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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

#101

Post by detaro »

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).

Hypothetically, Development funds would be ... salaries. Misleading presentation seems to me as a different issue than "but they spend X% on salaries", so where did you want to go with that.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#102

Post by hinkley »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #100
hinkley wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

Only if you believe that market economies are always efficient.

Plenty of things have a huge impact on your life and yet nobody wants to pay for them. They're important, but they're not important. If you have an endowment, you don't have to keep wrestling with keeping the two in sync.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#103

Post by lancesells »

xyzzyz wrote: post #76
Zababa wrote: post #24

> We have a deep and stable financial position that will help us grow and protect us from any storm, and the trust in our projects has never been higher. They earned 9 millions more than last year, from 120 millions to 129 millions, and spent 21 millions more, from 91 millions to 112 millions [1], with an increase of 10 millions in "awards and grants". The donations grew by 10 millions. If I read the financial statem…

That’s okay, if they go bankrupt, someone more competent could take over, and easily run Wikipedia on less than a tenth of their current budget. Look at their financials: Wikimedia Foundation is part jobs program, part grift.

I don't know why you're calling it grift. According to the definition a non-profit is not conducted or maintained to make a profit. I'm guessing most of us agree that Wikipedia is an asset to society and I'm hoping the people that work there get paid well. Why would I not want more people working at Wikimedia compared to something more detrimental to society like Facebook?

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#104

Post by hinkley »

tptacek wrote: post #96
hinkley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're making a simile it's good to pick something everyone has heard of.

I'm honestly not sure I've ever donated money to RC. UNHCR, yes, RC I don't think so.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#105

Post by hinkley »

axguscbklp wrote: post #90
hinkley wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re only in it for the money, you are a mercenary in all but title. People quit because nothing at the company is enough to make them stay. “Enough” is a complex thing and often the oddest details can be the last straw. I like to go to going away parties for people and listen to their reasons for leaving. I doubled down on better onboarding experiences when I noticed how often people were uncomfortable from day…

Yes, I'm only in it for the money. So are almost all other workers. I've been to work parties. I'm a very social person but work parties never did much for me because you can't talk freely at them. I don't need work parties. If I want to go party with coworkers, I can organize that myself, I don't need the organization to do it for me. Or I can go party with people who are not coworkers. I do understand that maybe so…

I seem to find a lot of people on HN who aren't just in it for the money.

Mind you, they wouldn't do this for free, and the money certainly helps. A lot. But it's not enough.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#106

Post by mikepurvis »

tristor wrote: post #38
mikepurvis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and I'm not sure it would be a defensible position to just be stashing your donated funds into a gigantic rainy day war chest— the money is there to spend on growing and fortifying the service in other ways, so it should be spent.

The proper way for non-profits to do this is to start an endowment fund, which provides consistent residual income that can help fund operations. Usually by identifying specific large donors who would wish to be named in the fund.

It looks as though they do indeed have such a fund:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia...

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#107

Post by kemayo »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #93
iso8859-1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the $9m they're talking about is the 2019 expense for "other operating expenses" in that budget statement you linked.

It's... probably not the category that's relevant, since they're complaining about parties that happened at conferences, which would presumably be accounted under "travel and conferences" which is just $3m for 2019.

"Other operating expenses" _would_ probably include things like a staff party, based on the definition at the end of the document, but that's not where the complaint started. More to the point, it also includes "facility expenses, funding of the Wikidata project, staff related expenses, insurance and personal property tax expenses, and other general administrative expenses", so claiming it as a party slush fund feels rather weird when it's almost certainly the category that includes things like office rent.

(I know nothing at all about the WMF's accounting practices, so I'm just reading the document and extrapolating.)

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#108

Post by nickff »

ardy42 wrote: post #91
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 c…

Wikipedia also has the Stack Overflow problem of 'deletionists' (who mark everything as already described somewhere else, or not notable).

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#109

Post by matthewmacleod »

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).

Can you answer the question that was posed? Is the amount of spending on salaries too high, or too low? It’s impossible to tell what point you are trying to make.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#110

Post by axguscbklp »

hinkley wrote: post #105
axguscbklp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm only in it for the money. So are almost all other workers. I've been to work parties. I'm a very social person but work parties never did much for me because you can't talk freely at them. I don't need work parties. If I want to go party with coworkers, I can organize that myself, I don't need the organization to do it for me. Or I can go party with people who are not coworkers. I do understand that maybe so…

I seem to find a lot of people on HN who aren't just in it for the money. Mind you, they wouldn't do this for free, and the money certainly helps. A lot. But it's not enough.

HN probably disproportionately attracts people who are well-off enough that they can afford to be choosy about work. There also might be some bias because working just for the money is the default and working for things other than the money is the exception, so people in the latter category are more likely to write about it than people in the former category. Also, some people who claim to be working for more than just the money might just be saying what they want to be true rather than what is true. It's not that they're consciously lying, cause there would be little reason to do that on HN, it's more that to believe that they are working for more than the money makes them feel good. Also, admitting that you're working just for the money is taboo in a large subset of corporate culture and, while there is not much reason to avoid violating the taboo on HN, the taboo may nonetheless spill over into outside-of-work thinking.
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