[danio]

They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers.

10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism.

5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable.

There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for?

$380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel.

Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.

[bjelkeman-again]

Running a site with 70M users/month and relying on the "majority" of new development work to be done by volunteers. I think that is highly optimistic.

[angrycoder]

The irony here is stunning, because that is what they rely on for their content, volunteers.

[gritzko]

Regarding contractors I might say that their multimedia-related code (ie the in-browser audio/video player) is done by Kaltura, an external contractor. http://kaltura.com Penny counting is a bit too much, folks should be paid properly. But their drift away from "organic" growth is a bit disturbing indeed.