A Layup Easy Proposal for Wikimedia at 25: Spend 25% of Donations on the Community
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, 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 toward funding community proposals by way of grants and only a smaller proportion of that going to pay community people's time. 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. I estimate 'the community' could hire over 100 people at the average WMF salary or about 250 at the US national average salary, which in turn could work on community determined objectives and goals (e.g., starting a volunteer union or whatever else you propose).
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]) [3]
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 *at least* 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. Turning contributor's volunteer efforts into something that is professionally valuable and pays for their decent living is the way to achieve multi-generational sustainability for the movement or mission (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024[4], Buttliere, Vetter, Rasberry, Pensa, Mietchen, & Mkrtchyan, 2025[5])..
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 US$208 million in revenue, mostly from donations, and spent approximately US$191 million over the course of that year (Figure 2 below; Wikimedia Financial Statement 2025; page 6[6]).
The good news is that US$200 million 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 US$50 million could be used to support community actions or given as grants.
As you can see in Figure 2, the WMF gives out approximately US$28.7 million, or about ~15% of the money it spends each year (13% of revenue), as grants, which is the main mechanism the WMF supports the community financially through. This is lower than I—and I think many—expected, especially as the volunteer editor community is so 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 are 114 million.
So Wikimedia is spending money on the community, but actually, getting to a ~52 million/ 25% spend rate would mean doubling the amount spent currently (28.7 million spent currently; 13% to 25%). The upside is that this could double the support the community, affiliates, or new projects receives. To me it feels like 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 (26% next year, then 27%, 28%, 29%), up to perhaps 90%. This would require a different mindset at WMF, one in which its mission is to facilitate the community, where as now perhaps they are trying to do (too many) things themselves or they feel some responsibility, which also results in projects that the community is not happy with and does not take up - because it is not the way they would have done it.
Where does all of this 208 million go? Well the single largest section in the budget is that the salaries of the people who work at WMF, at 114 million per year. If one adds 'Professional service expenses' to salaries, 68% of the budget is going to salaries. The key that rubs me a little bit the wrong way is that the salaries WMF is offering are far far higher than what is available on community projects or in the grants that WMF makes to the community, or even the average worker in the US in general.
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 effect has large implications also for biases on the project, because only certain types of people can afford to volunteer more than a small amount. 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. This is also evidenced by the focus in the last years being on recruiting new editors, and the focus on recruiting students and young people, rather than making editing an attractive thing to do for adults or professionals in general. If contributing is an attractive or valu-able activity people will come on their own. Indeed, we can have a discussion whether it is better to struggle to get people to come or struggle to keep too many even bad intentioned people from coming - right now we have the problem not enough people are coming, so let's worry about that situation when we come to it.
Making the mission about supporting volunteers
The idea 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. There is tension now both that the foundation does not listen to the community and also that everything the foundation does is wrong. People at the foundation are stressed and feel overwhelmed, and people in the community feel unheard and resentful when things don't turn out as they want.
This is perhaps and probably because WMF is trying to do everything its self, rather than helping the people in the community do the things they want to do. This can also be seen in the recent community wishlist debacle (Orlowitz, 2026[7]). Instead of establishing a way to help the people with the wishes do it, an elaborate structure was set up to vote on wishes and then the foundation implement them. Basically, we are taking work from people who really want to do it and paying a lot of community resource money to people who see it as a task and for which they are almost surely going to be criticized anyways so they are demotivated from the start.
This is a perfect example where helping those who are already doing it do more of it makes much more sense as a general way of doing things. Not only do the volunteers have the drive that makes good work, they are likely to accept much less money for doing it and probably even do a better, more community accepted, job. At least, people at the foundation should interface with them and maybe lead a group of volunteers to help them in their own work. If the argument is that the budget is not big enough to really pay people directly (though there are 150 million in salary already being managed), at least let's make contributing valuable as professional activity for people to do so that they are not hurting themselves by contributing (Buttliere et al., 2024/2025/2026).
In general, the idea should be to free existing contributors up to do more of the work that they already are, or want to be, doing. The problem is those volunteers need to go and also have another job, which limits their availability. In our studies of Wikimedia academics (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 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 are contributing even though it is probably hurting their professional prospects, because their work for Wikimedia unfortunately does not translate well into professional careers or tenure criteria. WMF or the community should be there in a way to help that individual make value, including mentorship and start up funds.
One of the themes Wikimedia has set out to achieve for 2026 is trying new things quickly (2026 annual plan[8]). Increasing the budget spent on the community could mean both better supporting the ongoing successes and also funding new initiatives.
Where would the extra 20 million come from?
If the target is to spend 25% of US$190 million (WMF's 2025 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 the overall budget, which, although not large overall, again is actually almost doubling the budget for community projects and grants made by the foundation.
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 US$8 million. 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 US$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. A quick and uneducated google search shows companies in the 100 million range that are ready to do it for 2%. 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 and only a smaller portion of this going to paying for the time of community leaders. This is a pretty serious imbalance, especially when considering the relative size of those two groups.
In looking to estimate the size of these groups we were surprised to find that the foundation only reports having about 650 staff (Who we are[9]), meaning WMF spends about ~US$177,000 per employee. This also tracks quite well with the salaries that are being offered currently by WMF, which often run from low 100s to 200,000s USD. This is a very good salary, approximately 2.25 times the national US average, and I believe that all Wikimedians deserve such a salary - especially the long time volunteers and editors. My question is whether community leaders and contributors really have such high salaries, my impression is that their average salary is much lower.
My suspicion is that this US$177,000 is multiple times higher than the average salary of community members, and especially those very often part time community leaders who get e.g., US$1,000 a month for half their working effort. 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 lower, but it is not a study i have done yet (because it is more than a volunteer effort and who would pay for my time to do it?). The problem is that there is just not enough money to go around; which is exactly why increasing the funding to the community could be so useful. This increase in investment would also be a move toward more equality in the movement.
This funding imbalance is an obvious source of frustration and resentment between the community (the poors) and the foundation (the rich) that can be addressed in a manner that everyone can agree on, i.e., by increasing support to the community - i.e., strategy 1.1!
What an extra 20 million could do: Build Equality
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 (~US$75,000), we could hire another 266 people full time. I don't want to say exactly what I think all of those people should work on here, but WMF reports that there are 179 affiliate groups in good standing[10]. 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 more than twice the average salary in the US, which also puts them into the 1% worldwide [11]. It is tricky in my mind to argue that someone deserves US$30,000+ a month, when this same amount could is the budget for some whole community groups or a conference for 100 people.
Conversely, and due to the law of large numbers, and also because so many Wikimedia volunteers are students, it is quite likely that the average community salary is similar to the US or worldwide average. This is a major inequality, between community salaries and WMF salaries. Therefore, increasing the average salary by investing more in grants and community salaries could build sustainability, or at least allow us to 'try new things quickly'. Some early readers of this post and long time contributors have expressed worries that making editing professionally or financially valuable could bring extrinsic motivations. These are the same motivations that WMF is using to hire employees (high salaries), hence this is not a convincing argument to me at least.
Equalizing the salaries of WMF employees and average volunteer editors, or of community leaders, creates equality and truly empowers the community that actually makes up the Wikimedia movement. Such a move would allow 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. This in turn should make it easier to recruit and maintain contributors, making Wikimedia truly multigenerational.
At least it is something the community can probably agree to.
At minimum, in the face of accusations that the foundation is doing nothing, this is a move that WMF can make that few in the community would have a problem with, thus potentially becoming the start of a new relationship between the community and the foundation at a crucial time and 25 years for the project.
References
- ^ Henner, Christophe. "Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call".
- ^ Jemielniak, Dariusz (13 January 2026). "The academic community failed Wikipedia for 25 years — now it might fail us". Nature. pp. 530–530. doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00075-0.
- ^ Making Science Public Using the Wikimedia Ecosystem.
- ^ Buttliere, Brett; Vetter, Matthew; Ross, Sage. "Developing Wikimedia Impact Metrics as a Sociotechnical Solution for Encouraging Funder and Academic Engagement". Wiki Meta. Retrieved 12 February 2026.
- ^ Buttliere, Brett; Vetter, Matthew; Rasberry, Lane; Pensa, Iolanda; Mietchen, Daniel; Mkrtchyan, Susanna. "State of Science and Wikimedia: Who is doing what, and who is funding it?". Retrieved 12 February 2026.
- ^ Foundation, Wikimedia. "Wikimedia Foundation FY 24–25 audit report (Audit Report)" (PDF). Retrieved 12 February 2026.
- ^ Orlowitz, Jake (13 June 2026). "The Team That Granted Wishes". Regarding Wikipedia. Retrieved 9 July 2026.
- ^ Deckelmann, Selena; Product, Chief; Officer, Technology; Foundation, Wikimedia (10 December 2025). "Shaping Wikimedia Foundation's 2026-2027 annual goals: Key questions for the Wikimedia movement". Diff. Retrieved 12 February 2026.
- ^ Wikimedia, Foundation. "The Humans behind our knowledge". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 13 February 2026.
- ^ "Wikimedia movement affiliates/Affiliates Status Report - Meta-Wiki". meta.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 13 February 2026.
- ^ "Average salary in the US in 2025". Fidelity. 16 June 2025. Retrieved 13 February 2026.
Discuss this story
Well, I'd want to talk to the academics who do spend time editing Wikipedia to see what motivates them to contribute. Like asilvering, who has responded extensively above.
Research is only useful to the extent it allows us to improve Wikipedia. Generating more research is not the destination; it's a way to help us on the journey. HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 17:12, 15 July 2026 (UTC)reply(Several of these got multiple mentions but I don't list them more than once.)
As you can tell, your op-ed and comments have generated strong engagement and discussion already. My advice at this point would be to stop responding, and take stock of what has been written by many different contributors from very different backgrounds already. But if you feel like you really have to keep engaging with some of the discussion, this specific thread is likely the last one where you should be doing that. Choucas 🐦⬛ 22:25, 19 July 2026 (UTC)reply
Just once, I'd really like to see this kind of article written by someone who knows something about cost accounting.
What might be useful for people debating other people's pay checks to know: The WMF pays in the middle of the market. If you live in a famously expensive country, where the median employee in your role, with your skill level, has a salary of $x, you'll probably be paid something close to $x, too. If you instead live in a lower-income country, where most people get paid $y, then you'll probably get paid about $y, the same as your neighbors – and less than your colleague in that famously expensive country. Some people think this is unfair, but having one person only able to rent a room in a house and their colleague able to buy a mansion with live-in servants is unfair in a different way.
WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:18, 27 July 2026 (UTC)reply