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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?

#351
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You find it disgusting that a service, which you probably use both directly and indirectly multiple times a day and costs you nothing, has the nerve to give you a suggestion of donating 10$ once? That is a very peculiar attitude to have.

I find this attitude peculiar. The editors who provided all that value will get $0. It's like buying an album where $9.92 goes to the label and yet the label still complains about freeloaders depriving the poor musicians of income if they don't pay the $10.

And who exactly gets the money? Because as I see, there is no corruption in the system at all. There are a few inefficiencies, but it’s incomparable to the bleeding out of musicians.

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

#352
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's absolutely great that Wikipedia is able to pay competitive salaries in a good location. It's probably one of the reasons why they can run such an amazing site. I consider my donations well spent.

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…

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

#353
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe to counter the decline of editors?

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

#354
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:…

They probably need to pay a good salary to be able to hire folks who would otherwise join a FAANG.

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

#355
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It's still sky-high to most of the world outside the US

It seems that the wealthiest countries also have higher cost of living (for the same level of life). I guess it kinda makes sense in a way.

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

#356
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's their foundation to run, they have big plans, and it you don't like it you can ignore it. (Some of) the execs are manipulating people to donate, many of the donors wouldn't have donated, had they known that there was enough money already for Wikipedia. > If people feel that they were somehow tricked into their donation Problem is, they are unaware about having been tricked. They generally don't know about this…

How is it tricked?

The annual donation drive messages dishonestly imply a level of urgency that has never existed. At no point in Wikipedia's history has the project been threatened due to a lack of funds.

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

#357

Ridiculous question and even more ridiculous factoids. The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please. Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in t…

> pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages My opinion is that basically no-one needs to have an income above a couple of times median in the country they're in [it's hard to normalise across countries]. Just because CEOs, etc., think they're worth $millions doesn't mean that charitable organisations should adopt that model. You're panhandling effectively, you beg people to give money but you already have i…

First enforce your (valid) criticism in other companies. If a person could make 10x what he/she currently makes with the same work, why would he/she settle for less? Even with very strong morals, this failing of capitalism should not be dealt with at Wikipedia’s level. Comparatively to US companies, wikipedia’s salaries are hardly extreme.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your POV is one way of looking at it.

Another one is that the companies that we work for make insane profits despite the sky high compensation.

In isolation, without major legislation that depresses those profits too, it at least makes more sense to share the spoils with the shareholders and the employees than with the shareholders alone.

I didn’t think it would happen at the time, but compensation saw a significant jump in the years after the compensation cartel (Apple, Google, Intuit etc.) was broken up.

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

#359
post #75

> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March... ) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade…

Note this part:

> 43% Direct support to communities

> The Wikimedia projects exist thanks to volunteer communities around the world that create and maintain them. We strengthen these communities through grants, programs, events, trainings, partnerships, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors.

My wife's friend just came to stay with us. He worked for the Wikimedia foundation for a long time and we were just talking about this. From what he said, after engineering expenses, legal expenses are the highest category. What he said happens is, say, the government of India finds editors with IP addresses in India, contributing to a page with a map not showing Kashmir as a part of India, and either arrests or sues those people, and Wikimedia Foundation tries to do all they can to provide legal defense for these people.

Ironically, this guy's biggest complaint and the reason he left Wikimedia is they don't pay enough for engineering. They're still fighting a propaganda war with all of the world's governments to provide accurate information, and that is a labor-intensive war being waged by true believers and volunteers. For instance, they block all IP blocks allocated to US legislative offices from editing any pages because of how consistently Congressional staffers were vandalizing pages and posting misinformation, but surely these people have learned of the existence of VPNs and working remotely. They clearly need better automated detection and moderation system, but to develop and deploy such systems, now they're competing with Facebook and Google for labor, but paying 1/3 of what Facebook and Google pay.

Apparently, people think the answer is they should just move to Vietnam or wherever labor rates are lowest.

Look, I don't doubt overseas developers are just as talented as anyone else, but history has inertia. There's a reason Silicon Valley firms are located in a place with university professors and professional mentors who invented much of the modern OS and Internet. I also don't doubt athletic talent is evenly spread around the world, but nonetheless South America and Europe dominate football, the US dominates baseball and basketball, Kenya dominates distance running. If you want to put together the best basketball team you possibly can, you go to Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. You don't look around the world for the cheapest labor rates and go there.

This kind of nonsense is exactly why I left the nonprofit world so long ago. The public all believe labor should subsist at the bare minimum living wage of the cheapest possible place to live, and no money whatsoever should be spent on fundraising.

Just understand when you take this position, if the nonprofit is involved in anything that governments and for-profits might also be interested, say, influencing how and what information gets disseminated to the entire world and for what purpose, the non-profit trying to minimize cost at all cost is going to lose to the governments and for-profits every single time.

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

#360
post #278

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.

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

None of those salaries are high compared to running a private company in a big American city.
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