Spending 25% on the community would mean nearly doubling support at a time of growing concern about a shrinking/flagging/ tiring community.

By the counting of WMF, Wikimedia is a community 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])

Here I suggest that in celebration of its 25th year and in the face of concerns about this community, 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 (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 this is substantial revenue and should be enough to solve any problems.

A 25% spend target on the community means between 48 and 52 million could be spent in support of the community (191 or 208 * .25). The somewhat bad news is that currently WMF only gives out approximately ~15% (28.7 million USD/ 191 million) of the money donated to it in grants and awards to support the community. Increasing this 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])

Thus, a 25% spend rate, while sounding rather modest given the importance of the community to Wikimedia’s mission, would mean nearly doubling the amount spent currently, and should provide for nearly a doubling of the community support that is provided.

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In a movement and foundation so focused on creating equality, increasing funding for awards and grants - for the community and its leaders in general - is essentially an equity and equality creating ‘investment in the community’.

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 need to make a living. This also applies to community leaders or 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 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 and reality, these are exactly the people that we 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., career.

The idea should be (in my opinion) to spend this and more money in general on freeing volunteers up to do more of the work that they already are or want to be doing. In our studies of Wikidemics (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'). In this situation it makes sense that especially engaged Wikimedians are leaving, especially if they begin to feel that their contributions are not valued.

One of the new themes in Wikimedia 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.

Make contributing valu-able Since grants are a generally inefficient way to disperse funds (after taxes and indirects a 50k grant turns into ~15-20k in actual salary for contributors), the money can also be used indirectly, to make contributing in general a valuable activity. One way we are advocating to spend more funds is to make the activity of contributing valuable to other decision makers (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024 ^[3]). Our recent work in WikiScience has focused on developing metrics which universities and funders can use to see which edits are related to which grants or researchers and thus their impact (e.g., Individual version of the P&E Dashboard; Impact Vizualizer). If part of scientist's jobs outcomes are related to contributing to public knowledge, then there is a motivation, and many of the problems get solved.

If we can make contributing to WikiMedia valuable to do, then it becomes a part of normal work activity which can be reported to decision makers (Buttliere, Vetter & Ross, 2024 ^[3]). If we can get academics contributing consistently as a part of their open science work, they teach many of the other professions that we want involved and open knowledge becomes institutionalized, thus multigenerational (Buttliere et al., 2025 ^[4]). These programs can be cheap, for instance awards for (groups of) individuals at organizations that are engaging in exemplary ways (e.g., APS Wiki Initiative or Berkman Klein at Harvard). This flags the contributors and organization in a positive way, giving the individuals involved institutional credit and a line on their CV. This activity is nearly free for Wikimedia and very good for the community.

If WMF is distributing ~15% now, where could this extra funding come from?

The question is where could this extra funding for the community come from? The budget is obviously limited (at 208 million), and each dollar that goes to the community needs to come from somewhere else. And it is obvious that saving 20% for the future is wise, so 190 million is the 'bottom line'. This is a discussion about the redistribution of (community?) funds. Still, we are only looking for about 10% of the overall budget for a major increase in the amount of support the community receives.

Figure 2 shows the income (top) and operating expenses of the foundation (the bottom part). Targeting a 25% spend would mean looking for approximately 20.8 extra million in the general budget, which is again only about 10% of the overall budget. This is small compared to some other 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 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 20% of the budget that we are looking for.

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To make informed decisions, one would need a more detailed summary of the budget, but when looking at the expenses, but 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, approximately 2.25 times the national US average, not counting additional costs like travel to conferences or technology.

After seeing that number the next question I want to ask is whether community leaders within Wikimedia and those extremely important administrators and users with extended rights who make the project work have a similarly high salary as WMF employees. Having seen by now several to many community grants and the salaries listed in them, my suspicion is that community leaders are actually no where near that. Thus, this increase in investment should also be seen as a move toward more equality in the movement.

Putting an extra 20 million would enable the community to hire an extra 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 essentially mean that every affiliate could hire another person (full time!), 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 good move to reduce the tensions^[10] which have been discussed. 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 ^[11], which due to the laws of large numbers is quite likely to be similar to the average wiki contributor's salary (it is extremely unlikely the 265,000 volunteer average salary is 2.25x the overall average).

At minimum, to me, one clear and obvious next step would be to simply invest more, especially in equalizing the salaries of WMF employees and average in the community, not only so that we can support and get the best out of the people that we have, but also so that there is real equality between these groups. Surely 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 of the community, and it will be enough to substantially increase the amount of support both for existing successes and new initiatives, indeed we estimate we could hire over 100 extra people at the average WMF salart or about 250 at the US national average salary.

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