Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-06-04/News and notes

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Pie chart visualizing the distribution of the Wikimedia Foundation's total cash expenditures, including all capital purchases, in the 2010/11 fiscal year (from the WMF annual report. Note: This is not directly comparable to the survey results, see comment)

As for the (kind of) obvious question of how the actual spending of the Foundation compares to the survey result (see also [1][2]), the short answer seems to be that it is very difficult to tell, because the tracking of the actual spending uses categories that differ from the options offered by the survey question. See this reply from WMF's data analyst Ayush Khanna (on whose blog post the story is based on) in response to a question for this Signpost story. However, as also pointed out there, there is an overview at m:Wikimedia Foundation/Annual Report/2010-2011/Financials#Where the money goes (see the pie chart on the right) which probably comes closest.

Note that this is not directly comparable to the distribution from the survey, for several reasons including but not limited to the following two:

  • The survey question does not account for administrative or fundraising costs (and vice versa the 2010/11 pie chart does not attempt to guess, for example, how much of the "costs for Foundation staff" in the 18% "Administration" part are due to staff in the tech department).
  • E.g. the "Community" part in the 2010/11 pie chart includes expenses for "improving new technologies to help project editors", which would probably be subsumed in the "technical" part of the survey question options.

It's also worth noting that a substantial part of the money donated for/on Wikimedia projects is not spent by the Foundation, but by the Wikimedia chapters, who may have different ratios of spending on technical/nontechnical areas. (In the first editor survey from April 2011, this question included the options "grantmaking to chapters, individuals" and "support for chapters", resulting in 7% each. After a discussion involving chapters, the options were modified for the second edition of the survey, removing all explicit mentions of chapters.)

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 09:21, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • "Widespread ignorance" sounds kind of flashy... Anyhow, the juxtaposition of said ignorance with the desire for more spending in technical areas doesn't exactly present a strong, obvious correlation. I'm still wondering why they're talked about in the same section. Killiondude (talk) 07:06, 6 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Core Contest[edit]

I don't know if this was announced in Signpost this year, but I hope it is announced prominently next year, as I was unaware that it was going on. -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:14, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I had the same thought. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:24, 6 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Me too. MathewTownsend (talk) 17:28, 6 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It was mentioned: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-03-12/News and notes#Brief notes -- Theramin (talk) 22:43, 18 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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