The ratio of overhead to other expenses isn't always a great meter stick, as Erik mentions. Nevertheless, one extraordinary aspect of Wikipedia and siblings is how high the efficiency of its core project work is by that measure: 100 billion views / 100 million edits a year, for $3M in hardware and bandwidth and maintenance, and a fraction of that in administrative costs.
We can drive down that fraction with an endowment dedicated to perpetual support of this core work. However, endowments and similar investment to support future program work don't show up directly as program expenses, though they are themselves low-overhead and improve future efficiency and stability. I'd also like to correct a myth about how Wikipedia is viewed by teachers and other encyclopedias: On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Gregory Kohs <[email protected]> wrote: > (1) That the Wikimedia Foundation's "impact" is a favorable one. (Many > would disagree, at least according to Andrew Keen, the staff of Encyclopedia > Britannica and World Book, and just about every high school teacher I've > ever talked to about Wikipedia.) I visited the offices of both Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book back in June (at the American Libraries Association conference in Chicago). Both are favorable towards Wikipedia today. I would characterize their perspective as positive interest, respect for our impact on the world, mixed with natural wariness. They recognized that the devoted contributors to our projects, as to theirs, are driven by similar passions to improve access to knowledge. EB actively use Commons as one potential source of images -- though they have a much more stringent license-clearing process, so it take them a while to decide whether they really have the rights to use an image... something we could learn from. And World Book's editor in chief has been a supporter of the wiki concept since he gave a talk at Wikimania in 2006. In my experience, high-school teachers were 90/10 anti Wikipedia 3 years ago, and are slightly in favor of it today. This sort of thing would be a fascinating survey to run year after year. SJ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
