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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?

#391

Post by iSnow »

reader_mode wrote: post #370
bluescrn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not true at all, most Western Europe 100k$ (80k EUR) is barely above average, you'd still be firmly middle class even on two such incomes, sky high would be at least twice that much.

80k annually works out to 6700 EUR/m

If Wikipedia(1) is semi-accurate, no (ZERO) major European county surpasses this. Not even Switzerland which clocks in at 70k EUR. And that's average, the mean is even lower due to skew by those making top money.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

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

#392

Post by jiofih »

kaba0 wrote: post #364
sorenjan wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comparison was aimed at the average salary of ~120k for all employees. And maybe there's a middle ground between moving everyone to Thailand and having a non profit operating on donated money based in the most expensive area in the world?

If an existing talent-pool is located there, why exactly should they move? Is a small inefficiency a failing of a non-profit? No company is a perfectly efficient profit-making machine (even though for-profits like to drop morals for profit), why are we feeling tricked by a non-profit wasting some negligible percentage of donations, especially that 100% efficiency is frankly impossible?

What talent pool? Wikipedia is not running any cutting edge tech that requires CS or research talent.

We are feeling tricked because it’s about 5% efficient right now.

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

#393

Post by jiofih »

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.

You mean running a non-profit donation machine that funnels $100M to a war chest. Sure as hell takes a lot of work.

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

#394

Post by 20after4 »

rightbyte wrote: post #323
hugi wrote: 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.

> It's probably one of the reasons why they can run such an amazing site. The reason Wikipedia is amazing is the user generated content and community moderation/admin.

Operating a network at the scale of Wikimedia's is no small task. AFAIK, The largest part of the budget goes to maintaining the servers and network (and paying the people who maintain them).

It's also worth noting that many of Wikimedia's staff are remote. I think more of the engineers are based in Europe than in the US and salaries are scaled somewhat based on the cost of living in each employees city/region. Wikimedia salary is almost certainly lower than the big tech companies but still pretty good for a non-profit and the benefits provided are very good if not quite up to the google level of luxury.

Disclosure: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation as a software engineer, however, I don't really know much about the financial details.

Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion / observation and not representative of my employer.

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

#395

Post by javagram »

nlitened wrote: post #294
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the same HN front page there has _just_ been a "senior developer drunk post", where a guy was complaining that full stack developers are being paid peanuts, and they deserve a compensation of at least 500k USD—and the comments were cheering "amen to that". I don't understand anything about US IT salaries anymore.

Probably not the same people writing comments, but also I think everyone has a bias towards being told people with their job should be paid more :-)

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

#396

Post by cedilla »

apercu wrote: post #332
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It's more than twice the median salary. It is quite high.

Upper class income only seem lackluster compared to the perverse 0.1% incomes and the housing bubble.

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

#397

Post by yanderekko »

bluescrn wrote: post #346
apercu wrote: 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

Yep. This is why I don't leave tips at US restaurants, because the servers' base $3/hour salary is still "sky high" compared to a comparable job in Sri Lanka.

/s

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

#398

Post by zozbot234 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #386
zozbot234 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. "Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on gi…

naw - I took three paragraphs of an important but obscure 20th century news event, rewrote using 8th grade English principles for clarity and order of facts, specifically and purposefully not changing any statement in the content, and it was immediately reverted with no recourse. The original was demonstrably awful writing -- total gatekeeping.

Rewriting whole paragraphs for clarity is very much the kind of thing that should be discussed on the talk page. That's why the feature exists.

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

#399

Post by iSnow »

TomVDB wrote: post #358
sorenjan wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

I guess that's at the core of the discussion. Wikipedia isn't seen by many as yet another tech company there to make insane profits.

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

#400

Post by spoiler »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #366
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a large city, with two kids, this is not an extravagant income. It's certainly a very good income, but a position like that deserves good compensation.

Maybe it's not that much for a single in parent of two wanting a life that's beyond "just comfortable"?
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