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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

en.wikipedia.org

41–50 of 417 posts

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#41
post #17

Just take a look at this graph. The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Net assets are sitting at ~$240M about 10x what they were a decade ago. Yet they roll out a sob-story banner on every page insinuating that they mi…

To be fair, salaries going up isn't necessarily a sign of them "bloating". I've worked for startups before at a reduced salary, with the expectation that as they become more stable they'll bump up the salary to a correct number. In theory, people could have joined Wikimedia at a low salary while they were still struggling, and as they've become way more stable the salaries have gone up as a bit of a correction. That…

You do that at a startup for stock compensation, with the expectation that your risk will be rewarded in the future.

A non-profit is not your future cashcow, you don't own it, you either work for current salary or you forgo payment because you believe in the cause. There is no scenario where non-profit workers get to cash out to compensate for previous struggling - except when that non-profit has been captured by a group of money grabbing profiteers who operate it for their own personal benefit.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#43

To put into perspective: the Wikimedia Foundation manages one of humanity’s greatest achievements. I thought it was an open secret that they’re pretty flush with cash overall despite the constant nag for justadollar’. I dunno, maybe I’ve been desensitised but these numbers are not horribly shocking to me, and when put in the context of the immense value the project brings to the rest of the world… I mean come on, loo…

If people donate 100m to an organisation claiming to be a charity and 99m goes into the pockets of the people running it then they’re going to question their donation. Why are donations being spent on enriching people instead of improving the project? Millions of dollars would pay for a hell of a lot of articles written by experts in their field.

Wikipedia is explicitly against articles written by experts. Because those are primary sources while wikipedia only allows secondary ones (IMO the biggest mistake, as it allows the HUGE bias it has)

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#44
post #19

Just take a look at this graph. The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... Net assets are sitting at ~$240M about 10x what they were a decade ago. Yet they roll out a sob-story banner on every page insinuating that they mi…

>politically neutral What does politically neutral mean?

The answer to that differs on your political perspective.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people donate 100m to an organisation claiming to be a charity and 99m goes into the pockets of the people running it then they’re going to question their donation. Why are donations being spent on enriching people instead of improving the project? Millions of dollars would pay for a hell of a lot of articles written by experts in their field.

Wikipedia is explicitly against articles written by experts. Because those are primary sources while wikipedia only allows secondary ones (IMO the biggest mistake, as it allows the HUGE bias it has)

No. But it expects experts to still provide citations and sources when writing articles (and not to excessively self-cite)

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#47
It looks like the CEO of Wikimedia gets paid roughly as much as a Staff/Senior Staff-level FAANG engineer. That looks about right. And they got 6 months severance. Also comparable.

I don't get why people are upset. Somehow everyone working for a nonprofit should bring home less money to their families. In truth what that assumption would mean is that nonprofits get less skilled people.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#48
post #20

This is what our donations are paying for? I'll be thinking twice before donating again.

The main organisation that owns Wikipedia funnels all the donations into the owners. Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text so they pocket almost all of the money.

> Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text

Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text.

Wikipedia is not static text. It runs Mediawiki which runs on PHP and requires a database, plus all forms of caching. They also serve media (images/video) have users, discussions, comments, etc.

And at wikipedia's scale they're not trivial problems to solve and dont cost peanuts for hosting.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#49
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher

"Maher states that she focuses on global digital inclusion as a way to improve and protect the rights of people to information through technology."

Yet the actual mission of Wikipedia is something quite different to this. They push a particular point of view, wrapped up in the false cloak of "neutrality", and assert this as truth. Wikipedia is part of a broader propaganda drive to export US cultural mores to the rest of the world.

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