QUOTE(Cedric @ Sun 27th December 2009, 5:31pm)
If this seems too vague a reason to get really, really pissed off, then consider this: the WMF's own financial statements reveal a
3,061.61% increase in expenses in the four year period from June 30, 2005 to June 30, 2009! Now Jimbo insists that the WMF needs
TEN MILLION DOLLARS to get through the next fiscal year, which means a
5,528.41% increase in expenses since 2005! Do you actually believe that reflects the reality?? Have the number of pages on WP actually increased
5,528.41% since 2005?? Does it seem even remotely plausible that server and administrative expenses have increased
5,528.41% since 2005??
Actually - yes. Very plausible indeed. Businesses in the $5 - 100m income bracket are my focus at work. An organization like WMF is a classic case. They became successful on the back of an ad-hoc team of pretty much "whoever helped out in the early days". Now they are bigger, more visible, and the focus changes a bit as the future plans gain depth.
Typical things that face such businesses: They need to fill out admin and peripheral roles (few early-stage businesses need an HR department). In WMF's case the servers used to go up and down like yoyos; they need to be reliable, more delivery, better backups, more developers. Its now rare they go down even though there's a lot more workload. They have expanded back-office functions - this year there's usability projects, donation and funding teams that didn't exist before. There's a sudden increase of organizational scope, instead of just one or two targets or areas with costs involves they're running multiple all in parallel and all growing, often also involving a wide geographic area. They need to build up a financial buffer, enough cash in the bank to see them safe if next year's bad or they have something unexpected happen; they may have formal paid advisors and professional analysts they didn't before, travel may go up as more outward-facing people attend more meetings, the newly employed professionals may need a market rate not a hobbyist rate for their paycheck, they may have to ditch or move people who were great for an early-day startup but who know they aren't skilled at the level now needed, recruitment itself isn't cheap, power costs or hosting methods (including duplicate hosting facilities) may change, number of page views (== data traffic) may radically increase, and so on.
I don't know the WMF back office any better than anyone else with access to the published data, so this isn't really a comment on WMF specifically. So I'm open to being told I'm wrong here. But these are typical and common things that many thriving businesses and non-profits in this situation and bracket undergo, and they can easily add millions to a budget. It's the difference between being a shoestring/garage structured organization, and an established organization with a proper fully operational back-office. Considering Wikimedia in 2005 and 2009/2010, very very plausible. More would not be untenable.
This was in another thread but I wanted to see a response to it. I know sometimes posts get lost in long threads or perhaps FT2 is usually ignored around here. Whatever that may be is there any truth to this?
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