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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#241
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope they're politically neutral. Wikipedia is definitely not.

When political parties have distinct relationships with objective truth, stating objective truths becomes political.

I don't think you're aware of the key political issues with Wikipedia.

The media rarely lies - this is a key issue at play - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...

>But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.

WP doesn't permit primary sources (usually), many right wing publications inc Fox News are banned - for not being a "Reliable Source", actually that activists will push source bans via wiki-lawyering (see the talk pages). I've been subject to Wiki-lawyering because a topic I contributed to became politically contentious, and activists jumped in the thread to revert disagreeable sources.

Wikipedia permits breaking rules if it "makes wikipedia a better place", and do not permit (WP:POINTY) you to try to enforce the same rules equally on other pages. The rules are often arbitrary and political articles are hijacked by activists - typically an active, small minority. The co-founder, Larry Sanger noted this in the earlier days as academics sitting on pages of their discipline, then as Wikipedia became a key source of information, editors were hired to represent certain causes (they are supposed to disclose them), and it became a hive of political activity.

Example - recently a user "TheTranarchist", a main contributor to gender pages, wrote about how she fights bigotry with her Wikipedia edits. She was tempbanned with pushback for those posts - the Vast Majority keeps quiet.

Next we have people like GorillaWarfare who see a hitpiece on people without WP pages - e.g. the CEO of cloudflare - and create a wikipage sourcing just the hitpiece.

WP:GOODBIAS - says bias is a good thing, using uncontentious examples (we are biased to a heliocentric, not geocentric model), but WP:GOODBIAS is actually used to explain away political activism on fuzzy issues.

WP:TRUTH - verifiability, not truth. There is provably false information on Wikipedia which can't be pointed out (except in the talk threads) because the sources referenced are either banned, or it falls under WP:OR (no original research). E.g., a man disappears, there's an article written that he's dead, source the article saying he's dead, turns out he's alive and pictures of him are posted on Twitter, can't edit the page until a new article comes out retracting the death. I could continue with all the nonsense I see on there, but I'll leave it at that.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#242

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…

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. Inst…

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...

'Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors Researchers found that 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors, and they think this is probably for the best.'

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#243
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you really not know that the editors and "moderators" (a term not used on Wikipedia) are unpaid? The Wikimedia Foundation intervenes very rarely in content. Essentially, it only takes action on content if there is a court order to that effect. ALL OTHER CONTENT CURATION IS DONE BY UNPAID VOLUNTEERS. The Foundation "does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects", as they are happy to tell you t…

No, I understand completely; it wasn't clear from my post. I've been an editor myself since 2004.

What Wikimedia have done is create a platform and mission and steered that mission to produce a culture that has bred the unpaid editors and kept them on-mission and stopped too many of them going rogue. That platform steering is not to be underestimated. Too many sites with user-generated content descend into insanity within a short amount of time.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#244
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?

> What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?

Assuming this is not rhetorical - everything is in git so you can look at the git log. Although it is spread through many repos, and not all contributors are paid by wmf.

https://github.com/wikimedia

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know. It wasn't clear from my post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36036396

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#246

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…

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. Inst…

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

You sound like someone who was pushing a particular point of view about politics, which is precisely the kind of edits that are set up for organ rejection given Wikipedia's strict stance on neutrality, sourcing, and the fact that politics are naturally contentious / prone to edit warring.

There are between 1.5 and 2 million anonymous edits to Wikipedia every month. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contrib... A lot of them are in reality vandalism, spam, and garbage by passersby, but they aren't all reverted.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#247
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

[flagged]

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#248
post #221
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…

I too am working for the Wikimedia Foundation. I have a good example showing how much we run on a budget, to avoid outing someone against their will, I will replace technology terms with letters:

A new employee joined from one of the big tech players. They got hired for a role with X technology. Upon joining the thin team of 4 or 5 persons, including the double hat manager/engineer, the person legitimately though the whole team was SOLELY in charge of said X technology. That is how their previously larger employer operated with multiple such teams scattered around the world. To their demise, the person was now more or less the lone tech lead for X and Y, with a worldwide and leadership responsibility for both. With of course shared responsibility with other tech managed by their teammate.

Thankfully we have grown a little bit since then and the kind of position I described is less of an occurrence nowadays (but still is for some area). That is far from lavish for sure.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 procedu…

One way to bootstrap this approach is to mirror Wikipedia and add on expert articles. That would demonstrate the value of the expert articles. I suspect this value is low. If it were sufficiently high, this Expert Wikipedia would rapidly come to dominate. I think the Expert Wikipedia would be a bad use of resources because most people do not desire this and because experts will not deliver better articles in general.

That’s an impossible experiment because a mirror would never get the same network effects, search engine treatment, and cultural integration Wikipedia has accumulated.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move to Canada, Germany, Australia or wherever.

> Move to Canada, Germany, Australia or wherever. Your solution on how to cover a topic in a neutral fashion when there are more than 2 political parties is to move to a country where there are more than 2 political parties? That doesn't seem like a productive comment.

A Wikimedia based in a country with much less polarised politics will have a much easier time with neutrality.

I guess I didn't include enough elaboration in my comment...

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