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Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

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Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#121

Post by lapinot »

xyzzyz wrote: post #33
woodruffw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: 25% overhead doesn’t really seem that bad? If those numbers are accurate, 75c of every dollar goes directly to hosting, development, and community support (things like grants and legal aid for editors). That’s probably on par if not better than most nonprofits.

Have you noticed any actual development on Wikipedia? Only thing that changes from the user perspective is that the donation request get more and more annoying every year.

I've noticed that now the language selector is a two seemingly random places depending on ?? (the classical places is on the left, an exhaustive list ordered alphabetically; the new place that is sometimes there is on the top right, in a drop down list, ordered by some obscure relevance metric).

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#122

Post by DrBenCarson »

jefftk wrote: post #113
endisneigh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

Because it doesn't contribute to Wikipedia remaining online.

If we agree that a poorly designed experience will become obsolete over time, then how does this expenditure not increase Wiki’s chances of staying online?

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#123

Post by akolbe »

yupper32 wrote: post #111
akolbe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the most expensive WMF execs have been complete disasters, exiting after a year or two and leaving the entire organisation in disarray.

Maybe they should spend more than $350k and find someone more competent.

That reminds me of the saying, "We have the best politicians money can buy."

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#124

Post by akolbe »

kemayo wrote: post #77
zihotki wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges, you should instead compare it with other non-profits. According to top links in search for 'non profit ceo salary' give me average salary numbers about $150k

I'd say it's still a tricky comparison because the WMF is (reductively) a tech company, and tech sector salaries remain pretty high. For a lot of roles they need to fill, they're competing with other tech companies for those employees, not just other nonprofits. A salary that's fantastic by average-nonprofit standards might be vastly underpaying someone who's deciding between a job at the WMF or Google.

Why not hire in Europe, or Asia? Almost all of them work remotely.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#125

Post by lapinot »

leokennis wrote: post #118

I might be too simple of a person, but I donate €10 per year to Wikipedia which is nothing. In return, I get immediate access to a veritable wealth of accurate and up to date knowledge on more or less everything. It’s such an amazingly great deal that I honestly think, who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way? Who cares that Jimmy Wales drives a BMW instead of a Volkswage…

> Who is the loser here?

When you have big money then you think like big money. What people are angry about is WMF becoming too big and the heads managing this budget becoming independent of the actual foot soldiers. It's not about starving wikipedia, it's about not making it bigger than it needs to be, because the bigger you are, the more problems you have.

> who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way?

It's not about optimizing stuff, it's about not growing into a monster.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#126

Post by akolbe »

yupper32 wrote: post #108
Dma54rhs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People working for them earn 100k+, Wikipedia has volunteers writhing the content for free.

If you want to compare it based on the people working for each company: Parag has around 3900 employees. Wikipedia has around 550. Around 7x multiplier. $30m / 7 = ~$4.3mil Sundar has around 135k employees. 245x multiplier. $250m / 245 = ~$1mil. $350k seems like a steal no matter how you put it.

How about comparing it to the Internet Archive (2019)? 169 employees, $11M salary costs:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

Wikimedia Foundation (2019): 291 employees, $56M salary costs.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...

Less than twice the US employees, more than five times the salary costs. (Both orgs also have some non-US employees included in the salary costs total, but they are a small minority of the staff.)

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#127

Post by loeg »

amelius wrote: post #94
orlp wrote: post #4

With the financial situation being how it is I, paradoxically, would currently consider donating to Wikipedia to be actively harmful to the future of Wikipedia. The larger its dragon hoard of money grows (which is already way beyond any sort of costs to keep up Wikipedia for decades), the larger the incentive for unscrupulous individuals to corrupt the Wikipedia mission to tap into this money for personal benefit. I…

Wow, that almost sounds like "don't feed the dog, because it'll become a beggar".

This metaphor is broken. Dogs (and their appetites) don't grow exponentially.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#128

Post by LegitShady »

kemayo wrote: post #77
zihotki wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges, you should instead compare it with other non-profits. According to top links in search for 'non profit ceo salary' give me average salary numbers about $150k

I'd say it's still a tricky comparison because the WMF is (reductively) a tech company, and tech sector salaries remain pretty high. For a lot of roles they need to fill, they're competing with other tech companies for those employees, not just other nonprofits. A salary that's fantastic by average-nonprofit standards might be vastly underpaying someone who's deciding between a job at the WMF or Google.

WMF is not a tech company, and their value is not in their tech. Their value is in their user created and populated content .

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#129

Post by samsquire »

z0r wrote: post #79
jefftk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an "$111 million operating budget", but that's because they've decided to spend money on lots of things other than "serve Wikipedia": https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe... Note that "Direct support to websites" includes things like designing and implementing more intuitive article editing UI, which while potentially worth it isn't the kind of "obviously we must do this" that keepin…

I appreciate this kind of thinking being shared by someone who I recall from previous HN postings spends a lot of time thinking about how to give to charity effectively. I've been turned off from donating to Wikipedia for the better part of the last decade.

I think this kind of thinking is negative and an example of the free rider problem.

Wikipedia provides a good service for the money it charges you. It doesn't charge you anything.

The thing about free things is that they aren't really free, someone is paying for it and the people doing the work to keep Wikipedia online are the best skilled and placed and experienced to decide these kind of spending decisions, not people with no personal investment orwho do not donate and don't even edit or do any work but somehow have opinions how other people should do their job for free.

If you use Wikipedia and getting value from it then you can't really complain, it's not positive.

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