User Feed Me Your Skin agreed to re-publish an original guide on Wikimedia, which can be found on his personal blog, on The Signpost. This is being presented as a multi-part series of columns in this space. – Signpost Editors

The role of The Wikimedia Foundation in this article has been like the foundation's role in the movement: omnipresent yet in the background. Now, I want to look at the foundation as something deserving of study on its own.

The foundation is run by a board of trustees composed of 16 people. Under current regulations, the board is made up of Jimmy Wales, 7 people appointed by the board, and 8 people elected by the community. The board votes on resolutions, with assistance from various committees. By regulation, the committees must have members from the board, but they also accept volunteer members if the board judges them to be sufficently qualified. A list of all the committees that the board is involved with, as well as the list of trustees, can be found here. A list of board meetings and their recorded minutes can also be found here, but they seem to be incomplete.

Unsurprisingly, the foundation has chosen to make information about itself available as a wiki. Not only does this include all the minutes and resolutions of the board, it also includes the resolutions and documentation for the Endowment and Enterprise product as well. There's nothing here that's particularly interesting if you're not a lunatic that decides to write a blog post about all of Wikimedia, except for one thing...

Recognizing the importance of preserving historical information about Wikimedia, the Foundation Wiki has a memory bank to record key events, collect stories from individuals, and develop a cohesive narrative for how Wikimedia came to be. Call this a bold claim, but I think that this will be an incredibly important resource in the future when academics begin to study Wikimedia as something deserving of study in and of itself.

So, I don't think I need to say this, but running an organization of this size and scope is pretty expensive. In the past couple of years, the Wikimedia Foundation has caught flack for perceived mismanagement and waste of funds, so I want to dedicate a section of this blog post to look at how the foundation gets and spends money.

You've probably noticed by now that there's a lot of people outside of the foundation that are doing important work, online and offline. The way they get the money to do these things is by asking the foundation for a grant. There are several different types of grants with different application processes, but they generally focus on funding people or organizations that foster Wikimedia communities, doing research on Wikimedia, working on a task aligned with the Movement Initiative, running non-profits aligned with the Wikimedia movement in sub-Saharan Africa or ESEAP, running a conference about Wikimedia, miscellaneous short-term projects, or promoting equity within the Wikimedia community. The last category started in response to the BLM protests of 2020, which made it immediately controversial for its perceived politicization of Wikimedia.

The application process differs across the various grant categories, but the general process is submit your proposal for review by the community at large, which will be used by the relevant committee of volunteers and designated Wikimedia employees to determine if your proposal should be accepted. Grants given to promote equity are a notably opaque exception to an otherwise exceptionally transparent process, which is deeply concerning given that these grants are typically 6 figures while other grants usually max out at 5 or even 4 figures. Notably, many of the other grants *also* support equity, which makes a dedicated equity fund even more odd. As we'll see later, these grants are a major source of controversy for critics of the foundation's spending.

If you use Wikipedia without adblock or disabling them in your account settings, you've probably noticed the banner ads begging you to donate to keep the website running. Despite the ads, Wikipedia isn't in danger of running out of money anytime soon. Instead, the need for funding is for all the other things. These ads have gotten some heated criticism, and for good reason. Even as an unapologetic Wikimedia stan, I have to admit that it's scummy to act as if you're going to run out of money to get donations from ordinary people. To make matters worse, an executive director admitted that money isn't a limiting factor for the foundation all the way back in 2012. As far as I can tell, there isn't really a coherent reason for why the foundation decided to seriously harm their reputation with these misleading banners. Is it as scummy as selling user data for profit? Eh, probably not, but that doesn't make it okay. Even if it gets them funds in the short term, in the long term, this strategy alienates people and potentially harms the foundation's ability to secure funding in the future.

For its part, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on reducing its dependence on donations. Part of this has been the Wikimedia Endowment, which generates revenue for the foundation to use indefinitely. The endowment was launched in 2016 with the goal of raising $100,000,000, which it did ahead of schedule in 2021. However, it reached its goal by receiving substantial donations from the Wikimedia Foundation itself, which made it a burden that caused the foundation to spend so much to begin with.

Another way that the foundation is reducing its dependence on donations is through a product called Wikimedia Enterprise. This provides APIs for accessing data from Wikimedia projects, like snapshots of an entire project or the contents of an entire article at any moment. To be blunt, there isn't any real direct benefit to using these APIs, since they can be easily replicated by a scraper or downloading from the free data dumps. The true reason why somebody would want to use these APIs is because they come with official support, which at the very least let's you CYA if something goes wrong and your boss wants answers. The product made $3,200,000 in 2022-2023, which makes up almost 2% of Wikimedia's revenue.

A more mundane way for the foundation to make money is by selling merch. Despite technically being for the movement as a whole, it almost exclusively sells merch with Wikipedia labelling, which is an awful snub to the other projects that desperately need name recognition. The store even has its own travel section, but for some reason, nobody thought to sell some stuff that has Wikivoyage's symbol printed on it. That may sound like a small thing to get worked up over, but for somebody that's immersed themselves into every project for this blog post, the bias towards Wikipedia is genuinely appalling.

Whenever talking about Wikimedia's financials, it's difficult not to mention a famous essay called Wikipedia Has Cancer. It's worth reading the essay in its entirety, but the gist of it is that the Wikimedia Foundation has been rapidly increasing its spending year after year without any obvious need to spend more money. The concern is that one day, the foundation will start to spend money that it doesn't have, harming or possibly even destroying the movement. You should draw your own conclusion about this essay, but here are my thoughts. First of all, deciding that the Wikimedia Foundation has nothing to do because Wikipedia is mostly the same as when the foundation started is simply wrong. Even back in 2005, which the author lists as a time when the Wikimedia Foundation was "healthy", the movement already included Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, and Wikinews. The mission was always to make the world's information globally accessible through the internet, and Wikipedia is just one part of that.

Also, the cost of running several of the largest websites (one of which is in the top 10 most visited websites in the world) doesn't scale linearly with usage. Instead, there's overhead from having to hire people to manage data centres, and even more overhead from having to hire managers, HR, and people to do fundraising to pay for all these salaries. I'm also not convinced by the concern that the Wikimedia Foundation will take on debt to fund the ever-increasing spending if the fundraising dries up. It wouldn't be pleasant, but the Wikimedia Foundation can tighten its belt, lay off some people, turn down grant applications. It's never said exactly why the Wikimedia Foundation would take on debt, but I think that the author is assuming that the increased spending is because of incompetence, not because of self-contained programs that can be shut down in hard times without affecting the main projects. Even though I have a pretty negative view of this essay, I still think it brings up a very important point about the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation's vision. A huge portion of its spending is towards grants, which doesn't directly help the main projects. The expenses for the foundation is incredibly large, and it's worthwhile to question if the foundation is growing too fast.

I've spent quite a bit of time listing all the things that the Wikimedia Foundation spends money on, but I didn't go that much into impact. While there's less information on how much certain features are used, there's enough to paint a pretty pessimistic picture. Quarry has had less than 9000 users in it's entire lifespan at the time of writing, outreach campaigns rarely get more than 1000 editors participating, and there are entire projects that feel borderline unusable. Is this worth the money that's spent on it? I genuinely don't know. For starters, it's often not really possible to get a good estimate on how much things even cost. For example, Quarry and PAWS were both developed by a very talented user called Yuvipanda, but were then worked on by actual staff members as part of their job. There's no good way to quantify the amount of money that indirectly went into the project because of the foundation's support. Another thing is that impact isn't easily defined just by the number of people who use the product. ClueNG is only used by Wikipedia admins, but its impact is felt by everyone. At the very least, it's okay to spend money while revenue keeps increasing. Unfortunately, when people see this amount of spending without a good explanation, it feels like the foundation is just throwing money away. To a small degree, when you're a foundation this large, that actually does happen because there's always some level of false negative when trying to weed out scammers. In 2022, there was a viral Twitter thread where somebody discovered that Wikimedia gave a fairly substantial grant to an organization who made questionable content as part of its drive for racial equity, which in turn gave a grant to a person who did an experiment that accidentally killed a few octopi. This was then followed by countless people saying that they were no longer going to donate to Wikipedia because they were outraged over this misuse of money.

It would be easy to criticize these people for unquestioningly accept what a random person on Twitter told them, but that misses the point. People aren't *just* getting fed up with Wikipedia because of a random person on Twitter or "Wikipedia Has Cancer", they're getting fed up with Wikipedia because these match up with their very legitimate impression that Wikipedia is the exact same now as it was 10 years ago. Regardless of whether or not the money that the Wikimedia Foundation is spending has enough impact to justify the costs, users certainly have to believe that it does. Because the foundation has failed to effectively state the breadth and importance of the Wikimedia movement, they're facing backlash, which ironically affects their ability to get donations in the future.

A major complaint from the essay was that the foundation isn't sufficiently transparent about how the money they get is spent. Particularly, the author feels that the foundation doesn't do enough to explain what the grants are and why they're given, even though the grants are one of the foundation's largest expenses. However, the foundation publishes their annual plan and a Q&A about their audit every year. Because of its open nature, even small expenses can often be found if you look for them, though it's difficult because of the massive breadth of Wikimedia (should have thought about that before writing this blog post...). To the author's credit, the Wikimedia Foundation could compile some of this information themselves and provide it to the community for better understanding. To the foundation's credit, they already go above and beyond when it comes to transparency by publishing as much financial information as possible and doing Q&A's about their finances. The fact that they allow for the community to actually get involved with the grant approval process is also incredibly unusual and totally solves the author's complaint that the community doesn't have enough say in how the foundation's money is spent.

Besides the foundation proper, there's a whole cottage industry of organizations that are centred around the Wikimedia movement. These groups usually either represent the interests of certain geographic areas (most commonly entire countries) or exist to ensure accurate and exhaustive information about a particular subject (e.g. art). While it's difficult to quantify and research them all, there's many organizations that are officially approved by the Affiliations Committee. Strictly speaking, you don't actually need to be recognized to form a group focused on Wikimedia, but recognition provides you the right to use official trademarks and receive funding from the foundation. Since these organizations can be considered part of the Wikimedia movement, and virtually all of them have a significant presence on at least one project, they deserve to be discussed.

These are the most basic kind of affiliates. The only requirements to join are to have at least 3 active editors that have an account with more than 500 edits on a Wikimedia project (800 if it's Wikidata), at least 10 members overall, and to agree to the code of conduct. Even these requirements can be waived in the application. Because of its flexible structure, it's the most common type of Wikimedia affiliation. The downside is that they only get to use Wikimedia trademarks and are only eligible for the Community grant.

These organizations are dedicated to geographical regions, most commonly entire countries. Not only do they get all the benefits of being a user group, they also get Wikimedia merchandise to hand out, access to the Annual Plan grant, and scholarships to send 2 members to Wikimedia, among other things. The downside is that the requirements are much more stringent. They have to be legally incorporated, show that their motives are in line with the movement's mission, have at least 10 editors with accounts over 6 months old that have 300 edits to a single project, and have already existed for 2 years, preferably as a user group.

These affiliates are very similar to chapters in what they get and what they have to do. However, instead of being focused on a geographical region, these organizations are focused on an overarching thematic purpose. There's only 2 of these affiliates: Amical Wikimedia, which focuses on the Catalan language and culture, and the Wiki Project Med Foundation, which is focused on providing accurate medical information on the Wikimedia projects.

Chapters and thematic organizations have to provide annual financial reports, while all 3 types of affiliates are expected to provide annual reports about their operations to make sure that they're still contributing to the Wikimedia mission. As part of Wikimedia's undying commitment to transparency, all of these reports are made available for public viewing. This is the main hub for people who want to learn more about the extended Wikimedia movement and how they interact with the official projects.

There's undoubtedly some really cool things that are going on in the affiliated organizations, but I simply can't do a deep dive into all of them. There's almost 200 organizations, and many of them aren't even in English. Instead, I've lightly browsed each and every one of them, looked closer at them if I see anything particularly interesting, and reported it here. As for the ones that I don't mention here, most of what they do is host edit-a-thons, workshops, and sometimes collaborate with educational institutions to have Wikimedia projects used in the classroom.

This is the chapter that represents all of Sweden. Despite the many things that they do to foster the Swedish Wikimedia community, I feel like the most interesting thing that they're currently working on is Wikispeech, a text-to-speech MediaWiki plugin. To be frank, it's not that good at the current moment, but once fully developed, it could help many people with literacy problems to access the Wikimedia projects.

This chapter, which represents Germany, is unusually political. Whereas many organizations try to maintain an air of neutrality, Wikimedia Deutschland meticulously lists the various ways that it represents the Wikimedia movement at the national and continental level. While I can only go off of what they say, it seems like their intense lobbying efforts have led to real improvements in how the government treats access to knowledge as a human right. Additionally, this chapter is large enough to have their own funding program to foster various initiatives, although I can't tell you anything about the initiatives themselves because all the information is in German. While it can be hard to quantify the impact that a group has, it seems like Wikimedia Deutschland is likely the most powerful organization in the extended Wikimedia movement.

The chapter that represents Tunisia has collaborated with the University of Sfax to create the Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit, which does research on knowledge graphs like Wikidata.

Somebody from the chapter representing Turkey made a 10 video course teaching beginners how to edit Wikipedia. The audio is in Turkish, but it has English subtitles.

Besides contributing content, this user group has a project to improve the organization's technological capacities. So far, the main focus has been to develop bots that automate repetitive tasks for Wikis in Moroccan languages.

Unlike most user groups, these people are chiefly focused on Wikiversity. Their main mission is to make accurate information about psychological science freely accessible through the Wikimedia movement.

This organization runs a project called Lingua Libre, which is dedicated to recording and preserving audio of people speaking. The goal is to preserve endangered languages by creating databases that people can study from. That being said, they also welcome audio recordings of people speaking common languages as well.

Unlike virtually every other user group, the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group isn't active on any of the Wikimedia projects. In fact, it's explicitly for people *outside* of the WMF and the projects. The mission is to work with developers and users from outside of Wikimedia to guide the development of MediaWiki in a way that doesn't hurt the user experience for non-Wikimedia websites built with the software. They also run a website that tracks every 3rd party website that uses MediaWiki, but it wasn't working at the time of writing this article. Predictably, this user group hosts information about itself on a wiki built with MediaWiki.

I talked about them briefly before, but this organization is surprisingly complex on its own. They have several different projects and get funding from groups besides the Wikimedia Foundation, such as the World Health Organization. If I were to describe them, I would say that they're a group aspiring to create a version of the Wikimedia movement that's entirely focused on medical knowledge. They're surprisingly obscure for who they are, so I decided to do a deep dive into the work that they do.

MDWiki is the organization's equivalent to Wikipedia. As you probably guessed, this website is heavily focused on medicine and topics adjacent to medicine, like biology and funding. As with Wikipedia, there's also a namespace to handle articles written about the website itself and how it's run. Unlike Wikipedia, or any of the Wikimedia projects, you have to apply for the right to edit pages, presumably to prevent any trolls looking to cause potentially fatal vandalism. The process doesn't seem too intense, but they do reject people from time to time.

This is Wikimedia Medicine's answer to Wikimedia Commons. It's a repository for medical images that are NC or ND licensed instead of being under a truly free license. In other words, NC Commons is how Wikimedia Medicine handles medical images that can't be stored on Wikimedia Commons.

In collaboration with Wikimedia Switzerland, Wikimedia Medicine has a mobile app called Medical Wikipedia to allow offline access to health information from both MDWiki and Wikipedia. This is essentially the same as getting a data dump and viewing it with Kiwix (which is what the app is built on). The app size depends on what language you download and whether or not you want video, but several versions clock in at over 1 GB. The focus of the app is obviously on mobile usage, but there's also mirrors for Windows and Linux, while iOS users have to download the ZIM file and just use Kiwix directly.

If you don't have good enough internet access to download the app, Wikimedia Medicine also sells an Internet-in-a-box. This is a small device that serves as a hotspot for people within a 100m radius so that people can access Wikipedia and medical content. You can purchase one from Wikimedia Medicine, but that could take several months to ship. You can also build one, but the instructions are pretty barebones. Better guides can be found online, and the guide does link to them.

For quite a while, many people in the Wikimedia movement have wanted an equivalent of Wikipedia that used video and audio instead of just text, in no small part to make information available to illiterate users. Enter VideoWiki. While this project was created by a user called Pratik.pks, the project has since been adopted by Wikimedia Medicine, who run it to this day. The project uses Wikipedia as the editing platform and Wikimedia Commons as the source for background visuals, as described in the tutorial. This is still in beta, but it could be fairly big if it's completed.

Like the Wikimedia Foundation proper, Wikimedia Medicine conducts research on itself. MDWiki has an entire page on research conducted by members of the organization on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Medicine's ability to democratize knowledge, but ironically, most of these articles are paywalled. Besides conducting research, Wikimedia Medicine also tries to spread information through the educational system as part of WikiEducation. Besides educational material, Wikimedia Medicine has also done important work advising major health organizations about the potential of the Wikimedia movement in medicine.

Next month: Part 4, The Future of Wikimedia and Conclusion.