Dear all,
Last weekend, an interview with Raju Narisetti, titled "Wikipedia is building trust with transparency", was published in the Indian Express, one of the major daily newspapers in India.
For your convenience, here is an archive link for the article: https://archive.ph/RaCwX
The Indian Express link is: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/raju-naris...
The article quotes Raju as saying (my emphases),
----
“*More than 75% of the money we raise globally* goes to two things. One is to *give money back to the volunteer community* so they can launch a new language. Two is about *half of it goes to the infrastructure.* You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, *most of it is actually flowing into the global south,* where the growth will come in languages and users.
----
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than 75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all, few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US, right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest (2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US. According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America (excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5% of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31 of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990 is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America (excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990 only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals, certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and $3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue. Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above, what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... – see also https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_...
This seems a reasonable request.
Cheers,
Peter
From: Andreas Kolbe [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 02 June 2022 15:13 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Fact-checking Raju Narisetti in the Indian Express
Dear all,
Last weekend, an interview with Raju Narisetti, titled "Wikipedia is building trust with transparency", was published in the Indian Express, one of the major daily newspapers in India.
For your convenience, here is an archive link for the article: https://archive.ph/RaCwX
The Indian Express link is: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/raju-naris...
The article quotes Raju as saying (my emphases),
----
“More than 75% of the money we raise globally goes to two things. One is to give money back to the volunteer community so they can launch a new language. Two is about half of it goes to the infrastructure. You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users.
----
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than 75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all, few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US, right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest (2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US. According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America (excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5% of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31 of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990 is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America (excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990 only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals, certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and $3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue. Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above, what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best,
Andreas
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... – see also https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts
Virus-free. http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient www.avg.com
Hi Andreas,
We have followed up to your questions on the fundraising meta talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Raju_Narisetti_interview:_most_of_the_money_is_flowing_into_the_Global_South .
Thank you,
Megan
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 6:52 PM Peter Southwood [email protected] wrote:
This seems a reasonable request.
Cheers,
Peter
*From:* Andreas Kolbe [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* 02 June 2022 15:13 *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Fact-checking Raju Narisetti in the Indian Express
Dear all,
Last weekend, an interview with Raju Narisetti, titled "Wikipedia is building trust with transparency", was published in the Indian Express, one of the major daily newspapers in India.
For your convenience, here is an archive link for the article: https://archive.ph/RaCwX
The Indian Express link is: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/raju-naris...
The article quotes Raju as saying (my emphases),
“*More than 75% of the money we raise globally* goes to two things. One is to *give money back to the volunteer community* so they can launch a new language. Two is about *half of it goes to the infrastructure.* You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, *most of it is actually flowing into the global south,* where the growth will come in languages and users.
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than 75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all, few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US, right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest (2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US. According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America (excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5% of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31 of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990 is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America (excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990 only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals, certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and $3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue. Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above, what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best,
Andreas
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... – see also https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts
Virus-free. www.avg.com http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient
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Dear all,
The Indian Express article has been updated. The paragraph discussed now reads as follows:
“More than 75% of the money we raise globally goes to two things. One is to give money back to the volunteer community so they can launch a new language. Two is about half of it goes to the infrastructure. You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, a lot of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users.
At the bottom of the article there is now a Disclaimer:
*Disclaimer: An earlier version of the story used the phrase ‘most of it’ in place of ‘a lot of it’ while talking of funding being used in the global south. This has been corrected.*
This is better, thank you, although still far from perfect. (I wouldn't have said "a lot of it"; it actually is relatively little, as explained earlier.)
I've been told the "More than 75%" in the first sentence of that paragraph refers to the sum of
42% Direct support to websites 31% Direct support to communities
mentioned in the Annual Report.[1]
Now, I am quite certain the "31% Direct support to communities" includes funding for the affiliates, which in many cases have paid staff, not volunteer staff. If so, then the phrase "give money back to the *volunteer* community" – which is different from "communities" in the Anual Report – is substantially misleading. (Wikimedia Germany alone has around 160 paid employees.)
The 65,000 Indian volunteer contributors mentioned in the Indian Express article by and large don't get any of those funds. What personal grants there were in South Asia ($75,198) went to 22 individuals, according to the Form 990 (p. 34, column (c), "Number of recipients").[2] The impression created by this passage is quite different from the reality.
Another inaccuracy is in the phrase "75% of the money we *raise*". As mentioned earlier, the WMF each year raises substantially more money than it spends. The percentages in the Annual Report relate to expenditure, not revenue. (You can tell that this is so because they sum to 100%.)
75% of $112 million (total expenses) is not 75% of $163 million (total support and revenue)![3]
Another paragraph in the Indian Express article that I thought was strange is this one:
“Unlike many other countries, India is mobile-centric… you can’t tell people to go to a desktop or laptop and edit. So that became a constraint. So we actually partnered with Jio and made sure it (editing) was built into the app itself… We enabled people to edit Wikipedia on the phone, which is a big breakthrough in a country like India, and so that has contributed to the significant growth in languages,” he said, adding this is also the answer to why Wikipedia raises money.
As an explanation for why Wikipedia raises money, this reads very well – "The Wikimedia Foundation needs money to create more free content in Indian languages!" I can imagine how this might be viewed as something Indians can get behind.
But as mentioned before, the Wikimedia Foundation had a surplus of $50 million in the 2020/2021 financial year. *That surplus alone* is ten times what the Foundation spent in the entire rest of the world (outside Europe and North America) in 2020, according to the Form 990.[4]
As a movement committed to accuracy and neutrality, we always fact-check narratives. Please let's do that with our own as well!
I would also like to point out that the only thing enabling us to check the facts in this case is the Form 990 the Wikimedia Foundation is legally required to publish in order to retain charitable status.
As I mentioned the other day, both here and in the Signpost,[5] the Wikimedia Endowment – which now also receives most planned gifts (assets left in people's will) that in the past would have gone to the Foundation[6] – has never produced a Form 990 or audited financial statements, because it is still not a 501(c)(3) organisation. As a movement, we should insist on the move to a 501(c)(3) being completed as a matter of urgency, to establish a minimum standard of transparency.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-2021-annual-report/f... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_... [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... [4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opinio... [6] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Remit_of_Planned_Gifts_to_t...
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 11:39 PM Megan Hernandez [email protected] wrote:
Hi Andreas,
We have followed up to your questions on the fundraising meta talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Raju_Narisetti_interview:_most_of_the_money_is_flowing_into_the_Global_South .
Thank you,
Megan
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 6:52 PM Peter Southwood < [email protected]> wrote:
This seems a reasonable request.
Cheers,
Peter
*From:* Andreas Kolbe [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* 02 June 2022 15:13 *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Fact-checking Raju Narisetti in the Indian Express
Dear all,
Last weekend, an interview with Raju Narisetti, titled "Wikipedia is building trust with transparency", was published in the Indian Express, one of the major daily newspapers in India.
For your convenience, here is an archive link for the article: https://archive.ph/RaCwX
The Indian Express link is: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/raju-naris...
The article quotes Raju as saying (my emphases),
“*More than 75% of the money we raise globally* goes to two things. One is to *give money back to the volunteer community* so they can launch a new language. Two is about *half of it goes to the infrastructure.* You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, *most of it is actually flowing into the global south,* where the growth will come in languages and users.
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than 75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all, few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US, right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest (2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US. According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America (excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5% of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31 of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990 is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America (excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990 only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals, certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and $3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue. Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above, what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best,
Andreas
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... – see also https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts
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The price of free and reliable information seems to be eternal questioning of the published information, something we are quite accustomed to. We expect this from politicians and big business interests. A pity it applies so much to our internal affairs too.
Cheers,
Peter
From: Andreas Kolbe [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 03 June 2022 12:20 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Fact-checking Raju Narisetti in the Indian Express
Dear all,
The Indian Express article has been updated. The paragraph discussed now reads as follows:
“More than 75% of the money we raise globally goes to two things. One is to give money back to the volunteer community so they can launch a new language. Two is about half of it goes to the infrastructure. You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, a lot of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users.
At the bottom of the article there is now a Disclaimer:
Disclaimer: An earlier version of the story used the phrase ‘most of it’ in place of ‘a lot of it’ while talking of funding being used in the global south. This has been corrected.
This is better, thank you, although still far from perfect. (I wouldn't have said "a lot of it"; it actually is relatively little, as explained earlier.)
I've been told the "More than 75%" in the first sentence of that paragraph refers to the sum of
42% Direct support to websites
31% Direct support to communities
mentioned in the Annual Report.[1]
Now, I am quite certain the "31% Direct support to communities" includes funding for the affiliates, which in many cases have paid staff, not volunteer staff. If so, then the phrase "give money back to the volunteer community" – which is different from "communities" in the Anual Report – is substantially misleading. (Wikimedia Germany alone has around 160 paid employees.)
The 65,000 Indian volunteer contributors mentioned in the Indian Express article by and large don't get any of those funds. What personal grants there were in South Asia ($75,198) went to 22 individuals, according to the Form 990 (p. 34, column (c), "Number of recipients").[2] The impression created by this passage is quite different from the reality.
Another inaccuracy is in the phrase "75% of the money we raise". As mentioned earlier, the WMF each year raises substantially more money than it spends. The percentages in the Annual Report relate to expenditure, not revenue. (You can tell that this is so because they sum to 100%.)
75% of $112 million (total expenses) is not 75% of $163 million (total support and revenue)![3]
Another paragraph in the Indian Express article that I thought was strange is this one:
“Unlike many other countries, India is mobile-centric… you can’t tell people to go to a desktop or laptop and edit. So that became a constraint. So we actually partnered with Jio and made sure it (editing) was built into the app itself… We enabled people to edit Wikipedia on the phone, which is a big breakthrough in a country like India, and so that has contributed to the significant growth in languages,” he said, adding this is also the answer to why Wikipedia raises money.
As an explanation for why Wikipedia raises money, this reads very well – "The Wikimedia Foundation needs money to create more free content in Indian languages!" I can imagine how this might be viewed as something Indians can get behind.
But as mentioned before, the Wikimedia Foundation had a surplus of $50 million in the 2020/2021 financial year. That surplus alone is ten times what the Foundation spent in the entire rest of the world (outside Europe and North America) in 2020, according to the Form 990.[4]
As a movement committed to accuracy and neutrality, we always fact-check narratives. Please let's do that with our own as well!
I would also like to point out that the only thing enabling us to check the facts in this case is the Form 990 the Wikimedia Foundation is legally required to publish in order to retain charitable status.
As I mentioned the other day, both here and in the Signpost,[5] the Wikimedia Endowment – which now also receives most planned gifts (assets left in people's will) that in the past would have gone to the Foundation[6] – has never produced a Form 990 or audited financial statements, because it is still not a 501(c)(3) organisation. As a movement, we should insist on the move to a 501(c)(3) being completed as a matter of urgency, to establish a minimum standard of transparency.
Best,
Andreas
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 11:39 PM Megan Hernandez [email protected] wrote:
Hi Andreas,
We have followed up to your questions on the fundraising meta talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Raju_Narisetti_interview:_most_of_the_money_is_flowing_into_the_Global_South .
Thank you,
Megan
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 6:52 PM Peter Southwood [email protected] wrote:
This seems a reasonable request.
Cheers,
Peter
From: Andreas Kolbe [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 02 June 2022 15:13 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Fact-checking Raju Narisetti in the Indian Express
Dear all,
Last weekend, an interview with Raju Narisetti, titled "Wikipedia is building trust with transparency", was published in the Indian Express, one of the major daily newspapers in India.
For your convenience, here is an archive link for the article: https://archive.ph/RaCwX
The Indian Express link is: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/raju-naris...
The article quotes Raju as saying (my emphases),
----
“More than 75% of the money we raise globally goes to two things. One is to give money back to the volunteer community so they can launch a new language. Two is about half of it goes to the infrastructure. You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users.
----
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than 75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all, few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US, right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest (2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US. According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America (excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5% of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31 of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990 is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America (excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990 only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals, certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and $3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue. Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above, what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best,
Andreas
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... – see also https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts
Virus-free. http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient www.avg.com
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An uncharitable + personalized take, Andreas... But an important topic.
That grantmaking line you found doesn't seem to include APGs; Indonesia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021_round_2/Wikimedia_Indonesia/Progress_report_form#Revenues and CIS https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021_round_2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Progress_report_form#Revenues would be another $500k.
My view: + Grants, exclusive of APGs, are mostly going outside of NA + Europe. – Few new organizations lately have reached the size / capacity of having regular APGs. This greatly limits what we can accomplish regionally.
= The other limit on $ diffusion right now is a shortage of good ideas for how to use funding locally to advance the projects, and people to implement them. We can't fund communities that don't have funding bottlenecks, or that don't exist. Recent proposals https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Alliances_Fund/Proposals are a mixed bag. + The new grants program is giving community members experience in evaluating + soliciting ideas, and increasing the supply of funds. Which starts the bootstrapping process. +10 – We're starting in a valley: total funds disseminated outside the foundation has been low for years, due in part to the WMF encouraging other orgs to limit growth.
[Q for former-APG affiliates: how is this changing for you? how are you setting budget targets?]
Outside grantmaking, more Foundation efforts seem to be focusing on underrepresented regions, and community members have been hired by WMF from those regions as liaisons and facilitators. We'll have to see if that is effective. (There are also negative side-effects from any framework where most funds go to salaries, and from engaging active multilingual community members in a way that obliges them to a central org. We need to watch out for these.)
I'd like to see us develop a better movement-wide understanding of a few interrelated goals, before getting worked up about the specifics of current resource allocation: Five questions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/Design_chats/Funds_dissemination:
* . **Bootstrapping**: *How should we support + invest in regions w/ no current community? : *Subsidiarity*: How much of this work should be run by local UGs, hubs, WMF, other [UNRWA]? *⋮ **Diffusion**: *Where we have full capacity, what are healthy distributions of $, labor, focus? *᠅* *Tactics*: In equilibrium, do all orgs grow/shrink together? How do we prioritize across orgs? ⸭ *Peter paradox*: Under what conditions does paying people strengthen local community?
We may have answers to most of these questions implicitly embedded in current processes. But I have not seen explicit answers or discussions in many years.
SJ
(apologies to anyone who feels individually called out above. except AK, who invited it :)
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 9:13 AM Andreas Kolbe [email protected] wrote:
“*More than 75% of the money we raise globally* goes to two things. One is to *give money back to the volunteer community* so they can launch a new language. Two is about *half of it goes to the infrastructure.* You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, *most of it is actually flowing into the global south,* where the growth will come in languages and users.
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than 75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all, few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US, right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest (2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US. According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America (excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5% of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31 of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990 is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America (excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990 only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals, certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and $3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue. Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above, what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... – see also https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/... To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
Hi Sam,
From looking at the pages about Indonesia and CIS you link to, they seem to relate to 2021, no?
All the figures I mentioned are from the 2020 Form 990, released by the WMF just a few days ago. I believe the WMF would have made sure they are complete.
(The 2021 form is not due until November 2022. However, I anticipate that the WMF will ask for an extension, as has been its practice, to delay publication of the 2021 Form 990 until May 2023.)
Now, you explain eloquently in your email why it has not been possible to send much money to the Global South. You cite a lack of mature organisations, a lack of good ideas, "starting in a valley", etc.
But you completely elide the fact that the Indian public has just been told that the situation is the complete opposite of what you describe. It has been told that "Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users."[1]
Are you then fully at ease with that apparent mismatch?
Do you think the Indian Express should publish a correction to reflect the real situation, as you describe it in your mail?
Andreas
[1] https://archive.ph/RaCwX#selection-875.433-875.614
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 8:42 PM Samuel Klein [email protected] wrote:
An uncharitable + personalized take, Andreas... But an important topic.
That grantmaking line you found doesn't seem to include APGs; Indonesia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021_round_2/Wikimedia_Indonesia/Progress_report_form#Revenues and CIS https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021_round_2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Progress_report_form#Revenues would be another $500k.
My view:
- Grants, exclusive of APGs, are mostly going outside of NA + Europe.
– Few new organizations lately have reached the size / capacity of having regular APGs. This greatly limits what we can accomplish regionally.
= The other limit on $ diffusion right now is a shortage of good ideas for how to use funding locally to advance the projects, and people to implement them. We can't fund communities that don't have funding bottlenecks, or that don't exist. Recent proposals https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Alliances_Fund/Proposals are a mixed bag.
- The new grants program is giving community members experience in
evaluating + soliciting ideas, and increasing the supply of funds. Which starts the bootstrapping process. +10 – We're starting in a valley: total funds disseminated outside the foundation has been low for years, due in part to the WMF encouraging other orgs to limit growth.
[Q for former-APG affiliates: how is this changing for you? how are you setting budget targets?]
Outside grantmaking, more Foundation efforts seem to be focusing on underrepresented regions, and community members have been hired by WMF from those regions as liaisons and facilitators. We'll have to see if that is effective. (There are also negative side-effects from any framework where most funds go to salaries, and from engaging active multilingual community members in a way that obliges them to a central org. We need to watch out for these.)
I'd like to see us develop a better movement-wide understanding of a few interrelated goals, before getting worked up about the specifics of current resource allocation: Five questions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/Design_chats/Funds_dissemination :
- . **Bootstrapping**: *How should we support + invest in regions w/ no
current community? : *Subsidiarity*: How much of this work should be run by local UGs, hubs, WMF, other [UNRWA]? *⋮ **Diffusion**: *Where we have full capacity, what are healthy distributions of $, labor, focus? *᠅* *Tactics*: In equilibrium, do all orgs grow/shrink together? How do we prioritize across orgs? ⸭ *Peter paradox*: Under what conditions does paying people strengthen local community?
We may have answers to most of these questions implicitly embedded in current processes. But I have not seen explicit answers or discussions in many years.
SJ
(apologies to anyone who feels individually called out above. except AK, who invited it :)
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 9:13 AM Andreas Kolbe [email protected] wrote:
“*More than 75% of the money we raise globally* goes to two things. One is to *give money back to the volunteer community* so they can launch a new language. Two is about *half of it goes to the infrastructure.* You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, *most of it is actually flowing into the global south,* where the growth will come in languages and users.
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than 75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all, few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US, right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest (2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US. According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America (excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5% of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31 of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990 is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America (excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990 only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals, certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and $3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue. Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above, what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_... – see also https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/... To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
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