Notes: Bandwidth and hosting figures based on publicly reported amounts (for example http://www.nowpublic DIGGITY DIGGITY DOT com/jimmy_wales_gives_talk_on_free_culture_transparency_and_search). Staff expenses estimate is my own, using the current staff and approximate salaries and including taxes paid for employees but not contractors. Depreciation estimate based on audit, as indicated, but converting to a 3-year useful life instead of 5 years, a change recommended by the auditors. -- Michael Snow 19:27, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Piotrus, personnel expenses are not "~3/2 of technical". Staff salaries might be more than the cost of bandwidth and hosting alone, but maintaining and replacing equipment (represented here by depreciation) relates entirely to the technical side.
Further regarding the staff costs, a good portion of them are developers whose work is entirely devoted to improving technical matters and keeping the site running. With all due respect to anyone who thinks that should all be handled without hiring staff, a) you are entirely welcome to step up, put your money time where your mouth is, and volunteer, and b) even with the use of paid staff, the available resources have so far been too limited to produce much-demanded features like stable versions or single login.
For public discussions of staffing issues, it's been primarily on foundation-l (a couple examples), but responses have tended more towards enthusiasm than debate about the expense. The remaining staff have largely been hired on a basis of organizational need to handle issues that urgently require attention but for which volunteers are inadequate. Some of this is a natural function of scaling up as an organization—when you're suddenly dealing with large amounts of money daily, you need somebody to handle that money. Otherwise bills don't get paid and all the servers in the world don't matter when the lights go dark. Similarly with a General Counsel and legal issues, it's to guard against threats to continued operation.
Relatively speaking, bandwidth and servers are inexpensive from a business perspective, and the strain they put on Wikimedia finances is a sign of the Foundation being run on the cheap. It actually holds the Foundation back from plans to hire more staff, especially developers. For most organizations with any kind of staff (including nonprofits and technology companies), salaries will be the single largest expense, usually by a hefty margin. -- Michael Snow 18:03, 13 February 2007 (UTC)