Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2024-11-18

Background: Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation blanked by court order, Litigation involving the Wikimedia Foundation, prior Signpost coverage

Commentary and facts involving the case were published by Bar and Bench, India Legal Live (ENC Network), The Hindu, and Hindustan Times. At least one source said that according to a summons issued by Delhi High Court, WMF had released or will release email addresses of three editors, "Defendants 2–4".

According to MediaNama, one of the defendants signed the on-wiki open letter protesting the case (see related Signpost coverage). – B

Aditi Agrawal covers the ANI case for Hindustan Times. The question of Wikipedia's publisher-like status is also addressed in India Today's Fiiber channel on MSN, "Why has the Indian government issued a notice to Wikipedia, explained in 5 points". – B

As we went to press on our last issue apblive reported that "According to ANI, the government has written to Wikipedia highlighting a number of complaints of bias and inaccuracy. In the letter, the Centre pointed out that a small group of people have editorial control over the website." The "Centre" refers to the central Indian government or specifically the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB).

The existence of this letter, or the timing of its issue, has itself been called into question. At The Signpost, we could not find a solid report to base a story on.

Some media just said there was "a notice" sent, another said unnamed government sources had spoken to one media outlet, and none we could find provided any real details (example, example). Since then, TechCrunch is also reporting that no complaint has been found by their staff, either. – B

• "Wikipedia Editors Add Article Titled 'Gaza Genocide' to 'List of Genocides' Page" (Haaretz)
• "'It's not close' - Israel committing genocide concludes Wikipedia ending editorial debate" (Middle East Monitor)

This closure of a more than month-long Request for comments (RfC) at List of genocides was noted in several press sources ...

The RfC confirming the page title follows a Requested move talkpage discussion which initially set the title earlier this year – see previous Signpost coverage. – B

There's a bizarre style of biography that commonly appears off-Wiki in the less-than-reliable press with headlines like John Doe Wiki. This week "GhanaCelebrities" provided the best example I've seen "Ginger Luckey Gaetz Wiki, Age, Career, Husband". The article is so well-written – it doesn't seem to have been authored with either artificial intelligence or natural stupidity – that if provided with references it would take at least a week to delete if it were posted on-Wiki. Luckey Gaetz's main claims to fame – if not notability – are that she has a rich brother and is married to the former congressman and currently nominated U.S. Attorney General Matt Gaetz. Mrs. Gaetz, according to the article, is a KPMG manager who has taken some MBA courses through Harvard's online program and in person at UC Berkeley. Mr. Gaetz's notability includes accusations of drug use and paying for sex with minors.

A completely separate linking of Gaetz with Wikipedia was published as a trivia question in Above the Law. Kathryn Rubino asked "What law school did (Matt) Gaetz attend?" Despite a wealth of official sources that she could have linked to document the answer, she linked to Wikipedia. She told The Signpost that she did so "because Wikipedia is the easiest way to encapsulate multiple facts about a source with a single link. In this instance I wanted a reference that Matt Gaetz went to William & Mary Law as well as the other notable legal figures that went to the law school but never held the position of U.S. Attorney General." – S

Dwarkesh Patel (a US podcaster who TIME magazine recently described as one of the 100 most influential people in AI) published an interview titled "Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory". According to Patel, Gwern has "deeply influenced the people building AGI," and "If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive."

User:Gwern is also a longtime Wikipedian with almost 100k edits on English Wikipedia. While the interview mostly focused on AI and Gwern's life as an independent writer, it also discussed the pivotal role that editing Wikipedia had played for him:

Dwarkesh Patel

What is it that you are trying to maximize in your life?

Gwern

I maximize rabbit holes. I love more than anything else, falling into a new rabbit hole. That's what I really look forward to. Like this sudden new idea or area that I had no idea about, where I can suddenly fall into a rabbit hole for a while.
[...]

Dwarkesh Patel

What were you doing with all these rabbit holes before you started blogging? Was there a place where you would compile them?

Gwern

Before I started blogging, I was editing Wikipedia.
That was really gwern.net before gwern.net. Everything I do now with my site, I would have done on English Wikipedia. If you go and read some of the articles I am still very proud of—like the Wikipedia article on Fujiwara no Teika—and you would think pretty quickly to yourself, “Ah yes, Gwern wrote this, didn't he?”

Dwarkesh Patel

Is it fair to say that the training that required to make gwern.net happened on Wikipedia?

Gwern

Yeah. I think so. I have learned far more from editing Wikipedia than I learned from any of my school or college training. Everything I learned about writing I learned by editing Wikipedia. [...] For me it was beneficial to combine rabbit-holing with Wikipedia, because Wikipedia would generally not have many good articles on the thing that I was rabbit-holing on.

It was a very natural progression from the relatively passive experience of rabbit-holing—where you just read everything you can about a topic—to compiling that and synthesizing it on Wikipedia. You go from piecemeal, a little bit here and there, to writing full articles. Once you are able to write good full Wikipedia articles and summarize all your work, now you can go off on your own and pursue entirely different kinds of writing now that you have learned to complete things and get them across the finish line.

However, echoing concerns Gwern had already detailed in a 2009 essay titled In Defense of Inclusionism, he cautioned that

It would be difficult to do that with the current English Wikipedia. It's objectively just a much larger Wikipedia than it was back in like 2004. But not only are there far more articles filled in at this point, the editing community is also much more hostile to content contribution, particularly very detailed, obsessive, rabbit hole-y kind of research projects. They would just delete it or tell you that this is not for original research or that you're not using approved sources.

He also recalled other ways in which Wikipedia was different in its earlier years:

Gwern

I got started on Wikipedia in late middle school or possibly early high school.
It was kind of funny. I started skipping lunch in the cafeteria and just going to the computer lab in the library and alternating between Neopets and Wikipedia. I had Neopets in one tab and my Wikipedia watch lists in the other.

Dwarkesh Patel

Were there other kids in middle school or high school who were into this kind of stuff?

Gwern

No, I think I was the only editor there, except for the occasional jerks who would vandalize Wikipedia. I would know that because I would check the IP to see what edits were coming from the school library IP addresses. Kids being kids thought they would be jerks and vandalize Wikipedia.

For a while it was kind of trendy. Early on, Wikipedia was breaking through to mass awareness and controversy. It’s like the way LLMs are now. A teacher might say, “My student keeps reading Wikipedia and relying on it. How can it be trusted?”

"Gwern Branwen" is a pseudonym. Of interest to Wikipedians who are conscientious about keeping their real name separated from their public editing activity (see also coverage of a current open letter in this issue's News and notes), the interview also discusses benefits of maintaining anonymity. While it was conducted in person, responses were re-recorded by a different person, and for the customary video of the interview, an AI-generated avatar was created as a stand-in.

In other parts of the interview that might likewise resonate with Wikipedians who devote large amounts of unpaid work to their hobby, Patel asked various probing questions about Gwern's personal finances, again starting from his Wikipedia volunteering:

Dwarkesh Patel

When you were an editor on Wikipedia, was that your full-time occupation?

Gwern

It would eat as much time as I let it. I could easily spend 8 hours a day reviewing edits and improving articles while I was rabbit-holing. But otherwise I would just neglect it and only review the most suspicious diffs on articles that I was particularly interested in on my watchlist. I might only spend like 20 minutes a day. It was sort of like going through morning email.

and later

Dwarkesh Patel

How do you sustain yourself while writing full time?

Gwern

Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. [...] So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last.
I should probably advertise the Patreon more, but I'm too proud to shill it harder.
[...]

I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. [...] I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway.

The interview then took a rather consequential turn:

Dwarkesh Patel

It seems like you’ve enjoyed this recent trip to San Francisco [home of several AI labs mentioned earlier in the interview, like OpenAI and Anthropic]? What would it take to get you to move here?

Gwern

Yeah, it is mostly just money stopping me at this point. I probably should bite the bullet and move anyway. But I'm a miser at heart and I hate thinking of how many months of writing runway I'd have to give up for each month in San Francisco.

If someone wanted to give me, I don’t know, $50–100K/year to move to SF and continue writing full-time like I do now, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

Patel then encouraged him to share contact information for potential donors, and two days after the interview' release noted that these had indeed been found and that Gwern would be moving to San Francisco.

– H

• Exploding Whale Day (including video coverage) was celebrated in Exploding Whale Memorial Park in Florence, Oregon and reported in The Oregonian. See previous Signpost coverage here or just click on the illustration on the right. Pageviews of Exploding whale, of course, went up 60x over the median on the anniversary.
• "Climate change researchers make 100 improvements to Wikipedia ahead of COP29" (University of Exeter News)
• itsnicethat.com tells us how 'Wikipedia rabbit holes' are the backbone of Chantal Jahchan's intricate editorial collages.
• Digital gravestones for lost species: Wikipedia articles about extinct species are a "place people return to in order to remember, or perhaps discover, what we once had", according to a study highlighted at The Conversation.
• Busybody, hunter, dancer: which one are you?: The New Indian Express [1], Nature briefing blog [2], RealClearScience [3], Australia's National Tribune website [4], and The Conversation [5] covered new research that outlines styles of information-gathering Wikipedia user employ, using catchy nicknames.
• Troubled effort to address Australian place names: As covered in the previous Signpost issue, representation of Australia place names has had some trouble. Now the Australian Computer Society's Information Age reports on research findings of "a spectrum of reluctance, hesitation, discomfort, sanitisation and also active resistance and racism" in the topic area. They also said, "Despite researchers' attempts to find a diversity of editors to interview, only one who took part identified as a woman, while one identified as non-binary, and none were First Nations people... [researchers found] that 'basically any non-white experiences or non-dominant experiences' were omitted from many Australian Wikipedia articles".
• Goldstar does not get a gold star from Wikipedia: According to the article, Goldstar Air was a "fake airline". Yet newsghana.com says that editors describing it as such are "saboteurs [who] hatched an evil plot". You be the judge.

Elena Lappen is the Wikimedia Foundation's Movement Communications Manager; some content in this post was previously published on Diff.

Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation shares our audited financial statements along with an explanation of what the numbers mean. Our goal is to make our finances understandable, so that community members, donors, readers and more have clear insight into how we use our funds to further Wikimedia's mission.

This post explains the audit reports for both the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment for fiscal year 2023–2024, providing key highlights and additional information for those who want to dive deeper.

An audit report presents details on the financial balances and financial activities of any organization, as required by US accounting standards. It is audited by a third party (in the Foundation's and Endowment's case, KPMG) in order to validate accuracy. The Foundation has received clean audits for the past 19 years. Each annual audit is an opportunity to evaluate the Foundation's activities and credibility as a responsible steward of donor funds.

The financial information found in the audit report is also then used to build an organization's Form 990, which is the form required by the United States government for organizations to maintain their nonprofit status. The Form 990 is released closer to the end of the current fiscal year.

The Foundation's 2023-2024 Annual Plan laid out a number of financial goals for the fiscal year. Below are key takeaways from the audit report related to those goals:

• Clean audit opinion: The external auditors, KPMG, issued their opinion that the Wikimedia Foundation's financial statements for FY 2023–2024 are presented accurately, marking the 19th consecutive year of clean audits since the Foundation's first audit in 2006.

• Expense growth slowing in line with target: In anticipation of slower revenue growth, our 2023–2024 Annual Plan aimed to slow budget growth to around 5% after significant growth in the prior five years averaging 16%. We were able to reach that goal: during the fiscal year, expenses grew at 5.5% ($9.4M), from $169.1M to $178.5M. This came in at only slightly over our target of $177M. Growth in expenses was driven primarily by increases in movement funding (detailed below) and increases in personnel cost due mostly to cost of living adjustments. The Foundation is working to continue this trend of stabilizing growth in the current fiscal year. As outlined in the annual plan for fiscal year 2024–2025, the budget is expected to be $188.7M, which is 6% percent year on year growth.

→ During the year, we prioritized spending on a number of Infrastructure related projects which is the largest area of the Foundation's work. Projects included a revamp of the Community Wishlist, new features for events and campaigns, improvements in moderation tools (e.g., EditCheck, Automoderator, Community Configuration etc.), and a new data center in Brazil.

→ Also during the year, we decided not to renew our lease of our San Francisco office and to instead move to a small administrative space. This move was aimed at both reducing expenses and responding to an increasingly global workforce, where the vast majority of employees (82%) are based outside the San Francisco Bay Area. This move will result in a rent cost savings of over 80% per month.

• More budget shifted toward movement support: The Annual Plan aimed to increase the percentage of the budget that goes directly to supporting the mission. This means working to minimize both fundraising and administrative costs and increase support for things like platform maintenance, grants to communities, feature development and more. This year's percentage was 77.5%, up from 76% in the prior fiscal year. In real terms, this means that $9.8M more went to direct movement support in the 2023-2024 fiscal year than the prior fiscal year. While this percentage was just shy of our goal of 77.9%, it is well within the range of best practice for nonprofits, which recommends that at least 65% be devoted to programmatic work.

→ Progress was made on greater effectiveness in how we communicate with communities which collectively speak hundreds of languages. A new system for providing translations of core Foundation documentation enabled us to complete more than 650 requests for translations in a year. This has increased the number of languages supported from six to thirty-four languages in written translations. As an added benefit, the translations are provided by members of the Wikimedia volunteer community – whose experience and knowledge of the movement provides much higher quality translations.

• Growth sustained in community grants: In spite of the Foundation's overall growth slowing to 5%, we increased community grants by $2.2M, or 9.9% from the previous fiscal year. Our Annual Plans have repeatedly prioritized growing community funding at a significantly higher rate than the overall budget–a goal we have continued to prioritize in the 2024-2025 Annual Plan.

→ We support our grantees by working closely with them to form strategic partnerships to close content gaps. An example is how we supported community gender gap campaigns in biographies and women's health during Women's History Month. This included running the Wikipedia Needs More Women campaign (14.5M Unique people reached) and coordinating the global landing page and calendar for the Celebrate Women campaign.

• Exploring diversified revenue streams for the movement: In order to ensure the movement's future financial sustainability, the Foundation has aimed to diversify our revenue streams over time. For several years, we have been anticipating a trend where fundraising revenue through banners would no longer represent the majority of our donations. During fiscal year 2023–2024, the Foundation's total revenue was $185.4M, of which $174.7M came from donations. This total number represents not only banner fundraising, but also increased percentages in email and major gift donations. Diversified donation income was complemented by increased investment income, income from the Wikimedia Endowment's cost-sharing agreement, and increased income from Wikimedia Enterprise. Investment income was $5.1M up from $3M in the prior year, primarily due to increased interest income from higher interest rates during the year. The new cost sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Endowment generated $2.1M in revenue to offset costs incurred by the Foundation to support the Endowment (Note: This is in addition to the $2.6 million the Foundation received from the Endowment to support technical innovation projects), and Wikimedia Enterprise brought in gross revenue of $3.4M, up slightly from $3.2M in FY 2022–2023. While diversification fell slightly short of our Annual Plan goals, we believe we are still on track over the medium-term: Enterprise contracts have since increased $400K year over year in monthly revenue so far in FY 2024–2025, and we anticipate more income to be generated from Enterprise in subsequent fiscal years.

→ More about Enterprise's financials and the work to diversify revenue streams is available in the Enterprise financial report. More information about the Endowment detailed below.

You can read the full audit report on the Foundation's website, review the frequently asked questions on Meta-Wiki, or ask any additional questions on the FAQ talk page.

The Wikimedia Endowment has completed its audit report covering the fiscal year (FY) 2023–2024, which was the nine month time period from 30 September 2023 – 30 June 2024, from the time that the Endowment began operations as a standalone 501(c)(3) organization on 30 September 2023 through the end of the fiscal year on 30 June 2024. This was the first year that the Wikimedia Endowment completed an independent audit report, as it became a standalone 501(c)(3) during this fiscal year. The Endowment is a permanent fund that generates income for the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity with the aim of protecting Wikimedia projects far into the future. The work was overseen by the Endowment's Audit Committee, led by Chair Kevin Bonebrake. Here are a few key takeaways:

• Clean audit opinion: The external auditors, KPMG, issued their opinion that the Wikimedia Endowment's financial statements for fiscal year 2023–2024 are presented fairly and in accordance with U.S. GAAP.
• Revenue from Tides transfer, donations, and investment income: The Endowment's total revenue was $132.0M for fiscal year 2023–2024. However, the vast majority of this revenue came from the transfer of $116.2M of the Endowment fund from the Tides Foundation. Funds for the Endowment were held by the Tides Foundation from 2016–2023. In 2023, the Endowment became its own standalone 501(c)(3). At that point, all of the Endowment funds held by Tides were transitioned over to the new entity in the form of a one-time transfer. The Endowment received $13.4M in new donations during FY 2023-2024 and had $2.4M in investment income.
• Funding to support Wikimedia projects: The Endowment provided $2.9M in funding in FY 2023–2024 to support technical innovation on the Wikimedia projects: $1.5M for MediaWiki upgrades, $600,000 for Abstract Wikipedia, $500,000 for efforts aimed at reaching new audiences, and $278,375 for Kiwix. More information about this round of Endowment funding can be found here.
• Strong financial position: As of June 30, 2024, the Endowment's net assets were $144.3 million, made up primarily of cash of $20.1M and investments of $123.4M. These assets have generated $19.7M in returns on investment during FY 2023–2024, of which $6.1M has been used to fund technological innovation of the Wikimedia projects over the past two fiscal years.

You can read the full audit report, review the frequently asked questions on Meta-Wiki, or ask any additional questions on the FAQ talk page.

Launched in 2016, the Wikimedia Endowment is a nonprofit charitable organization providing a permanent safekeeping fund to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity.  It aims to create a solid financial foundation for the future of the Wikimedia projects. As of June 30, 2024, the Wikimedia Endowment was valued at $144.3 million USD. The Wikimedia Endowment is a U.S.-based 501(c)3 charity (Tax ID: 87-3024488). To learn more, please visit www.wikimediaendowment.org.