These are the smallest parachutes to make headlines.
Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
91–100 of 417 posts
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#92Do not donate to Wikipedia.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#93Just 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?
I call anyone who agrees with my politics, or keeps quiet about theirs politically neutral.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#94Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#95They aren't the ones bringing the value. It's the volunteers, which don't get a penny. They have received enough money to sustain Wikipedia almost indefinitely, I have no idea why they are still begging for money. I haven't heard of a single thing that's good excuse for that money in years. And a corollary would be saying that GitHub deserve money because otherwise there would be no open source. Wikipedia's code and…
Volunteers don't run the servers, they don't handle donation processing for small donors or sweet talk the egos of large donors, they don't respond to lawsuits from people upset about how they are portrayed on Wikipedia. Then all those employees need HR, IT, janitors, etc., and then there are executives who run the organization. If you were a regular Wikipedia editor, you'd know there is a ton of resistance among vol…
They have plenty of money. Why do they need to hire expensive executives to sweet-talk large donors? This line of justification is similar to that used to justify administrative bloat in universities.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#96This is why you shouldn’t donate to Wikimedia
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
After what happened with openai I wouldn’t say no scenario
Can you elaborate?
I've been involved in a non-profit startup before. There are potentially ways around restrictions (like licensing), but they're difficult and fraught with other issues. You can't "cash-out" at a non-profit.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#98Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to shareholders and executives. Those tragic appeals they put out are lies.
> Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to shareholders and executives.
Reminder that the above is total horseshit.
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#99Is this some sort of scam? I don't understand why they would receive such huge amounts of money, for doing nothing other than choosing to leave their jobs. It seems especially bizarre for a non-profit organisation where the bulk of all the actual work is done freely by volunteers. What is actually going on here?
I just don't donate to anything anymore. So many non-profits and charities are total scams that it pulls down the whole space. When you have cancer and missing children charities giving 2% to their cause and spending the remainder on bullshit it is trivial to make your charity not look as bad. If you really dig into it, a huge % of charity money is just funding the insiders travel and lifestyle in the name of "fund r…
I take your approach to large charities, but not small ones. I feel comfortable donating to small locally run charities for which I can personally observe their works. Particularly, my local volunteer fire department. I can see what they're buying (they show it off proudly) and talk with the people who actually do the work there, so I feel that I can trust them to use the money wisely. Sure as hell, nobody there is getting 6-figure severance payments...
Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
#100Why are they actually getting any severance at all? It looks like they resigned to take new jobs. They weren't sacked or made redundant.