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Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

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Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#331

Post by ekianjo »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #322
sorenjan wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? What important strategic decisions are there to make at Wikipedia? Why do they have to be San Francisco based? The annual real median personal income in the US in 2019 was $35,977[0], how can anyone think that $120k isn't a lot? Why should people around the world donate their hard earned money so that some employees in America can have Silicon Valley salaries? [0] https:…

> What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? Well, managing a company with over a hundred million a year in revenue, for one.

When you beg for money I'm not sure you can call that revenue

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#332

Post by apercu »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #321
zozbot234 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is not a dot-com. And their executive compensation is hardly "sky-high"; it amounts to a FAANG middle manager 's salary, for a positive impact on the world that's easily as high as that of any FAANG.

Anything above 100K is sky-high, and you need to have drunk a lot of the SF kool-aid to think anything else. That the cost of living in SF is so high that a wage like that doesn't cover basic living costs is not because the wages aren't high enough.

Hold on there, cowboy.

100k was maybe "sky high" 20 years ago. 100k in most large cities is not. When your modest house costs $800k USD, a car costs 30k, auto insurance is $1600 a year, groceries are 10k a year (looking at you, Toronto), just how in the hell is 100k "sky high"?

$80k was a decent salary in a mid-size city 15 years ago.

Just because six figures seems like a lot of money to you doesn't mean it's a lot of money.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#333

Post by [deleted] »

zozbot234 wrote: post #188
jiggawatts wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is hosted on ordinary rackmount servers at a handful of colocation facilities: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers It does not significantly use cloud services, and as you can see by the picture of their racks, they use standard 1 RU pizzaboxes. Their workload is highly scalable horizontally, and doesn't even need much in the way of expensive "enterprise" hardware such a SAN arrays: https://up…

> It does not significantly use cloud services They do host their own private "cloud", mostly used for research and project development. > English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! Nitpicking, page views from outside users are not supposed to hit PHP at all…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#334

Post by apercu »

sorenjan wrote: post #295
zhdc1 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was expecting to see semi-outrageous, border line unjustifiable executive salaries after reading this comment and clicking on the direct link below. I guess there's a chance that executive compensation went up significantly after 2018, but nothing I saw looks out of place for an organization as large as Wikipedia. ~300k for a San Fransisco-based CEO and an average salary of ~120k for all employees employees seems f…

What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? What important strategic decisions are there to make at Wikipedia? Why do they have to be San Francisco based? The annual real median personal income in the US in 2019 was $35,977[0], how can anyone think that $120k isn't a lot? Why should people around the world donate their hard earned money so that some employees in America can have Silicon Valley salaries? [0] https:…

Just because the richest most powerful people have convinced you that 120k is a lot of money doesn't mean that it is. Especially in a city.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#335

Post by OhNoMyqueen »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #290
bomdo wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For others interested in this, Wikimedia salaries are all public [0]. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

As someone who worked in a sandwich shop to survive while going to college($7.5/hr, 30 hrs/week), I can't imagine the universe some people live in where an income of $375,000 doesn't seem sky high. It's like there is a section of people who live in a different world. I understand that it isn't much for an executive, but then that stuns me even more. Edit: median US salary is around $70k. This executive's pay is over…

I think it was bad wording. Those salaries are sky-high, but they're about average for those kinds of positions.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#336

Post by randallsquared »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #322
sorenjan wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? What important strategic decisions are there to make at Wikipedia? Why do they have to be San Francisco based? The annual real median personal income in the US in 2019 was $35,977[0], how can anyone think that $120k isn't a lot? Why should people around the world donate their hard earned money so that some employees in America can have Silicon Valley salaries? [0] https:…

> What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? Well, managing a company with over a hundred million a year in revenue, for one.

Ah, ouroboros. :)

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#337

Post by OhNoMyqueen »

blagie wrote: post #259
mhh__ wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to want these foundations to not only spend the absolute bare minimum but also don't like them paying their staff properly or even at all. So many times I've read people grumbling about expenses, only when you work out it out per employee it's completely reasonable for a small business let alone one of the largest brands in the world.

It's about aligned incentives. I worked for a not-for-profit which needed 10 people, but had funds and grew to 100. From there on, it did less with more. The CEO had his headcount and first-class airfares. Beneficiaries turned into cash cows. Etc. I trust the founders. I don't trust new leadership. That's not specific to Wikimedia.

That's also not specific to non-profits.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#338

Post by EdiX »

zozbot234 wrote: post #262
EdiX wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the 20 million they spend on awards and grants? It doubled between 2019 and 2020, isn't it weird that they spend 10x as much in awards and grants than they spend on hosting everything?

So you'd want them to cut the item in their budget that most directly rewards and supports their volunteer editors' work on the projects? That would seem to be unwise.

Maybe?

First off, how much of this is going to wikipedia editors and how much is going to other stuff? Honest question, I tried looking and I couldn't figure out which grants actually get approved.

Secondly, the number of editors peaked in 2007, as far as I know. Why does the money spent on grants and awards keep going up if the number of editors keeps going down?

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#339

Post by sorenjan »

FredPret wrote: post #319
sorenjan wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average software developer salary in Germany is €50 000 per year, just to take one western country as an example. I doubt Wikipedia would be much worse with European developers. American IT salaries are not the norm, and they're a bit insane. When your budget consists of donations, I think it's disrespectful to spend it on frivolous things like San Francisco salaries. The average programmer salary in Sweden is $5…

Seems like it’s Eurpoean incomes that are insanely low, why not get outraged about that? Your attitude creates a race to the bottom.

We get by just fine. Education, health care, vacation, parental leave, child care, a house and two cars. What else do you need?

It's not about a race to the bottom, it's the vast differences in pay in the same society. If the median real salary is $35 000, why should a 25 year old web developer make 3X that? Some software engineers act like what they do is so much more important and difficult than what everyone else do, it's a bit disturbing. Of course, people in finance are even worse.

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