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Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#91

Post by ardy42 »

nickpp wrote: post #80

Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information. Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through. Even worse, the leve…

> Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information.

Then there are also the people with ideological axes to grind, and the community's seeming belief that it's fine to merely reform a problematic user to just the barest level of acceptability.

Unless you find some forgotten corner, being a Wikipedia editor requires an inhuman level of patience or obsessiveness, which probably ends up turning off a huge number of potential contributors.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#92

Post by detaro »

ndiscussion wrote: post #89
matthewmacleod wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Lavish waste” my arse. You people will be dissatisfied so long as there is a nonprofit worker out there who isn’t subsisting on gruel.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... Unless I'm misreading something, 64% of their expenses in 2018 went to salaries.

And that tells you what exactly? Do you think they should spend less on salaries, or more? What should they spend on instead/what should they cut?

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#93

Post by jrochkind1 »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #72
jrochkind1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want a line-item for how much they spend on office coffee-per-person too? Surely parties can't be the only thing you are concerned about. There does seem to be a line "Special event expense, net". I would guess parties go in there? It was reported as around $300K, or 0.2% of expenses, in the most recent fiscal year. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim... " I cannot tell you how much th…

It really depends how much the coffee costs. Like with Putin's palace, people wouldn't complain about the toilet brushes if they weren't gold-coated. Is the coffee bought from Mahers cousin? Sure, I'd like to know that. Parties do not have to be funded by the company. During my lifetime, I never went to a company-funded party. But I have been doing fine, funding my own parties. What do you need? A stereo and a disco…

And how can we know how much the coffee costs without a line-item?

It is clear you don't trust how wikimedia is going to use your money, so you shouldn't donate to them. Nobody is forcing you, certainly.

I don't think any line-items or "declaring it up front" is going to satisfy you though. Most people don't seem to agree with you. I don't think it's really a reporting or "declaring it up front" issue.

Where is your "$9 million" figure coming from though?

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#94

Post by axguscbklp »

leetcrew wrote: post #30
axguscbklp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>parties and group binding is appreciated more than salary by workers I'd be surprised if this is true for more than a tiny fraction of workers. Given the high salaries at Google, maybe it's more true there than at other places.

why do so many companies throw holiday parties then? according to the top few google results, a typical company party costs somewhere in the vicinity of $75/head. they could instead just add $75 (minus additional tax liabilities) to everyone's bonus and call it a day. is it just to be nice, or do executives believe that throwing a few parties is a cheaper way to boost retention?

I don't know. I can think of some possible reasons, for example: the people who decide to have a company party do want to be nice, and/or maybe they want to party themselves, and/or maybe they see it as an opportunity to get publicity and network, and/or maybe they do it because other companies do it and so it's just "what is done", and/or maybe they do it because they think it'll raise morale and team bonding.

But I don't know. Maybe someone who has personal insight into the matter can chime in.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#95

Post by einpoklum »

nickpp wrote: post #80

Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information. Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through. Even worse, the leve…

> Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors

You're assuming this is not enabled and supported by the WikiMedia foundation. I believe you are wrong. That is, what you see when you try to edit values are those "entrenched editors", but those are just the front lines.

Certainly, some policy and customs are set by virtue of being an active editor; but more fundamental and site-scale issues are just as certainly discussed, decided and acted upon - infrastructurally - by the foundation.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#96

Post by tptacek »

hinkley wrote: post #86
tptacek wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, because the Red Cross is famously one of the least effective deals in charity.

I think they are running a charity on hard mode. If I were feeding homeless people (any year except last year), I have a pretty good idea of what I have to accomplish and for how many people. I could run a pretty lean operation. Meanwhile RC “has to” stash supplies 12 hours from everywhere in the world and then let most of them rot. Their overheads are huge, even before you get into any discussion of mismanagement.

You can Google to quickly get a bunch of different articles about how ineffective the Red Cross is; we don't need to recapitulate them all here, it's just a little funny that they were your example of an obvious recurring charity donation.

If I have a real point here, it's that people all have different definitions of what important charities are.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#97

Post by ndiscussion »

detaro wrote: post #92
ndiscussion wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... Unless I'm misreading something, 64% of their expenses in 2018 went to salaries.

And that tells you what exactly? Do you think they should spend less on salaries, or more? What should they spend on instead/what should they cut?

I think I can agree to disagree with most people replying, I consider it highly misleading that they prod users to donate when using Firefox, and don't mention that Firefox is not funded by donations: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

A few years ago, I certainly thought the funds went to development. And I can't say I'm a big fan of most of their initiatives (most of which have been abandoned Google-style).

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#98

Post by [deleted] »

ndiscussion wrote: post #97
detaro wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that tells you what exactly? Do you think they should spend less on salaries, or more? What should they spend on instead/what should they cut?

I think I can agree to disagree with most people replying, I consider it highly misleading that they prod users to donate when using Firefox, and don't mention that Firefox is not funded by donations: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ A few years ago, I certainly thought the funds went to development. And I can't say I'm a big fan of most of their initiatives (most of which have been abandoned Google-style).

[deleted]

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#99

Post by triceratops »

jahlove wrote: post #11
iso8859-1 wrote: post #2

I didn't know my Wikipedia donations funded parties in Accra, Berlin and Chandigarh. I think that should be been in the fundraising statement.

They also spent $2.8m on travel and conferences in 2019 [0], which is more than they spent on internet hosting... [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... (page 13)

How do they spend so little on internet hosting? They're one of the top 10 websites in the world. Are servers and bandwidth really that cheap? It's not like it's all text either - they serve images, audio, and video too.

Anyone know if someone donates hosting resources to them? I simply cannot imagine serving that much traffic on < $3m.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#100

Post by throwaway2245 »

hinkley wrote: post #82
throwaway2245 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Wikimedia need a significant nest egg? What do you do with the money, when people have stopped valuing Wikimedia enough that they are no longer paying for it to exist?

Donations are not a zero sum game but they aren’t terribly elastic either. Try as you might, every dollar you get as a donation is taking some of that money from someone else. There will be times when Wikipedia is not sexy, but taken for granted. That’s when you need the endowment.

If Wikipedia becomes unfashionable to the extent it is highly dependent on its savings, it will no be longer valued for being Wikipedia (by definition).

It might be valued as an institution with modest economic power, which doesn't seem to me to add anything to the world that isn't already there.

2 years of all current spending as a cushion seems like plenty to me (for Wikipedia, which has not faced any unexpected financial shocks, even in 2020). If you can't navigate shocks and downward trends with that cushion, then you probably ought not to exist.

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