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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#231

Post by jl6 »

carapace wrote: post #144
jl6 wrote: post #54

There'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 j…

[flagged]

You could submit your CV to an executive search agency.

But wouldn’t it be remarkable if what you are saying was true? If there really is a pool of 100,000’s of equally skilled people lining up to do the same job for much, much less, then that would make the board of every major corporation fools. Remember, these are the cut-throat capitalists who’ll sell their mother for a percentage, who relentlessly optimize their businesses and seek to drive down wages in pursuit of profit - and yet they have been duped into paying over the odds for something they could easily get for much less?

It just doesn’t add up, does it?

Because of course there is not such a large pool of equally skilled people.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#232

Post by tptacek »

andersrs wrote: post #14

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…

Just don't donate to them. My feelings about Wikipedia come pretty close to reverence, and I've never even considered sending them money. They'll be fine no matter what. By all means, advocate against donating to them! They don't need the money.

Unless someone here really thinks it's important for Wikipedia to pull in 9 figures in grants and donations, I'm not sure there's as much to argue about here as it seems. Organizations expand to fit their budget constraints, and fundraising success has expanded those constraints for Wikimedia. Seems straightforward.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#233

Post by mrguyorama »

Vuizur wrote: post #146
Towaway69 wrote: post #27

One thing I do respect is that this article is hosted on Wikipedia. Not many corporations nor non-profits would host an obviously self effacing article.

It is a community newspaper that is (apparently) independent of the WMF, and they don't have quarrels about hosting WMF-critical articles. Anti-WMF sentiment is surprisingly common on some Wikimedia projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

This is one of the longest pages I have seen on wikipedia for a while.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#234

Post by akolbe »

ff317 wrote: post #221
akolbe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual Internet hosting costs have consistently been less than $3 million a year: 2022/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim... 2020/2019: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim... And they were the same a decade ago: 2012/2011: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL... Admittedly, this doesn't include salaries.

The salaries are much larger than what gets put in the "hosting" line, which merely covers things like leasing cage space in datacenters and paying for transit/transport/peering links. I'm not gonna do another deep dive on the org structure, because I've done it before when these topics come up ( like this one half a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 ), but I'll provide my overall view as a 10 y…

Well, the 5% layoff is more than balanced by the 25% increase in headcount (from 570 to 711) that appears to have happened between March 2022 and December 2022:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

The Foundation's cash pile (not all in actual cash, of course) is currently at around $350 million, $100 million of which is in a completely non-transparent fund held by the Tides Foundation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

There have been promises made for years and years that this fund would soon be converted into a standalone 501c3 and start filing an annual Form 990. Still has not happened. Even though the 501c3 has existed for almost a year now, the money is still with Tides and still nobody has ever seen an audited statement of what goes in and out.

This said, I agree with you that WMF engineers do a lot of good work (much of it not necessarily apparent to casual readers as opposed to editors). It is noticeable that the site is more cared for.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#235

Post by camel_Snake »

laratied wrote: post #86
bulion wrote: post #6

Is 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…

Gonna go ahead and plug https://www.givewell.org/ here, since they do an obscene amount of research to verify the cost-efficacy and trustworthiness of all the charities they funnel money to.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#236

Post by costco »

Joeboy wrote: post #195
costco wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but the current budget is more than twice that and continues to grow at a very fast rate. The budget trajectory may even be sustainable from a revenue perspective, I'm just saying it might not be so from a public interest perspective. Wikipedia to the typical user is basically entirely unchanged since 2016 and it's not clear to me why they need so much more money now than they did in 2016.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#237

Post by bdidbdidhdidh »

bombcar wrote: post #187
notpeter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience reading hundreds of IRS 990 forms these number are not out of bounds for non-profits at their scale. Healthcare and university may skew the absolute numbers, but are similar. Specifically a great executive will personally move the fundraising needle in organizations (+1-5% or more) and mediocre executive can cause losses/missed opportunities in the opposite direction of a similar magnitude. The conve…

The fundraising part is the completeness of it. I could probably COO on the non-fundraising side, but I'd be an absolute fundraising failure. Non-profit C level execs are fundraisers.

even when all the money is from a banner?

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#238

Post by [deleted] »

hashar wrote: post #230
ilikehurdles wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

I would guess the pool of IP addressed used by Apple has been blocked from contributing since for any good faith editor, there is a vast amount of vandals taking advantage of the feature to deface articles en masse. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay has some context and list potential problems that might arise (and do in your case). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_Re…

[deleted]

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#239

Post by mattlondon »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #192
costco wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

It has always been like this - at least for the past 10-15 years or so it has been essentially impossible to edit wikipedia.

Basically any change you make it insta-reverted by some bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.

I think some editors decide that they "own" certain pages or group of pages and install themselves as some sort of authority/gate keeper/moderator. If your edit does not please them, it's gone. Instantly. You only get to edit the pages if you are in the editor's cabal of friends.

If you don't have an account, or you do have an account but perhaps have only made a handful of edits, you are instantly distrusted and assumed to be malicious.

Of course, you can never prove that you are not malicious, because there is the default stance of immediate-distrust for anyone, so your edits are constantly undone and you never get to build up enough credibility to appease the editors who control who gets to edit "their" articles.

I gave up years ago after a small edit-war with someone who kept reverting changes about a UK politician who was in national news at the time. No amount of references or citations from e.g. the BBC or the Guardian was good enough as I guess the verifiable truth didn't fit with their view of what this page should selectively say about that person, and so they banned my IP as a "vandal". I gave up (but got a new IP after redialing so it was pointless)

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#240

Post by arrozconcosas »

"I think that's also not sustainable to just expect that rich people who don't need to care for their bread in the morning can just come and work for us." - Nataliia Tymkiv

Call me crazy, but $623,286 USD will buy a LOT of bread.

"Putting food on the table for your family" phrases start to become almost comical when they're made by people earning good portions of a million per year.

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