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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?

#461

Post by bawolff »

saurik wrote: post #248
bawolff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They currently don't hire any moderators. According to the article, they got 142 million in donations so far this fiscal year. Assuming they spent that entirely on hiring editors, had no other expenses (including no other fundraising expenses), had no server costs, etc they could hire 4500 people at min wage. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/... there's been 39 thousand editors…

Right: because you shifted the argument to editors from moderators; what they need are not people to edit articles, but instead to do community management that reduces the toxicity of the current de facto bureaucracy that is designed to prevent arguments but instead seems to cause them.

The parent literally used the phrase "editors/moderators".

The current bureaucracy is not designed to prevent arguments, its designed to make sure such arguments are productive. Whether it succedes is debatable. Its certainly not without issue.

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

#462

Post by nemothekid »

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:…

This is insane - are you arguing the Wikipedia should hire cheaper developers because they are a non-profit? Why stop there - why shouldn't Wikipedia fully cut corners and hire a body shop in a 3rd world country to build the site that millions of people use.

wikipedia SHOULD be paying competitve salaries so that their best and brightest don't leave to join tire-fire companies like Facebook. I don't know why you think someone working at Wikipedia shouldn't be paid a competitive salary if they work there; if not they will go work for Facebook and the world slowly loses out on an incredible resource while companies like FB get stronger because of misaligned thinking.

You are disparaging a CEO for making 350k/year for one of the highest trafficked sites in the world. For perspective, Zuckerberg's net worth places him at an effective salary of 3B/year (his current net worth divided by his age), nearly 10,000x of the guy you are saying is getting paid too much and potentially driving employees away from.

If your problem is the median personal income you don't solve that by trying to reduce the CEO of wikipedia's salary. Focus on that - it's your kind of attitude (why should a burger flipper get paid $15/hr) that is actually suppressing wages in this country.

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

#463

Post by reader_mode »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #452
reader_mode wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a masters, >3 years of experience and aren't making 50-70k in Wester Europe, you either don't put emphasis on your career, or you need to switch jobs and work on your negotiation skills.

In Germany and Scandinavia maybe. In France, Spain, Italy, etc, this is normal. For example here [1] you can see some reliable statistics for France, see page 2 (it's in French but the plots are easy to understand). The median salary (annual before taxes) when starting is 35k€, and roughly increases by 1800€/year. So it only reaches 40k€ after 3 years. It reaches 50k€ after 8 years only. Also all engineers have Maste…

Sorry I assumed we're talking about Software Engineering here, I accept your point.

But Italy and Spain aren't really what I would consider Western Europe, they are the less developed parts and I admit I have no experience with France and know nobody who works there.

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

#464

Post by chasil »

potamic wrote: post #454
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...

Chief of Community Engagement Chief Community Officer Chief Talent and Culture Officer Chargée d'affaires Chief Global Development Officer Chief Creative Officer Chief Communications Officer Chief Revenue Officer VP of Strategic Partnerships 55 million USD in annual salary expenses seems a bit high, even more so for a non-profit. I have seen startup unicorns spend less on salaries. I think there really needs to be so…

In my youth, my parents spent quite a bit of money on a Funk & Wagnal's encyclopedia set. I do not regret my $20 donation, as I've received far more in return.

However, this seems like excessive marketing for an organization that does not produce a physical product (unlike Funk & Wagnal's).

I have seen less online criticism of WikiPedia accuracy of late; perhaps this is the result of the marketing dollars. If true, it is good, but it could likely be done with marketing efforts a fraction of the size.

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

#465

Post by jimmont »

jiofih wrote: post #260
paxys wrote: 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…

The expenses for operating Wikipedia.com would be around $10m. Their $112M expenses include the sky high executive compensation, money sent to the fund, millions spent on fundraising itself, and financing a host of programs not directly related to Wikipedia. I stopped donating because of this - definitely want to contribute to keeping Wikipedia online, I don’t necessarily want to give my money to a larger foundation…

Interesting to see the cultural expectations across business types. Most of the successful management are so grossly overcompensated they cannot humanly imagine the magnitude yet this criticism of a different entity type captures what is an arguably reasonable critical perspective toward compensation. The social contract has become distinctly warped in the States.

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

#466

Post by bawolff »

mschuster91 wrote: post #234
yoz-y wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! Hm, since Wikipedia dumps are public, has anybody tried? Moving wikipedia itself might be a large endeavor, but seeing some submissions on HN I think a very dedicated dev or two could possibly manage a rewrite to have a proof of concept.

Mediawiki markup language is not efficiently parse-able and extremely complex with lots of bolted-on features, which is why it took ages for the visual editor to be implemented as a prototype and to iron out the bugs. For any attempt at porting over MW, you will need to re-implement the whole parse/include stuff... and that is a lot of work, even for a proper team.

So just steal the parser part

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

#467

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #300
nlitened wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, but US IT salaries are very easy to understand! They're too high, though not high enough. We've become the new priesthood. People who complain that sacrificing one calf to us each year would do well to be reminded that we're not demanding one child per year.

https://www.amazon.com/Priests-Programmers-Technologies-Engi...

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

#468

Post by opportune »

zhdc1 wrote: post #284
jiofih wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expenses for operating Wikipedia.com would be around $10m. Their $112M expenses include the sky high executive compensation, money sent to the fund, millions spent on fundraising itself, and financing a host of programs not directly related to Wikipedia. I stopped donating because of this - definitely want to contribute to keeping Wikipedia online, I don’t necessarily want to give my money to a larger foundation…

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…

I was prepared to defend even $1m. $300k is an absolute bargain for a CEO running a $120m organization. There are 25 year olds getting paid that much to fix Jenkins pipelines

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

#469

Post by SirSourdough »

potamic wrote: post #454
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...

Chief of Community Engagement Chief Community Officer Chief Talent and Culture Officer Chargée d'affaires Chief Global Development Officer Chief Creative Officer Chief Communications Officer Chief Revenue Officer VP of Strategic Partnerships 55 million USD in annual salary expenses seems a bit high, even more so for a non-profit. I have seen startup unicorns spend less on salaries. I think there really needs to be so…

It’s a community-edited encyclopedia with thousands of contributors and billions of users, I feel like community engagement is very central to that. Global development also seems central to scaling their core product. Communications is likewise no surprise for an organization of their scale and global importance.

Obviously there’s a debate to be had about what and how much Wikipedia should engage in other ventures but even for their core work a lot of these roles seem pretty reasonable...

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

#470

Post by kqr »

potamic wrote: post #454
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...

Chief of Community Engagement Chief Community Officer Chief Talent and Culture Officer Chargée d'affaires Chief Global Development Officer Chief Creative Officer Chief Communications Officer Chief Revenue Officer VP of Strategic Partnerships 55 million USD in annual salary expenses seems a bit high, even more so for a non-profit. I have seen startup unicorns spend less on salaries. I think there really needs to be so…

"Let's just do the one thing we've always been doing, that will surely work forever" said Kodak, manufacturers of carburetors, Blockbuster, GM, I don't know, Sears, and many others. The road to stagnation and eventual failure is littered with their corpses.

The ones that made it through were specifically the ones that embraced and prepared for change, by running parallel long-shot projects and branched out from doing whatever they were doing before.

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