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Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#81

Post by humanistbot »

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?

It isn't like the org makes a decision to give them severance after they announce their resignation. It gets written into their contract from the beginning. The reason why organizations offer large severance packages is to attract good candidates. At good companies, even junior devs get severance. In good times, it's a good thing to do. Wouldn't you be more likely to take a job if you knew that no matter what happened, you would have a nice severance package to help you find your next position?

Also, there is bloat in non-profits, but it isn't like everything is done by volunteers. Volunteers don't run the servers, they don't handle donation processing, 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.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#82

Post by humanistbot »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #36

They aren't the ones bringing the value. It's the volunteers, which don't get a penny. They have received enough money to sustain Wikipedia almost indefinitely, I have no idea why they are still begging for money. I haven't heard of a single thing that's good excuse for that money in years. And a corollary would be saying that GitHub deserve money because otherwise there would be no open source. Wikipedia's code and…

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 volunteers to directly paying volunteers to contribute. It gets proposed every now and then, but the consensus is that this would short-circuit the motivation and lead to a bunch of people currently on Mechanical Turk flooding in to try and make a bunch of edits to get paid. If you saw what happened with Hacktoberfest offering free tshirts to make PRs to popular open source projects, you'd be worried about that too.

And a lot of the money goes directly to volunteer-directed projects, like meetups. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#84

Post by machina_ex_deus »

humanistbot wrote: post #82
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #36

They aren't the ones bringing the value. It's the volunteers, which don't get a penny. They have received enough money to sustain Wikipedia almost indefinitely, I have no idea why they are still begging for money. I haven't heard of a single thing that's good excuse for that money in years. And a corollary would be saying that GitHub deserve money because otherwise there would be no open source. Wikipedia's code and…

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…

Of course if you're comparing to a strawman where they pay everyone that'd be a bad idea that I wouldn't approve either.

Nothing Wikipedia currently does with its money justifies the sums they are getting.

If they decided to use that money to generate content, I'd imagine that would work more like normal encyclopedias instead of volunteer based. Where they would seek out actual experts, and only in scientific fields and other areas where there is a knowledge gap rather than opinions. You know, like companies can pay engineers to work on open source projects. Doesn't stop volunteers from volunteering. But you obviously don't throw away money at everyone, you pay for specific work.

Honestly, only the math / scientific parts of Wikipedia are good, there's opinionated garbage in controversial areas. And it's better than books usually because it's easier to click and jump between definitions than the usual book or encyclopedia. If someone compressed all math and physics books into the Wikipedia format with links, I'd barely use Wikipedia again.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#85

Post by chessgecko »

cornholio wrote: post #41
tombert wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, salaries going up isn't necessarily a sign of them "bloating". I've worked for startups before at a reduced salary, with the expectation that as they become more stable they'll bump up the salary to a correct number. In theory, people could have joined Wikimedia at a low salary while they were still struggling, and as they've become way more stable the salaries have gone up as a bit of a correction. That…

You do that at a startup for stock compensation, with the expectation that your risk will be rewarded in the future. A non-profit is not your future cashcow, you don't own it, you either work for current salary or you forgo payment because you believe in the cause. There is no scenario where non-profit workers get to cash out to compensate for previous struggling - except when that non-profit has been captured by a g…

After what happened with openai I wouldn’t say no scenario

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#86

Post by laratied »

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 raising".

This payout is nothing on a relative basis compared to other non-profits and that is the real issue.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#87

Post by Clubber »

tombert wrote: post #77
Clubber wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but let me counterpoint. Anybody with any financial sense should save their money and not spend it as soon as they get it. This is to prepare for the drought years. Could this be something like that?

Forgive me, I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to say. You're saying that by giving a large severance to people no longer affiliated with the company, it's a form of saving money? I'm not trying to straw-man, I'm genuinely not sure what I'm responding to.

>You're saying that by giving a large severance to people no longer affiliated with the company, it's a form of saving money?

No, I'm saying having a large amount of cash on hand is a hedge against drought periods. I suspect they have a certain monetary goal during donation drives, so meeting those goals is part of their funding strategy. Some drives exceed goals, some don't. They need to account for runway or future lack thereof.

Replying specifically to this:

>They will have messages like "If everyone reading this right now gave a buck then this donation drive would be finished in five minutes". In hindsight, it feels a bit deceptive even if it's not an outright lie.

FWIW, 1.5x severance doesn't seem excessive to me, I wish that would be the industry norm for everyone. If it were, there'd be a lot fewer stressed out people right now.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#88

Post by WeylandYutani »

jackvalentine wrote: post #16
tombert wrote: post #5

Man, I've been fired by for-profit companies and felt lucky to get four weeks severance. It's upsetting that people working for a non-profit are getting 1.5x their salary, but I guess this is kind of what we get for believing that a non-profit is going to act better than an evil corporation.

I have the complete opposite read of the situation to you. I have no beef with people getting treated well by any kind of organisation.

An admirable position if we lived in a society in which fastfood workers or cleaners got severance pay.

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#89

Post by hammock »

humanistbot wrote: post #82
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #36

They aren't the ones bringing the value. It's the volunteers, which don't get a penny. They have received enough money to sustain Wikipedia almost indefinitely, I have no idea why they are still begging for money. I haven't heard of a single thing that's good excuse for that money in years. And a corollary would be saying that GitHub deserve money because otherwise there would be no open source. Wikipedia's code and…

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…

>If you were a regular Wikipedia editor, you'd know there is a ton of resistance among volunteers to directly paying volunteers to contribute. It gets proposed every now and then, but the consensus is that this would short-circuit the motivation and lead to a bunch of people currently on Mechanical Turk flooding in to try and make a bunch of edits to get paid.

Kind of makes me think about the debate on elected officials' salaries (and the ban on Congressional insider trading that never seems to pass)

Re: Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

#90

Post by George83728 »

IceWreck wrote: post #69
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.

What about development costs ?

The last time Wikimedia Foundation released a new project website was WikiData in 2012, more than 10 years ago.

Okay well maybe that's not fair. They did recently update the CSS for Wikipedia itself ... I don't know how many millions of dollars they spent on that...

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