Tuesday, October 26, 2010

#Wikimedia publishes its audited financial statements

Organisations like the Wikimedia Foundation have their annual financial statements audited. Such statements are prepared by the auditor and the financial staff of the WMF.

The statements for 2009 and 2010 have been audited by KPMG. It is accompanied by a Q&A.

There is a part in the statements that hit two of the things I hold dear:

....an overwhelming majority of the Foundation’s project activities are carried out by an international network of volunteers, whose activity is not reflected in the table above.

For example (unaudited):
  • In the year ended June 30, 2010, the educational content of the Foundation’s largest project, Wikipedia, grew by approximately 2.8 million articles to 16.2 million articles total.
  • In the year ended June 30, 2010, volunteers added approximately 2.3 million images, movies, and sound files to the Foundation’s multimedia repository.
  • Volunteers also contribute in several ways to the Foundation’s wiki software: volunteer software developers add new functionality to the code base, and volunteer language specialists add to the code base by translating the wiki interface into different languages. In the year ended June 30, 2010, the source code hosted in the Foundation’s version control repository grew by approximately 960,000 lines of code.
 Thanks,
     GerardM

2 comments:

filceolaire said...

Yes. Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects cannot be valued by looking at a conventional balance sheet. A large part of the donations received by the wikimedia projects is in the form of donations of time and knowledge which just don't show up on a balance sheet. Similarily nearly all of the donations made by Wikimedia is in the form of downloads by people all round the world. Again these do not show up on the balance sheet.

Anonymous said...

Thanks