Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to shareholders and executives. Those tragic appeals they put out are lies.
[citation needed]
Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
51–60 of 417 posts
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#52Earlier 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)
An expert can write an article and cite the correct sources to go along with it. If anything, the fact that they are an expert makes this easier.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
It's critical to compensate non-profit employees near the market rate otherwise you end up with sub-par performers, martyrs, having the vision co-opted by the wealthy who can afford to be underpaid, or the young who leave disillusioned.
The Gates foundation pioneered this approach and imho it's the right way to operate in the sector.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#54There's nothing intrinsically wrong with nonprofits paying high salaries to senior leaders. You will find very well compensated people at the top of many large charities. That's because they are big orgs with hundreds of employees, with all the same problems as similar-sized big orgs. They employ a lot of people, and the job of managing and leading a lot of people isn't easy. It's in the charity's interest that the job is done well, and so they pay well to get the best talent, because they're competing with for-profit orgs for this same talent. And yes, severance is negotiated as part of the employment contract - it's a tool to attract talent.
There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial and doesn't deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance.
Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It's a global top 10 website, and that puts a target on their back. They have lawyers. They have an HR department. They have a Finance department. These departments do complex real-world stuff that needs planning, management and strategy. Maybe you know how to scale an SQL database, but do you know how to sue the Turkish government?
Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful, their grant money spending could use some scrutiny:
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#55What concerns me more is Wikimedia Foundation was apparently until recently led by someone now on the payroll of Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. Must have done wonders to neutrality at Wikipedia.
Reminds me of articles written by American think tanks trying to convince me a multipolar world is bad.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#56Just 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?
Siding with whoever in power meets your financial goals.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#57It 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.
To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your salary?
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#58> After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language Institute's Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative experience that instilled a deep love for the Middle East. Maher subsequently studied at the Institut français d’études arabes de Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia. In 2005, Maher received a bachelor's degree from…
She did have an extensive experience working in different areas prior to joining Wikimedia as COO. Seems unfair to just post an excerpt of her education background and directly unqualify her.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#59The arguments are attacking the people but it's the organisation that should be questioned. If I am a private company and I am struggling to keep profits, I can justify an expensive Director, ideally with good experience, whose relatively large salary will result in very large profits. Of course it doesn't always work and those people will have asked for big penalty clauses if you decide they didn't do well enough but that is the risk in capitalism.
Not-for-profit is something else and should have a different enough culture that you aren't looking for people who require large salaries and big contract penalties. What are you solving (and wikimedia particular is famous for being really involved with almost everything except what most people think they do: wikipedia). If you are Oxfam, you might want to pay for someone with lots of experience in poverty scenarios. If you are Save The Children, you might want a Doctor with lots of experience helping children in poor countries etc. and those might cost you money.
What do Wikimedia want? People with contacts? People who they can hold up as some kind of political statement? Someone who knows how to migrate PHP to something else? Who knows?
It just all smells really bad and as others have said, it has been toxic for ages and doesn't deserve to go out with the begging hat when most work is done by a very small number of paid staff and mostly unpaid volunteers.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hosti…
Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous. They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop, it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.