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 to the community in the form of grants and the average community leader gross salary is far below the average WMF 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 *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 good living is the way to achieve multi-generational sustainability for the movement or mission, similar to the way contributing is valuable is for WMF employees (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024^[3], Buttliere, Vetter, Rasberry, Pensa, Mietchen, & Mkrtchyan, 2025^[4])..

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 (13% of revenue), 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 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 25% spend rate would mean doubling the amount spent currently (13% to 25%). The upside is that this could double the support the community 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 things that the community is not happy with - 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 to community projects or in the grants that WMF makes to the community, who are often working for only a small fraction of those amounts each month.

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. 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.

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. 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^[6]). 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.

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 (Buttliere et al., 2024/2025/2026).

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. 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.

One of the themes Wikimedia has set out to achieve for 2026 is trying new things quickly (2026 annual plan^[7]). Increasing the budget spent on the community could mean both better supporting the ongoing successes and also funding new initiatives.

If the target is to spend 25% of 190 million USD (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 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 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, #transparency, 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 directly to paying for the time of community leaders. This is a pretty serious imbalance, especially when considering the relative size of those two groups.

What is also interesting is that the foundation only reports having about 650 staff (Who we are^[8]), 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 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’s 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!

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!), 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 ^[10].

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 leader 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 may be worried 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 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.