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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no reason why expert-written articles would have to be locked from further edits, or marked as expert-written. They could be subject to the same formal standards as the rest of Wikipedia, but with guarantee that those standards are applied. There are already paid Wikipedia editors, they tend to be working for PR firms. A non-profit doing the same thing for altruistic purposes sounds feasible and good to me, it…

Because if they are not marked or restricted then I believe they won't appeal to users who want expert articles. Like in the reaction to LLMs we know that people who want high certainty in their articles also want to know when they're in their high certainty environment and when they're not. Mixing the two will cause many of them to be upset. Permitting volunteers to edit will cause many of them to be upset, especial…

> Because if they are not marked or restricted then I believe they won't appeal to users who want expert articles.

I believe they will, because the quality will be higher. They shouldn't employ experts as a marketing campaign, they should employ experts as a way to keep interesting entries from devolving into trash heaps. I'd honestly prefer those experts to be research librarians and experts on parliamentary procedure or statistics, rather than subject matter. Instead all editorial decisions are made through trials adjudicated by a few people who happened to walk by, and other people paid to be there by private organizations and/or governments.

A higher-quality Wikipedia needs defenses against paid and deeply-invested mobs.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#192
post #174

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…

2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $145,970,915 I love Wikipedia but I don't see how this cost explosion can evenly be remotely justified. What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?

In that time it’s become increasingly challenging to contribute anything to The People’s Encyclopedia.

I wanted to update a local wiki page with newer data from its original sources, but apparently I have become blacklisted because I use/used Apple’s private relay and safari’s privacy measures by default in all my browsing. Disabling them didn’t fix it. I would love to sign up as a fallback measure to be able to contribute, and verify my account by whatever means necessary, but apparently in the 2020s that’s just not something Wikipedia supports (as I’m also black listed from signing up despite never contributing to Wikipedia.)

Increasingly I see out of date and opinionated articles and I wonder how many of us have meaningful contributions ready but are forced to sit on the sidelines because there’s no “way in” with this product.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#193
post #164

Granted, I'm looking at these salaries, from over in the healthcare sectors where CEOs and executives (whose value many of us find questionable) make $5 mil salaries, even for being CEO of a "nonprofit hospital/foundation", and have way larger golden parachutes to boot. I'd say it's (relatively) admirable the Wikimedia board is stressing out about severances from $300-500k.

America has an income stratification problem to go with it's wealth problem

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under what circumstances would Wikipedia shit down, if it still has money for operational expenses? The biggest set of responsibilities charites I didn't list is sales (aka donations). But Wikipedia doesn't do more good work (as donors think of it) the more money they get. It doesn't scale up much that way.

Mismanagement could help those funds disappear pretty quickly. It's rare that any kind of organization or business needs no governance.

Only "mismanagement" used as a euphemism for self-dealing or embezzlement, which is what I think many people suspect is occurring now on some level. Wikipedia has a small, constrained remit and if no one ever edited it again, it would still be very useful for decades.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#195
post #174

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…

2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $145,970,915 I love Wikipedia but I don't see how this cost explosion can evenly be remotely justified. What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?

> 2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758

$200k less than Beeple's "Everyday" NFT sold for.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#196
post #57

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.

To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your salary?

Where are you getting 10-100x? None of the salaries in the linked article are even over $1M. As the upthread poster explains, these numbers are merely FAANG-competetive. None of these Wikemedia execs are making more than they would in a routine private sector position of the same seniority.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#197

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…

I honestly don't care if Wikimedia has several billion stashed away like all the Ivy Leagues do. They are doing God's work, mostly thankless work, and they have managed to do it well in an Internet mostly comprised of dross. How they have managed to keep the quality up and keep it as neutral as they have is beyond me. I've run user-generated content sites and keeping on top of the moderation will make you Google self…

But the editors and moderators aren't paid.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but ideally the federal election system will be fixed eventually (and also most of the states). And I'd prefer if then we also didn't need to fix a bunch of other systems because they had a lot of 2 party assumptions baked into them.

Okay but your ideal scenario is not our current reality

The reality is that the US Federal government currently has elected members belonging to neither the Democratic nor Republican party [1] [2] (Sinema doesn't count since she changed her party after being elected). This has been true for the majority of the US's short existence.

There is no reason to make long-term decisions based on the current short-term circumstances of a two party dominance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_elec...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_elec...

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#199
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They need to sweet talk donors so they can pay themselves more for sweet talking donors.

At this point, Wikimedia is just a facade for socialite activity.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#200
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18 months' severance. US$623,286 when their last full year's base compensation was $400K. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...

Oh yikes, staff with a larger severance. I'm not surprised, I can't imagine it's easy to find a new CEO job after losing your last one.

It's not as if someone who has already been making several hundred grand is in dire need of financial stability between employment opportunities.
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