151–160 of 252 posts
This is an extremely misleading take. Wikipedia had a really good year in 20-21, their most recent financial report. They took in $162 million, against an $111 million operating budget, and came out of the year with $240 million in assets.[1] So they had about half a year's surplus, and wound up with ~2 years worth of savings. And yes, that's a simplification, a good chunk of those assets are necessary to continue op…
Where does it all go?
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…
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I honestly question the value added by these execs. The other day, you and I discussed some of the expensive C-Suite disasters Wikimedia has bought. They actually set Wikimedia back by years. Dozens of valuable, experienced staff left. And Wikipedia became a top-10 website in 2007, when there was no C-Suite. There seems to be little awareness these days that the main value of the site to the public was and is built a…
Whether or not a particular set of executives (who have all left at this point) are shit at their jobs is a totally different question to what is a reasonable salary for an executive. As far as early days of wikipedia. I agree the community is what provides value. But at the same time i think there is a lot of rose coloured glasses for that era. I remember there being a lot of downtime and slowness on the site in tha…
I’ve come to see Wikipedia as the enemy in many cases, where its editorial policies, intentionally or not, result in entrenching corrupt establishment political narratives propagated by the White House, State Dept, corporate media, etc. I remember looking at the vote history where they decided The Greyzone (one of whose journalists was called to testify at the UN on their investigative journalism) wasn’t a “credible…
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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…
Redesigning the article editing UI is pretty darn important when the only thing that ensures the site stays up to date is attracting new editors to work on it. Nobody wants a dead Wikipedia with hopelessly obsolete and misleading information, even though it would be incredibly cheap to host. And the Wikipedia partner projects are just as important as Wikipedia itself to the broader ecosystem of open content and open…
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> But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive. Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?
The normal person knows that just having big paycheck does not make an executive more competent. We have all seen people with huge paychecks fail spectacularly.
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> if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap. True, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's a realistic hypothetical at all.
Some of the most expensive WMF execs have been complete disasters, exiting after a year or two and leaving the entire organisation in disarray.
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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 c…
$11mil / 169 = ~$65k / employee. So average pay at Internet Archive is barely over the median salary in the US? That's not good. Salary costs don't need to be looked at as something to aggressively push down. You can treat your employees well while still being a non-profit. (Though I'm not claiming wikipedia treats their employees well, I have no idea.)
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In a sense they are, but comparable to executive salaries at companies with roughly comparable tech/services, those salaries are probably very low. Probably any tech company of note is paying "executives" far, far more than that, at least in the US.
I don't think it's valid to think extravagant pay rates are not extravagant simply because other executives are also paid extravagant rates. They are all a bit over-the-top.
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Sundar Pichai gets ~$250M. Parag Agrawal gets something like $30M.
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