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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

#181

Post by s1artibartfast »

presentation wrote: post #171
dbingham wrote: post #9

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…

I for one am worried that Wikipedia only has enough assets to survive a bit over a couple years of the fundraising climate dries up. That is not anti fragile.

Someone could replace it with Wikipedia II for 5% the cost or less. A tiny fraction of spend is on hosting and site maintenance.

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

#182

Post by s1artibartfast »

reflexco wrote: post #10
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…

The bigger threat to Wikipedia is people who want to corrupt its information content. People wanting to get their treasure chest is not an existential threat. The existing employees and collaborators are more likely to get corrupted by nefarious actors if they don't have independent revenue sources.

More reason to have fewer employees.

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

#183

Post by s1artibartfast »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #46
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…

Right, I've seen many, many projects in the for-profit sector fail because the budget was too high.

Not fail, but I have seen tons of for profit companies become shitty, expensive, and wasteful products once they had a monopoly and massive revenue

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

#184

Post by random314 »

akolbe wrote: post #57
random314 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in SF. Maybe there is a case to be made to move Wikipedia operations outside Bay area.

Maybe there is a case for moving much of it outside the US? Lots of staffers work remotely anyway.

Yes. OTOH, United states has one of the best free speech protections in the world. It would make sense, to have the key people and data centers in the US. EU, however, has better privacy protection initiatives.

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

#186

Post by kemayo »

LegitShady wrote: post #128
kemayo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

WMF is a company that's mostly engaged in maintaining a tech product, and much of its hiring needs are for people who'd otherwise be working in tech. If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.

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

#187

Post by fluoridation »

bawolff wrote: post #179
fluoridation wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relevance is that some of those donors are donating the little money they have because they think there's a chance Wikipedia might cease to exist otherwise, not knowing that the WMF is actually using that money on gold water dishes rather than saving it for a rainy day. Simply put, if Wikipedia asks for donations to continue operating, 100% of those donations should go towards server costs. That can include the h…

But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers. I know people like to complain that managers are useless, but if they really were, every company would get rid of them. The cost of managers is what is being complained about in this thread. There might be other superflorus things wmf might spend money on which i might agree with you on, but this doesn't se…

If they're paying 350K for an ops manager, that's definitely too much.

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

#188

Post by throwoutway »

dbingham wrote: post #9

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…

It’s not misleading. If you look at their past decade, they’re doing really well, and yet the banner begging for money now takes up most of my screen. I gave once and I regretted it after looking at how much profit they’re tunneling away. It’s scammy

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

#189

Post by bawolff »

fluoridation wrote: post #187
bawolff wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers. I know people like to complain that managers are useless, but if they really were, every company would get rid of them. The cost of managers is what is being complained about in this thread. There might be other superflorus things wmf might spend money on which i might agree with you on, but this doesn't se…

If they're paying 350K for an ops manager, that's definitely too much.

They are paying 350k for a ceo, who is a manager of a manager of an ops manager.

Which is way way below industry average.

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

#190

Post by fluoridation »

bawolff wrote: post #189
fluoridation wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're paying 350K for an ops manager, that's definitely too much.

They are paying 350k for a ceo, who is a manager of a manager of an ops manager. Which is way way below industry average.

Then when you said

>But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.

you were raising an irrelevant point, because the salaries of the direct managers of the operations team is not what's under discussion here. They wouldn't need such a deep organizational structure if they weren't paying a bunch of people that take no part in running the site.

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