Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate? • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by bawolff » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

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…

> Some things have been rewritten already, notably the wikitext parser

The new parser is being rewritten in php in order to be integrated with the rest of the php code.

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

#472

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

mratsim wrote: post #418

jiofih wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is a non-profit foundation. $374k is a pretty damn good salary for a foundation.

If you want to attract the best talents you also need sufficient benefits. A sense of purpose alone won't let you lodge in cities with high cost of living. If anything, I dare say running a non-profit usually requires a lot more skills, especially people skills and passion than a tech job. I'm not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there is this sense of entitlement when you talk to people that because you work a…

> If you want to attract the best talents you also need sufficient benefits.

Same line used in defense of corporate board hiring practices, and as in that case, stated without evidence to support the claim.

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

#473

Post by snuxoll » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

mkoubaa wrote: post #363

ekianjo wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they have to be based in SF? that's wasting the donations' cash.

Exactly. I don't mind a high salary by an average city standard but a high salary by SF standards is unjustifiable. Move to Atlanta or Dallas or Boise, idc

Boise ain’t cheap anymore - our COL may not be Bay Area crazy yet, but they many locals are rapidly being priced out of the area with stagnating wages and 2 bedroom apartments costing $1200/mo and rising fast. Add on our dysfunctional political mess and it’s not worth it anymore unless you’re wealthy and have a “got mine, fuck you” attitude.

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

#474

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

Much of this stuff is needed in some form. It's the kind of things that random Internet volunteers don't do well. And with the unique opportunity that Wikimedia has of establishing the broader free-knowledge and free-content movement as a leading force in global education, I think we should be happy that significant resources are being used to pursue this strategic goal.

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

#475

Post by SirSourdough » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #367

OhNoMyqueen wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any idea if the Wikipedia people getting those salaries are based in the US?

Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered in SF, so probably safe to assume a lot of executives getting those salaries are based there.

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

#476

Post by M2Ys4U » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

apercu wrote: post #419

bluescrn wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median income in the UK is just over £30k (about 35k EUR)

We're on hacker news. What is the median for people in UK that that do what we do?

£44k according to the April 2020 release of the Annual Survey for Hours and Earnings by the Office for National Statistics.

That is the figure for "programmers and software development professionals", anyway.

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

#477

Post by boringg » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #230

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…

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.

100% agree with this. It's such a BS narrative. It's like the world wants not for profits to not be able to support staff or to pay them the bare minimum so that at some point the staff go leave for the private sector and rob the organization of its talent/knowledge base. FWIW I don't work for a NFP but both the public sector and NFP world are not well funded enough.

Instead of complaining when a top shelf global organization get paid a reasonable wage in California for the scope of their work maybe focus on how we can redistribute incomes more appropriately.

Also - I am obviously against wasted resources or overly bloated organization or corruption but nothing in this report seems to point anything of that nature. /end mini-rant

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

#478

Post by baby » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

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…

> The sky high executive compensation

After looking, I realized that I made more than them at my previous job just being an engineer.

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

#479

Post by a4isms » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

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…

> Those who say it's not a lot are disconnected from the way that most people in the country and the world live.

I live in Canada. I earn much less than USD $375K/yr. But can we agree that I am very connected with how people live in other parts of the world?

Good. Now let me tell you that were my employer to ask me to move my family to the US, ANYWHERE in the US, I would want way more than $375,000/yr to duplicate the lifestyle we have now.

That’s just how it works when you move from a place with a safety net to one where losing your job could mean certain death.

And in my family’s case, I am not exaggerating: My partner is a cancer survivor. What would we have done if we were living in the US? Hire lawyers to fight with insurance companies for her treatment? What if I was laid off and lost my benefits right when she was diagnosed?

SHUDDER.

Were I to live in the US, I would want to be stinking, immorally rich. It’s the only way to insure yourself against disaster.

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

#480

Post by Aachen » Mon, May 31, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #468

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…

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

So it's good because they're not corrupt? Or why should the company value be related to the compensation you receive?

Like, this claim of "if everyone donated $2..." (or whatever this year's amount is) means they need more than a hundred thousand donations to pay this guy. And then the site is still at zero, getting nothing, that only pays one person at a "non profit".

I'm all for fair compensation but if you dedicate yourself to running a non-profit, getting rich on people's donations (98% of whose money you took earning less than you) is a weird kind of definition of fair.

If people want to get rich, maybe they should go and fix Jenkins pipelines for some adtech company where everyone's clear on what the goal is.