52 ms·

Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

412 points by akolbe 3y ago

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
So I see people scoffing at the way the English Wikipedia is run, and people referring incorrectly to "What Wikipedia does" when the Wikipedias are just one aspect of the WMF's activities. So do you really know what the WMF does? The encyclopedias, and MediaWiki software, are the flagship projects, and they come in hundreds of languages (I'm watching what happens on the Nahuatl project right now). There are also many Wiktionaries, where words are defined in any language you can name. There is Wikidata, which interfaces in a machine-readable way with every other Wikipedia. There is Commons, which is one of the world's largest repositories of freely-licensed media. This is the first place I search if I am looking for a PD or CC-licensed image. That's what it's there for, in addition to serving media for all the other projects. There is Wikisource, a large repository of freely-licensed text. See above. There is Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikinews... The WMF does not simply run web servers, they run a cloud platform. WMF is a player in Big Data, and the WMF Cloud supports developers of bots, tools, database queries, scripts, and all sorts of widgets that interface with at least one project. Software development. I've already mentioned that MediaWiki is an open-source, in-house platform, and it's constantly under active development. Anyone may create an account and submit an issue in the Phabricator bug database. Outreach. Wikipedias coordinate with college instructors who are teaching how to edit Wikipedia as part of a class. There is a standardized and recognizable process for this now. WMF holds conferences worldwide, to get people interested in editing, learn how to do it, and keep them engaged. All projects have separate sets of administrators and unique policies and guidelines. If all you know is English Wikipedia by reputation, you've barely scratched the surface.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
The CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation moving to a higly opinioned think tank with a clear agenda worries me. I agre with Atlantic Council on a number of issues so I am not expressing a bias against Atlantic Council but on principle. She is certialy enttited to work whereever she wants and I wish her well.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I thought severance payments went to employees that were laid off? I believe both the people mentioned chose to leave the foundation? Is severance payment a bonus you accrue by working there? Only time I have gotten it was when I was laid off. I guess the C* have it better?
superchroma 3y ago
Utterly unacceptable for a nonprofit allegedly serving the greater good. Disgusting to beg for "just even a single dollar" as they do on meraphorical hands and knees, with plea after tortured, heartfelt plea from Jimmy Wales whilst doing this on the back-end. I already knew about how flush for cash the Wikimedia Foundation was, but this really is astonishing behavior.
- bhickey 3y ago
  They beg for a single dollar to satisfy the public support test. This requires that a third of their funding must come from small dollar donors. I wouldn't give Wikimedia a dollar (mission creep, etc.) asking for piddling amounts isn't necessarily pleading poverty.
  - superchroma 3y ago
    Every year, wikipedia hits users with an even larger, ballsier banner begging for donations. The last one covered the entire screen, and button to dismiss it was hidden. Fuck them.
mintaka5 3y ago
...while they bang on my email server's door for donations because wikimedia is "struggling" so badly. what a crock of shit. i told you silicon valley is made up of con-artists. i'll put money on it.
rg111 3y ago
> After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language Institute's Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative experience that instilled a deep love for the Middle East. Maher subsequently studied at the Institut français d’études arabes de Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia. In 2005, Maher received a bachelor's degree from New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. I wonder how could she serve the Wikimedia Foundation and what background she had that helped her do so. ~600K USD in severance and much more of donors' money were spent to bankroll her salary. What a waste!
- zzzziZzzZzZzZz 3y ago
  [flagged]
- jtefera 3y ago
  She did have an extensive experience working in different areas prior to joining Wikimedia as COO. Seems unfair to just post an excerpt of her education background and directly unqualify her.
tombert 3y ago
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.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  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.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Sure, it's good to compensate employees well. I replied in a sister comment that it's not inherently bad for the salaries to be high at Wikimedia, but it does seem a little frustrating to see a 1.5x annual salary severance for quitting a job when it's donation money being used to fund that severance. If it were, I don't know, three months severance, that would still be very generous, and I don't think most people would be very upset. We've all seen a ton of banners vaguely implying that Wikimedia is strapped for cash and needs your help, but they have enough to spend an extra six hundred grand for someone quitting?
  - II2II 3y ago
    For nearly half of households, the severance for the CEO represents over 10 years of income. Households, not people. A great many of those people would have never received severance pay of any amount. Of those who do, they would be fortunate to receive months of severance pay based upon earnings that are a fraction of what a CEO earns. Is it any surprised that some people would be upset? Factor in that the Wikipedia depends upon donations and volunteer labour, and it looks like some people are reaping a disproportionate amount of the rewards. I'm not saying this to diminish what the Wikipedia does, nor to suggest the pay was not earned. These people almost certainly could have earned more elsewhere, yet decided to align themselves with an organization that serves the greater good. What I am saying is it is (or should be) easy to see where these sentiments come from.
scrollaway 3y ago
To put into perspective: the Wikimedia Foundation manages one of humanity’s greatest achievements. I thought it was an open secret that they’re pretty flush with cash overall despite the constant nag for justadollar’. I dunno, maybe I’ve been desensitised but these numbers are not horribly shocking to me, and when put in the context of the immense value the project brings to the rest of the world… I mean come on, look at some of the comments posted here. “Con artists”, are you serious?
- tombert 3y ago
  "Con artists" might be a strong term, but honestly I can't blame people for being upset. Obviously Wikipedia is a pretty useful tool, I don't think anyone disputes that, but I think people can be forgiven to think that half-page-sized banners begging for money indicates that they're strapped for cash. 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. Should anyone go to jail for this? No, I think that would be ridiculous, but it does kind of erode a bit of the trust that I had for Wikimedia.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    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?
    - tombert 3y ago
      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.
      - Clubber 3y ago
        >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.
bulion 3y ago
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?
- prepend 3y ago
  It seems to me that they have lots of cash available and are financially able to “do the right thing.” Firing people is not fun and is emotionally difficult. I would love to give 1.5x salary but there’s usually some controller restricting me to something I don’t like but can’t change. Wikimedia doesn’t have a duty to maximize shareholder equity and they have tons of money, so they can. I wonder what else they spend similarly on. I typically donate to wikimedia and behavior like this makes me rethink. How many more people need to donate to allow these people their money?
  - komadori 3y ago
    Were they fired, made redundant, or otherwise "let go"? My assumption is that severance is only paid under such circumstances, but, as the grandparent poster points out, the linked article makes it sound like they chose to leave for new jobs.
- scns 3y ago
  People freed from the shackles of ethics taking as much as they can get? Who cares if they deserve it? /s Not a crime, only grifters griftin along, same old. Sorry for the negativity, feeling bitter about it.
- humanistbot 3y ago
  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.
acadapter 3y ago
Why can't the Wikimedia projects just be forked by some more normal people?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
andersrs 3y ago
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/File:Wikimedia_Foundation's_expenses_evolution_by_rubrics_in_US_Dollars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation's_expenses_percentage.svg 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 might cease to exist if you don't cough up. It gives me an uneasy feeling that the ex-CEO went to work for a think tank. I hope they're politically neutral. Obviously it's become a gravy train. At a certain point they should have stopped the begging because clearly they have the resources to run the site several times over.
- dpflan 3y ago
  Seems like a common trend, pushing down true costs while pushing the difference up the management chain. (The trending growing chasm between wage growth and productivity seems apropos here.)
- tombert 3y ago
  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 said....1.5x your annual salary as severance sort of spits in the face of that bit of apologia.
  - andersrs 3y ago
    I was referring to salaries on the big picture financial reports. It could mean more people.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    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 group of money grabbing profiteers who operate it for their own personal benefit.
max_ 3y ago
How exactly does Wikipedia make its money? Is it exclusively through donors? If so, who are the top donors?
- andersrs 3y ago
  The donations go to the parent org (Wikimedia) and the top donors are published in the financial reports. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annual-report/donors/#section-2 https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annu... It's mostly corporations but a lot of them are employee matching schemes.
pmoriarty 3y ago
How can this foundation be held accountable?
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Tax exempt organizations such as nonprofits and churches are pretty famous for being difficult to hold accountable. There are some required public filings, but for the most part, a handpicked board, founder or president decides if they will enrich the mission or enrich themselves. Donors should know who they are giving money to, but most people just recognize a logo and give without thinking much about it.
tjpnz 3y ago
This is what our donations are paying for? I'll be thinking twice before donating again.
- JCharante 3y ago
  They spend more money on travel than they do on hosting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation's_expenses_evolution_by_rubrics_in_US_Dollars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
- MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  The main organisation that owns Wikipedia funnels all the donations into the owners. Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text so they pocket almost all of the money.
  - IceWreck 3y ago
    > 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 hosting.
    - lapinot 3y ago
      Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous. They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop, it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.
      - pas 3y ago
        it's in the top10 sites worldwide, it's ridiculously naive to assume it's just servers and a few BGP dudes.
oefrha 3y ago
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.
- gumby 3y ago
  I don’t understand. What job could someone take after leaving that post that you think would be neutral? Work for google? Become a bricklayer?
  - oefrha 3y ago
    I can think of very few jobs less neutral than Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. You don’t get invited to those boards without prior connections to some of the least neutral people on the planet.
    - gumby 3y ago
      Sometimes the most effective heads of large organizations are effective because of their connections, especially when many of the issues they will deal with involve countries threatening the organization with censorship, control, and takedown issues. Wikipedia has a much more admirable history in this regard than the major for profit online companies.
      - oefrha 3y ago
        Those same connections ask for favors which is how they undermine neutrality. These is a reason revolving doors are bad.
    - humanistbot 3y ago
      >I can think of very few jobs less neutral than Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. What about any senior exec position at Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, or Microsoft? I hope you don't believe those organizations are 'neutral' either.
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to shareholders and executives. Those tragic appeals they put out are lies.
- gumby 3y ago
  Shareholders? It’s a non-profit.
  - b3lvedere 3y ago
    Great financial packages for a non-profit
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Could it be that their financial packages is part of what makes it such an effective operation?
      - b3lvedere 3y ago
        I don't know. If it's a standard into obtaining certain levels of effectiveness, then why don't they just add it to their salary or something? Why the extra things?
    - skyyler 3y ago
      Are they? It's also the 7th most visited site on the web. I don't think as many people would take offense to Roblox or Reddit leadership taking these kinds of packages...
      - b3lvedere 3y ago
        I don't take offense at all. I think it's strange/confusing for a non-profit organisation, but maybe not unheard of. Certain roles need certain amounts of money i guess. Kinda also gives weird vibes on what the definition of non-profit really is.
- 3y ago
Towaway69 3y ago
One thing I do respect is that this article is hosted on Wikipedia. Not many corporations nor non-profits would host an obviously self effacing article.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Most of this is required public reporting for non-profits.
- Vuizur 3y ago
  It is a community newspaper that is (apparently) independent of the WMF, and they don't have quarrels about hosting WMF-critical articles. Anti-WMF sentiment is surprisingly common on some Wikimedia projects.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie... This is one of the longest pages I have seen on wikipedia for a while.
machina_ex_deus 3y ago
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 data is open source, even if they somehow ran out of cash for hosting, which would never happen, people could easily set it up again. And they obviously would. I would donate directly to the people doing the actual contributions, not to the joke "non profit" that's getting all the credit.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  This seems to be a gross oversimplification of one of the most frequented, neutral and useful services humanity has created. And it's free
- humanistbot 3y ago
  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 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
  - machina_ex_deus 3y ago
    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.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
This is why I use ublock to hide their ridiculous requests for money. Among other reasons.
lallysingh 3y ago
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.
- detaro 3y ago
  To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your salary?
  - cgio 3y ago
    I would be happy to donate considering the value I get from their work. Given the market where they operate, the salary and severance is actually low in my opinion. I would like them to pay their people well.
  - bradfa 3y ago
    It depends. If the charity is doing amazingly good things and the executives in question are making a big impact on being able to do those good things, then yes I'd be fine with that.
  - lallysingh 3y ago
    It's this question about value for skills or resentment for income inequality? For the latter, wikimedia would have to move somewhere with lower labor rates yet is somehow to keep talent from leaving for better paying places.
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    I would be happy. I'm not an executive so I don't get executive pay. The executive salaries at Wikimedia seem low compared to what you can earn at a similarly sized business.
    - 3y ago
mtttpt 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher "Maher states that she focuses on global digital inclusion as a way to improve and protect the rights of people to information through technology." Yet the actual mission of Wikipedia is something quite different to this. They push a particular point of view, wrapped up in the false cloak of "neutrality", and assert this as truth. Wikipedia is part of a broader propaganda drive to export US cultural mores to the rest of the world.
- stubybubs 3y ago
  I'm curious, do you do much reading of Wikipedia in languages other than English? I don't, so I don't have an answer here, but I wonder how much neutrality there is in Russian or Vietnamese or Urdu wiki articles. English Wikipedia is going to have at the very least an English-speaking world tilt to it. Are the others similar?
  - bestbuyer__ 3y ago
    The English-speaking world is not a monolith. They have the tilt of a fraction of the English-speaking world.
itronitron 3y ago
Are they hiring? lol
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Only for temporary help, as can be seen, which can end at any time. Otherwise they wouldn't need much of a severance package.
jl6 3y ago
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with nonprofits paying high salaries to senior leaders. You will find very well compensated people at the top of many large charities. That's because they are big orgs with hundreds of employees, with all the same problems as similar-sized big orgs. They employ a lot of people, and the job of managing and leading a lot of people isn't easy. It's in the charity's interest that the job is done well, and so they pay well to get the best talent, because they're competing with for-profit orgs for this same talent. And yes, severance is negotiated as part of the employment contract - it's a tool to attract talent. There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial and doesn't deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance. Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It's a global top 10 website, and that puts a target on their back. They have lawyers. They have an HR department. They have a Finance department. These departments do complex real-world stuff that needs planning, management and strategy. Maybe you know how to scale an SQL database, but do you know how to sue the Turkish government? Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful, their grant money spending could use some scrutiny: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
- carapace 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - jl6 3y ago
    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 businesses and seek to drive down wages in pursuit of profit - and yet they have been duped into paying over the odds for something they could easily get for much less? It just doesn’t add up, does it? Because of course there is not such a large pool of equally skilled people.
lbriner 3y ago
The arguments are attacking the people but it's the organisation that should be questioned. If I am a private company and I am struggling to keep profits, I can justify an expensive Director, ideally with good experience, whose relatively large salary will result in very large profits. Of course it doesn't always work and those people will have asked for big penalty clauses if you decide they didn't do well enough but that is the risk in capitalism. Not-for-profit is something else and should have a different enough culture that you aren't looking for people who require large salaries and big contract penalties. What are you solving (and wikimedia particular is famous for being really involved with almost everything except what most people think they do: wikipedia). If you are Oxfam, you might want to pay for someone with lots of experience in poverty scenarios. If you are Save The Children, you might want a Doctor with lots of experience helping children in poor countries etc. and those might cost you money. What do Wikimedia want? People with contacts? People who they can hold up as some kind of political statement? Someone who knows how to migrate PHP to something else? Who knows? It just all smells really bad and as others have said, it has been toxic for ages and doesn't deserve to go out with the begging hat when most work is done by a very small number of paid staff and mostly unpaid volunteers.
jtefera 3y ago
Ignoring for now the severance package, the salary seems pretty low for a CEO of such a large foundation. $400-500K is about the salary range of a senior-staff engineer at FAANG and their responsibility is way lower. One of the issues with non-profits is that people expects the employees/management to be there for the cause and to be happy with lower salaries. This seems to incentives IMO one of the following: - only already rich people to apply - high turnover - people with less experience or options to apply Having a generous severance package that for example requires you to work for at least x amount of years might solve some of those pitfalls?
- barrkel 3y ago
  A senior staff engineer at FAANG makes decisions on the implementation of features which have effects on 8+ digits of revenue. It's mostly downside risk: if you don't do it right, then the lack of availability costs a lot.
  - ivalm 3y ago
    And you don’t think Wikipedia has that level of impact?
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  It might be normal in the little bubble that is the Bay area. This just goes to show what a poor choice that is as a location to operate from. 500K would be about our staffing and office cost here in Berlin. We're a mere eight people. And Wikimedia actually has an office here. One of their largest offices outside of SFO according to this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_offices https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_offices. I've been there. Nice place. Look, this is just the tip of the ice berg: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim... This spells it out. This is foundation is spending tens of million on salaries and sitting on a quarter billion in assets. That's some spectacularly inefficient spending no matter how you look at it. I would call it shameless. And then they do the yearly thing of holding out their hand for donations because boohoo all the money is gone. Again! But at least they are transparent about enriching themselves.
troyvit 3y ago
Newsflash: nonprofit company that forms a linchpin of digital knowledge is doing well enough to pay severance packages in the (... checks notes ...) six digit range, sets up policy to do better in the future! Cue HN rage machine.
blairanderson 3y ago
These are the smallest parachutes to make headlines.
gcau 3y ago
Do not donate to Wikipedia.
Drblessing 3y ago
This is why you shouldn’t donate to Wikimedia
gadders 3y ago
Why are they actually getting any severance at all? It looks like they resigned to take new jobs. They weren't sacked or made redundant.
- bawolff 3y ago
  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.
  - gadders 3y ago
    It's amazing how once you become what used to be called a quangocrat [1] you seem to live in this charmed circle where you keep getting offered positions on the board for X or a researcher at Y, effortlessly failing upwards through NGOs, think tanks and charities without any accountability or record of achievement. [1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/quangocrat https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/quang...
    - rexreed 3y ago
      That's because so many of those NGOs are hustles of their own, delivering some marginal value while supporting their own bloated universe.
  - akolbe 3y ago
    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_pump_(proposals)&diff=prev&oldid=1123369545 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 realised it was set up to funnel millions of dollars of Wikipedia donations to non-Wikimedia social justice causes via Tides Advocacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-10-31/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... Janeen announced on 14 May 2021, two weeks after Katherine had left, that she was going to leave the WMF and devote herself to racial equity and technology causes: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/WT4K4O45EDWNUWMEP55YBLWGASUQQXWA/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... She started as CEO of the National Society of Black Engineers on 7 July 2021, just one week after her last day with the WMF. Including the $325K severance, she pocketed over half a million dollars for half a year's work and went straight to her next job.
fcol 3y ago
This reminds me a bad experience. I worked very hard day in and day out for a startup and then quit bcz of bad management and got no severance (not blaming anybody). At the same time not good engineers got fired, they all got severance packages. It's a good life lesson though
TurkishPoptart 3y ago
This I why I don't donate to wikipedia anymore; I found out they actually don't need it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gamblor956 3y ago
If the Wikimedia Foundation were incorporated in California, the CA Attorney General would like investigate these payments, which appear to be out-of-band from similar organizations. But Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated in Florida (https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/api/report/GetImageByNum/244142135123189171054228164010114232204080233146 https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/api/report/GetImageByNum/24... direct pdf download), which lets nonprofits do whatever they want. A nonprofit organized in a state other than where it is headquartered (unless the incorporation state is Delaware) is a huge red flag with respect to the organization's commitment to proper governance.
Eumenes 3y ago
Imagine donating to this corrupt organization
caycep 3y ago
Granted, I'm looking at these salaries, from over in the healthcare sectors where CEOs and executives (whose value many of us find questionable) make $5 mil salaries, even for being CEO of a "nonprofit hospital/foundation", and have way larger golden parachutes to boot. I'd say it's (relatively) admirable the Wikimedia board is stressing out about severances from $300-500k.
- cogidub 3y ago
  America has an income stratification problem to go with it's wealth problem
bawolff 3y ago
One thing to consider is that katherine became CEO at a very turbulant time at WMF. The previous ceo (lila) was extremely unpopular and facing a staff revolt [1]. Morale was terrible. Maybe katherine had a big severence agreement because she was walking into a shit show. [1] https://www.mollywhite.net/timelines/wikimedia/ https://www.mollywhite.net/timelines/wikimedia/
hermitcrab 3y ago
They are doing a great job, but any organization who can pay US$623,286 in severance pay for 1 person shouldn't be putting out sob stories asking for donations IMHO. I've made donations in the past, but I'm not sure I'll be making any in the future, if there is where it is going.
71a54xd 3y ago
This is why I refuse to donate to WikiMedia.
weystrom 3y ago
Cheers, I'm never donating ever again.
Gartent 3y ago
[flagged]
fastily 3y ago
I’ve been an editor on Wikipedia for nearly 15 years. I reckon I’ve easily contributed tens of thousands of dollars worth of value during this time. To be clear, I don’t expect/want any compensation (I firmly believe in the free knowledge for all mission), but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting to see others profit handsomely off of my hard work.
- xpe 3y ago
  I can understand that. It grates against some notions of fairness. In any case, others being paid doesn’t diminish your contributions. You know that you’ve helped and benefited others. (Wikipedia redefined my view of networks!) Quantifying your impact may be challenging, and this is frankly one of the best things about volunteering. Doing something for the process, not e.g. for some downstream effects that are not under your control. <puts philosopher hat on> Sometimes it’s nice just to do and not think about consequentialist ethics. Let us know something non-financial we can do to help you or your causes out?
  - akolbe 3y ago
    I always think this notion of fairness is perfectly encapsulated by this famous experiment involving Capuchin monkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg As that video demonstrates (a Capuchin who was happy to perform a simple task in order to get a piece of cucumber goes crazy when another monkey is introduced who gets a grape for the same task) this notion of fairness is so basic, it is pre-human. According to the video, it's even been replicated with dogs and birds.
- june_twenty 3y ago
  Of course it does. They've used you. They're laughing in mansions with brand new cars and sending their kids to Ivy League schools etc etc
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    This doesn't seem productive
xpe 3y ago
(/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.
arrozconcosas 3y ago
"I think that's also not sustainable to just expect that rich people who don't need to care for their bread in the morning can just come and work for us." - Nataliia Tymkiv Call me crazy, but $623,286 USD will buy a LOT of bread. "Putting food on the table for your family" phrases start to become almost comical when they're made by people earning good portions of a million per year.
- akolbe 3y ago
  Exactly. With the added irony that the whole Wikimedia system is based on volunteers who do just that: come and work for Wikipedia for no pay. Gosh, they must be so rich!
Jianghong94 3y ago
I mean, can't we form a web3 dao to perform acquisition of WMF (or a hostile-takeover?), if it works out donors get to vote next leadership, etc etc, drive cost low and make sure things are in good hands, if it doesn't work out then just return the cash back, plain and simple.
kloch 3y ago
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.
- Alpha3031 3y ago
  Have you considered donating an hour or so of your time every month instead? This could be instead of or in addition to a monetary donation.
- andersrs 3y ago
  But you're not donating to Wikipedia or the contributors whom make it a great source. WikiMedia spend your money on all sorts of things which have don't promote sharing knowledge via the internet. The expenses have ballooned 5x in 10 years.
andersrs 3y ago
[flagged]
t8sr 3y ago
From what I could find, Wikimedia employs about 250 people in total. The compensation paid to the CEO of Wikimedia is about what a senior SWE makes at Facebook. I don't see what's outrageous here - they are amazingly efficient. Someone managing 250 people at a for-profit company across the street would make 3-4 times as much, and, I mean Twitter had 7,500 employees. Yes, the CEO got 18 months severance which is on the high side, but her compensation to begin with was very low for the Bay Area. I think the scandal here is just people in the rest of the world being outraged at median salaries in California. But remember, the cost of living is also stratospheric.
hexo 3y ago
Unfortunately, this is one of the reasons I would never donate to wikipedia financially or with edits / my time.
AlbertCory 3y ago
I always try the Buzzword Bingo game on all these corpy pronouncements, and finally: I have bingo! for https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... Here's the card: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp0DqAK/view?usp=share_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp...

412 points by akolbe 3y ago

So I see people scoffing at the way the English Wikipedia is run, and people referring incorrectly to "What Wikipedia does" when the Wikipedias are just one aspect of the WMF's activities. So do you really know what the WMF does? The encyclopedias, and MediaWiki software, are the flagship projects, and they come in hundreds of languages (I'm watching what happens on the Nahuatl project right now). There are also many Wiktionaries, where words are defined in any language you can name. There is Wikidata, which interfaces in a machine-readable way with every other Wikipedia. There is Commons, which is one of the world's largest repositories of freely-licensed media. This is the first place I search if I am looking for a PD or CC-licensed image. That's what it's there for, in addition to serving media for all the other projects. There is Wikisource, a large repository of freely-licensed text. See above. There is Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikinews... The WMF does not simply run web servers, they run a cloud platform. WMF is a player in Big Data, and the WMF Cloud supports developers of bots, tools, database queries, scripts, and all sorts of widgets that interface with at least one project. Software development. I've already mentioned that MediaWiki is an open-source, in-house platform, and it's constantly under active development. Anyone may create an account and submit an issue in the Phabricator bug database. Outreach. Wikipedias coordinate with college instructors who are teaching how to edit Wikipedia as part of a class. There is a standardized and recognizable process for this now. WMF holds conferences worldwide, to get people interested in editing, learn how to do it, and keep them engaged. All projects have separate sets of administrators and unique policies and guidelines. If all you know is English Wikipedia by reputation, you've barely scratched the surface.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

The CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation moving to a higly opinioned think tank with a clear agenda worries me. I agre with Atlantic Council on a number of issues so I am not expressing a bias against Atlantic Council but on principle. She is certialy enttited to work whereever she wants and I wish her well.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I thought severance payments went to employees that were laid off? I believe both the people mentioned chose to leave the foundation? Is severance payment a bonus you accrue by working there? Only time I have gotten it was when I was laid off. I guess the C* have it better?

superchroma 3y ago

Utterly unacceptable for a nonprofit allegedly serving the greater good. Disgusting to beg for "just even a single dollar" as they do on meraphorical hands and knees, with plea after tortured, heartfelt plea from Jimmy Wales whilst doing this on the back-end. I already knew about how flush for cash the Wikimedia Foundation was, but this really is astonishing behavior.

bhickey 3y ago
They beg for a single dollar to satisfy the public support test. This requires that a third of their funding must come from small dollar donors. I wouldn't give Wikimedia a dollar (mission creep, etc.) asking for piddling amounts isn't necessarily pleading poverty.
- superchroma 3y ago
  Every year, wikipedia hits users with an even larger, ballsier banner begging for donations. The last one covered the entire screen, and button to dismiss it was hidden. Fuck them.

mintaka5 3y ago

...while they bang on my email server's door for donations because wikimedia is "struggling" so badly. what a crock of shit. i told you silicon valley is made up of con-artists. i'll put money on it.

rg111 3y ago

> After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language Institute's Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative experience that instilled a deep love for the Middle East. Maher subsequently studied at the Institut français d’études arabes de Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia. In 2005, Maher received a bachelor's degree from New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. I wonder how could she serve the Wikimedia Foundation and what background she had that helped her do so. ~600K USD in severance and much more of donors' money were spent to bankroll her salary. What a waste!

zzzziZzzZzZzZz 3y ago
[flagged]
jtefera 3y ago
She did have an extensive experience working in different areas prior to joining Wikimedia as COO. Seems unfair to just post an excerpt of her education background and directly unqualify her.

tombert 3y ago

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.

jackvalentine 3y ago
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.
- tombert 3y ago
  Sure, it's good to compensate employees well. I replied in a sister comment that it's not inherently bad for the salaries to be high at Wikimedia, but it does seem a little frustrating to see a 1.5x annual salary severance for quitting a job when it's donation money being used to fund that severance. If it were, I don't know, three months severance, that would still be very generous, and I don't think most people would be very upset. We've all seen a ton of banners vaguely implying that Wikimedia is strapped for cash and needs your help, but they have enough to spend an extra six hundred grand for someone quitting?
- II2II 3y ago
  For nearly half of households, the severance for the CEO represents over 10 years of income. Households, not people. A great many of those people would have never received severance pay of any amount. Of those who do, they would be fortunate to receive months of severance pay based upon earnings that are a fraction of what a CEO earns. Is it any surprised that some people would be upset? Factor in that the Wikipedia depends upon donations and volunteer labour, and it looks like some people are reaping a disproportionate amount of the rewards. I'm not saying this to diminish what the Wikipedia does, nor to suggest the pay was not earned. These people almost certainly could have earned more elsewhere, yet decided to align themselves with an organization that serves the greater good. What I am saying is it is (or should be) easy to see where these sentiments come from.

scrollaway 3y ago

To put into perspective: the Wikimedia Foundation manages one of humanity’s greatest achievements. I thought it was an open secret that they’re pretty flush with cash overall despite the constant nag for justadollar’. I dunno, maybe I’ve been desensitised but these numbers are not horribly shocking to me, and when put in the context of the immense value the project brings to the rest of the world… I mean come on, look at some of the comments posted here. “Con artists”, are you serious?

tombert 3y ago
"Con artists" might be a strong term, but honestly I can't blame people for being upset. Obviously Wikipedia is a pretty useful tool, I don't think anyone disputes that, but I think people can be forgiven to think that half-page-sized banners begging for money indicates that they're strapped for cash. 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. Should anyone go to jail for this? No, I think that would be ridiculous, but it does kind of erode a bit of the trust that I had for Wikimedia.
- Clubber 3y ago
  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?
  - tombert 3y ago
    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.
    - Clubber 3y ago
      >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.

bulion 3y ago

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?

prepend 3y ago
It seems to me that they have lots of cash available and are financially able to “do the right thing.” Firing people is not fun and is emotionally difficult. I would love to give 1.5x salary but there’s usually some controller restricting me to something I don’t like but can’t change. Wikimedia doesn’t have a duty to maximize shareholder equity and they have tons of money, so they can. I wonder what else they spend similarly on. I typically donate to wikimedia and behavior like this makes me rethink. How many more people need to donate to allow these people their money?
- komadori 3y ago
  Were they fired, made redundant, or otherwise "let go"? My assumption is that severance is only paid under such circumstances, but, as the grandparent poster points out, the linked article makes it sound like they chose to leave for new jobs.
scns 3y ago
People freed from the shackles of ethics taking as much as they can get? Who cares if they deserve it? /s Not a crime, only grifters griftin along, same old. Sorry for the negativity, feeling bitter about it.
humanistbot 3y ago
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.

acadapter 3y ago

Why can't the Wikimedia projects just be forked by some more normal people?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

andersrs 3y ago

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/File:Wikimedia_Foundation's_expenses_evolution_by_rubrics_in_US_Dollars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation's_expenses_percentage.svg 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 might cease to exist if you don't cough up. It gives me an uneasy feeling that the ex-CEO went to work for a think tank. I hope they're politically neutral. Obviously it's become a gravy train. At a certain point they should have stopped the begging because clearly they have the resources to run the site several times over.

dpflan 3y ago
Seems like a common trend, pushing down true costs while pushing the difference up the management chain. (The trending growing chasm between wage growth and productivity seems apropos here.)
tombert 3y ago
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 said....1.5x your annual salary as severance sort of spits in the face of that bit of apologia.
- andersrs 3y ago
  I was referring to salaries on the big picture financial reports. It could mean more people.
- cornholio 3y ago
  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 group of money grabbing profiteers who operate it for their own personal benefit.

max_ 3y ago

How exactly does Wikipedia make its money? Is it exclusively through donors? If so, who are the top donors?

andersrs 3y ago
The donations go to the parent org (Wikimedia) and the top donors are published in the financial reports. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annual-report/donors/#section-2 https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annu... It's mostly corporations but a lot of them are employee matching schemes.

pmoriarty 3y ago

How can this foundation be held accountable?

dougmwne 3y ago
Tax exempt organizations such as nonprofits and churches are pretty famous for being difficult to hold accountable. There are some required public filings, but for the most part, a handpicked board, founder or president decides if they will enrich the mission or enrich themselves. Donors should know who they are giving money to, but most people just recognize a logo and give without thinking much about it.

tjpnz 3y ago

This is what our donations are paying for? I'll be thinking twice before donating again.

JCharante 3y ago
They spend more money on travel than they do on hosting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation's_expenses_evolution_by_rubrics_in_US_Dollars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
The main organisation that owns Wikipedia funnels all the donations into the owners. Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text so they pocket almost all of the money.
- IceWreck 3y ago
  > 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 hosting.
  - lapinot 3y ago
    Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous. They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop, it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.
    - pas 3y ago
      it's in the top10 sites worldwide, it's ridiculously naive to assume it's just servers and a few BGP dudes.

oefrha 3y ago

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.

gumby 3y ago
I don’t understand. What job could someone take after leaving that post that you think would be neutral? Work for google? Become a bricklayer?
- oefrha 3y ago
  I can think of very few jobs less neutral than Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. You don’t get invited to those boards without prior connections to some of the least neutral people on the planet.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Sometimes the most effective heads of large organizations are effective because of their connections, especially when many of the issues they will deal with involve countries threatening the organization with censorship, control, and takedown issues. Wikipedia has a much more admirable history in this regard than the major for profit online companies.
    - oefrha 3y ago
      Those same connections ask for favors which is how they undermine neutrality. These is a reason revolving doors are bad.
  - humanistbot 3y ago
    >I can think of very few jobs less neutral than Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. What about any senior exec position at Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, or Microsoft? I hope you don't believe those organizations are 'neutral' either.

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to shareholders and executives. Those tragic appeals they put out are lies.

gumby 3y ago
Shareholders? It’s a non-profit.
- b3lvedere 3y ago
  Great financial packages for a non-profit
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Could it be that their financial packages is part of what makes it such an effective operation?
    - b3lvedere 3y ago
      I don't know. If it's a standard into obtaining certain levels of effectiveness, then why don't they just add it to their salary or something? Why the extra things?
  - skyyler 3y ago
    Are they? It's also the 7th most visited site on the web. I don't think as many people would take offense to Roblox or Reddit leadership taking these kinds of packages...
    - b3lvedere 3y ago
      I don't take offense at all. I think it's strange/confusing for a non-profit organisation, but maybe not unheard of. Certain roles need certain amounts of money i guess. Kinda also gives weird vibes on what the definition of non-profit really is.
3y ago

Towaway69 3y ago

One thing I do respect is that this article is hosted on Wikipedia. Not many corporations nor non-profits would host an obviously self effacing article.

dougmwne 3y ago
Most of this is required public reporting for non-profits.
Vuizur 3y ago
It is a community newspaper that is (apparently) independent of the WMF, and they don't have quarrels about hosting WMF-critical articles. Anti-WMF sentiment is surprisingly common on some Wikimedia projects.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie... This is one of the longest pages I have seen on wikipedia for a while.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago

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 data is open source, even if they somehow ran out of cash for hosting, which would never happen, people could easily set it up again. And they obviously would. I would donate directly to the people doing the actual contributions, not to the joke "non profit" that's getting all the credit.

hackernewds 3y ago
This seems to be a gross oversimplification of one of the most frequented, neutral and useful services humanity has created. And it's free
humanistbot 3y ago
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 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
- machina_ex_deus 3y ago
  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.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

This is why I use ublock to hide their ridiculous requests for money. Among other reasons.

lallysingh 3y ago

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.

detaro 3y ago
To take a global perspective: Would you be happy to donate to charity that uses the money to pay executives 10x-100x your salary?
- cgio 3y ago
  I would be happy to donate considering the value I get from their work. Given the market where they operate, the salary and severance is actually low in my opinion. I would like them to pay their people well.
- bradfa 3y ago
  It depends. If the charity is doing amazingly good things and the executives in question are making a big impact on being able to do those good things, then yes I'd be fine with that.
- lallysingh 3y ago
  It's this question about value for skills or resentment for income inequality? For the latter, wikimedia would have to move somewhere with lower labor rates yet is somehow to keep talent from leaving for better paying places.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  I would be happy. I'm not an executive so I don't get executive pay. The executive salaries at Wikimedia seem low compared to what you can earn at a similarly sized business.
  - 3y ago

mtttpt 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher "Maher states that she focuses on global digital inclusion as a way to improve and protect the rights of people to information through technology." Yet the actual mission of Wikipedia is something quite different to this. They push a particular point of view, wrapped up in the false cloak of "neutrality", and assert this as truth. Wikipedia is part of a broader propaganda drive to export US cultural mores to the rest of the world.

stubybubs 3y ago
I'm curious, do you do much reading of Wikipedia in languages other than English? I don't, so I don't have an answer here, but I wonder how much neutrality there is in Russian or Vietnamese or Urdu wiki articles. English Wikipedia is going to have at the very least an English-speaking world tilt to it. Are the others similar?
- bestbuyer__ 3y ago
  The English-speaking world is not a monolith. They have the tilt of a fraction of the English-speaking world.

itronitron 3y ago

Are they hiring? lol

fuzzfactor 3y ago
Only for temporary help, as can be seen, which can end at any time. Otherwise they wouldn't need much of a severance package.

jl6 3y ago

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with nonprofits paying high salaries to senior leaders. You will find very well compensated people at the top of many large charities. That's because they are big orgs with hundreds of employees, with all the same problems as similar-sized big orgs. They employ a lot of people, and the job of managing and leading a lot of people isn't easy. It's in the charity's interest that the job is done well, and so they pay well to get the best talent, because they're competing with for-profit orgs for this same talent. And yes, severance is negotiated as part of the employment contract - it's a tool to attract talent. There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial and doesn't deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance. Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It's a global top 10 website, and that puts a target on their back. They have lawyers. They have an HR department. They have a Finance department. These departments do complex real-world stuff that needs planning, management and strategy. Maybe you know how to scale an SQL database, but do you know how to sue the Turkish government? Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful, their grant money spending could use some scrutiny: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start

carapace 3y ago
[flagged]
- jl6 3y ago
  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 businesses and seek to drive down wages in pursuit of profit - and yet they have been duped into paying over the odds for something they could easily get for much less? It just doesn’t add up, does it? Because of course there is not such a large pool of equally skilled people.

lbriner 3y ago

The arguments are attacking the people but it's the organisation that should be questioned. If I am a private company and I am struggling to keep profits, I can justify an expensive Director, ideally with good experience, whose relatively large salary will result in very large profits. Of course it doesn't always work and those people will have asked for big penalty clauses if you decide they didn't do well enough but that is the risk in capitalism. Not-for-profit is something else and should have a different enough culture that you aren't looking for people who require large salaries and big contract penalties. What are you solving (and wikimedia particular is famous for being really involved with almost everything except what most people think they do: wikipedia). If you are Oxfam, you might want to pay for someone with lots of experience in poverty scenarios. If you are Save The Children, you might want a Doctor with lots of experience helping children in poor countries etc. and those might cost you money. What do Wikimedia want? People with contacts? People who they can hold up as some kind of political statement? Someone who knows how to migrate PHP to something else? Who knows? It just all smells really bad and as others have said, it has been toxic for ages and doesn't deserve to go out with the begging hat when most work is done by a very small number of paid staff and mostly unpaid volunteers.

jtefera 3y ago

Ignoring for now the severance package, the salary seems pretty low for a CEO of such a large foundation. $400-500K is about the salary range of a senior-staff engineer at FAANG and their responsibility is way lower. One of the issues with non-profits is that people expects the employees/management to be there for the cause and to be happy with lower salaries. This seems to incentives IMO one of the following: - only already rich people to apply - high turnover - people with less experience or options to apply Having a generous severance package that for example requires you to work for at least x amount of years might solve some of those pitfalls?

barrkel 3y ago
A senior staff engineer at FAANG makes decisions on the implementation of features which have effects on 8+ digits of revenue. It's mostly downside risk: if you don't do it right, then the lack of availability costs a lot.
- ivalm 3y ago
  And you don’t think Wikipedia has that level of impact?
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It might be normal in the little bubble that is the Bay area. This just goes to show what a poor choice that is as a location to operate from. 500K would be about our staffing and office cost here in Berlin. We're a mere eight people. And Wikimedia actually has an office here. One of their largest offices outside of SFO according to this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_offices https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_offices. I've been there. Nice place. Look, this is just the tip of the ice berg: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim... This spells it out. This is foundation is spending tens of million on salaries and sitting on a quarter billion in assets. That's some spectacularly inefficient spending no matter how you look at it. I would call it shameless. And then they do the yearly thing of holding out their hand for donations because boohoo all the money is gone. Again! But at least they are transparent about enriching themselves.

troyvit 3y ago

Newsflash: nonprofit company that forms a linchpin of digital knowledge is doing well enough to pay severance packages in the (... checks notes ...) six digit range, sets up policy to do better in the future! Cue HN rage machine.

blairanderson 3y ago

These are the smallest parachutes to make headlines.

gcau 3y ago

Do not donate to Wikipedia.

Drblessing 3y ago

This is why you shouldn’t donate to Wikimedia

gadders 3y ago

Why are they actually getting any severance at all? It looks like they resigned to take new jobs. They weren't sacked or made redundant.

bawolff 3y ago
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.
- gadders 3y ago
  It's amazing how once you become what used to be called a quangocrat [1] you seem to live in this charmed circle where you keep getting offered positions on the board for X or a researcher at Y, effortlessly failing upwards through NGOs, think tanks and charities without any accountability or record of achievement. [1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/quangocrat https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/quang...
  - rexreed 3y ago
    That's because so many of those NGOs are hustles of their own, delivering some marginal value while supporting their own bloated universe.
- akolbe 3y ago
  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_pump_(proposals)&diff=prev&oldid=1123369545 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 realised it was set up to funnel millions of dollars of Wikipedia donations to non-Wikimedia social justice causes via Tides Advocacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-10-31/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... Janeen announced on 14 May 2021, two weeks after Katherine had left, that she was going to leave the WMF and devote herself to racial equity and technology causes: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/WT4K4O45EDWNUWMEP55YBLWGASUQQXWA/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... She started as CEO of the National Society of Black Engineers on 7 July 2021, just one week after her last day with the WMF. Including the $325K severance, she pocketed over half a million dollars for half a year's work and went straight to her next job.

fcol 3y ago

This reminds me a bad experience. I worked very hard day in and day out for a startup and then quit bcz of bad management and got no severance (not blaming anybody). At the same time not good engineers got fired, they all got severance packages. It's a good life lesson though

TurkishPoptart 3y ago

This I why I don't donate to wikipedia anymore; I found out they actually don't need it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gamblor956 3y ago

If the Wikimedia Foundation were incorporated in California, the CA Attorney General would like investigate these payments, which appear to be out-of-band from similar organizations. But Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated in Florida (https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/api/report/GetImageByNum/244142135123189171054228164010114232204080233146 https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/api/report/GetImageByNum/24... direct pdf download), which lets nonprofits do whatever they want. A nonprofit organized in a state other than where it is headquartered (unless the incorporation state is Delaware) is a huge red flag with respect to the organization's commitment to proper governance.

Eumenes 3y ago

Imagine donating to this corrupt organization

caycep 3y ago

Granted, I'm looking at these salaries, from over in the healthcare sectors where CEOs and executives (whose value many of us find questionable) make $5 mil salaries, even for being CEO of a "nonprofit hospital/foundation", and have way larger golden parachutes to boot. I'd say it's (relatively) admirable the Wikimedia board is stressing out about severances from $300-500k.

cogidub 3y ago
America has an income stratification problem to go with it's wealth problem

bawolff 3y ago

One thing to consider is that katherine became CEO at a very turbulant time at WMF. The previous ceo (lila) was extremely unpopular and facing a staff revolt [1]. Morale was terrible. Maybe katherine had a big severence agreement because she was walking into a shit show. [1] https://www.mollywhite.net/timelines/wikimedia/ https://www.mollywhite.net/timelines/wikimedia/

hermitcrab 3y ago

They are doing a great job, but any organization who can pay US$623,286 in severance pay for 1 person shouldn't be putting out sob stories asking for donations IMHO. I've made donations in the past, but I'm not sure I'll be making any in the future, if there is where it is going.

71a54xd 3y ago

This is why I refuse to donate to WikiMedia.

weystrom 3y ago

Cheers, I'm never donating ever again.

Gartent 3y ago

[flagged]

fastily 3y ago

I’ve been an editor on Wikipedia for nearly 15 years. I reckon I’ve easily contributed tens of thousands of dollars worth of value during this time. To be clear, I don’t expect/want any compensation (I firmly believe in the free knowledge for all mission), but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting to see others profit handsomely off of my hard work.

xpe 3y ago
I can understand that. It grates against some notions of fairness. In any case, others being paid doesn’t diminish your contributions. You know that you’ve helped and benefited others. (Wikipedia redefined my view of networks!) Quantifying your impact may be challenging, and this is frankly one of the best things about volunteering. Doing something for the process, not e.g. for some downstream effects that are not under your control. <puts philosopher hat on> Sometimes it’s nice just to do and not think about consequentialist ethics. Let us know something non-financial we can do to help you or your causes out?
- akolbe 3y ago
  I always think this notion of fairness is perfectly encapsulated by this famous experiment involving Capuchin monkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg As that video demonstrates (a Capuchin who was happy to perform a simple task in order to get a piece of cucumber goes crazy when another monkey is introduced who gets a grape for the same task) this notion of fairness is so basic, it is pre-human. According to the video, it's even been replicated with dogs and birds.
june_twenty 3y ago
Of course it does. They've used you. They're laughing in mansions with brand new cars and sending their kids to Ivy League schools etc etc
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  This doesn't seem productive

xpe 3y ago

(/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.

arrozconcosas 3y ago

"I think that's also not sustainable to just expect that rich people who don't need to care for their bread in the morning can just come and work for us." - Nataliia Tymkiv Call me crazy, but $623,286 USD will buy a LOT of bread. "Putting food on the table for your family" phrases start to become almost comical when they're made by people earning good portions of a million per year.

akolbe 3y ago
Exactly. With the added irony that the whole Wikimedia system is based on volunteers who do just that: come and work for Wikipedia for no pay. Gosh, they must be so rich!

Jianghong94 3y ago

I mean, can't we form a web3 dao to perform acquisition of WMF (or a hostile-takeover?), if it works out donors get to vote next leadership, etc etc, drive cost low and make sure things are in good hands, if it doesn't work out then just return the cash back, plain and simple.

kloch 3y ago

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.

Alpha3031 3y ago
Have you considered donating an hour or so of your time every month instead? This could be instead of or in addition to a monetary donation.
andersrs 3y ago
But you're not donating to Wikipedia or the contributors whom make it a great source. WikiMedia spend your money on all sorts of things which have don't promote sharing knowledge via the internet. The expenses have ballooned 5x in 10 years.

andersrs 3y ago

[flagged]

t8sr 3y ago

From what I could find, Wikimedia employs about 250 people in total. The compensation paid to the CEO of Wikimedia is about what a senior SWE makes at Facebook. I don't see what's outrageous here - they are amazingly efficient. Someone managing 250 people at a for-profit company across the street would make 3-4 times as much, and, I mean Twitter had 7,500 employees. Yes, the CEO got 18 months severance which is on the high side, but her compensation to begin with was very low for the Bay Area. I think the scandal here is just people in the rest of the world being outraged at median salaries in California. But remember, the cost of living is also stratospheric.

hexo 3y ago

Unfortunately, this is one of the reasons I would never donate to wikipedia financially or with edits / my time.

AlbertCory 3y ago

I always try the Buzzword Bingo game on all these corpy pronouncements, and finally: I have bingo! for https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... Here's the card: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp0DqAK/view?usp=share_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp...