Legal fees and legal staff take up much of their expenses as well. When you have a platform that aims to make truth public, you are getting threatened with lawsuits 24 hours a day.
Legal fees were $493,315 for the fiscal year ending in 2023. Web hosting expenses were $3,120,819. They spent more on travel and conferences than both these combined ($4,180,219). Also, they pay their CEO more than all legal expenses.
I would really like to see Wikipedia become fully self-sufficient, so it can’t be threatened by a hostile takeover. They could do that through investment income without ever touching their principal, especially if they started reasonably managing expenses years ago.
Edit for accuracy: so, earlier I totally misread the only paragraph with “legal” mentioned in last financial disclosure (here). There’s no other mention of legal directly, so it must be lumped in with one of the other expense buckets. Maybe part of “professional service expenses” at $15,464,635?
