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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#221

Post by ff317 »

akolbe wrote: post #62
IceWreck wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text. Wikipedia is not static text. It runs Mediawiki which runs on PHP and requires a database, plus all forms of caching. They also serve media (images/video) have users, discussions, comments, etc. And at wikipedia's scale they're not trivial problems to solve and dont cost peanuts for hosti…

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 year engineering veteran at the WMF who has fought many battles in this org, which you can take or leave:

There are problems at the Foundation, like there are everywhere. Resources are not allocated as well as they should be, which is also common just about everywhere. However, by and large, the money is put to good use, and the employees of the Foundation are doing good and necessary work, and there's no way to run today's Wikipedia on today's Internet for anywhere close to $3M/year total organizational budget, so it's pretty disingenuous to use that as a comparison point.

Go look at budgets for any other org which runs a top-N important site on the Internet for comparison. Consider that we adhere to stronger values and principles around rights and privacy and open source, all of which /increase/ our operating costs.

WMF runs on a shoestring, relatively-speaking. WMF just had a ~5% layoff over budget reductions ( https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-lay... ) in response to a community outcry about our fundraising. We (the engineers) regularly run into budgetary and/or priority constraints pursuing new useful SRE-level projects that increase scalability, reliability, or directly improve user experience (e.g. latency for readers and editors, rendering speed, better APIs for various consuming parties, more edge caches, more hardware redundancy, etc). We also don't get paid industry equivalent rates, or get the stocks or bonuses that we'd get elsewhere.

You can make all the arguments you want about some past or present form of grift at some upper organizational levels, but I'll still contend that most of the money is going to good use, that it's very expensive to run Wikipedia responsibly and reliably, and that the foundation doesn't have the cash pile necessary to stop relying on donations for the long-term sustainability of its projects. Even if the budget we have was allocated perfectly, I'd still be arguing that we need more to do the job right.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#222

Post by xpe »

(/me looks around at comments)… The logical fallacies abound. It is nice when people think slowly and deliberately. It doesn’t seem to happen often. Much of what is happening here seems to be emotional reactions followed by attempts at reason. Glad to know things are about the same, otherwise I might be worried that the HN conversation is progressing too rapidly.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#223

Post by Joeboy »

capitainenemo wrote: post #213
tasuki wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an unreasonable comparison at all. It puts things in perspective. I dislike what Wikimedia is becoming, yet Wikipedia is still functioning and useful!

It's fairly unreasonable since NFT values are really not tied to anything, and in tokens that may or may not be valued at what they are supposedly valued due to manipulation of the small markets (similar to penny stock pump and dump). So those values can be more about money laundering or poor signaling than any indication of real worth.

What would be a good comparison? Meta spending $36+bn on the Metaverse[0]? What are examples of websites that provide clearly better value for money than Wikipedia?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#224

Post by xpe »

oefrha wrote: post #24

What concerns me more is Wikimedia Foundation was apparently until recently led by someone now on the payroll of Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. Must have done wonders to neutrality at Wikipedia.

I think you might be confused about different meanings of ‘neutral’.

Wikipedia’s policy of a neutral point of view (NPOV) is not “neutral” in the broad spectrum of political philosophy. The underlying principles of Wikipedia draw very much from something akin to anthropology; namely, describe what exists and what is happening according to some culture or point of view.

There are plenty of regimes in the world that do not tolerate Wikipedia’s values.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#225

Post by GauntletWizard »

notpeter wrote: post #139
starkparker wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking tangentially, earnestly, and with a genuine lack of knowledge: are $404k and $311k the market rate for the base compensation of a CEO and COO of a non-profit at Wikimedia's scale? EDIT: Found at least one source on US non-profits that excludes healthcare and university roles which skew numbers: https://analytics.excellenceingiving.com/2021-2022-nonprofit... Suggesting $364k compensation for the CEO a nonprofit…

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 problem isn't that Wikimedia is paying employees too much, so much as it is that they have too many of them. Their COO compensation is not out of line for the scale of Wikimedia - But Wikimedia is way too big of an org without relation to serving their core goal.

Explorative projects like their New Editor Experience[1] were interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful moonshots. That one wrapped up (without anything to show for it, as far as I can tell). They didn't take the hint and downsize, they doubled down.

This is an incredibly common problem for organizations - "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" as was put by Oscar Wilde.

[1]https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Editor_Experiences

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#226

Post by OkayPhysicist »

xpe wrote: post #214
rsynnott wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a think tank, presumably completely disconnected from the world, meditating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (Though possibly that sort of awkward theology, too, is political; it's not something anyone ever did, rather a bit of anti-Catholicism from the reformation). More seriously, when someone says "politically neutral", they typically mean "agrees with me". It's otherwise meaningless for basi…

> More seriously, when someone says "politically neutral", they typically mean "agrees with me". This is an empirical statement. What experience underlies it? My experience (working across many sectors, including tech, government, and not for profits), is quite different. I think it is better to say this… There are various possible meanings for ‘politically neutral’: A person or organization that (a) is not tied to p…

"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.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#227

Post by nickthegreek »

concordDance wrote: post #119
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.

People are upset because it was working fine 10 years ago when execs were paid a fraction of the amount. They're upset because wikipedia asks for donations every year even though they've collected enough money to run wikipedia off interest from treasury bonds.

then don't donate?

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#228

Post by gred »

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…

Hire PHBs, win PHB prizes.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#229

Post by xpe »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #226
xpe wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More seriously, when someone says "politically neutral", they typically mean "agrees with me". This is an empirical statement. What experience underlies it? My experience (working across many sectors, including tech, government, and not for profits), is quite different. I think it is better to say this… There are various possible meanings for ‘politically neutral’: A person or organization that (a) is not tied to p…

"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.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#230

Post by hashar »

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…

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... is the related discussion page if you want to ask more.

Back in the old days, we maintained a list of trustworthy http proxies for which 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). So the sole thing we see is the Apple relays IPs and if those are a source of vandalism for sure the community will block them from contributing.

There is a more or less similar issue with TOR exit node for which the issue is described at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editing_with_Tor

Given the relay is only enforced by Safari (as I understand it), you can use the IOS Wikipedia application for editing: https://apps.apple.com/app/wikipedia/id324715238 , though that will not pass through the Apple relays and leak your IP.

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