4 ms·

Wikimedia publishes independently-audited financial statements. Here's the latest one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundati

Wikimedia publishes independently-audited financial statements. Here's the latest one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim... It's clear that salaries and awards and grants are driving the increase in cost. Maybe this is damning evidence of a decadent culture, which the author of this op-ed clearly presume, but I doubt it. I would expect that Wikipedia's employees have been working very hard for a long time to keep the site running and they've cultivated expertise in governing the site in a way that avoids controversy and maintains credibility. I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are. It seems that they've done that, and they've waited until the organization was financially stable to do so.

weeks 9y ago
Where I feel a lot of the animosity from the Wikipedia community stems from is that the people who have "cultivated expertise in governing" are actually Wikipedia volunteers, not WMF employees.
hackuser 9y ago
I'd add: Let's not get caught in the trap of looking at good-paying jobs as a problem. Wikipedia employees shouldn't be expected to work for next-to-nothing or nothing and to make great sacrifices for the rest of us, which is what many open source leaders and contributors must do (a bad thing). Why shouldn't we pay then well?
- emmelaich 9y ago
  That's a red herring; see jessriedel's comment above.
saurik 9y ago
When I say "I want to know where Wikimedia is spending its money", I don't mean "is it on people or on bandwidth or on equipment?"; I mean "is it on Wikipedia or Wiktionary? how much money did they burn into the finally-launched WYSIWYG editor that their own research shows is barely used and solves the wrong problem? how little time is being spent figuring out how to handle a world with decreasingly reliable second-party sources, given their adamant refusal to allow reliance on first-party material? do they have any resources at all dedicated to dealing with deletionism?". I do not care if the people there are being paid a million dollars a year: I want to know their time is being used in ways that makes sense, and as far as I can tell almost none of their resources are being spent on anything which seems to actually matter. If they explained "actually, we added an automated model for verifying the value of an edit that our metrics have shown decreased the amount of time moderators have to spend watching the site while having minimal effects on new user retention, a project which used twenty engineers for five years to build" I'd at least shrug and go "huh, OK"; but as of right now I am not seeing it... it isn't that they overpay their staff, it is that they fundamentally don't have anything useful to do with staff but seem to keep growing their staff and then allocating them towards dumb things while telling everyone if they stop donating to this cancerous staff growth the site will go offline, which is a situation for which I simply can't attach enough modifiers to the word "lie" to to express the level of active deception at play.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Exactly. There's this folk belief that the main risk with non-profits is that that they will pay themselves above-market salaries or otherwise embezzle money in outright fraud. And when people criticize the non-profit for inefficiency, they often defend themselves by saying "Look! The salaries for our legions of workers are market rate and we have all these noble sounding projects." But this is a red herring, because outright fraud is relatively rare. Rather, the much biggest issue is a terribly managed organization spending resources ineffectively. Non-profits shouldn't be judged on overhead or executive salary (who cares?), they should be judged on what they accomplish for the amount they spend. And WMF does terribly on this metric.
  - emmelaich 9y ago
    Great comments. "spending resources ineffectively" Often staff is taken on in order to fill vacancies without as much regard for skill levels. The marginal value of extra employees lowers and can dip into the negative. This is the sort of ineffective spending which is invisible to all but their closest colleagues -- who have too little political capital to do anything about it.
icantdrive55 9y ago
"I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are." I think there's a happy medium? I've seen too many 591c3's pay their popular employees way too much money, or they just spend on questionable stuff. I am looking at the table in the article and wondering what huge problem is, other than start saving, maybe start investing. (Nonprofits in CA, and Deleware can save, and invest? I thought? I know they can in California.) What I got out of the article is why Wikipedia still begging for money? (I look at Guidestar whenever I get the beg. I noticed recently they made getting the free financial statements (1040's harder to access, or maybe I don't like the new user interface? I'm usually appalled at what I can find in those financials. The bigger nonprofits don't seem to need more funding--crazy?)

weeks 9y ago

Where I feel a lot of the animosity from the Wikipedia community stems from is that the people who have "cultivated expertise in governing" are actually Wikipedia volunteers, not WMF employees.

hackuser 9y ago

I'd add: Let's not get caught in the trap of looking at good-paying jobs as a problem. Wikipedia employees shouldn't be expected to work for next-to-nothing or nothing and to make great sacrifices for the rest of us, which is what many open source leaders and contributors must do (a bad thing). Why shouldn't we pay then well?

emmelaich 9y ago
That's a red herring; see jessriedel's comment above.

saurik 9y ago

When I say "I want to know where Wikimedia is spending its money", I don't mean "is it on people or on bandwidth or on equipment?"; I mean "is it on Wikipedia or Wiktionary? how much money did they burn into the finally-launched WYSIWYG editor that their own research shows is barely used and solves the wrong problem? how little time is being spent figuring out how to handle a world with decreasingly reliable second-party sources, given their adamant refusal to allow reliance on first-party material? do they have any resources at all dedicated to dealing with deletionism?". I do not care if the people there are being paid a million dollars a year: I want to know their time is being used in ways that makes sense, and as far as I can tell almost none of their resources are being spent on anything which seems to actually matter. If they explained "actually, we added an automated model for verifying the value of an edit that our metrics have shown decreased the amount of time moderators have to spend watching the site while having minimal effects on new user retention, a project which used twenty engineers for five years to build" I'd at least shrug and go "huh, OK"; but as of right now I am not seeing it... it isn't that they overpay their staff, it is that they fundamentally don't have anything useful to do with staff but seem to keep growing their staff and then allocating them towards dumb things while telling everyone if they stop donating to this cancerous staff growth the site will go offline, which is a situation for which I simply can't attach enough modifiers to the word "lie" to to express the level of active deception at play.

jessriedel 9y ago
Exactly. There's this folk belief that the main risk with non-profits is that that they will pay themselves above-market salaries or otherwise embezzle money in outright fraud. And when people criticize the non-profit for inefficiency, they often defend themselves by saying "Look! The salaries for our legions of workers are market rate and we have all these noble sounding projects." But this is a red herring, because outright fraud is relatively rare. Rather, the much biggest issue is a terribly managed organization spending resources ineffectively. Non-profits shouldn't be judged on overhead or executive salary (who cares?), they should be judged on what they accomplish for the amount they spend. And WMF does terribly on this metric.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Great comments. "spending resources ineffectively" Often staff is taken on in order to fill vacancies without as much regard for skill levels. The marginal value of extra employees lowers and can dip into the negative. This is the sort of ineffective spending which is invisible to all but their closest colleagues -- who have too little political capital to do anything about it.

icantdrive55 9y ago

"I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are." I think there's a happy medium? I've seen too many 591c3's pay their popular employees way too much money, or they just spend on questionable stuff. I am looking at the table in the article and wondering what huge problem is, other than start saving, maybe start investing. (Nonprofits in CA, and Deleware can save, and invest? I thought? I know they can in California.) What I got out of the article is why Wikipedia still begging for money? (I look at Guidestar whenever I get the beg. I noticed recently they made getting the free financial statements (1040's harder to access, or maybe I don't like the new user interface? I'm usually appalled at what I can find in those financials. The bigger nonprofits don't seem to need more funding--crazy?)