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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

#201

Post by xenadu02 »

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…

It is clear the foundation has been corrupted by the professional non-profit class. These are the same kinds of people who staff up a "housing foundation" in San Francisco, burn money for 10-15 years, and never build a single unit of housing.

The organization becomes a parasite that exists only to perpetuate itself. Hiring and spending expand to fill all available space which becomes its own justification to increase fundraising further. If any actual work for the public good gets done that's just a side benefit.

If WMF had simply held spending constant (adjusting for inflation) for just a few years they could have had an endowment big enough to ensure Wikipedia is able to run independently forever. If they were being responsible they'd also have spun it into a subsidiary non-profit that owned Wikipedia along with that endowment with a charter to focus exclusively on running Wikipedia and developing the software. Then their octopus of random spending programs could be operated as a sister subsidiary without any risk of destroying Wikipedia itself.

Honestly at this point if they proposed that plan I'd be willing to donate to get it done. Instead they hold Wikipedia hostage to justify their expanding empire.

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

#202

Post by spookierookie »

yupper32 wrote: post #3

Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.

I wonder how much the contributors are being paid...

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

#203

Post by omnimus »

yupper32 wrote: post #3

Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.

Its SF salaries. Why are these nonprofits based in SF anyway? Same goes for Mozilla.

Seems like anywhere else it would be pretty insane money for nonprofits.

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

#204

Post by krageon »

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…

The core of what they do needs maybe 2% of what they spend. That they spend more doesn't mean they need money, it means they are frivolous spenders.

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

#205

Post by fluoridation »

bawolff wrote: post #196
fluoridation wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you think an appropriate number of people is to run the sixth most popular website in the world? Even if you cut everyone doing software development (which would in itself probably cause a collapse since that is critical to keeping wikipedia running), cut all the lawyers (also pretty important), cut the trust and safety people, etc - you are still left with quite a lot of sysadmins, more than can reasonably b…

Even if you had multiple operations teams, you could still get away with a fairly flat organizational structure. Not every organization needs to be a top-down hierarchy, and a flat organization makes sense if your funds come from donations and you don't want to pay for too many people who won't directly produce anything.

Now, if your primary objective is not to run a website but something else entirely, then it does make sense for your infrastructure and the salaries of the people maintaining it not to be the largest part of your budget.

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

#206

Post by fluoridation »

kotenshu wrote: post #198
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…

Is it really true that their hoard is enough to keep the site running for decades? it seems their annual surplus is less than their annual expenses..

"Decades" might be an exaggeration, but certainly several years if they got they spenditures under control.

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

#207

Post by akolbe »

c4ptnjack wrote: post #195
mcguire wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had a 2021 operating cash flow of $92B, and they've decided to spend money on lots of things that aren't "serving ads". And yet nobody complains.

Im pretty sure a ton of people complain how Google spends their money, quite frequently. As well, one of the major complaints from people has nothing to do with their ad budget. It has to do with the fact they both host the marketplace for advertising and are a competitor in the same space. And they expert that market dominance by manipulating prices, perception, and their own products success.

Not to mention the fact that Google et al. do everything they can to avoid paying taxes in the countries they operate in, including developing countries. The global South loses billions of dollars that way that they could use to fund education and healthcare. The odd "philanthropic" project does not make up for that.

https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TCPB1...

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

#208

Post by akolbe »

autoexec wrote: post #98
xyzzyz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have noticed some changes like in how they handle media, but most of their development must be backend work because for the most part you shouldn't notice a bunch of changes. The site should be kept as simple and unobtrusive as possible. The only feature I really want them to have that they don't is dark mode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dark_mode_(gadget)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dark_mode

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

#209

Post by fluoridation »

themitigating wrote: post #156
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying there's no correlation between salary and performance?

There's no direct correlation, yes. If you took two executives (or really two people in any profession), one making 10x as much as the other, and swapped their positions, you would not see one position dropping to 10% performance and the other rising to 1000% performance. In all likelihood, they would both drop to 50-70% for a while and then stabilize to their original values.

Individual persons are not orders of magnitude more productive on their own, they're just in environments that allow them to be more productive, for example by giving them control over more resources.

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

#210

Post by bawolff »

Spooky23 wrote: post #146
samsquire wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

Charitable giving is important to me personally, and I have a relatively limited budget to donate. I get a lot of utility from Wikipedia, but is my marginal dollar helping the mission or paying for dinner at a conference? Perhaps I’d be better off donating to an open source foundation for that part of the charity portfolio, which may actually have more impact on Wikipedia! I think this org doesn’t communicate what it…

Is paying for dinner at a conference of wikipedia editors really that bad a thing?

In person conferences move open source projects forward. They build relationships and synergy between people who usually only see each other online. A cheap dinner is probably a lot of bang for buck when it comes to outcomes.

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