Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/News and notes
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Wikimedia Foundation publishes its Form 990 for fiscal year 2022-2023
Form 990: WMF now holding quarter-billion dollars[edit]
The Form 990 is a United States Internal Revenue Service document that provides the public with financial information about a nonprofit organization. It is often the only source of such information. The Wikimedia Foundation recently published its Form 990 for the 2022–2023 financial year, along with an FAQ on Meta and a public-facing blog post. Here is a very brief summary of some key points:
- Total revenue was $180.2M ($173.4M in donations and grants, $3M in investment income, and $3.8M of "other revenue", such as funds coming from Wikimedia Enterprise), up from $167.9M.
- Total expenditure was $168.3M, up from $145.8M.
- According to the FAQ, 43% of this went to technology, 33% went to support volunteers, 11% went to fundraising expenses, and 13% went to general and administrative support.
Net assets at the end of the year (not including the $120M Wikimedia Endowment) were $254,971,336 (up from $239,351,532).
"Direct support to volunteers"?[edit]
The WMF blog post and the FAQ further mention that –
Our second largest expense category is direct support to volunteers. A third of our expenses went to support volunteers totalling $56.1M, of which $24.7M is given as grants to community groups for their work towards the Wikimedia mission.
Careful readers will note that this says nothing about what the remaining $31.4M was spent on. The paragraph continues:
You can find out more about the grants in this fiscal year in the Wikimedia Foundation Funding Report.
This sounded promising. But the linked Wikimedia Foundation Funding Report covers "grants to mission-aligned organizations and people around the world, totaling $17,512,472". Disappointingly, the figure of $24.7M is nowhere to be found on the page.
As we were drafting this article – in public, as we usually do – the WMF added an explanation to the FAQ on 30 May 2024 that the $24.7M additionally includes –
- $4M for Wikidata,
- $1.5M in grants to the Wikimedia Endowment,
- $1M for Knowledge Equity, and
- $800K in scholarships for two Wikimanias.
This is welcome information. However, the $17.5M that are accounted for in the Wikimedia Foundation Funding Report already include $1M for the Knowledge Equity Fund. According to this, then, there were two separate Knowledge Equity grants for $1M each. Right?
And apart from the Wikimania scholarships, none of the items mentioned – support for Wikidata, the Endowment and the Knowledge Equity Fund, which gives grants to various NGOs unrelated to the Wikimedia projects (see previous Signpost coverage) – would seem to benefit volunteers directly. So why are they included under "direct support to volunteers"? Moreover, whichever way one cuts it, we were still well over $30M short of the claimed $56.1M volunteer support total.
But the edit made to the FAQ on 30 May addressed that too. It added the following new text to the FAQ:
The Foundation spent $56.1M on support for volunteers in FY 22-23, of which $24.7M was given as grants to community groups for their work towards the Wikimedia mission (line 4b in Part III). The remaining spend of $31.4M funded volunteer support work led by Wikimedia Foundation teams, including legal support, trust and safety support, community programs like GLAM and education work, partnerships, public policy work, human rights work, community research such as the Community Insights survey, and communications. Through these activities, the Foundation aims to support, protect and advocate for volunteers, and expand the impact and reach of the Wikimedia projects.
The information added to the FAQ does improve the page. But it still seems odd that the $56.1M spent on "direct support to volunteers" should include $7.5M in grants given to Wikidata, the Wikimedia Endowment and the Knowledge Equity Fund. One gets the sense that these may be "broad strokes" data published for PR purposes, rather than rigorously sourced figures.
Salaries and severance payments[edit]
The WMF's salary costs were up from $88.1M to $96.8M. Page 9 tells us that 252 individuals (up from 233) received more than $100,000 in reportable compensation. Page 53 of the Form tells us that there were no big raises for Wikimedia executives in 2022–2023. In fact, some of the top earners' total compensation shrank slightly, with increases in base salaries cancelled out by the absence of bonuses and incentives (cf. previous year). Ten executives had total compensation above $300K; figures for the top five on page 53, column E, are:
- Maryana Iskander, CEO: $534,468
- Jaime Villagomez, CFO & Treasurer: $418,040
- Lisa Seitz, CAO and Deputy CEO: $411,984
- Amanda Keton, General Counsel & Sec (through 23 February): $411,682
- Robyn Arville, Chief T&C Officer: $384,200
Severance payments (page 54) were:
- $248,228 for Robyn Arville
- $111,383 for Anthony Negrin
- $94,738 for Carol Dunn
Below, for your reference, is the announcement the WMF's Elena Lappen submitted to us for publication in The Signpost. – AK
WMF announcement[edit]
The Wikimedia Foundation released its Form 990 for fiscal year July 2022 – June 2023 on 14 May. It is now available on the Foundation website, along with FAQs available on Meta. The Form 990 is the annual tax form required of all nonprofits in the United States. It contains disclosures about an organization’s finances, governance practices, activities and more. The highlights of the Foundation's 2022–2023 Form 990 show: high ratings for governance policies; information about leadership transitions; revenue numbers supported mostly by donations; slow growth in expenses driven primarily by an increase in the grants budget and in personnel costs; and expense breakdowns that aligned with the 2022–2023 Annual Plan goals. More details about these highlights are available in a summary post on Diff. Questions and comments can be left on the FAQ talk page.
New York Times, NPR and Reuters block Wikipedia editors from citing their articles[edit]
A bug filed on April 12 (phab:T362379) uncovered that "several major news websites (NYT, NPR, Reuters...) block citoid", the service underlying the "Add a citation" tool in Wikipedia's Visual Editor. The tool retrieves metadata (like author, title and publication date) from the cited site to generate a reference, and fails with a "we couldn't make a citation for you" message in those cases.
As explained by the Wikimedia Foundation's Citoid expert Marielle Volz:
The NYTimes has been blocking us for a while, it briefly worked when we changed datacenters and ergo IP, but they've understandably reblocked us after a few weeks' reprieve!
[...]
This is partly a consequence of the fact that over the last few years our traffic has increased a lot, we didn't used to trigger IP blocks as often.
Sam Walton (who, as product manager for The Wikipedia Library, maintains contact with various publishers including Elsevier, whose ScienceDirect database appears affected too) confirmed that
We've been explicitly told by at least one organisation that the block is deliberate unfortunately, due to concerns with the volume of traffic. I agree that there are convincing reasons for them not to block us and that it is ultimately in their best interests - we'll just have to see how these conversations go.
However, other comments questioned whether the rate of citations requested (which on average only amount to a few per second overall according to one commenter) could really be the root cause of overloading the APIs of external sites, and further discussion veered into an investigation whether Citoid itself might be generating an excessive amount of traffic, possibly due to issues with the Zotero service that it relies on.
At the time of writing, the tool worked again for a New York Times article but was still failing for examples from NPR and Reuters. – H
U4C election results in no quorum[edit]
Results were announced on May 31 by the chair of the Elections Committee for the first U4C elections, with only seven of the sixteen seats filled. Thirty other candidates did not receive the required 60% support from the voters. The U4C serves "as final recourse in the case of systemic failures by local groups to enforce the UCoC."
Eight members of the committee are required to form a quorum to vote or to make any decision, though the committee may still conduct discussion. The only exception is that they may set the scope and call a special election to seat additional members. 0xDeadbeef, one of the newly elected members, states that a new election could be held "earliest in September" and that so far "there doesn't appear to be any progress" in finding a way to secure a quorum. Another newly elected member, Ghilt adds that changes to the rules are contemplated: "It is obvious that the current set of rules is partially dysfunctional."
Three candidates were elected to fill regional seats:
- Ghilt (Northern and Western Europe) – home Wiki German
- Ibrahim.ID (Middle East and Northern Africa) – home Wiki Arabic
- 0xDeadbeef (East, South East Asia and Pacific) – home Wiki English
Four candidates were elected to fill community-at-large seats:
- Superpes15 – home Wiki Italian
- Barkeep49 – home Wiki English
- Civvì – home Wiki Italian
- Luke081515 – home Wiki German
The Signpost thanks all candidates, the election committee, and voters for their participation. – S
WikiConference in Indiana, 4–6 October 2024[edit]
Wikimedians of Indiana User Group, other Hoosier Wikimedians, and the WikiConference North America team invite the world to WikiConference North America in Indianapolis, Indiana on 4–6 October. Scholarships were available to attendees in North America until 31 May. Submissions are currently being sought, with no posted deadline, but the sooner the better. – BR
Brief notes[edit]
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- Annual reports: Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia España, Wikimedians of Slovakia.
- New administrators: There are no new administrators to report. Two requests for adminship (RfAs) in the waning days of May were closed as unsuccessful, and another one that began on 31 May is still running. The last successful RfA was in February — one of just four successful RfAs this year — making 2024 one of the four least productive January–May periods on record. Only 2018 and 2023 were less productive, according to the monthly charts. The list of active administrators stands at 436 as of 31 May, one greater than the record low reported in the last issue of The Signpost.
- WikiCup: In the annual WikiCup, editors compete to improve and create content, earning points for various types of work. The competition is divided into multiple rounds, each progressively narrowing down the participants. We are now in Round 3, and the leaders are currently
Generalissima (752 points), 
AryKun (415 points), 
Skyshifter (403 points), 
OlifanofmrTennant (261 points), and 
Hey man im josh (235 points). In this round, there are a total of 3882 points altogether. - Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Sun Management Center, followed next week by State of emergency. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
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