[HN Gopher] Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
___________________________________________________________________
Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
Author : akolbe
Score : 328 points
Date : 2023-05-22 09:31 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| tjpnz wrote:
| This is what our donations are paying for? I'll be thinking twice
| before donating again.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You're upset that a nonprofit org employs people?
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| The main organisation that owns Wikipedia funnels all the
| donations into the owners.
|
| Wikipedia doesn't really cost anything because it's just static
| text so they pocket almost all of the money.
| IceWreck wrote:
| > Wikipedia doesn't really cost anything because it's just
| static text
|
| Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text.
|
| Wikipedia is not static text. It runs Mediawiki which runs on
| PHP and requires a database, plus all forms of caching. They
| also serve media (images/video) have users, discussions,
| comments, etc.
|
| And at wikipedia's scale they're not trivial problems to
| solve and dont cost peanuts for hosting.
| lapinot wrote:
| Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous.
| They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some
| full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop,
| it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure
| they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about
| it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.
| akolbe wrote:
| The actual Internet _hosting costs_ have consistently been
| less than $3 million a year:
|
| 2022/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundatio
| n/2/26/Wikim...
|
| 2020/2019: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundatio
| n/f/f7/Wikim...
|
| And they were the same a decade ago:
|
| 2012/2011: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundatio
| n/0/09/FINAL...
|
| Admittedly, this doesn't include salaries.
| ff317 wrote:
| The salaries are much larger than what gets put in the
| "hosting" line, which merely covers things like leasing
| cage space in datacenters and paying for
| transit/transport/peering links.
|
| I'm not gonna do another deep dive on the org structure,
| because I've done it before when these topics come up (
| like this one half a year ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 ), but I'll
| provide my overall view as a 10 year engineering veteran
| at the WMF who has fought many battles in this org, which
| you can take or leave:
|
| There are problems at the Foundation, like there are
| everywhere. Resources are not allocated as well as they
| should be, which is also common just about everywhere.
| However, by and large, the money is put to good use, and
| the employees of the Foundation are doing good and
| necessary work, and there's no way to run today's
| Wikipedia on today's Internet for anywhere close to
| $3M/year total organizational budget, so it's pretty
| disingenuous to use that as a comparison point.
|
| Go look at budgets for any other org which runs a top-N
| important site on the Internet for comparison. Consider
| that we adhere to stronger values and principles around
| rights and privacy and open source, all of which
| /increase/ our operating costs.
|
| WMF runs on a shoestring, relatively-speaking. WMF just
| had a ~5% layoff over budget reductions (
| https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-
| lay... ) in response to a community outcry about our
| fundraising. We (the engineers) regularly run into
| budgetary and/or priority constraints pursuing new useful
| SRE-level projects that increase scalability,
| reliability, or directly improve user experience (e.g.
| latency for readers and editors, rendering speed, better
| APIs for various consuming parties, more edge caches,
| more hardware redundancy, etc). We also don't get paid
| industry equivalent rates, or get the stocks or bonuses
| that we'd get elsewhere.
|
| You can make all the arguments you want about some past
| or present form of grift at some upper organizational
| levels, but I'll still contend that most of the money is
| going to good use, that it's very expensive to run
| Wikipedia responsibly and reliably, and that the
| foundation doesn't have the cash pile necessary to stop
| relying on donations for the long-term sustainability of
| its projects. Even if the budget we have was allocated
| perfectly, I'd still be arguing that we need more to do
| the job right.
| hashar wrote:
| I too am working for the Wikimedia Foundation. I have a
| good example showing how much we run on a budget, to
| avoid outing someone against their will, I will replace
| technology terms with letters:
|
| A new employee joined from one of the big tech players.
| They got hired for a role with X technology. Upon joining
| the thin team of 4 or 5 persons, including the double hat
| manager/engineer, the person legitimately though the
| whole team was SOLELY in charge of said X technology.
| That is how their previously larger employer operated
| with multiple such teams scattered around the world. To
| their demise, the person was now more or less the lone
| tech lead for X and Y, with a worldwide and leadership
| responsibility for both. With of course shared
| responsibility with other tech managed by their teammate.
|
| Thankfully we have grown a little bit since then and the
| kind of position I described is less of an occurrence
| nowadays (but still is for some area). That is far from
| lavish for sure.
| akolbe wrote:
| Well, the 5% layoff is more than balanced by the 25%
| increase in headcount (from 570 to 711) that appears to
| have happened between March 2022 and December 2022:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpos
| t/2...
|
| The Foundation's cash pile (not all in actual cash, of
| course) is currently at around $350 million, $100 million
| of which is in a completely non-transparent fund held by
| the Tides Foundation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpos
| t/2...
|
| There have been promises made for years and years that
| this fund would soon be converted into a standalone 501c3
| and start filing an annual Form 990. Still has not
| happened. Even though the 501c3 has existed for almost a
| year now, the money is still with Tides and still nobody
| has ever seen an audited statement of what goes in and
| out.
|
| This said, I agree with you that WMF engineers do a lot
| of good work (much of it not necessarily apparent to
| casual readers as opposed to editors). It is noticeable
| that the site is more cared for.
| IceWreck wrote:
| What about development costs ?
| George83728 wrote:
| The last time Wikimedia Foundation released a new project
| website was WikiData in 2012, more than 10 years ago.
|
| Okay well maybe that's not fair. They did recently update
| the CSS for Wikipedia itself ... I don't know how many
| millions of dollars they spent on that...
| jamilton wrote:
| There's also the visual editor, which I think got a mixed
| reception, but I like it for quick edits.
| akolbe wrote:
| You mean for software features and the like? Some good
| work has been done there in the background - it's not
| stuff that readers would notice, but contributors do. It
| wouldn't be fair to say that all the money has been mis-
| spent - there are lots of people working at the
| Foundation who are doing good work and who are _not_
| getting rich - especially bearing in mind the cost of
| living in parts of the US (though this begs the question
| whether the work could not be done more cost-effectively
| elsewhere).
| bawolff wrote:
| Note - many wmf staff do not live in the usa. Some who do
| do not live in expensive parts of the usa.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| [flagged]
| mtttpt wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher
|
| "Maher states that she focuses on global digital inclusion as a
| way to improve and protect the rights of people to information
| through technology."
|
| Yet the actual mission of Wikipedia is something quite different
| to this. They push a particular point of view, wrapped up in the
| false cloak of "neutrality", and assert this as truth. Wikipedia
| is part of a broader propaganda drive to export US cultural mores
| to the rest of the world.
| stubybubs wrote:
| I'm curious, do you do much reading of Wikipedia in languages
| other than English? I don't, so I don't have an answer here,
| but I wonder how much neutrality there is in Russian or
| Vietnamese or Urdu wiki articles.
|
| English Wikipedia is going to have at the very least an
| English-speaking world tilt to it. Are the others similar?
| itronitron wrote:
| Are they hiring? lol
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Only for temporary help, as can be seen, which can end at any
| time.
|
| Otherwise they wouldn't need much of a severance package.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| How can this foundation be held accountable?
| dougmwne wrote:
| Tax exempt organizations such as nonprofits and churches are
| pretty famous for being difficult to hold accountable. There
| are some required public filings, but for the most part, a
| handpicked board, founder or president decides if they will
| enrich the mission or enrich themselves. Donors should know who
| they are giving money to, but most people just recognize a logo
| and give without thinking much about it.
| mintaka5 wrote:
| ...while they bang on my email server's door for donations
| because wikimedia is "struggling" so badly. what a crock of shit.
| i told you silicon valley is made up of con-artists. i'll put
| money on it.
| kloch wrote:
| Wikipedia is an amazing resource that I use all the time, and
| currently the best (or least worst) model for curating such a
| massive knowledge base. For these reasons I have $100/mo
| recurring donation set up. $240M is less than two years of
| expenses but I do think they could do a much better job
| explaining their budget/expense growth.
|
| I tend to view math/science pages most of the time and it's rare
| to see any non-neutroal POV issues on most of those kinds of
| pages.
|
| Even for topics that are contentious today, the system _should_
| converge towards neutrality over long time frames. It 's just
| unrealistic to expect that hot/political topics would be
| perfectly NPOV in the short run.
| andersrs wrote:
| But you're not donating to Wikipedia or the contributors whom
| make it a great source. Wiki _Media_ spend your money on all
| sorts of things which have don 't promote sharing knowledge via
| the internet. The expenses have ballooned 5x in 10 years.
| mjparrott wrote:
| "I think that's also not sustainable to just expect that rich
| people who don't need to care for their bread in the morning can
| just come and work for us." - Nataliia Tymkiv
|
| Call me crazy, but $623,286 USD will buy a LOT of bread.
|
| "Putting food on the table for your family" phrases start to
| become almost comical when they're made by people earning good
| portions of a million per year.
| jl6 wrote:
| There's nothing intrinsically wrong with nonprofits paying high
| salaries to senior leaders. You will find very well compensated
| people at the top of many large charities. That's because they
| are big orgs with hundreds of employees, with all the same
| problems as similar-sized big orgs. They employ a lot of people,
| and the job of managing and leading a lot of people isn't easy.
| It's in the charity's interest that the job is done well, and so
| they pay well to get the best talent, because they're competing
| with for-profit orgs for this same talent. And yes, severance is
| negotiated as part of the employment contract - it's a tool to
| attract talent.
|
| There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial
| and doesn't deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then
| decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance.
|
| Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved
| engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It's a
| global top 10 website, and that puts a target on their back. They
| have lawyers. They have an HR department. They have a Finance
| department. These departments do complex real-world stuff that
| needs planning, management and strategy. Maybe you know how to
| scale an SQL database, but do you know how to sue the Turkish
| government?
|
| Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful,
| their grant money spending could use some scrutiny:
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
| carapace wrote:
| > All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel
| like doing it for a pittance.
|
| Where can I sign up for that?
|
| Sarcasm, but also not. There are literally 100,000's of people
| willing and able to do those jobs for much much less.
|
| Not to put too fine a point on it, ask around in India or
| China, eh?
| jl6 wrote:
| You could submit your CV to an executive search agency.
|
| But wouldn't it be remarkable if what you are saying was
| true? If there really is a pool of 100,000's of equally
| skilled people lining up to do the same job for much, much
| less, then that would make the board of _every_ major
| corporation fools. Remember, these are the cut-throat
| capitalists who'll sell their mother for a percentage, who
| relentlessly optimize their businesses and seek to drive down
| wages in pursuit of profit - and yet they have been duped
| into paying over the odds for something they could easily get
| for much less?
|
| It just doesn't add up, does it?
|
| Because of course there is _not_ such a large pool of equally
| skilled people.
| carapace wrote:
| _That 's_ your rejoinder?
|
| > Because of course there is not such a large pool of
| equally skilled people.
|
| Of course there is, they're just stuck in India or China or
| ...
|
| Talent in the USA is fungible with talent in, say, India,
| and we all know it. Your "cut-throat capitalists" have to
| invent dodges like _H-1B visa_ to get around systemic
| barriers to market efficency.
| jl6 wrote:
| Your hypothesis is that these skilled potential-CEOs have
| not found a way to leave India or China? The existence
| and popularity of visa schemes undermines your point -
| companies are _very_ willing to source labor from
| overseas. Why have they done this for engineers but not
| CEOs?
| rg111 wrote:
| > _After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language
| Institute 's Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American
| University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative
| experience that instilled a deep love for the Middle East. Maher
| subsequently studied at the Institut francais d'etudes arabes de
| Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia. In 2005,
| Maher received a bachelor's degree from New York University in
| Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies._
|
| I wonder how could she serve the Wikimedia Foundation and what
| background she had that helped her do so. ~600K USD in severance
| and much more of donors' money were spent to bankroll her salary.
|
| What a waste!
| jtefera wrote:
| She did have an extensive experience working in different areas
| prior to joining Wikimedia as COO. Seems unfair to just post an
| excerpt of her education background and directly unqualify her.
| zzzziZzzZzZzZz wrote:
| [flagged]
| oefrha wrote:
| What concerns me more is Wikimedia Foundation was apparently
| until recently led by someone now on the payroll of Atlantic
| Council and U.S. Department of State. Must have done wonders to
| neutrality at Wikipedia.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Reminds me of articles written by American think tanks trying
| to convince me a multipolar world is bad.
| gumby wrote:
| I don't understand. What job could someone take after leaving
| that post that you think would be neutral? Work for google?
| Become a bricklayer?
| oefrha wrote:
| I can think of very few jobs less neutral than Atlantic
| Council and U.S. Department of State. You don't get invited
| to those boards without prior connections to some of the
| least neutral people on the planet.
| humanistbot wrote:
| >I can think of very few jobs less neutral than Atlantic
| Council and U.S. Department of State.
|
| What about any senior exec position at Meta, Alphabet,
| Amazon, or Microsoft? I hope you don't believe those
| organizations are 'neutral' either.
| George83728 wrote:
| The State Department is maximally non-neutral, they are
| explicitly looking after American foreign policy
| interests. That is their raison d'etre. It simply is not
| possible to be less neutral than the State Department.
| They're as not-neutral as the US military.
|
| Those corporations are not exactly shining examples of
| neutrality, but by simple virtue of being multinationals
| which do business in many countries, cooperating with and
| abiding by the laws of many governments, they are _more_
| neutral than the State Department itself. They are not
| explicitly and overtly set up to serve a single
| particular government, although there is good and ample
| reason to believe they covertly do so. I don 't think
| anybody believes these corporations are strictly neutral,
| but to claim they're less neutral than the State
| Department is quite absurd.
| gumby wrote:
| Sometimes the most effective heads of large organizations
| are effective _because_ of their connections, especially
| when many of the issues they will deal with involve
| countries threatening the organization with censorship,
| control, and takedown issues.
|
| Wikipedia has a much more admirable history in this regard
| than the major for profit online companies.
| oefrha wrote:
| Those same connections ask for favors which is how they
| undermine neutrality. These is a reason revolving doors
| are bad.
| xpe wrote:
| I think you might be confused about different meanings of
| 'neutral'.
|
| Wikipedia's policy of a neutral point of view (NPOV) is _not_
| "neutral" in the broad spectrum of political philosophy. The
| underlying principles of Wikipedia draw very much from
| something akin to anthropology; namely, describe what exists
| and what is happening according to some culture or point of
| view.
|
| There are plenty of regimes in the world that do not tolerate
| Wikipedia's values.
| Drblessing wrote:
| This is why you shouldn't donate to Wikimedia
| tombert wrote:
| Man, I've been _fired_ by for-profit companies and felt lucky to
| get four weeks severance. It 's upsetting that people working for
| a non-profit are getting 1.5x their salary, but I guess this is
| kind of what we get for believing that a non-profit is going to
| act better than an evil corporation.
| xpe wrote:
| Here we go with this _good_ versus _evil_ thing. Don't get me
| wrong; I don't put any corporation on any kind of pedestal
| whatsoever. But when I hear a good versus evil, it doesn't
| indicate to me that the speaker is thinking clearly; it seems
| like they're thinking imprecisely.
|
| I could be wrong; you could have a religious view that suggests
| that Satan works his malfeasance through corporate influence.
|
| We're seeing human nature at play in the context of
| organizational dynamics. That's hardly evil.
| FredPret wrote:
| While I think Wikipedia is highly suspect given its ample
| reserves and continued begging, it should not be upsetting for
| you. It should bring you joy that someone got treated well.
| tester457 wrote:
| A little too well. This thread has taught me not to donate to
| Wikipedia.
| tombert wrote:
| When a for-profit company gives someone a huge
| severance/golden-parachute, that's fine. Fundamentally I was
| giving them money for "whatever they want", and if that's how
| they felt they should allocate those funds then fair enough.
|
| However, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and their messaging in
| their donation drives always sort of implied that they
| _really_ needed these donations. Since Wikipedia is a non-
| profit, I _do_ have higher aspirations of how they 're going
| to allocate their funds: chiefly in making the highest
| quality freely-available knowledge resource even better.
|
| If they had given these people a three month paid severance,
| I would not criticize them at all. That's very generous and
| there _is_ value in making sure employees are treated well.
| 1.5x your annual salary though? I 'm sorry, but there's
| "generous" and then there's "shady".
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > It should bring you joy that someone got treated well.
|
| It highlights that it's not the standard. I don't feel
| particular joy that a person who is already treated well
| continues to be treated well. I feel joy when a person who
| isn't already treated well is treated well. Joy is not my
| default state; I don't feel it about status quo human
| situations.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you like that, I've got a non-profit that pays 100% of net
| income out as a severance package for its ex-CEO, who is
| currently helping as the interim CEO (and only employee) for
| a token $1/year. I will accept all donations in the spirit of
| joy in which they were given.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Its not so much about non-profit vs evil-for-profit. Once
| certain people from certain money-cultures enter management of
| a for-profit, it is going to hell. Sure, they will give the
| speeches which are expected, promising to the lowly
| contributors that everything will stay cozy and nice. I guess
| vampire-management is a good word?
| jackvalentine wrote:
| I have the complete opposite read of the situation to you. I
| have no beef with people getting treated well by any kind of
| organisation.
| tombert wrote:
| Sure, it's good to compensate employees well. I replied in a
| sister comment that it's not inherently bad for the salaries
| to be high at Wikimedia, but it does seem a little
| frustrating to see a 1.5x annual salary severance for
| quitting a job when it's donation money being used to fund
| that severance.
|
| If it were, I don't know, three months severance, that would
| still be very generous, and I don't think most people would
| be very upset. We've all seen a ton of banners vaguely
| implying that Wikimedia is strapped for cash and needs your
| help, but they have enough to spend an extra six hundred
| grand for someone quitting?
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| An admirable position if we lived in a society in which
| fastfood workers or cleaners got severance pay.
| Clent wrote:
| Champions of executive's compensation is what the working
| class is fighting against. You lack of beef would classify
| you as their class traitor.
| II2II wrote:
| For nearly half of households, the severance for the CEO
| represents over 10 years of income. Households, not people. A
| great many of those people would have never received
| severance pay of any amount. Of those who do, they would be
| fortunate to receive months of severance pay based upon
| earnings that are a fraction of what a CEO earns. Is it any
| surprised that some people would be upset? Factor in that the
| Wikipedia depends upon donations and volunteer labour, and it
| looks like some people are reaping a disproportionate amount
| of the rewards.
|
| I'm not saying this to diminish what the Wikipedia does, nor
| to suggest the pay was not earned. These people almost
| certainly could have earned more elsewhere, yet decided to
| align themselves with an organization that serves the greater
| good. What I am saying is it is (or should be) easy to see
| where these sentiments come from.
| concordDance wrote:
| > For nearly half of households, the severance for the CEO
| represents over 10 years of income
|
| 90% of households actually. Most people aren't USAians.
| jzb wrote:
| "I have no beef with people getting treated well"
|
| Nor I. But there's being treated _well_ and then there 's
| being showered with cash, which is how I'd read getting a
| severance package in excess of 1.5 your base comp for a _full
| year_ when walking away to take another job.
|
| Generally speaking, if I leave my current job for another job
| I don't expect any severance at all. If I was laid off I'd
| feel pretty good about getting six months of severance.
| There's no reality where I expect 18 months severance walking
| away to take another gig.
| lbriner wrote:
| The arguments are attacking the people but it's the organisation
| that should be questioned. If I am a private company and I am
| struggling to keep profits, I can justify an expensive Director,
| ideally with good experience, whose relatively large salary will
| result in very large profits. Of course it doesn't always work
| and those people will have asked for big penalty clauses if you
| decide they didn't do well enough but that is the risk in
| capitalism.
|
| Not-for-profit is something else and should have a different
| enough culture that you aren't looking for people who require
| large salaries and big contract penalties. What are you solving
| (and wikimedia particular is famous for being really involved
| with almost everything except what most people think they do:
| wikipedia). If you are Oxfam, you might want to pay for someone
| with lots of experience in poverty scenarios. If you are Save The
| Children, you might want a Doctor with lots of experience helping
| children in poor countries etc. and those might cost you money.
|
| What do Wikimedia want? People with contacts? People who they can
| hold up as some kind of political statement? Someone who knows
| how to migrate PHP to something else? Who knows?
|
| It just all smells really bad and as others have said, it has
| been toxic for ages and doesn't deserve to go out with the
| begging hat when most work is done by a very small number of paid
| staff and mostly unpaid volunteers.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| They are doing a great job, but any organization who can pay
| US$623,286 in severance pay for 1 person shouldn't be putting out
| sob stories asking for donations IMHO. I've made donations in the
| past, but I'm not sure I'll be making any in the future, if there
| is where it is going.
| weystrom wrote:
| Cheers, I'm never donating ever again.
| [deleted]
| 71a54xd wrote:
| This is why I refuse to donate to WikiMedia.
| fcol wrote:
| This reminds me a bad experience.
|
| I worked very hard day in and day out for a startup and then quit
| bcz of bad management and got no severance (not blaming anybody).
| At the same time not good engineers got fired, they all got
| severance packages.
|
| It's a good life lesson though
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to
| shareholders and executives. Those tragic appeals they put out
| are lies.
| lallysingh wrote:
| [citation needed]
| gumby wrote:
| Shareholders? It's a non-profit.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Great financial packages for a non-profit
| skyyler wrote:
| Are they? It's also the 7th most visited site on the web. I
| don't think as many people would take offense to Roblox or
| Reddit leadership taking these kinds of packages...
| ethanbond wrote:
| Could it be that their financial packages is part of what
| makes it such an effective operation?
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to
| shareholders and executives.
|
| Reminder that the above is total horseshit.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I thought most of it qent to donations to other "charities"?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| One thing I do respect is that this article is hosted on
| Wikipedia. Not many corporations nor non-profits would host an
| obviously self effacing article.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Most of this is required public reporting for non-profits.
| Vuizur wrote:
| It is a community newspaper that is (apparently) independent of
| the WMF, and they don't have quarrels about hosting WMF-
| critical articles.
|
| Anti-WMF sentiment is surprisingly common on some Wikimedia
| projects.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie.
| ..
|
| This is one of the longest pages I have seen on wikipedia for
| a while.
| bulion wrote:
| Is this some sort of scam? I don't understand why they would
| receive such huge amounts of money, for doing nothing other than
| choosing to leave their jobs.
|
| It seems especially bizarre for a non-profit organisation where
| the bulk of all the actual work is done freely by volunteers.
|
| What is actually going on here?
| prepend wrote:
| It seems to me that they have lots of cash available and are
| financially able to "do the right thing."
|
| Firing people is not fun and is emotionally difficult. I would
| love to give 1.5x salary but there's usually some controller
| restricting me to something I don't like but can't change.
|
| Wikimedia doesn't have a duty to maximize shareholder equity
| and they have tons of money, so they can. I wonder what else
| they spend similarly on.
|
| I typically donate to wikimedia and behavior like this makes me
| rethink. How many more people need to donate to allow these
| people their money?
| komadori wrote:
| Were they fired, made redundant, or otherwise "let go"? My
| assumption is that severance is only paid under such
| circumstances, but, as the grandparent poster points out, the
| linked article makes it sound like they chose to leave for
| new jobs.
| scns wrote:
| People freed from the shackles of ethics taking as much as they
| can get? Who cares if they deserve it? /s Not a crime, only
| grifters griftin along, same old.
|
| Sorry for the negativity, feeling bitter about it.
| humanistbot wrote:
| It isn't like the org makes a decision to give them severance
| after they announce their resignation. It gets written into
| their contract from the beginning. The reason why organizations
| offer large severance packages is to attract good candidates.
| At good companies, even junior devs get severance. In good
| times, it's a good thing to do. Wouldn't you be more likely to
| take a job if you knew that no matter what happened, you would
| have a nice severance package to help you find your next
| position?
|
| Also, there is bloat in non-profits, but it isn't like
| everything is done by volunteers. Volunteers don't run the
| servers, they don't handle donation processing, they don't
| respond to lawsuits from people upset about how they are
| portrayed on Wikipedia. Then all those employees need HR, IT,
| janitors, etc., and then there are executives who run the
| organization.
| laratied wrote:
| I just don't donate to anything anymore. So many non-profits
| and charities are total scams that it pulls down the whole
| space.
|
| When you have cancer and missing children charities giving 2%
| to their cause and spending the remainder on bullshit it is
| trivial to make your charity not look as bad.
|
| If you really dig into it, a huge % of charity money is just
| funding the insiders travel and lifestyle in the name of "fund
| raising".
|
| This payout is nothing on a relative basis compared to other
| non-profits and that is the real issue.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| Gonna go ahead and plug https://www.givewell.org/ here, since
| they do an obscene amount of research to verify the cost-
| efficacy and trustworthiness of all the charities they funnel
| money to.
| George83728 wrote:
| I take your approach to large charities, but not small ones.
| I feel comfortable donating to small locally run charities
| for which I can personally observe their works. Particularly,
| my local volunteer fire department. I can see what they're
| buying (they show it off proudly) and talk with the people
| who actually do the work there, so I feel that I can trust
| them to use the money wisely. Sure as hell, nobody there is
| getting 6-figure severance payments...
| Gartent wrote:
| [flagged]
| troyvit wrote:
| Newsflash: nonprofit company that forms a linchpin of digital
| knowledge is doing well enough to pay severance packages in the
| (... checks notes ...) six digit range, sets up policy to do
| better in the future! Cue HN rage machine.
| scrollaway wrote:
| To put into perspective: the Wikimedia Foundation manages one of
| humanity's greatest achievements.
|
| I thought it was an open secret that they're pretty flush with
| cash overall despite the constant nag for justadollar'. I dunno,
| maybe I've been desensitised but these numbers are not horribly
| shocking to me, and when put in the context of the immense value
| the project brings to the rest of the world...
|
| I mean come on, look at some of the comments posted here. "Con
| artists", are you serious?
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| If people donate 100m to an organisation claiming to be a
| charity and 99m goes into the pockets of the people running it
| then they're going to question their donation.
|
| Why are donations being spent on enriching people instead of
| improving the project? Millions of dollars would pay for a hell
| of a lot of articles written by experts in their field.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Wikipedia is explicitly against articles written by experts.
| Because those are primary sources while wikipedia only allows
| secondary ones (IMO the biggest mistake, as it allows the
| HUGE bias it has)
| krageon wrote:
| An expert can write an article and cite the correct sources
| to go along with it. If anything, the fact that they are an
| expert makes this easier.
| detaro wrote:
| No. But it expects experts to still provide citations and
| sources when writing articles (and not to excessively self-
| cite)
| tombert wrote:
| "Con artists" might be a strong term, but honestly I can't
| blame people for being upset. Obviously Wikipedia is a pretty
| useful tool, I don't think anyone disputes that, but I think
| people can be forgiven to think that half-page-sized banners
| begging for money indicates that they're strapped for cash.
|
| They will have messages like "If everyone reading this right
| now gave a buck then this donation drive would be finished in
| five minutes". In hindsight, it feels a bit deceptive even if
| it's not an outright lie.
|
| Should anyone go to jail for this? No, I think that would be
| ridiculous, but it does kind of erode a bit of the trust that I
| had for Wikimedia.
| Clubber wrote:
| I see your point, but let me counterpoint. Anybody with any
| financial sense should save their money and not spend it as
| soon as they get it. This is to prepare for the drought
| years. Could this be something like that?
| tombert wrote:
| Forgive me, I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to say.
| You're saying that by giving a large severance to people no
| longer affiliated with the company, it's a form of saving
| money?
|
| I'm not trying to straw-man, I'm genuinely not sure what
| I'm responding to.
| Clubber wrote:
| >You're saying that by giving a large severance to people
| no longer affiliated with the company, it's a form of
| saving money?
|
| No, I'm saying having a large amount of cash on hand is a
| hedge against drought periods. I suspect they have a
| certain monetary goal during donation drives, so meeting
| those goals is part of their funding strategy. Some
| drives exceed goals, some don't. They need to account for
| runway or future lack thereof.
|
| Replying specifically to this:
|
| >They will have messages like "If everyone reading this
| right now gave a buck then this donation drive would be
| finished in five minutes". In hindsight, it feels a bit
| deceptive even if it's not an outright lie.
|
| FWIW, 1.5x severance doesn't seem excessive to me, I wish
| that would be the industry norm for everyone. If it were,
| there'd be a lot fewer stressed out people right now.
| rob74 wrote:
| One of humanity's greatest achievements, built by unpaid
| volunteers - so yes, some might find it shocking that none of
| the money from the donations that Wikipedia asks for year after
| year goes to these volunteers, while quite a lot of it is spent
| on large salaries and even larger severance packages.
| chasd00 wrote:
| The money we donate also goes to lots of random causes not
| related to wikipedia. I wonder what percent of the budget
| goes to actual wikipedia hosting and maintenance costs.
| fastily wrote:
| I've been an editor on Wikipedia for nearly 15 years. I reckon
| I've easily contributed tens of thousands of dollars worth of
| value during this time. To be clear, I don't expect/want any
| compensation (I firmly believe in the free knowledge for all
| mission), but I'd be lying if I said it doesn't sting to see
| others profit handsomely off of my hard work.
| xpe wrote:
| I can understand that. It grates against some notions of
| fairness.
|
| In any case, others being paid doesn't diminish your
| contributions. You know that you've helped and benefited
| others. (Wikipedia redefined my view of networks!)
|
| Quantifying your impact may be challenging, and this is frankly
| one of the best things about volunteering. Doing something for
| the process, not e.g. for some downstream effects that are not
| under your control.
|
| <puts philosopher hat on> Sometimes it's nice just to _do_ and
| not think about consequentialist ethics.
|
| Let us know something non-financial we can do to help you or
| your causes out?
| june_twenty wrote:
| Of course it does. They've used you. They're laughing in
| mansions with brand new cars and sending their kids to Ivy
| League schools etc etc
| xpe wrote:
| (/me looks around at comments)... The logical fallacies abound.
| It is nice when people think slowly and deliberately. It doesn't
| seem to happen often. Much of what is happening here seems to be
| emotional reactions followed by attempts at reason. Glad to know
| things are about the same, otherwise I might be worried that the
| HN conversation is _progressing_ too rapidly.
| acadapter wrote:
| Why can't the Wikimedia projects just be forked by some more
| normal people?
| [deleted]
| Eumenes wrote:
| Imagine donating to this corrupt organization
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| They aren't the ones bringing the value. It's the volunteers,
| which don't get a penny. They have received enough money to
| sustain Wikipedia almost indefinitely, I have no idea why they
| are still begging for money. I haven't heard of a single thing
| that's good excuse for that money in years.
|
| And a corollary would be saying that GitHub deserve money because
| otherwise there would be no open source.
|
| Wikipedia's code and data is open source, even if they somehow
| ran out of cash for hosting, which would never happen, people
| could easily set it up again. And they obviously would. I would
| donate directly to the people doing the actual contributions, not
| to the joke "non profit" that's getting all the credit.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Volunteers don't run the servers, they don't handle donation
| processing for small donors or sweet talk the egos of large
| donors, they don't respond to lawsuits from people upset about
| how they are portrayed on Wikipedia. Then all those employees
| need HR, IT, janitors, etc., and then there are executives who
| run the organization.
|
| If you were a regular Wikipedia editor, you'd know there is a
| ton of resistance among volunteers to directly paying
| volunteers to contribute. It gets proposed every now and then,
| but the consensus is that this would short-circuit the
| motivation and lead to a bunch of people currently on
| Mechanical Turk flooding in to try and make a bunch of edits to
| get paid. If you saw what happened with Hacktoberfest offering
| free tshirts to make PRs to popular open source projects, you'd
| be worried about that too.
|
| And a lot of the money goes directly to volunteer-directed
| projects, like meetups. See
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| Of course if you're comparing to a strawman where they pay
| everyone that'd be a bad idea that I wouldn't approve either.
|
| Nothing Wikipedia currently does with its money justifies the
| sums they are getting.
|
| If they decided to use that money to generate content, I'd
| imagine that would work more like normal encyclopedias
| instead of volunteer based. Where they would seek out actual
| experts, and only in scientific fields and other areas where
| there is a knowledge gap rather than opinions. You know, like
| companies can pay engineers to work on open source projects.
| Doesn't stop volunteers from volunteering. But you obviously
| don't throw away money at everyone, you pay for specific
| work.
|
| Honestly, only the math / scientific parts of Wikipedia are
| good, there's opinionated garbage in controversial areas. And
| it's better than books usually because it's easier to click
| and jump between definitions than the usual book or
| encyclopedia. If someone compressed all math and physics
| books into the Wikipedia format with links, I'd barely use
| Wikipedia again.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think the people who want "actual experts" should go read
| encyclopedias built by actual experts. That user segment
| need not be targeted by Wikipedia.
|
| Wikipedia is what it is because of volunteer editors like
| me. It is not feasible to convert it to be majority
| "expert" so if it attempted to do so, the cost would be
| exorbitant and the users who prefer "expert-written work"
| will not be satisfied until it is complete since the
| presence of volunteer work will be considered by them a bad
| thing.
|
| Those users will be concerned that they do not know which
| articles are "expert"-written and WP will lose volunteers
| who get upset that they can't correct "expert" works.
|
| It's best that Wikipedia not attempt to be a thing it is
| not.
|
| Encyclopedia Britannica does exist. There is no reason that
| Wikipedia needs to enter that space.
| jamilton wrote:
| I see no reason why expert-written articles would have to
| be locked from further edits, or marked as expert-
| written. They could be subject to the same formal
| standards as the rest of Wikipedia, but with guarantee
| that those standards are applied.
|
| There are already paid Wikipedia editors, they tend to be
| working for PR firms. A non-profit doing the same thing
| for altruistic purposes sounds feasible and good to me,
| it wouldn't even need to necessarily be part of the
| Wikimedia Foundation.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Because if they are not marked or restricted then I
| believe they won't appeal to users who want expert
| articles. Like in the reaction to LLMs we know that
| people who want high certainty in their articles also
| want to know when they're in their high certainty
| environment and when they're not. Mixing the two will
| cause many of them to be upset. Permitting volunteers to
| edit will cause many of them to be upset, especially if
| there is one with an error.
|
| It's better this way with a clear separation of wiki and
| expert.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Because if they are not marked or restricted then I
| believe they won't appeal to users who want expert
| articles.
|
| I believe they will, because the quality will be higher.
| They shouldn't employ experts as a marketing campaign,
| they should employ experts as a way to keep interesting
| entries from devolving into trash heaps. I'd honestly
| prefer those experts to be research librarians and
| experts on parliamentary procedure or statistics, rather
| than subject matter. Instead all editorial decisions are
| made through trials adjudicated by a few people who
| happened to walk by, and other people paid to be there by
| private organizations and/or governments.
|
| A higher-quality Wikipedia needs defenses against paid
| and deeply-invested mobs.
| renewiltord wrote:
| One way to bootstrap this approach is to mirror Wikipedia
| and add on expert articles. That would demonstrate the
| value of the expert articles. I suspect this value is
| low. If it were sufficiently high, this Expert Wikipedia
| would rapidly come to dominate.
|
| I think the Expert Wikipedia would be a bad use of
| resources because most people do not desire this and
| because experts will not deliver better articles in
| general.
| manmal wrote:
| That's an impossible experiment because a mirror would
| never get the same network effects, search engine
| treatment, and cultural integration Wikipedia has
| accumulated.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I suspect getting experts to write any significant
| fraction of articles is a multi-million dollar
| experiment. I don't think it's worth it, and I doubt
| anyone running WMF would think so either.
|
| We have completely expert written media in Encyclopedia
| Brittanica, so that's probably the best place for people
| who don't want to use WP because it's insufficiently
| expert-written. It doesn't make sense to go join that
| market.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| [dead]
| mjhay wrote:
| They have plenty of money. Why do they need to hire expensive
| executives to sweet-talk large donors? This line of
| justification is similar to that used to justify
| administrative bloat in universities.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| They need to sweet talk donors so they can pay themselves
| more for sweet talking donors.
|
| At this point, Wikimedia is just a facade for socialite
| activity.
| jamilton wrote:
| I agree that freelance-style paid editors isn't a great idea,
| but it's not the only option for paid editors.
| hammock wrote:
| _> If you were a regular Wikipedia editor, you'd know there
| is a ton of resistance among volunteers to directly paying
| volunteers to contribute. It gets proposed every now and
| then, but the consensus is that this would short-circuit the
| motivation and lead to a bunch of people currently on
| Mechanical Turk flooding in to try and make a bunch of edits
| to get paid._
|
| Kind of makes me think about the debate on elected officials'
| salaries (and the ban on Congressional insider trading that
| never seems to pass)
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Something something block chain
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| This I why I don't donate to wikipedia anymore; I found out they
| actually don't need it.
| caycep wrote:
| Granted, I'm looking at these salaries, from over in the
| healthcare sectors where CEOs and executives (whose value many of
| us find questionable) make $5 mil salaries, even for being CEO of
| a "nonprofit hospital/foundation", and have way larger golden
| parachutes to boot. I'd say it's (relatively) admirable the
| Wikimedia board is stressing out about severances from $300-500k.
| cogidub wrote:
| America has an income stratification problem to go with it's
| wealth problem
| bawolff wrote:
| One thing to consider is that katherine became CEO at a very
| turbulant time at WMF. The previous ceo (lila) was extremely
| unpopular and facing a staff revolt [1]. Morale was terrible.
| Maybe katherine had a big severence agreement because she was
| walking into a shit show.
|
| [1] https://www.mollywhite.net/timelines/wikimedia/
| jtefera wrote:
| Ignoring for now the severance package, the salary seems pretty
| low for a CEO of such a large foundation. $400-500K is about the
| salary range of a senior-staff engineer at FAANG and their
| responsibility is way lower.
|
| One of the issues with non-profits is that people expects the
| employees/management to be there for the cause and to be happy
| with lower salaries. This seems to incentives IMO one of the
| following: - only already rich people to apply - high turnover -
| people with less experience or options to apply
|
| Having a generous severance package that for example requires you
| to work for at least x amount of years might solve some of those
| pitfalls?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It might be normal in the little bubble that is the Bay area.
| This just goes to show what a poor choice that is as a location
| to operate from.
|
| 500K would be about our staffing and office cost here in
| Berlin. We're a mere eight people.
|
| And Wikimedia actually has an office here. One of their largest
| offices outside of SFO according to this:
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_offices. I've been
| there. Nice place.
|
| Look, this is just the tip of the ice berg:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
|
| This spells it out. This is foundation is spending tens of
| million on salaries and sitting on a quarter billion in assets.
| That's some spectacularly inefficient spending no matter how
| you look at it. I would call it shameless. And then they do the
| yearly thing of holding out their hand for donations because
| boohoo all the money is gone. Again!
|
| But at least they are transparent about enriching themselves.
| barrkel wrote:
| A senior staff engineer at FAANG makes decisions on the
| implementation of features which have effects on 8+ digits of
| revenue. It's mostly downside risk: if you don't do it right,
| then the lack of availability costs _a lot_.
| andersrs wrote:
| Just take a look at this graph. The salaries have been bloating
| whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion
| of all expenses.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
|
| Net assets are sitting at ~$240M about 10x what they were a
| decade ago. Yet they roll out a sob-story banner on every page
| insinuating that they might cease to exist if you don't cough up.
|
| It gives me an uneasy feeling that the ex-CEO went to work for a
| think tank. I hope they're politically neutral.
|
| Obviously it's become a gravy train. At a certain point they
| should have stopped the begging because clearly they have the
| resources to run the site several times over.
| kylec wrote:
| Yeah, I love Wikipedia, but it's been a long time since I've
| donated because they clearly have more money than they know
| what to do with
| tptacek wrote:
| Just don't donate to them. My feelings about Wikipedia come
| pretty close to reverence, and I've never even considered
| sending them money. They'll be fine no matter what. By all
| means, advocate against donating to them! They don't need the
| money.
|
| Unless someone here really thinks it's important for Wikipedia
| to pull in 9 figures in grants and donations, I'm not sure
| there's as much to argue about here as it seems. Organizations
| expand to fit their budget constraints, and fundraising success
| has expanded those constraints for Wikimedia. Seems
| straightforward.
| airstrike wrote:
| "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the
| expanding bureaucracy."
| f6v wrote:
| > I hope they're politically neutral.
|
| Wikipedia is definitely not.
| pklausler wrote:
| When political parties have distinct relationships with
| objective truth, stating objective truths becomes political.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Except Wikipedia's bias goes far, far beyond "objective
| truths". There's not a lot of objective truths in politics,
| since politics is inherently subjective matter, but reading
| Wikipedia articles on political subjects systematically you
| will discover very quickly it has very distinct political
| makeup, which is quite one-sided, and if you ever meet the
| admins or prominent editors, you'll also recognize the same
| political makeup. You may agree with them, but that doesn't
| make it "objective truth" - that just makes one more person
| with that opinion.
| Gartent wrote:
| I don't think you're aware of the key _political_ issues
| with Wikipedia.
|
| The media rarely lies - this is a key issue at play -
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-
| rarely-...
|
| >But people - including the very worst perpetrators of
| misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they
| say true things without enough context. But nobody will
| ever agree what context is necessary and which context is
| redundant.
|
| WP doesn't permit primary sources (usually), many right
| wing publications inc Fox News are banned - for not being a
| "Reliable Source", actually that activists will push source
| bans via wiki-lawyering (see the talk pages). I've been
| subject to Wiki-lawyering because a topic I contributed to
| _became_ politically contentious, and activists jumped in
| the thread to revert disagreeable sources.
|
| Wikipedia permits breaking rules if it "makes wikipedia a
| better place", and do not permit (WP:POINTY) you to try to
| enforce the same rules equally on other pages. The rules
| are often arbitrary and political articles are hijacked by
| activists - typically an active, small minority. The co-
| founder, Larry Sanger noted this in the earlier days as
| academics sitting on pages of their discipline, then as
| Wikipedia became a key source of information, editors were
| hired to represent certain causes (they are supposed to
| disclose them), and it became a hive of political activity.
|
| Example - recently a user "TheTranarchist", a main
| contributor to gender pages, wrote about how she fights
| bigotry with her Wikipedia edits. She was tempbanned with
| pushback for those posts - the Vast Majority keeps quiet.
|
| Next we have people like GorillaWarfare who see a hitpiece
| on people without WP pages - e.g. the CEO of cloudflare -
| and create a wikipage sourcing just the hitpiece.
|
| WP:GOODBIAS - says bias is a good thing, using
| uncontentious examples (we are biased to a heliocentric,
| not geocentric model), but WP:GOODBIAS is _actually_ used
| to explain away political activism on fuzzy issues.
|
| WP:TRUTH - verifiability, not truth. There is provably
| false information on Wikipedia which can't be pointed out
| (except in the talk threads) because the sources referenced
| are either banned, or it falls under WP:OR (no original
| research). E.g., a man disappears, there's an article
| written that he's dead, source the article saying he's
| dead, turns out he's alive and pictures of him are posted
| on Twitter, can't edit the page until a new article comes
| out retracting the death. I could continue with all the
| nonsense I see on there, but I'll leave it at that.
| Akronymus wrote:
| The absolute worst bias is where news sites have an
| active interest in only reporting one-sidedly. As only
| "reliable" sources can be used, only their reporting gets
| picked up and states as fact. Gamergate is one of the
| most blatant examples of that. So much so, that the very
| wiki page on it fuels a cycle of "there is no way that so
| much of it is made up"
| qingcharles wrote:
| I honestly don't care if Wikimedia has several billion stashed
| away like all the Ivy Leagues do. They are doing God's work,
| mostly thankless work, and they have managed to do it well in
| an Internet mostly comprised of dross. How they have managed to
| keep the quality up and keep it as neutral as they have is
| beyond me. I've run user-generated content sites and keeping on
| top of the moderation will make you Google self-harm FAQs on an
| hourly basis.
|
| I'm throwing my money at the screen right now.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They aren't though. The amount of money they are spending on
| the core product you are thinking of is actually declining.
| All this extra raised cash is going to other purposes.
| qingcharles wrote:
| They are and they aren't. I mean, they are still spending
| money on the core product and it is still a great product
| and I still love it, but I understand what you're getting
| at - they're getting proportionally more cash but not
| spending it on Wikipedia, but all sorts of other side
| projects that most people are never going to use.
|
| I'm still happy to let them do it simply because of the
| love I have for all their work on Wikipedia. They can spend
| my money on crazy if they want, as long as it makes the
| right people happy.
|
| The fact that the (essentially) negative article about
| severance payments exists _on Wikipedia itself_ is at least
| a good sign that they 're not trying to hide what other
| nonprofits would gladly want to sweep under the rug.
| akolbe wrote:
| Did you really not know that the editors and "moderators" (a
| term not used on Wikipedia) are unpaid? The Wikimedia
| Foundation intervenes very rarely in content. Essentially, it
| only takes action on content if there is a court order to
| that effect. ALL OTHER CONTENT CURATION IS DONE BY UNPAID
| VOLUNTEERS.
|
| The Foundation "does not write or curate any of the content
| found on the projects", as they are happy to tell you
| themselves here:
|
| https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-
| kno...
|
| Even most of the emails sent to the Wikimedia Foundation are
| answered by unpaid volunteers, the Volunteer Response Team:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Volunteer_Response_T.
| ..
|
| Sorry to sound harsh, but you are laboring under a
| misconception and spreading it.
| qingcharles wrote:
| No, I understand completely; it wasn't clear from my post.
| I've been an editor myself since 2004.
|
| What Wikimedia have done is create a platform and mission
| and steered that mission to produce a culture that has bred
| the unpaid editors and kept them on-mission and stopped too
| many of them going rogue. That platform steering is not to
| be underestimated. Too many sites with user-generated
| content descend into insanity within a short amount of
| time.
| dlubarov wrote:
| As a former admin, I don't think I ever interacted with
| anyone from WMF. As you probably know, deletions, locks,
| bans, bot approvals, etc. are normally handled by
| volunteers. Even requests for adminship are discussed by
| volunteers, then finalized by volunteer bureaucrats.
|
| I would say the culture you mention was bred in very
| early days of Wikipedia. Editor activity peaked in 2007,
| when the annual budget was ~$2m. The prior year was
| <$800k.
| akolbe wrote:
| Okay, I understand, and thanks for explaining. (I first
| registered an account in 2006.)
|
| To what extent do you think it is the Foundation that
| keeps this culture and mindset going these days? And does
| more money and higher pay help them to do so?
| lozenge wrote:
| But the editors and moderators aren't paid.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I know. It wasn't clear from my post.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36036396
| dpflan wrote:
| Seems like a common trend, pushing down true costs while
| pushing the difference up the management chain. (The trending
| growing chasm between wage growth and productivity seems
| apropos here.)
| tombert wrote:
| To be fair, salaries going up isn't necessarily a sign of them
| "bloating". I've worked for startups before at a reduced
| salary, with the expectation that as they become more stable
| they'll bump up the salary to a correct number.
|
| In theory, people could have joined Wikimedia at a low salary
| while they were still struggling, and as they've become way
| more stable the salaries have gone up as a bit of a correction.
|
| That said....1.5x your annual salary as severance sort of spits
| in the face of that bit of apologia.
| andersrs wrote:
| I was referring to salaries on the big picture financial
| reports. It could mean more people.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| You don't join a startup with the expectation that your base
| salary is going to explode from the related growth; that's
| the equity lottery. Your startup salary might go from
| somewhat below to market, that's not waht's happening here.
| ska wrote:
| > below to market, that's not waht's happening here.
|
| It isn't? They seemed like pretty normal market salaries
| for the type of position.
| ska wrote:
| In my limited experience 1.5x annual is pretty normal for
| senior executives.
| cornholio wrote:
| You do that at a startup for stock compensation, with the
| expectation that your risk will be rewarded in the future.
|
| A non-profit is not your future cashcow, you don't own it,
| you either work for current salary or you forgo payment
| because you believe in the cause. There is no scenario where
| non-profit workers get to cash out to compensate for previous
| struggling - except when that non-profit has been captured by
| a group of money grabbing profiteers who operate it for their
| own personal benefit.
| AdamN wrote:
| It's critical to compensate non-profit employees near the
| market rate otherwise you end up with sub-par performers,
| martyrs, having the vision co-opted by the wealthy who can
| afford to be underpaid, or the young who leave
| disillusioned.
|
| The Gates foundation pioneered this approach and imho it's
| the right way to operate in the sector.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Getting people market rate is fair, but that's
|
| 1. for regular employees. 2. Assuming market rate is fair
| and not minimum wage
|
| There is no reason executive pay needs to follow market
| rate dynamics at a non profit. Otherwise you'll have
| underpaid and free labor while executives milk the cow at
| 100x median pay rates and generous golden parachutes.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Just imagine in Bobby Kotick were on the board of a non-
| profit!
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> It's critical to compensate non-profit employees near
| the market rate otherwise you end up with sub-par
| performers
|
| I hear this all the time for not-for-profits and
| government roles, it sounds good but just doesn't hold
| up. The leaders in these roles are not measured or held
| to the same metrics as private companies, they're not
| competing for the same jobs and they're not the same pool
| of candidates. The results prove this out: the metrics
| and tenure of "high paid" bureaucrats are no better than
| lower paid leaders at the orgs. The "we have to pay the
| same high comp to get the same high quality leaders"
| fallacy is misleading.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I think it holds true for competitive public positions in
| places where they are trying to get rid of corruption. It
| raises the cost of bribing people in power, and makes it
| much more attractive to get into politics for the right
| reasons.
|
| The best example is probably Singapore, which is
| surrounded by corrupt neighbors, and deeply involved in
| industries that thrive on corruption (shipping), but is
| notoriously a place where officials follow the rules.
| starkparker wrote:
| Asking tangentially, earnestly, and with a genuine lack
| of knowledge: are $404k and $311k the market rate for the
| base compensation of a CEO and COO of a non-profit at
| Wikimedia's scale?
|
| EDIT: Found at least one source on US non-profits that
| excludes healthcare and university roles which skew
| numbers: https://analytics.excellenceingiving.com/2021-20
| 22-nonprofit...
|
| Suggesting $364k compensation for the CEO a nonprofit
| with $50M+ revenue. Wikimedia Foundation reports $150M+:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
| bawolff wrote:
| Also there aren't many tech non profits - i imagine
| skillset is a little more specialized than your average
| non-profit.
| notpeter wrote:
| In my experience reading hundreds of IRS 990 forms these
| number are not out of bounds for non-profits at their
| scale. Healthcare and university may skew the absolute
| numbers, but are similar.
|
| Specifically a great executive will personally move the
| fundraising needle in organizations (+1-5% or more) and
| mediocre executive can cause losses/missed opportunities
| in the opposite direction of a similar magnitude. The
| conventional thinking is the relative fundraising impact
| of a great vs a good executive may 10x their total
| compensation, so it's probably worth trying to retain the
| best.
|
| Anecdotally, I know of a not-for-profit COO who offended
| an NBA player killing the relationship. His successor COO
| repaired the relationship, ultimately resulting in
| multiple millions of new donations and a co-marketing
| agreement with the team. When the COO was hired there
| were rumblings because he'd negotiated +$50k over his
| predecessor.
|
| With no equity and the poor optics of commission
| compensation or cash-bonuses, big severance packages are
| one of the few ways an organization can reward employees
| following years of great service.
| bombcar wrote:
| The fundraising part is the completeness of it.
|
| I could probably COO on the non-fundraising side, but I'd
| be an absolute fundraising failure. Non-profit C level
| execs are fundraisers.
| bdidbdidhdidh wrote:
| even when all the money is from a banner?
| bombcar wrote:
| Not sure what the percentages are but many non profits
| live or die on a few large donors.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| The problem isn't that Wikimedia is paying employees too
| much, so much as it is that they have too many of them.
| Their COO compensation is not out of line for the scale
| of Wikimedia - But Wikimedia is way too big of an org
| without relation to serving their core goal.
|
| Explorative projects like their New Editor Experience[1]
| were interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful moonshots.
| That one wrapped up (without anything to show for it, as
| far as I can tell). They didn't take the hint and
| downsize, they doubled down.
|
| This is an incredibly common problem for organizations -
| "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the
| expanding bureaucracy" as was put by Oscar Wilde.
|
| [1]https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Editor_Experiences
| chessgecko wrote:
| After what happened with openai I wouldn't say no scenario
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
|
| I've been involved in a non-profit startup before. There
| are potentially ways around restrictions (like
| licensing), but they're difficult and fraught with other
| issues. You can't "cash-out" at a non-profit.
| [deleted]
| rsynnott wrote:
| > The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are
| flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses.
|
| I mean, over the last five years, you could say that of
| practically anyone who employs a bunch of engineers. Tech
| sector wage inflation was absolutely enormous; it seems to be
| stabilising now, but still at a pretty high level.
| costco wrote:
| 2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758
|
| 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $145,970,915
|
| I love Wikipedia but I don't see how this cost explosion can
| evenly be remotely justified. What value have they added in
| that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?
| Alupis wrote:
| During which, Wikipedia and it's prominent editors have
| become increasingly biased in their reporting of events.
| Instead of being a neutral "just the facts", we get
| editorialization about all kinds of things that just further
| entrench our two camps. Word choice, framing, referenced
| articles, things left unsaid, etc.
| bawolff wrote:
| > What value have they added in that time? A new editor and
| CSS on articles?
|
| Assuming this is not rhetorical - everything is in git so you
| can look at the git log. Although it is spread through many
| repos, and not all contributors are paid by wmf.
|
| https://github.com/wikimedia
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| In that time it's become increasingly challenging to
| contribute anything to The People's Encyclopedia.
|
| I wanted to update a local wiki page with newer data from its
| original sources, but apparently I have become blacklisted
| because I use/used Apple's private relay and safari's privacy
| measures by default in all my browsing. Disabling them didn't
| fix it. I would love to sign up as a fallback measure to be
| able to contribute, and verify my account by whatever means
| necessary, but apparently in the 2020s that's just not
| something Wikipedia supports (as I'm also black listed from
| signing up despite never contributing to Wikipedia.)
|
| Increasingly I see out of date and opinionated articles and I
| wonder how many of us have meaningful contributions ready but
| are forced to sit on the sidelines because there's no "way
| in" with this product.
| mattlondon wrote:
| It has always been like this - at least for the past 10-15
| years or so it has been essentially impossible to edit
| wikipedia.
|
| Basically _any_ change you make it insta-reverted by some
| bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.
|
| I think some editors decide that they "own" certain pages
| or group of pages and install themselves as some sort of
| authority/gate keeper/moderator. If your edit does not
| please them, it's gone. Instantly. You only get to edit the
| pages if you are in the editor's cabal of friends.
|
| If you don't have an account, or you do have an account but
| perhaps have only made a handful of edits, you are
| instantly distrusted and assumed to be malicious.
|
| Of course, you can never prove that you are _not_
| malicious, because there is the default stance of
| immediate-distrust for anyone, so your edits are constantly
| undone and you never get to build up enough credibility to
| appease the editors who control who gets to edit "their"
| articles.
|
| I gave up years ago after a small edit-war with someone who
| kept reverting changes about a UK politician who was in
| national news at the time. No amount of references or
| citations from e.g. the BBC or the Guardian was good enough
| as I guess the verifiable truth didn't fit with their view
| of what this page should selectively say about that person,
| and so they banned my IP as a "vandal". I gave up (but got
| a new IP after redialing so it was pointless)
| swalling wrote:
| > Basically any change you make it insta-reverted by some
| bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.
|
| You sound like someone who was pushing a particular point
| of view about politics, which is precisely the kind of
| edits that are set up for organ rejection given
| Wikipedia's strict stance on neutrality, sourcing, and
| the fact that politics are naturally contentious / prone
| to edit warring.
|
| There are between 1.5 and 2 million anonymous edits to
| Wikipedia every month. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-
| wikipedia-projects/contrib... A lot of them are in
| reality vandalism, spam, and garbage by passersby, but
| they aren't all reverted.
| b59831 wrote:
| Have you used Wikipedia?
|
| It was one of the first culture war battlegrounds... And
| it's been owned for a while now.
|
| Looking at these gross payments (and executive migration
| to think tanks), are you really pretending things aren't
| political?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'm going to be honest I've gone to some of the more
| controversial articles they don't seem far off from
| reality a lot of the time. They usually have citations of
| both pro and anti arguments on both sides of any debate.
| Is there something I'm missing?
| musicale wrote:
| Similar issues with stackoverflow. Entrenched systems and
| editors/moderators create barriers that discourage
| contributions.
|
| Tried a few times and realized it wasn't worth the
| effort.
| vosper wrote:
| A weird thing about SO is that you can accumulate
| privileges for doing nothing. I once answered a question
| about Python which has accumulated thousands of
| votes/points over the years, and now I have been granted
| all these editing rights that I don't even know what to
| do with (nor do I use them).
| thr-nrg wrote:
| [dead]
| olivermarks wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-
| eli...
|
| 'Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of
| Its Editors Researchers found that 77 percent of
| Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia
| editors, and they think this is probably for the best.'
| hashar wrote:
| I would guess the pool of IP addressed used by Apple has
| been blocked from contributing since for any good faith
| editor, there is a vast amount of vandals taking advantage
| of the feature to deface articles en masse.
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay
| has some context and list potential problems that might
| arise (and do in your case).
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_R
| e... is the related discussion page if you want to ask
| more.
|
| Back in the old days, we maintained a list of trustworthy
| http proxies for which we trusted the IP of their client.
| The community could then block the user behind the proxy.
| With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more
| possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header
| to carry the information). So the sole thing we see is the
| Apple relays IPs and if those are a source of vandalism for
| sure the community will block them from contributing.
|
| There is a more or less similar issue with TOR exit node
| for which the issue is described at
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editing_with_Tor
|
| Given the relay is only enforced by Safari (as I understand
| it), you can use the IOS Wikipedia application for editing:
| https://apps.apple.com/app/wikipedia/id324715238 , though
| that will not pass through the Apple relays and leak your
| IP.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > we trusted the IP of their client. The community could
| then block the user behind the proxy. With everything
| behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the
| intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the
| information).
|
| Not exactly true - the "Proxy Protocol" [1] was invented
| for that purpose. Wikipedia as an entity should be large
| enough to ask Apple if they can implement support for it
| - the question is if they _want to_.
|
| [1]
| https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/latest/load-
| bala...
| smsm42 wrote:
| Note that WMF has very little relation to article editing.
| And login problems are likely because you are using some
| kind of VPN, which is also something the trolls like to
| use, so it frequently ends up in ban lists. It's a hard
| problem, because trolls are much more determined to (ab)use
| any privacy feature that is out there than legitimate
| newcomers, and unfortunately most Wiki admin teams lean
| towards solutions that ensure less trolls even if it means
| also more barriers to entry. These people are almost always
| volunteers, and handling trolls is not an activity they
| particularly enjoy, so that's the source of the bias.
| Joeboy wrote:
| > 2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758
|
| $200k less than Beeple's "Everyday" NFT sold for.
| tasuki wrote:
| This is not an unreasonable comparison at all. It puts
| things in perspective. I dislike what Wikimedia is
| becoming, yet Wikipedia is still functioning and useful!
| capitainenemo wrote:
| It's fairly unreasonable since NFT values are really not
| tied to anything, and in tokens that may or may not be
| valued at what they are supposedly valued due to
| manipulation of the small markets (similar to penny stock
| pump and dump).
|
| So those values can be more about money laundering or
| poor signaling than any indication of real worth.
| Joeboy wrote:
| What _would_ be a good comparison? Meta spending $36+bn
| on the Metaverse[0]? What are examples of websites that
| provide clearly _better_ value for money than Wikipedia?
|
| [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-
| on-meta...
| capitainenemo wrote:
| That would be a better one yes. It was just a bad
| comparison of fake valuation to real.
|
| But I don't think anyone is disagreeing that Wikipedia is
| offering good value for money, just that some people
| might be justifying that to excessively compensate
| themselves for an operation that requires very little to
| run and depends almost entirely on unpaid volunteers.
|
| "well, our service is a boon to mankind, therefore it
| warrants skimming a bit off the top"
|
| And that could be a problem in the long run.
| costco wrote:
| I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but the current budget
| is more than twice that and continues to grow at a very
| fast rate. The budget trajectory may even be sustainable
| from a revenue perspective, I'm just saying it might not be
| so from a public interest perspective. Wikipedia to the
| typical user is basically entirely unchanged since 2016 and
| it's not clear to me why they need so much more money now
| than they did in 2016.
| ilyt wrote:
| And I preferred previous theme anyway...
|
| And it can't be set without being logged in ;/
| Akronymus wrote:
| I use redirector with the following settings:
|
| Redirect: https:\/\/(. _)\\.wikipedia\\.org\
| /wiki\/([^?]_)(?!=\?useskin=vector)
|
| to: https://$1.wikipedia.org/wiki/$2?useskin=vector
|
| Applies to: Main window (address bar)
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Are you saying if we use the URL parameter "useskin" set
| to "vector" we can get the old layout back? I wonder if
| this applies on other sites using mediawiki.
|
| [EDIT] Fuck me! It does work both on wikipedia and the
| Arch wiki. So long.
| thecopy wrote:
| >politically neutral
|
| What does politically neutral mean?
| rsynnott wrote:
| For a think tank, presumably completely disconnected from the
| world, meditating on how many angels can dance on the head of
| a pin. (Though possibly that sort of awkward theology, too,
| is political; it's not something anyone ever did, rather a
| bit of anti-Catholicism from the reformation).
|
| More seriously, when someone says "politically neutral", they
| typically mean "agrees with me". It's otherwise meaningless
| for basically anything which engages with the real world.
| xpe wrote:
| > More seriously, when someone says "politically neutral",
| they typically mean "agrees with me".
|
| This is an empirical statement. What experience underlies
| it?
|
| My experience (working across many sectors, including tech,
| government, and not for profits), is quite different.
|
| I think it is better to say this... There are various
| possible meanings for 'politically neutral': A person or
| organization that
|
| (a) is not tied to political organizations (for some
| definition of political);
|
| (b) doesn't take a position on political matters;
|
| (c) does work that is both unaffected by politics and does
| not attempt to influence politics (IMO, impossible
| practically, but could be interpreted as a matter of
| degree)
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| "Is not", "doesn't", and "does" are not adequate for
| demonstrating an organization's apoliticalness, it simply
| demonstrates that they content with the status quo. The
| status quo is a political position, and depending on what
| about it you don't want to see change, can be a rather
| contentious one.
| xpe wrote:
| Interesting points to consider -- thanks.
|
| To clarify: _endorsing_ the status quo is a political
| position. Not saying something is not identical to that.
| It of course can have probabilistic implications. In
| other words, silence doesn't necessarily mean an entity
| (a person or org) is content with the status quo. It can
| be a strategic decision.
| airstrike wrote:
| "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have
| chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its
| foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are
| neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
|
| -- Desmond Tutu
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Both sides think you're biased. That's how the BBC does it.
| smsm42 wrote:
| You seem to be implying BBC is not biased. I have bad news
| for you in this case.
| bluescrn wrote:
| But being heavily biased in different directions on
| different issues doesn't sum up to neutrality.
| lesuorac wrote:
| How do you do this in a country with more than 2 political
| parties such as the United States [1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_partie
| s_in_t...
| stonogo wrote:
| Pretending the US has more than two political parties is
| a weird hobby. There are only two that matter, and it
| can't be any other way with the current federal election
| system. It's a problem worth fixing but Wikipedia is not
| relevant to any solutions.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Ok but ideally the federal election system will be fixed
| eventually (and also most of the states). And I'd prefer
| if then we also didn't need to fix a bunch of other
| systems because they had a lot of 2 party assumptions
| baked into them.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| Okay but your ideal scenario is not our current reality
| lesuorac wrote:
| The reality is that the US Federal government currently
| has elected members belonging to neither the Democratic
| nor Republican party [1] [2] (Sinema doesn't count since
| she changed her party after being elected). This has been
| true for the majority of the US's short existence.
|
| There is no reason to make long-term decisions based on
| the current short-term circumstances of a two party
| dominance.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Sen
| ate_elec...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Sen
| ate_elec...
| stonogo wrote:
| All of them caucus with one of the two major parties. As
| with so much in politics, it's a distinction without a
| difference.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| Idk I live in a place like that I find there are still
| two broad groups of parties that rarely make coalitions a
| large distance across the divide. It's not like there is
| only one axis of politics but there is a sort of broad
| undercurrent of older/conservative and younger/change
| broad split.
|
| But speaking to your point, there is no reason at all why
| a two party system is required to have a rule of thumb
| that if everyone thinks you're biased you're on the right
| track...
| George83728 wrote:
| s/Both/All/
| concordDance wrote:
| Move to Canada, Germany, Australia or wherever.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Move to Canada, Germany, Australia or wherever.
|
| Your solution on how to cover a topic in a neutral
| fashion when there are more than 2 political parties is
| to move to a country where there are more than 2
| political parties?
|
| That doesn't seem like a productive comment.
| concordDance wrote:
| A Wikimedia based in a country with much less polarised
| politics will have a much easier time with neutrality.
|
| I guess I didn't include enough elaboration in my
| comment...
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| There are only two parties in Canada. Three if you count
| the Bloc.
| kwooding wrote:
| That's a weird comment. Were you trying to be sarcastic?
|
| There are 3 major federal parties (Liberals,
| Conservatives, NDP), who received 33%, 33%, and 18% of
| the popular vote respectively.
|
| There are two minor federal parties (Greens and the
| People's party) who together took around 7% of the
| popular vote, and
|
| Finally there is the Bloc Quebecois. It is a federal
| party but it exists only in one province. It grabbed
| around 8% last time.
|
| Of course those percentages aren't entirely
| representative, because seats are won in a first-past-
| the-post style in each riding.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The NDP has never formed a federal government.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The BBC is not neutral. They are the mouthpiece of the UK
| government.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| No, what they actually are is a mouthpiece for
| corporations and capital owners. Just like every other
| major media company out there. The government is also a
| mouthpiece for capital owners and corporations which is
| why you might think that
| gadders wrote:
| Hardly. They're pro-immigration, anti-Brexit, anti-any
| cuts anywhere for anything. They're the voice of the
| Guardian-reading middle classes.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This thread nicely illustrates the BBC's long balancing
| act.
|
| From a (BBC) radio sitcom from the 80s:
|
| > [interviewer to Director General of BBC] Director
| General, everyone seems to hate you. How would you
| respond?
|
| > [DG] Well, I think that shows we have the balance about
| right.
| bluescrn wrote:
| To be fair, pro-immigration is governnment policy too.
| Just for different reasons. The Tories want cheap
| labour/low wages, and sky-high house prices.
| gadders wrote:
| Fair point.
| andersrs wrote:
| The BBC knowingly covered up kiddy fiddlers for years. Not
| exactly a stellar organization.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It means the green-username parent commenter is trying to
| derail the thread.
| miah_ wrote:
| Siding with whoever in power meets your financial goals.
| Bran_son wrote:
| Not serving on the US Department of State's Foreign Affairs
| Policy Board would be a good start. To be fair, Katherine
| Maher took that role _after_ her time as Wikimedia CEO. But
| landing such a role implies one is well connected, and she
| interned at the CFR [1] before her time at Wikimedia. In
| other words, she seems far too well connected to the US
| government to be called "neutral".
|
| In the words of the New York Times, "Journalists have no
| place on the playing fields of politics. Staff members are
| entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise
| questions about their professional neutrality" -
| https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-
| journali...
|
| [1] _The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an American
| think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and
| international relations. [..] Its membership has included
| senior politicians, numerous secretaries of state, CIA
| directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, corporate directors
| and CEOs, and senior media figures._ -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| [flagged]
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Taking a more holistic view perhaps.
| version_five wrote:
| It's not possible if you want to do any analysis. Maybe if
| you just report statistics and limit your reporting to a set
| of uncontroversial fields. Best you could hope for in a think
| tank would be setting orthogonal to the main thrust of either
| side, like libertarian or something - some version of free
| software advocacy could also work.
| objektif wrote:
| [flagged]
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| The answer to that differs on your political perspective.
| vkou wrote:
| I call anyone who agrees with my politics, or keeps quiet
| about theirs politically neutral.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I call people who don't care about the outcome of a
| particular issue that is a source conflict disinterested,
| and that's close enough to politically neutral to kiss it.
| Instead, on Wikipedia the people most involved and
| passionate about an issue will be the biggest contributors
| to entries related to it, and the side with the most paid
| contributors and/or internet-addicted contributors will run
| those pages like a fiefdom.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| A wise man once said, "You're either with us, or you're
| with the enemy"
|
| I think that sums up US politics pretty well since 2016
| zweifuss wrote:
| 'You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists' - George
| W. Bush 2001-09-21
|
| 'Every nation has to either be with us, or against us.
| Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are
| going to pay a price.' Hillary Clinton 2001-09-13
| wubbert wrote:
| [dead]
| mock-possum wrote:
| telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in essence
| - dealing in facts, not editorializing.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Of course it's a gravy train. Like Mozilla, they have offices
| in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.
| It's all about the prestige and posturing for an address by the
| C-suite.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > I hope they're politically neutral.
|
| WMF is definitely not politically neutral, neither is English
| Wikipedia (don't know much about the rest).
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If the Wikimedia Foundation were incorporated in California, the
| CA Attorney General would like investigate these payments, which
| appear to be out-of-band from similar organizations.
|
| But Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated in Florida
| (https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/api/report/GetImageByNum/24...
| direct pdf download), which lets nonprofits do whatever they
| want.
|
| A nonprofit organized in a state other than where it is
| headquartered (unless the incorporation state is Delaware) is a
| huge red flag with respect to the organization's commitment to
| proper governance.
| gadders wrote:
| Why are they actually getting any severance at all? It looks like
| they resigned to take new jobs. They weren't sacked or made
| redundant.
| mikeryan wrote:
| Executive compensation packages work differently and tend to be
| much more bonus driven.
|
| Frequently these types of severance packages are to make up
| some sort of assumed bonus and ensure no compensation based
| contract disputes later.
| gadders wrote:
| Even if you quit voluntarily?
| bawolff wrote:
| Katherine left under questionable circumstances (right after a
| rebranding attempt that absolutely exploded). Who knows what
| really happened, but it seems plausible it wasn't her choice.
| akolbe wrote:
| There was this post last year on Wikipedia by Victoria
| Doronina, one of the WMF trustees:
|
| "The Board has done its main job - changed the CEO."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village.
| ..
|
| Victoria explicitly referred to the Knowledge Equity Fund in
| that post, which appears to have been Uzzell's and Maher's
| brainchild.
|
| The Knowledge Equity Fund became very controversial last year
| when people realised it was set up to funnel millions of
| dollars of Wikipedia donations to non-Wikimedia social
| justice causes via Tides Advocacy:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2.
| ..
|
| Janeen announced on 14 May 2021, two weeks after Katherine
| had left, that she was going to leave the WMF and devote
| herself to racial equity and technology causes:
|
| https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list.
| ..
|
| She started as CEO of the National Society of Black Engineers
| on 7 July 2021, just _one week_ after her last day with the
| WMF.
|
| Including the $325K severance, she pocketed over half a
| million dollars for half a year's work and went straight to
| her next job.
| gred wrote:
| Hire PHBs, win PHB prizes.
| smsm42 wrote:
| This actually makes me feel optimistic. An org like
| Wikimedia being able to resist the attempt to subvert their
| mission to "social justice" instead of doing what it was
| created to do, sounds great. So many other orgs have fallen
| to the same and turned into a mockery of their former
| selves...
| gadders wrote:
| It's amazing how once you become what used to be called a
| quangocrat [1] you seem to live in this charmed circle where
| you keep getting offered positions on the board for X or a
| researcher at Y, effortlessly failing upwards through NGOs,
| think tanks and charities without any accountability or
| record of achievement.
|
| [1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/qu
| ang...
| rexreed wrote:
| That's because so many of those NGOs are hustles of their
| own, delivering some marginal value while supporting their
| own bloated universe.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| This is why I use ublock to hide their ridiculous requests for
| money. Among other reasons.
| blairanderson wrote:
| These are the smallest parachutes to make headlines.
| max_ wrote:
| How exactly does Wikipedia make its money? Is it exclusively
| through donors? If so, who are the top donors?
| andersrs wrote:
| The donations go to the parent org (Wikimedia) and the top
| donors are published in the financial reports.
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annu...
|
| It's mostly corporations but a lot of them are employee
| matching schemes.
| superchroma wrote:
| Utterly unacceptable for a nonprofit allegedly serving the
| greater good. Disgusting to beg for "just even a single dollar"
| as they do on meraphorical hands and knees, with plea after
| tortured, heartfelt plea from Jimmy Wales whilst doing this on
| the back-end. I already knew about how flush for cash the
| Wikimedia Foundation was, but this really is astonishing
| behavior.
| bhickey wrote:
| They beg for a single dollar to satisfy the public support
| test. This requires that a third of their funding must come
| from small dollar donors. I wouldn't give Wikimedia a dollar
| (mission creep, etc.) asking for piddling amounts isn't
| necessarily pleading poverty.
| gcau wrote:
| Do not donate to Wikipedia.
| Jianghong94 wrote:
| I mean, can't we form a web3 dao to perform acquisition of WMF
| (or a hostile-takeover?), if it works out donors get to vote next
| leadership, etc etc, drive cost low and make sure things are in
| good hands, if it doesn't work out then just return the cash
| back, plain and simple.
| lallysingh wrote:
| It looks like the CEO of Wikimedia gets paid roughly as much as a
| Staff/Senior Staff-level FAANG engineer. That looks about right.
| And they got 6 months severance. Also comparable.
|
| I don't get why people are upset. Somehow everyone working for a
| nonprofit should bring home less money to their families. In
| truth what that assumption would mean is that nonprofits get less
| skilled people.
| concordDance wrote:
| People are upset because it was working fine 10 years ago when
| execs were paid a fraction of the amount. They're upset because
| wikipedia asks for donations every year even though they've
| collected enough money to run wikipedia off interest from
| treasury bonds.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| then don't donate?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| What was FAANG developer salaries like 10 years ago? Was that
| 'working fine'?
| detaro wrote:
| To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to
| charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your
| salary?
| tchaffee wrote:
| I would be happy. I'm not an executive so I don't get
| executive pay. The executive salaries at Wikimedia seem low
| compared to what you can earn at a similarly sized business.
| barrkel wrote:
| The thing is, what exactly does something like Wikipedia
| need executives for? What strategic shifts does it need to
| adapt to? What new product lines does it need to move the
| entire org around to create? What hard decisions does it
| need to make to shut stuff down?
|
| It's not really a business.
| tchaffee wrote:
| You're giving a business definition of a few
| responsibilities for an executive and then saying it's a
| poor fit. Now try giving an NGO definition of an
| executive to see if it's a better fit and if they have
| any significant responsibilities.
|
| Non-profits shut down all the time. If you're concerned
| about a lasting impact you'll pay for a talented
| executive team.
| barrkel wrote:
| Under what circumstances would Wikipedia shit down, if it
| still has money for operational expenses?
|
| The biggest set of responsibilities charites I didn't
| list is sales (aka donations). But Wikipedia doesn't do
| more good work (as donors think of it) the more money
| they get. It doesn't scale up much that way.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Mismanagement could help those funds disappear pretty
| quickly. It's rare that any kind of organization or
| business needs no governance.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Only "mismanagement" used as a euphemism for self-dealing
| or embezzlement, which is what I think many people
| suspect is occurring now on some level. Wikipedia has a
| small, constrained remit and if no one ever edited it
| again, it would still be very useful for decades.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Not only that. Name a big business or big NGO that runs
| well and has zero leadership.
| manmal wrote:
| Valve?
| bradfa wrote:
| It depends. If the charity is doing amazingly good things and
| the executives in question are making a big impact on being
| able to do those good things, then yes I'd be fine with that.
| ajross wrote:
| Where are you getting 10-100x? None of the salaries in the
| linked article are even over $1M. As the upthread poster
| explains, these numbers are merely FAANG-competetive. None of
| these Wikemedia execs are making more than they would in a
| routine private sector position of the same seniority.
| cgio wrote:
| I would be happy to donate considering the value I get from
| their work. Given the market where they operate, the salary
| and severance is actually low in my opinion. I would like
| them to pay their people well.
| lallysingh wrote:
| It's this question about value for skills or resentment for
| income inequality? For the latter, wikimedia would have to
| move somewhere with lower labor rates yet is somehow to keep
| talent from leaving for better paying places.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| You'd struggle to find one that doesn't.
| akolbe wrote:
| _18 months ' severance._
|
| US$623,286 when their last full year's base compensation was
| $400K.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
| lallysingh wrote:
| Oh yikes, staff with a larger severance. I'm not surprised, I
| can't imagine it's easy to find a new CEO job after losing
| your last one.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It's not as if someone who has already been making several
| hundred grand is in dire need of financial stability
| between employment opportunities.
| morsch wrote:
| Were they fired or did they quit because they got a better job?
| Do people usually get a severance in the latter case?
| smsm42 wrote:
| I don't think I ever heard any engineer leaving WMF,
| voluntarily or not, getting 18-month severance. I'm not sure
| why the CEO should. It's not like she is going to be destitute
| otherwise. I mean good for her for getting cool half mil just
| for leaving, but I don't see how it makes any sense for WMF.
| It's not like "nobody is going to want to be WMF CEO unless
| they are promised to get half mil for leaving", is it?
|
| Generally WMF's salaries are on the low side - their VP Eng was
| getting 220K in 2020, and 255K in 2021, which is kinda low for
| a VP of a decent-sized engineering org - but that doesn't
| answer the question of severance.
| joseph_grobbles wrote:
| [dead]
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