]), meaning WMF spends about ~ 177,000$ 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 177,000USD is multiples higher than the average salary of community members, and especially those very often part time community leaders who get e.g., 1,000USD 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 is just not enough money to go around = exactly why i think increasing the funding could be so useful. Thus, this increase in investment can be seen as 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^[9], this would mean that every affiliate could hire another person (full time!), and 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. In a movement founded on equality and openness to knowledge, it is interesting that the average WMF employee earns ~2.25 the average salary in the US, which also puts them into the 1% worldwide ^[10].

Due to the laws 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 worried about the extrinsic motivations which making editing valuable could bring, but these are the same motivations that WMF is using to hire people i.e., high salaries. - so in my opinion this is not a convincing argument.

Equalizing the salaries of WMF employees and average in the community, or of community leaders, creates equality and truly empowers the community which actually makes up the Wikimedia movement. It also 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.

tldr/ Simple Summary

If strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community (Figure 1), we suggest a simple - straightforward - strategy would be to increase the investment in the community. 25% seems like a good round number that is not burdensome, especially given the relative size and importance of the community for the mission, and it will be enough to substantially increase (nearly double) the amount of support both for existing successes and new initiatives. We estimate we could hire over 100 extra people at the average WMF salary or about 250 at the US national average salary.

NabuKudurru (talk) 13:59, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]