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I didn't know my Wikipedia donations funded parties in Accra, Berlin and Chandigarh. I think that should be been in the fundraising statement.
by iso8859-1 6y ago
I didn't know my Wikipedia donations funded parties in Accra, Berlin and Chandigarh. I think that should be been in the fundraising statement.
- ndiscussion 6y agoSadly just like Mozilla. Most of these charities are a lavish waste.
- gruez 6y agoYeah, afaik firefox development is carried out by mozilla corporation (the for-profit subsidiary of mozilla), but your donations goes to mozilla foundation, which spends the money on "advocacy".
- matthewmacleod 6y ago“Lavish waste” my arse. You people will be dissatisfied so long as there is a nonprofit worker out there who isn’t subsisting on gruel.
- approxim8ion 6y agoThis is exactly it. Somehow providing something for free means that every cent someone throws at you is scrutinized.
- ndiscussion 6y agohttps://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... Unless I'm misreading something, 64% of their expenses in 2018 went to salaries.
- detaro 6y agoAnd that tells you what exactly? Do you think they should spend less on salaries, or more? What should they spend on instead/what should they cut?
- ndiscussion 6y agoI think I can agree to disagree with most people replying, I consider it highly misleading that they prod users to donate when using Firefox, and don't mention that Firefox is not funded by donations: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ A few years ago, I certainly thought the funds went to development. And I can't say I'm a big fan of most of their initiatives (most of which have been abandoned Google-style).
- matthewmacleod 6y agoCan you answer the question that was posed? Is the amount of spending on salaries too high, or too low? It’s impossible to tell what point you are trying to make.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- detaro 6y agoHypothetically, Development funds would be ... salaries. Misleading presentation seems to me as a different issue than "but they spend X% on salaries", so where did you want to go with that.
- ndiscussion 6y agoI'm sorry, on further consideration, you're right about the salaries. I think with some charities (like feeding children), my expectation would be that the salaries would be very low, and the costs of providing the "good" would be the bulk of the expense. But in the case of an advocacy/software platform, you're right that salaries would be expected to be a large part of the expense. As someone who's used Firefox for close to 20 years, their recent activities have left a sour taste in my mouth, and I suppose I'm a bit biased as a result. For the last five years as everyone switched to Chrome, I continued to use Firefox, and encouraged others to use the same. I believe that the Firefox project has been somewhat mismanaged, which has resulted in a large drop in users. For example, they could have started including an ad blocker by default - they would probably have killed Brave's business that way. If they care so much about privacy, it seemed like a no-brainer. I guess I was reaching for reasons that their budget was lavish... but that wasn't true. My real concern is with the fact that donations to the organization don't, and cannot, go to the browser. When I first saw a notice to donate in my browser years ago, I certainly thought my money was going to development. They want to encourage an "open web", privacy, etc, and I think those goals are all very important. The continued dominance of Firefox was probably the best way to actually achieve those goals. Talk is cheap, and I'm a bit sad that the browser share is now dwindling. We have many other organizations making blog posts/activism for the open web, but Firefox was the only one actually doing something about it, which is 1000x as valuable as far as I'm concerned. So when they encouraged me to donate, and I thought it went to development, and realized it was going towards this kind of "activism", I felt betrayed and tricked. I still stand by that sentiment. We have plenty of activists and journalists who fight for the open web via words - all for free. I feel that by existing, Firefox took up most of the market share for that, and by encouraging donations, they created a desert for other browsers to rise up. If another organization had forked Firefox and taken over with hundreds of millions in donations, I doubt the market share would have dropped so sharply. For example, they wouldn't have been "forced" to do privacy-bad things like selling ads on the new tab page. By claiming to be "the" privacy-focused browser, they soured any efforts to make a new one. And now it's probably too late: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.... All this to say, I'm mostly sad about it. I miss Firefox, and I wish we had a strong fighter still in the arena. I'm doubtful Firefox can turn it's product and reputation around at this point given their corporate structure. Cheers.
- craigsmansion 6y ago> Sadly just like Mozilla. Hmm. Maher earned about 375K in 2018 for presiding over a foundation with 145M in assets. I don't feel that's exorbitant in any way. Looking through https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY18-19.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim..., wikimedia has enough income from investments to keep the wikipedia site running indefinitely should donations collapse. I don't like these big budgets for foundations and groups for the public interest either, but in my opinion Wikimedia definitely shouldn't be compared to Mozilla here.
- qazxcvbnmlp 6y agoFor profit entities use parties to bond teams and accomplish a goal. Non profit entities ought to have that freedom as well.
- vorpalhex 6y agoThey are welcome to, just declare it upfront.
- ben_w 6y agoDo shareholding and dividend statements generally say such things upfront?
- medicineman 6y agoDo share holders donate or do they expect returns?
- wittyreference 6y agoI have a hard time imagining something more destructive to the ability to run an organization than putting forward all managerial initiatives for public consent, just in case some portion of the public disagrees with that choice. Talk about design by committee.
- caseysoftware 6y ago> Talk about design by committee. aka Wikipedia.
- medicineman 6y ago>I have a hard time imagining something more destructive to the ability to run an organization How about eroding public trust? I can think of a lot more. Perhaps your imagination is subject to a hidden bias.
- jrochkind1 6y agoWhat does "declaring it upfront" look like, what are you asking for? Like, a copy of their budget before donating? I think you can probably get that?
- umvi 6y agoYeah, I wish there were a way to support just Wikipedia. I don't really care about a lot of Wikimedia Foundation's other pet projects, but the way they phrase their banners and emails, you'd think we are always a razor's edge from Wikipedia servers shutting off...
- jacobr1 6y agoAnd a few wikipedia-like sites: wiktionary and wikidata in particular.
- Aunche 6y agoYou can support just Wikipedia by contributing ;) I think that Wikipedia just doesn't need that much money. If people just let them fail their fundraising goals, the core service will likely continue to get the same budget, but they'll cut their pet projects and parties.
- h_anna_h 6y agoSadly this is not what happened with Mozilla.
- mikepurvis 6y agoIsn't it? Mozilla has cut or spun-off basically everything other than Firefox.
- Macha 6y agoThe most prominent project on mozilla.org at time of writing is Mozilla VPN. Pocket also gets substantial screen space dedicated: https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/
- mikepurvis 6y agoFair, though I would argue that those services are much more closely tied to the core experience of Firefox (and in particular the promise of safer, more private internet access) than something like Sunbird ever was.
- jahlove 6y agoThey also spent $2.8m on travel and conferences in 2019 [0], which is more than they spent on internet hosting... [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY18-19.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... (page 13)
- arnaudsm 6y agoWhich is 3% of their total expenses that year. Considering how much exposure and grants conferences can bring to a non-profit, it seems fair.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI can understand that, but the more surprising thing was that hosting is even less...
- whimsicalism 6y agoHosting a static site doesn't sound that expensive, plus they're likely not paying for a premium & costly cloud provider like AWS/Azure.
- saagarjha 6y agoWikimedia isn't completely static…
- whimsicalism 6y agoOkay, sure - but many, many more reads than writes. That is cheaper to implement with caching, CDN, etc.
- jonas21 6y agoThis seems like the typical HN meme of looking at something and assuming the technical piece is all there is to it. Wikipedia's biggest challenge over the years hasn't been building or hosting its website. It's been convincing the world that an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone on the Internet is a credible and neutral source of information. One of the ways you do that is by speaking at conferences, traveling to meet with people, etc.
- jackTheMan 6y agoIf you read the book of the book Work Rules! of Laszlo Bock (HR in google) you will learn that parties and group binding is appreciated more than salary by workers. So if you see from the money side of things, you can get/keep (more) highly talented people for less money.
- axguscbklp 6y ago>parties and group binding is appreciated more than salary by workers I'd be surprised if this is true for more than a tiny fraction of workers. Given the high salaries at Google, maybe it's more true there than at other places.
- leetcrew 6y agowhy do so many companies throw holiday parties then? according to the top few google results, a typical company party costs somewhere in the vicinity of $75/head. they could instead just add $75 (minus additional tax liabilities) to everyone's bonus and call it a day. is it just to be nice, or do executives believe that throwing a few parties is a cheaper way to boost retention?
- axguscbklp 6y agoI don't know. I can think of some possible reasons, for example: the people who decide to have a company party do want to be nice, and/or maybe they want to party themselves, and/or maybe they see it as an opportunity to get publicity and network, and/or maybe they do it because other companies do it and so it's just "what is done", and/or maybe they do it because they think it'll raise morale and team bonding. But I don't know. Maybe someone who has personal insight into the matter can chime in.
- hinkley 6y agoIf you’re only in it for the money, you are a mercenary in all but title. People quit because nothing at the company is enough to make them stay. “Enough” is a complex thing and often the oddest details can be the last straw. I like to go to going away parties for people and listen to their reasons for leaving. I doubled down on better onboarding experiences when I noticed how often people were uncomfortable from day one on the job and they never shook that feeling. At a good employer, the only one who expects anything from you in your first week is yourself, but those feelings of alienation can stick around. You don’t have to go to the parties, but other people need to. And really, you should go too. You’re missing out and driving yourself to burnout. In nonprofits, burnout is the boogeyman.
- awhitby 6y agoI have no connection to and don't know Wikimedia Foundation, and the context for these references is not totally clear. (Maybe it was related to these https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_20/Events https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_20/Events.) Regardless, do you really begrudge the CEO visiting these places? I get where you're coming from: it's easy to roll your eyes and dismiss this kind of thing as political correctness, pointless "diversity and inclusion" work, pandering to liberal friends etc. But step back: Wikipedia aims to be the world's encyclopedia. I'm as much in awe as anyone of what a fairly narrow group of pretty obsessive contributors has been able to achieve (I just checked: I've made five tiny edits in 15 years, so not me). But Wikipedia will never succeed in its aim unless it has active contributors in places like Accra, Berlin and Chandigarh. I honestly don't remember what the donation banners have said in past years. Did they imply they were funding servers and bandwidth only? Maybe they did. But if you actually believe in the mission of Wikipedia, you have to consider that servers and bandwidth will not be enough and that community—maybe including the odd party—is a core part of it. In that respect, I'm not sure it's too helpful to lump it with Mozilla.
- iso8859-1 6y agoWikipedia doesn't need that kind of attention. Writing for Wikipedia is like journalism, it is not automatically better just because you have more eyeballs. What kind of people do you want to attract? Do you think the best writers are attracted by the best parties? Wikipedia has loads of contributors in Germany. That is because of a long history of German intellectualism, it is not because Wikimedia is throwing parties. If Wikimedia were as global as you suggest, where are the parties in Iran and Russia? Are these parties without alcohol? I hope so, because we wouldn't want to exclude the muslim world, right? I say this as a Wikipedia contributor since 2005 with 16k edits.
- foolmeonce 6y ago> Are these parties without alcohol? I hope so, because we wouldn't want to exclude the muslim world, right? What? They aren't a fraternity, so I don't think drinking is mandatory. If you look at any large organization it has these kinds of frivolous events. Among other things, they let the leadership get a sense of the social environment and how it reacts to some of their ideas with less filtering. I personally don't attend most of these events, but it is really a silly direction to assume everything that is not technically necessary is a waste of money.
- tomca32 6y agoI've been involved with some non-profit organizations that do work in post conflict countries, mostly Africa. From my experience, these organizations throw parties because they have to. This is how non-profits fundraise. I don't think there is a non-profit organization on the planet that has a significant impact and is funded only by small individual donations. Money is raised by throwing a party, presenting all the great work you're doing, and getting rich people drunk so they either give you right there and then or secure you a meeting with someone who will on the spot. These events are funded by your small donations. This sounds like a horrible amount of overhead, and it is, but that's how the world works. Most NGOs will say they have very small overhead, something silly like 5%, but that's because they don't count fundraising as overhead, or they put fundraising events into "programming" which again doesn't count as overhead.
- hinkley 6y agoBecause shame is a shitty motivator, and for some people it shuts them down entirely. You get many more people to participate by giving them hope for a better future, whatever form you’re pandering to. Asking people to help divert a disaster smells of lack of planning, too. Even if it’s not your disaster you’re cleaning up, people start to wonder if they need to go up the chain to prevent the next one instead of fixing the current one.
- Igelau 6y agoI mean, if you really want to see the schedule for WikiIndaba 2017 that took place in Accra, here you go. http://2017.wikiindaba.net/index.php/Programme http://2017.wikiindaba.net/index.php/Programme Try not to tear the armrests off your chair in rattles of indignation.
- iso8859-1 6y agoMy chair doesn't have armrests, I do not squander my money like they do. I dedicate my time to editing Wikipedia, where is my reward? > There will be live performances, karaoke and some pleasant taste of good music. This night promises to be super fun filled. Are you ready to sing and dance in representation of your country at a thrilling battle with the Ghanaians? Yes, please invite me to your next party. I am a fun person.
- saagarjha 6y agoPerhaps you should invest yourself by getting a chair with armrests.
- pwinnski 6y agoWhy does this make you feel indignant? It seems like a very typical three-day conference schedule.
- Igelau 6y ago> Why does this make you feel indignant? It doesn't. That was the point.
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