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.
I mean, Wikimedia has about 250-300 employees and what they pay their CEO is about what Facebook and Google pay a senior SWE. They seem to run pretty lean to me.
Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany.
I don't really see what's outrageous here?
> Obviously it's become a gravy train .
Oh come on - their CEO manages 250 people and gets paid what a SWE with 3 years of experience gets paid down the street. Their engineers are paid like a third of what they could be making at Amazon. Nobody is doing this for the money.
EDIT: As a comparison for people unaware of the cost of living in SF, a bus driver makes about 80k a year. A senior SWE at Wikimedia makes about 120k, according to levels.fyi.
It is entirely possible to work in tech for a company that does not make any profit for years but still receive big pay checks. I used to work for a company that is at a loss, but we have the "potential" to turn around and i still get paid quite well. How does that work?
It works because supply and demand in the labor market has nothing whatsoever to do with the profitability of a firm.
It's like how the price of strawberries this week in the supermarket is determined by the supply of strawberries, demand from customers, and the price at neighboring supermarkets. It's not set by anything to do with the supermarket's profitability.
I mean yes and no. If the supermarket never sells it because they can't make a profit (and it's not in enough demand to be a loss leader that brings people in), then the supermarket won't sell them, driving down demand to the supplier. If that exists for one supermarket it likely exists for others driving down the demand more (even if said demand would have otherwise remained high) .
You see this dynamic in markets fairly frequently and the profitable goods and services will be promoted more heavily. One can get philosophical about what is supply and what is demand, but middle man profitablity is a factor in those things as they're at once a customer and a seller.
TLDR supermarket profitablity definitely drives pricing as well. Just another component.
Normally by convincing VCs that the company is worth the money of your inflated salaries and after X years they will make it back. Not many people out here are investing out of good will.
Imagine thinking that people making high six figures are the problem. Don't be afraid to set your sights a little higher, or you'll keep making the classic mistake of tearing down the upper middle class.
Well yes, we tried once "fixing" it with communism, which simply dictated values for things like salaries and forcibly assigned jobs. And communist economies fell apart because of the horrific inefficiencies and inflexibilities.
If you want to fix it, I'd ask you this: suppose there are 20 million people who know how to code worldwide. But that if coders were paid the same as bus drivers, there would be 100 million coding positions available worldwide. How do you decide which one-fifth of companies get coders, and which four-fifths go without?
Currently we allocate the fifth to the companies who want to pay the most*, because we've decided that's where they're most helpful in general, because those are the companies building the most potentially profitable products that provide the most economic efficiency (lower prices and/or higher value for consumers). And this is why coders are paid more than bus drivers.
So what's the alternative allocation you're suggesting? To achieve what alternative goal? Because it's not helpful to say "it is a problem that can be fixed" if you don't also provide the fix.
----
* There can also be non-monetary factors (nice office environment, purposeful mission, good vibe with team) but they can be converted into estimated monetary values for purposes of comparison -- it doesn't change the argument
Currently we allocate most talent to unprofitable enterprises. Uber isn't profitable. DoorDash isn't. A lot of these companies will never turn a profit.
It says a lot about Western society that people only really feel incentivized to be a doctor or lawyer or engineer or coder if the money is right. Not about passion, or wanting to help people, or solve a particular societal problem. Just a bunch of individuals on a hedonistic treadmill making line go up.
There are tons of criticisms for the USSR and PRC, the two big examples that come to mind. But within living memory (my grandparents) both countries went from backwater agrarian feudal states to global superpowers. That amount of progress in so short of a timescale is dizzying to think about, and if we want to talk about the human cost of that progress (worthwhile) we should maybe recount the human cost for liberal representative democracy to reach where it is today.
How should labor be allocated? It's a great question. I think personally that having to sell your body to a capitalist in order to meet your basic needs is only a few polite steps removed from serfdom. When it's not regulated it clearly veers in that direction (scrip, company towns, etc.), and the only alternative is for you yourself to acquire/borrow capital and hope to enter the rent-seeking class. An alternative could be to simply meet people's basic needs without the fanfare. Let people work on solving real problems (climate change, carceral system, education, etc.) instead of optimizing ads and telemetry for the latest planned obsolence plastic box. We live in a post-scarcity society where food and clothes are destroyed so that the "underclass" can't at least enjoy the scraps.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops". - Stephen Jay Gould
A bus driver in San Francisco makes about 80k on average, ranging up to about 150k AFAIK. The higher end is more than a senior engineer makes at Wikimedia in California.
It maybe highlights that salaries in the US are higher than in much of the rest of the world, but I don't think that's Wikimedia's fault.
As for the other side of the equation, revenue, most of that is from readers' donations. And most of that comes from North America, Europe, Australia and East Asia.
But the Foundation also shows its fundraising messages and sends its fundraising emails begging readers to chip in in places like India, Brazil and South Africa:
And in those markets I'm sure they're paid less. The most recent salary report at levels.fyi is about 120k in LA, which is as expensive as SF. They're paying in California less than Spotify is paying in Germany.
And I'm not sure what you're saying - should they only ask for donations in the US? I mean, they could, probably, but why is it a problem that people in poorer countries also donate, proportionally I assume much less?
Maybe US is out of whack a bit with salaries. As software engineer I never made 80k in Europe. I made more when I was freelance engineer.
Now I live in Asia only the very senior people will make like around 100k.
I have had several leadership roles still not make as much money as a SWE in America.
Now I bought land and build a nice house on it, with a big garden, pool and big garage for my motorcycles. All out of my own pocket without going into debt. Think in the end it is not the size of the paycheck that matters. But quality of life is calculated with cost of living and your paycheck.
Disagree. If you are as an engineer make 10s-100s of millions or billions in some cases, you are worth every penny. Also the good engineers when they feel slighted go out and start a company relatively easily competing or changing the environment.
The last fact is why FAANG pays a lot -- to stop people from starting companies.
If a company is making 1 million per employee, why shouldn't the employee get a substantial part of that? I was personally responsible for easily 2 million / year in income at my previous job (and possibly just as much or more at my current job).
I have a hard time tracking income of a software product to specific employee contribution, unless it's a solo enterprise, which is rare and fraught with its own issues. Who's responsible for a piece of income? The original software author? The maintenance SWE? The SRE? The PM that identified the market opportunity? The exec that signed off the funds for the whole thing?
the reason people find these massive pay packets unbecoming is because it's a nonprofit. Companies can do what they like -- but these folks are going hat in hand to civilians and asking for handouts, which they then use to people these people 700k. Are you happy to subsidize that? I suspect many normal people donors would not be.
This seems to me like a strange and counterproductive attitude. People are fine with Facebook or Google manipulating them and extracting vast amounts of money from them and handing it out to their employees, but get upset when an extremely useful product simply asks for voluntary payment from time to time to pay out a fraction as much in order to retain talent?
The world would be better off if people were happy to donate to useful products like Wikipedia, and encouraged high pay there (because with a large enough denominator, it's an insignificant amount of money to users), and more upset about the exploitative practices of mainstream companies. Then we might see more open and straightforward services like Wikipedia, and fewer creepy and insidious businesses like Facebook or Google (thinking specifically of YouTube and it's attempts to drive 'engagement' here...)
Hm. Though I'm skeptical it's really "talent" in the sense of purely meritocratic ability, you know? It seems cronyish. Why does a nonprofit actually need someone who is "worth" 700k/year? Would that person be able to command that much in private industry? In theory, if they could legitimately pull down 700k from nonprofit work, this suggests they would be worth far _more_ in industry. The Wikimedia foundation does not oversee a fast growing startup. They need to maintain a website. Why does that need 200 staff and some of them pulling down 700k? The other thing is that nonprofits have a fundamental misalignment in product market fit. They are not selling a good to a customer, so the feedback loop is not tight. They have to convince donors of their value, fundamentally an ideological proposition in many ways, but the donors are not the consumers of the product. So there's an information asymmetry there. Of course I agree on all your points about corporates. But nonprofits get a special status -- both in terms of tax and in the eyes of the public -- so we hold them to a different standard.
It's hard to argue with someone who calls running Wikipedia "maintaining a website". Either you have never worked in the industry or you're just being intellectually dishonest. It will take you 5 minutes to find videos of the CEO of Wikipedia talking to congressional committees about just a small selection of stuff she was dealing with.
And for doing that she was paid what a staff software engineer makes for taking 6 months to change the shade of blue of a button in gmail.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The banner probably drives enough small donors to give the big donors confidence that they are force multipliers and not just propping up a one-off thing.
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.
Maybe at the $10MM scale I'd agree but even CEOs of Fortune 500 companies rarely make that much unless they are founders or hit all their targets over many years in a row.
>> 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.
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.
Virtually all of the underpaid executive bureaucrats in the US are already rich or will be once they cycle out. They are underpaid for a few years and then are made whole. It would be better to just pay them properly in the first place.
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.
Usually, by abusing the financials to give yourself outsized rewards, like this case right here.
Regardles of the legal structure, it's always about power: who has it and who they are responsible too. For a largely unaccountable entity like Wikimedia, with the power to print money by simply placing a banner on the site, it was only a matter of time until it was to be captured by a self serving clique.
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.
Paid from money donated to Wikipedia – unlike the Google executive. I think it is normal and legitimate for donors to Wikipedia – whether they've donated labour or money – to have a qualitatively different kind of interest in the former case than the latter.
Many have noticed that the more useful a job is to society the less it pays.
People seem to have a weird expectation that if you want to work on something useful you should expect to be paid well below market rates. (In this case, 50-70% below market!)
Why? I can think of no system of ethics that says someone working on addictive mobile games should be making more than the CEO of wikipedia, but that's exactly what's happening. And still people are mad about it! Apparently suckers who want to do something nice for society should do it for free.
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?
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.
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)
> 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.
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?
Sure there is a lot of spam but there is also a lot of political pressure to influence politically controversial articles. This rather old video was an eye opener for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY
They mention the topic of the Gaza flotilla raid in the video. If you read the actual article on this topic, it's pretty balanced, and mentions in the introduction that Israel was condemned by the UN Human Rights Council and their use of force was called excessive and unreasonable. Hardly a Zionist propaganda piece.
'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.'
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).
I got all my SO points from answering a single question on JavaFX, which I only used for about 6 months. It is not even the accepted answer (which was, and still is, incorrect).
There is a lot of demand to control the narrative on political articles. Some political groups [1][2] have mobs of Wikipedia editors trying to influence what you read. I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few moderator roles otherwise a lot of their work would be reverted.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If that protocol is a technical solution to the problem and match our requirements toward privacy, I don't see why it would not be adopted, then:
- The TCP header is not encrypted and thus publicly exposes the IP address of the client
- I don't see why the Apple Relays would emit that information since that would defeat its purpose of obscuring the original client IP
- It looks like it is a custom protocol between two HAProxy Enterprise instances
- It seems to be a feature of "HAProxy Enterprise" which sounds like it is not available under an open source license.
We do have direct point of contacts with engineers at Apple, Facebook, Google etc and do collaborate with them on a wide range of technical topics. The foundation has a dedicated team to vandalism, blocking etc https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-Harassment_Tools . I forwarded your remark and maybe they can update the wiki page at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay (it is mostly from November 2021 and looks like it might use a refresh).
HAproxy is just an implementer of this protocol, there are others as well (nginx and AWS I know support this), and IIRC also the haproxy community edition.
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.
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.
I’m not sure how you’d like people to evaluate this claim without some examples. Yes, some people will try to nitpick, but many readers here will engage in good faith. What’s an example of a heavily editorialized article?
It demonizes right-wing YouTubers with the slur "alt-right". There could absolutely no such article exist about a "woke" pipeline. Anti left-wing bias is not acceptable in Wikipedia. Anti right-wing bias is not much of a problem.
Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative. Remember how all the media outlets were “anti Trump” because they all described the voting scandal as being “without evidence”? That’s because there was none.
You couldn’t report on that and simultaneously be on the side of reality without also being against the Trump campaign.
Of course "woke" is mostly used in a derogatory way. Again, no such article analysing a supposed "woke pipeline" would be acceptable in Wikipedia.
> Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative.
The same thing can be said about progressives. Nonetheless, the above example would be seen as highly biased.
> 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.
Thank you for this! Just installed redirector. Actually a few of my tampermonkey scripts are to map twitter to nitter etc, and I have old reddit redirect addon which could be consolidated into this as well.
BTW, to make it work I had to change:
(.) to ([^.]*) and ([^?]) to ([^?]*)
I think HN formatting ate some characters (I used indenting to try and preserve)
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.
The `useskin` parameter should work on any MediaWiki instance as long as the targeted skin is installed on the instance. You can grab the list of skins from:
Their costs went up about 100%. The cumulative inflation over those 6 years was about 25%. The US averages 6% salary growth yearly, which over six years is about 42%, and would have been much higher in the tech industry. California averages a cost of living increase of about 8% annually, over six years that's 58%.
So if you adjust for the rising costs of doing anything in tech, their operating budget has increased by much less than would seem - only about 20%.
In those same six years, they've had to deal with a rise in misinformation campaigns, spam, infosec threats and recently ML models.
Call me crazy, but dealing with all of the extra complexity 2022 has over 2016 on a 20% budget increase is pretty great.
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!
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
Are the universities fine after the decades long algae bloom of administrators? Has admission become more merit based, tuition more affordable, inquiry freer, and the pace of scientific breakthroughs faster?
It is not. But since you seem to tacitly agree that most of Wikipedia's enormous wealth is funneled into putting people into positions of power who are not predominantly motivated by furthering Wikimedia's core mission, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on when in human history this has worked out "fine" for an organization, i.e. without degrading or even perverting the pursuit of its original objectives? If it hasn't, what makes you so confident Wikipedia will be different?
Wikipedia indeed has some unique aspects that give it additional resilience from hostile takeovers, such as public auditability (via edit history etc.), forkability, and finally the fact that the bureaucrats have unusually little leverage over the lives of those who do the actual mission-aligned work.
But universities also enjoyed some unique protections (tenure etc.). The end result was that it just took a bit longer.
> not giving money to one of the few online that provide free access to billions of people without ads
So what would you give your money to? inb4 typical homeless/war/refugee charity. People give money to way greater evil than Wikimedia. For example I myself bought expensive as shit coffee (not even worth the price) twice for the past 2 months. It's an overpriced garbage that I regret buying every time, but I never donated to Wikimedia either. I am sure you and many others share the same experience.
With regards to money, they can put all that to an investment company or something and continue to make more money. Why not? So far they have much better track record than any other organizations/companies that I can think of.
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.)
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That would be okay if not for one (1) the deceptive advertising they plaster Wikipedia with saying they’re about to shut down when in fact hosting costs are a rounding error, and (2) many of the things they are funding has absolutely jack all to do with Wikipedia.
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 eveр 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.
>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.
Fox News isn't banned, unlike the Daily Mail. When it is on the record that everyone from the hosts up to network executives were aware and continued to report falsehoods, one might think the lady doth protest too much.
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"
The Atlantic Council is far from politically neutral. It's very much a neoliberal swamp creature closely tied the U.S. state department's international influence operations.
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.
> 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)
"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.
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.
"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."
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men." - Abraham Lincoln
"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." - Elie Wiesel
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy
Generally: For almost every piece of advice there are useful contrasts. More than useful, actually: necessary. Ideas that seem reasonable (even wise) in isolation often don’t ‘survive contact’ with broader thinking. In other words, an isolated idea may not prove applicable for a particular context.
Here are more quotes that can help weigh your choice to speak:
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy." - Howard W. Newton (not Isaac Newton)
“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Specifically: The early and outspoken critics sometimes get their heads cut off. Sometimes this galvanizes change. Sometimes this just helps the decapitator find his enemies more efficiently. Sometimes it is wiser — and more ethical — to quietly (even secretly) organize and act when you have a critical mass.
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." - Japanese Proverb
“A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle." - Japanese Proverb
To be fair, it was apropos, so I don’t think it was chosen randomly. :} The quote illustrates a relevant and related point of view. I probably agree with you in this sense: I would prefer the author take the time to say more and try to persuade.
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.
'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
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
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.
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.
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.
Two-party dominance has been a feature of the American political scene since before the Civil War - that is, for most of its existence. I wouldn't call that "current short-term circumstances".
It's also very hard to change because both major parties benefit from the existing system and are protective of it, knowing full well that proportional representation would cost them a lot of votes. Republicans usually trot out the old "but small states!" canard, while Democrats are getting creative and claiming that IRV and RCV are racist because e.g. "majority voting may seem innocuous, but if the vote is racially polarized, “runoffs discriminate against Blacks because they are a minority of the voters.”"
Given that Congress has the final say on how federal elections are run, I find it rather unlikely that this is going to change anytime soon - at least, not as long as federal politics is consumed almost entirely by polarization and voting against rather than for.
Indeed; I just didn't want to get into the whole debate about whether the replacement of the Whigs with the GOP as the other dominant party was a meaningful change or not. But it's safe to argue that the present system, including the specific parties in question, has been around for >160 years now.
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s an impossible experiment because a mirror would never get the same network effects, search engine treatment, and cultural integration Wikipedia has accumulated.
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.
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.
>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)
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.
You could say the same about any professional. You do it because it's the right thing to do, and if you don't do it, people are more likely not to work for you in the future.
It's not assuming a lot to think someone who made several hundred thousand dollars has enough to live comfortably for a few months.
I could move into a very nice apartment in any city in the world for less than $5,000/mo. I have no doubt that with that kind of cash, I could move in today. Surely after making $300,000 you would have enough left over to do the same!
If not, then you are obviously not qualified to be making that kind of compensation in the first place.
Yea everybody knows that if you’re not capable of living frugally and/or have mastered the art of personal finance you couldn’t possibly have any specialized skills or technical abilities.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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...
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.
To be clear I'm not as familiar with this for non-profits.
But generally yes, if much of your compensation is bonus based most executive contracts will have a mechanism for pro-rating or just paying out future bonuses.
This sounds a bit like it was something of a mutual parting of the ways so sometimes boards will payout other bonuses like Retention Bonuses (A bonus for staying at a position, frequently with another job offer at hand) even though the person is leaving. It could also just be a bonus triggered by the board choosing to part ways with her that was part of her executive contract. Proving a firing is "for cause" is frequently difficult so sometimes if there's a desire to replace a senior executive it's easier to just pay them off.
From what I could find, Wikimedia employs about 250 people in total. The compensation paid to the CEO of Wikimedia is about what a senior SWE makes at Facebook.
I don't see what's outrageous here - they are amazingly efficient. Someone managing 250 people at a for-profit company across the street would make 3-4 times as much, and, I mean Twitter had 7,500 employees.
Yes, the CEO got 18 months severance which is on the high side, but her compensation to begin with was very low for the Bay Area.
I think the scandal here is just people in the rest of the world being outraged at median salaries in California. But remember, the cost of living is also stratospheric.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is some hardcore, nuclear-powered cherry picking. Economic inequality in the US is vast and though this one small example sounds pretty bad, it's trivial by comparison to the larger trends.
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?
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.
it sounds like desire for prudence at a quasi-public foundation.
it might be completely misplaced though.
but more transparency might help in this case too. make the job have some standard salary, make the contract public, and allow people to submit their resumes and let the board pick the best candidate. again, this might be super naive (it is!), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work.
of course if it's a requirement to have the CEO live in the Bay Area, continue growing the WMF (and in general do a lot more than keeping Wikipedia working well), then it's not surprising that the candidate pool is drastically smaller, and the money involved is a lot more.
(of course, again, maybe it's worth talking about what the public wants Wikipedia and the WMF to be, but ... maybe it's up to those who donate?)
No. I'm disputing the idea that this qualifies as merely being "treated well." Treated extravagantly would be more accurate, and from the budget of a non-profit no less.
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?
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.
It's upsetting that you only got 4 weeks. I'm happy WMF is not so shitty. I think it's more productive for everybody if the bar is raised, not lowered.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
...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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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?
As that video demonstrates (a Capuchin who was happy to perform a simple task in order to get a piece of cucumber goes crazy when another monkey is introduced who gets a grape for the same task) this notion of fairness is so basic, it is pre-human. According to the video, it's even been replicated with dogs and birds.
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.
"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.
Exactly. With the added irony that the whole Wikimedia system is based on volunteers who do just that: come and work for Wikipedia for no pay. Gosh, they must be so rich!
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.
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.
Is neutrality essential to your moral philosophy? Please define neutrality.
Do you think it should be essential to someone who works at Wikipedia? Even after they leave? Why exactly? Make the argument if you want to persuade. I think I speak for a lot of people in saying that such a claim is overly strict.
Have you reviewed various forms of moral relativism recently? If not, I think the ideas will be fruitful.
There is an idea that I’ve stolen from Robert Kane (a philosopher) that I want to share any chance I get: a quest for knowledge means starting with an open mind — but it does not mean stopping there. Neutrality can help you weigh ideas more objectively. But the process of weighing them will show that some ideas are better than others. Therefore, neutrality as an end state of knowledge or ethics is not a wise goal. Foolish neutrality is unethical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
But you're not donating to Wikipedia or the contributors whom make it a great source. WikiMedia 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.
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.
(/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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every year, wikipedia hits users with an even larger, ballsier banner begging for donations. The last one covered the entire screen, and button to dismiss it was hidden. Fuck them.
So I see people scoffing at the way the English Wikipedia is run, and people referring incorrectly to "What Wikipedia does" when the Wikipedias are just one aspect of the WMF's activities. So do you really know what the WMF does?
The encyclopedias, and MediaWiki software, are the flagship projects, and they come in hundreds of languages (I'm watching what happens on the Nahuatl project right now).
There are also many Wiktionaries, where words are defined in any language you can name.
There is Wikidata, which interfaces in a machine-readable way with every other Wikipedia.
There is Commons, which is one of the world's largest repositories of freely-licensed media. This is the first place I search if I am looking for a PD or CC-licensed image. That's what it's there for, in addition to serving media for all the other projects.
There is Wikisource, a large repository of freely-licensed text. See above.
There is Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikinews...
The WMF does not simply run web servers, they run a cloud platform. WMF is a player in Big Data, and the WMF Cloud supports developers of bots, tools, database queries, scripts, and all sorts of widgets that interface with at least one project.
Software development. I've already mentioned that MediaWiki is an open-source, in-house platform, and it's constantly under active development. Anyone may create an account and submit an issue in the Phabricator bug database.
Outreach. Wikipedias coordinate with college instructors who are teaching how to edit Wikipedia as part of a class. There is a standardized and recognizable process for this now.
WMF holds conferences worldwide, to get people interested in editing, learn how to do it, and keep them engaged.
All projects have separate sets of administrators and unique policies and guidelines. If all you know is English Wikipedia by reputation, you've barely scratched the surface.
I don't know. If it's a standard into obtaining certain levels of effectiveness, then why don't they just add it to their salary or something? Why the extra things?
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...
I don't take offense at all. I think it's strange/confusing for a non-profit organisation, but maybe not unheard of. Certain roles need certain amounts of money i guess. Kinda also gives weird vibes on what the definition of non-profit really is.
> 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 français d’études 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.
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.
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:
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.
"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. "
Don't forget that a lot of board members sit on a lot of other boards or are executives somewhere. It's an insider club that protects themselves.
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?
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.