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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#261

Post by smsm42 »

pklausler wrote: post #184
f6v wrote: 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.

Except Wikipedia's bias goes far, far beyond "objective truths". There's not a lot of objective truths in politics, since politics is inherently subjective matter, but reading Wikipedia articles on political subjects systematically you will discover very quickly it has very distinct political makeup, which is quite one-sided, and if you eveр meet the admins or prominent editors, you'll also recognize the same political makeup. You may agree with them, but that doesn't make it "objective truth" - that just makes one more person with that opinion.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#262

Post by thr-nrg »

mattlondon wrote: post #239
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…

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…

[dead]

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#263

Post by smsm42 »

lallysingh wrote: post #47

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.

I don't think I ever heard any engineer leaving WMF, voluntarily or not, getting 18-month severance. I'm not sure why the CEO should. It's not like she is going to be destitute otherwise. I mean good for her for getting cool half mil just for leaving, but I don't see how it makes any sense for WMF. It's not like "nobody is going to want to be WMF CEO unless they are promised to get half mil for leaving", is it?

Generally WMF's salaries are on the low side - their VP Eng was getting 220K in 2020, and 255K in 2021, which is kinda low for a VP of a decent-sized engineering org - but that doesn't answer the question of severance.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#264

Post by smsm42 »

akolbe wrote: post #161
bawolff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Katherine left under questionable circumstances (right after a rebranding attempt that absolutely exploded). Who knows what really happened, but it seems plausible it wasn't her choice.

There was this post last year on Wikipedia by Victoria Doronina, one of the WMF trustees: "The Board has done its main job - changed the CEO." https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village... Victoria explicitly referred to the Knowledge Equity Fund in that post, which appears to have been Uzzell's and Maher's brainchild. The Knowledge Equity Fund became very controversial last year when people realise…

This actually makes me feel optimistic. An org like Wikimedia being able to resist the attempt to subvert their mission to "social justice" instead of doing what it was created to do, sounds great. So many other orgs have fallen to the same and turned into a mockery of their former selves...

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#265

Post by airstrike »

tptacek wrote: post #232
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. Org…

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#266

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information).

Not exactly true - the "Proxy Protocol" [1] was invented for that purpose. Wikipedia as an entity should be large enough to ask Apple if they can implement support for it - the question is if they want to.

[1] https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/latest/load-bala...

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#267

Post by kloch »

Wikipedia is an amazing resource that I use all the time, and currently the best (or least worst) model for curating such a massive knowledge base. For these reasons I have $100/mo recurring donation set up. $240M is less than two years of expenses but I do think they could do a much better job explaining their budget/expense growth.

I tend to view math/science pages most of the time and it's rare to see any non-neutroal POV issues on most of those kinds of pages.

Even for topics that are contentious today, the system should converge towards neutrality over long time frames. It's just unrealistic to expect that hot/political topics would be perfectly NPOV in the short run.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#268

Post by airstrike »

xpe wrote: post #229
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is not", "doesn't", and "does" are not adequate for demonstrating an organization's apoliticalness, it simply demonstrates that they content with the status quo. The status quo is a political position, and depending on what about it you don't want to see change, can be a rather contentious one.

Interesting points to consider — thanks. To clarify: endorsing the status quo is a political position. Not saying something is not identical to that. It of course can have probabilistic implications. In other words, silence doesn’t necessarily mean an entity (a person or org) is content with the status quo. It can be a strategic decision.

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

― Desmond Tutu

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#269

Post by musicale »

mattlondon wrote: post #239
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…

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…

Similar issues with stackoverflow. Entrenched systems and editors/moderators create barriers that discourage contributions.

Tried a few times and realized it wasn't worth the effort.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#270

Post by jl6 »

carapace wrote: post #247
jl6 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Your hypothesis is that these skilled potential-CEOs have not found a way to leave India or China? The existence and popularity of visa schemes undermines your point - companies are very willing to source labor from overseas. Why have they done this for engineers but not CEOs?
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