[weeks]

As a Wikipedia administrator (mostly inactive), this sentiment makes complete sense to me. The WMF seemingly spends the majority of its money on non-critical functions such as community outreach, local chapters, yearly conferences and other non-critical costs. Including a parade of highly paid, not very effective executives. One thing to keep in mind is the WMF != the Wikipedia community, it is very possible to truly support the Wikipedia mission without also supporting how the WMF is ran.

[smsm42]

> on non-critical functions such as community outreach, local chapters, yearly conferences

These are critical functions if you want to have live developing community. If you just want to have a site that answers http requests, sure, not critical. There are billions of those. Making sure Wiki projects work as communities and not just as IP address answering http requests is what makes it critical.

> One thing to keep in mind is the WMF != the Wikipedia community, it is very possible to truly support the Wikipedia mission without also supporting how the WMF is ran.

Absolutely. But in doing that one must not forget what the point is. If you declare chapters and and community development unnecessary, what is necessary? Just server maintenance? Nope. Google has tons of expertise in maintaining servers, still can't make communities. Their Freebase project is no more, Wikidata is alive and well. Something to learn from this?

[ChristianKle]

Wikipedia had more membership growth in the time where there was no money for yearly conferences and community outreach.

Wikidata mainly works because it's programmers do a decent job and people like to participate. It doesn't work because WMF invests in community outreach and yearly conferences. It's get's a lot of money from the German chapter, so it shows some usefulness of the chapter but it's not a result of the community building spending of that chapter.

[fiter]

How does WMF measure their community building success/failure?

[smsm42]

There are regular surveys, and then by talking to people on events, conferences or just by people providing feedback on one of many channels. And of course by statistical measures such as traffic, editor activities, etc. (for which WMF has team that does relevant data collection and research - yet another non-obvious place where people work that is not directly "site maintenance"). You can also check out https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources for teams that do it and know better than I do :)

[lern_too_spel]

Highly paid executives? https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar... shows that the top executives are paid less than individual contributors at other companies in the area. If anything, they're underpaid.