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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

#211

Post by bawolff »

jefftk wrote: post #177
presentation wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So social good projects need to suck because we’re all misers? Try applying this logic to a for profit company and you’d laugh.

No; see my reply to dbingham above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32843394 When deciding where to donate we should consider where our money will do the most good. "Keep Wikipedia online" is a candidate for one of the most important things, if that's actually what your money will help do. But other Wikimedia projects, while useful, are generally nowhere near as high priority, and there are a lot of other places…

They are all hosted on the same group of servers using the same software. Its non-sensical to talk about money going to keep other wikimedia projects online instead of wikipedia. That's not how things work.

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

#212

Post by bawolff »

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 cares that Jimmy Wales drives a BMW instead of a Volkswagen?

Jimmy is not a wikimedia foundation employee (he is a board member, but that is unpaid). None of the donations are going to him.

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

#213

Post by bawolff »

akolbe wrote: post #168
themitigating wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "treat" are you referring to? Employees need to be compensated for a company to be competitive. Speaking of manipulative your augment takes a complex situation and turns it into "poor people using the last of their money to pay for US employees extra benefits"

Treats mentioned here ... https://wantremote.com/company_for_remote_job/wikimedia-foun... ... include "reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, massages, cooking classes and much more" This is a fine thing I'm sure, but I wouldn't want it to be paid for by Indian or African donors worried Wikipedia will disappear, or start charging a subscription, if they don't donate. So fundrais…

Paying for a gym membership is pretty standard perk in the industry. If anything, this is usually considered bare minimum

You can't get employees if you don't pay them. This is what paying employees means in the tech industry.

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

#214

Post by akolbe »

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..

Please have a look at this table:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...

Then read this 2013 post from a past Wikimedia VP:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...

So there is a difference between keeping the Wikimedia Foundation organization going and keeping Wikipedia going. Keeping the Wikimedia Foundation going at its current size costs about 10 times as much as just keeping Wikipedia going, under the assumptions of that 2013 post.

You can't use "keep Wikipedia online" indefinitely as a justification for raising ever more money in order to expand. The Wikimedia Foundation should talk far more in its fundraising about what those hundreds of additional people are actually doing, including projects other than Wikipedia, instead of projecting this image of a small raft of people struggling to hold Wikipedia together with duct tape.

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

#215

Post by akolbe »

bawolff wrote: post #213
akolbe wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treats mentioned here ... https://wantremote.com/company_for_remote_job/wikimedia-foun... ... include "reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, massages, cooking classes and much more" This is a fine thing I'm sure, but I wouldn't want it to be paid for by Indian or African donors worried Wikipedia will disappear, or start charging a subscription, if they don't donate. So fundrais…

Paying for a gym membership is pretty standard perk in the industry. If anything, this is usually considered bare minimum You can't get employees if you don't pay them. This is what paying employees means in the tech industry.

That's what it means in Silicon Valley. It's not what it means in India, South Africa, Brazil, nor even Europe I think. These are all places where the WMF has just been fundraising. Nobody is forcing the WMF to hire in America.

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

#216

Post by xboxnolifes »

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..

You can't just look at the total expenses, you need to look at what the necessary expenses are. It's easy to create new expenses when you have available money to spend.

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

#217

Post by xboxnolifes »

yupper32 wrote: post #95
jhbadger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is lots of people (including myself until about a year ago) were under the impression that Wikipedia was on the verge of bankruptcy, and would likely either stop existing or be purchased by Microsoft or Google if it wasn't for our donations, so I gave every time they asked. Learning that they are swimming in money makes us seem like we've been fooled.

Do you just donate to places without looking into their finances and how they spend their money? It's not like wikipedia hides it. It's right on their website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances I tend to only donate to places that seem to spend the money well and efficiently, for example.

> Do you just donate to places without looking into their finances and how they spend their money?

I'd say most people do, yes.

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

#218

Post by xboxnolifes »

yupper32 wrote: post #95
jhbadger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is lots of people (including myself until about a year ago) were under the impression that Wikipedia was on the verge of bankruptcy, and would likely either stop existing or be purchased by Microsoft or Google if it wasn't for our donations, so I gave every time they asked. Learning that they are swimming in money makes us seem like we've been fooled.

Do you just donate to places without looking into their finances and how they spend their money? It's not like wikipedia hides it. It's right on their website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances I tend to only donate to places that seem to spend the money well and efficiently, for example.

> Do you just donate to places without looking into their finances and how they spend their money?

I'd say most people do, yes. Especially when it's something like $10.

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

#219

Post by chmod775 »

kemayo wrote: post #186
LegitShady wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.

They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content.

In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maintaining some sort of technology, then pretty much every company would be a tech company nowadays. In that scenario the category would be truly meaningless.

The easiest way to spot a tech company is looking at their R&D spending: a tech company is constantly exploring instead of just maintaining.

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

#220

Post by akolbe »

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.

By 2020, the latest figures we have (page 48 of the Form 990), there were 8 people whose total compensation exceeded $300K. The CEO was at $423k:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...

This was two years ago. Some of these salaries rose by over 20 or 30 percent in the space of two years, when annual US inflation was at 2%. I fully expect to find even greater salary rises since – once the Form 990 for this year is published sometime in 2024 – as US inflation went up during the pandemic.

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