19 ms·

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.wik

• 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.
    • AdamN 3y ago
      It's critical to compensate non-profit employees near the market rate otherwise you end up with sub-par performers, martyrs, having the vision co-opted by the wealthy who can afford to be underpaid, or the young who leave disillusioned. The Gates foundation pioneered this approach and imho it's the right way to operate in the sector.
      • starkparker 3y ago
        Asking tangentially, earnestly, and with a genuine lack of knowledge: are $404k and $311k the market rate for the base compensation of a CEO and COO of a non-profit at Wikimedia's scale? EDIT: Found at least one source on US non-profits that excludes healthcare and university roles which skew numbers: https://analytics.excellenceingiving.com/2021-2022-nonprofit-ceo-compensation-study/ https://analytics.excellenceingiving.com/2021-2022-nonprofit... Suggesting $364k compensation for the CEO a nonprofit with $50M+ revenue. Wikimedia Foundation reports $150M+: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
        • bawolff 3y ago
          Also there aren't many tech non profits - i imagine skillset is a little more specialized than your average non-profit.
        • notpeter 3y ago
          In my experience reading hundreds of IRS 990 forms these number are not out of bounds for non-profits at their scale. Healthcare and university may skew the absolute numbers, but are similar. Specifically a great executive will personally move the fundraising needle in organizations (+1-5% or more) and mediocre executive can cause losses/missed opportunities in the opposite direction of a similar magnitude. The conventional thinking is the relative fundraising impact of a great vs a good executive may 10x their total compensation, so it's probably worth trying to retain the best. Anecdotally, I know of a not-for-profit COO who offended an NBA player killing the relationship. His successor COO repaired the relationship, ultimately resulting in multiple millions of new donations and a co-marketing agreement with the team. When the COO was hired there were rumblings because he'd negotiated +$50k over his predecessor. With no equity and the poor optics of commission compensation or cash-bonuses, big severance packages are one of the few ways an organization can reward employees following years of great service.
  • skeeter2020 3y ago
    You don't join a startup with the expectation that your base salary is going to explode from the related growth; that's the equity lottery. Your startup salary might go from somewhat below to market, that's not waht's happening here.
    • ska 3y ago
      > below to market, that's not waht's happening here. It isn't? They seemed like pretty normal market salaries for the type of position.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • ska 3y ago
    In my limited experience 1.5x annual is pretty normal for senior executives.
  • t8sr 3y ago
    The CEO who successfully managed hundreds of people at a fairly visible non-profit got about 300k in severance. Meanwhile: "Google gave top executive $90m payoff but kept sexual misconduct claim quiet – report" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/25/google-andy-rubin-android-creator-payoff-sexual-misconduct-report https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/25/google-an...
    • akolbe 3y ago
      You are mistaken. The CEO's severance was $623K. Paid from money donated to Wikipedia – unlike the Google executive. I think it is normal and legitimate for donors to Wikipedia – whether they've donated labour or money – to have a qualitatively different kind of interest in the former case than the latter.
      • t8sr 3y ago
        Many have noticed that the more useful a job is to society the less it pays. People seem to have a weird expectation that if you want to work on something useful you should expect to be paid well below market rates. (In this case, 50-70% below market!) Why? I can think of no system of ethics that says someone working on addictive mobile games should be making more than the CEO of wikipedia, but that's exactly what's happening. And still people are mad about it! Apparently suckers who want to do something nice for society should do it for free.
• thecopy 3y ago
  >politically neutral What does politically neutral mean?
  • vkou 3y ago
    I call anyone who agrees with my politics, or keeps quiet about theirs politically neutral.
    • Firmwarrior 3y ago
      A wise man once said, "You're either with us, or you're with the enemy" I think that sums up US politics pretty well since 2016
      • wubbert 3y ago
        [dead]
      • zweifuss 3y ago
        'You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists' - George W. Bush 2001-09-21 'Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.' Hillary Clinton 2001-09-13
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      I call people who don't care about the outcome of a particular issue that is a source conflict disinterested, and that's close enough to politically neutral to kiss it. Instead, on Wikipedia the people most involved and passionate about an issue will be the biggest contributors to entries related to it, and the side with the most paid contributors and/or internet-addicted contributors will run those pages like a fiefdom.
  • Towaway69 3y ago
    Taking a more holistic view perhaps.
  • WeylandYutani 3y ago
• f6v 3y ago
  > I hope they're politically neutral. Wikipedia is definitely not.
  • pklausler 3y ago
    When political parties have distinct relationships with objective truth, stating objective truths becomes political.
    • f6v 3y ago
      I’m surprised there’re people who think objective truth exists in international politics. At a very least, it’s very uncommon.
    • Gartent 3y ago
      I don't think you're aware of the key political issues with Wikipedia. The media rarely lies - this is a key issue at play - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-... >But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant. WP doesn't permit primary sources (usually), many right wing publications inc Fox News are banned - for not being a "Reliable Source", actually that activists will push source bans via wiki-lawyering (see the talk pages). I've been subject to Wiki-lawyering because a topic I contributed to became politically contentious, and activists jumped in the thread to revert disagreeable sources. Wikipedia permits breaking rules if it "makes wikipedia a better place", and do not permit (WP:POINTY) you to try to enforce the same rules equally on other pages. The rules are often arbitrary and political articles are hijacked by activists - typically an active, small minority. The co-founder, Larry Sanger noted this in the earlier days as academics sitting on pages of their discipline, then as Wikipedia became a key source of information, editors were hired to represent certain causes (they are supposed to disclose them), and it became a hive of political activity. Example - recently a user "TheTranarchist", a main contributor to gender pages, wrote about how she fights bigotry with her Wikipedia edits. She was tempbanned with pushback for those posts - the Vast Majority keeps quiet. Next we have people like GorillaWarfare who see a hitpiece on people without WP pages - e.g. the CEO of cloudflare - and create a wikipage sourcing just the hitpiece. WP:GOODBIAS - says bias is a good thing, using uncontentious examples (we are biased to a heliocentric, not geocentric model), but WP:GOODBIAS is actually used to explain away political activism on fuzzy issues. WP:TRUTH - verifiability, not truth. There is provably false information on Wikipedia which can't be pointed out (except in the talk threads) because the sources referenced are either banned, or it falls under WP:OR (no original research). E.g., a man disappears, there's an article written that he's dead, source the article saying he's dead, turns out he's alive and pictures of him are posted on Twitter, can't edit the page until a new article comes out retracting the death. I could continue with all the nonsense I see on there, but I'll leave it at that.
• rsynnott 3y ago
  > The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses. I mean, over the last five years, you could say that of practically anyone who employs a bunch of engineers. Tech sector wage inflation was absolutely enormous; it seems to be stabilising now, but still at a pretty high level.
• KennyBlanken 3y ago
  Of course it's a gravy train. Like Mozilla, they have offices in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. It's all about the prestige and posturing for an address by the C-suite.
• qingcharles 3y ago
  I honestly don't care if Wikimedia has several billion stashed away like all the Ivy Leagues do. They are doing God's work, mostly thankless work, and they have managed to do it well in an Internet mostly comprised of dross. How they have managed to keep the quality up and keep it as neutral as they have is beyond me. I've run user-generated content sites and keeping on top of the moderation will make you Google self-harm FAQs on an hourly basis. I'm throwing my money at the screen right now.
  • adastra22 3y ago
    They aren’t though. The amount of money they are spending on the core product you are thinking of is actually declining. All this extra raised cash is going to other purposes.
    • qingcharles 3y ago
      They are and they aren't. I mean, they are still spending money on the core product and it is still a great product and I still love it, but I understand what you're getting at - they're getting proportionally more cash but not spending it on Wikipedia, but all sorts of other side projects that most people are never going to use. I'm still happy to let them do it simply because of the love I have for all their work on Wikipedia. They can spend my money on crazy if they want, as long as it makes the right people happy. The fact that the (essentially) negative article about severance payments exists on Wikipedia itself is at least a good sign that they're not trying to hide what other nonprofits would gladly want to sweep under the rug.
      • adastra22 3y ago
        That would be okay if not for one (1) the deceptive advertising they plaster Wikipedia with saying they’re about to shut down when in fact hosting costs are a rounding error, and (2) many of the things they are funding has absolutely jack all to do with Wikipedia. It’s Kars4Kids levels of charitable fraud.
  • lozenge 3y ago
• costco 3y ago
  2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $145,970,915 I love Wikipedia but I don't see how this cost explosion can evenly be remotely justified. What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?
  • Alupis 3y ago
    During which, Wikipedia and it's prominent editors have become increasingly biased in their reporting of events. Instead of being a neutral "just the facts", we get editorialization about all kinds of things that just further entrench our two camps. Word choice, framing, referenced articles, things left unsaid, etc.
    • xnyan 3y ago
      I’m not sure how you’d like people to evaluate this claim without some examples. Yes, some people will try to nitpick, but many readers here will engage in good faith. What’s an example of a heavily editorialized article?
      • cubefox 3y ago
        This article is quite heavily biased: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline For an exercise, try mentally replacing terms like "alt-right movement" with "woke movement", "alt-right pipeline" with "woke pipeline" etc.
        • zulban 3y ago
          Gave it a skim. What specifically is biased about it? Even ideas that are wrong need to have articles about those labels. There could also be an article about a "woke pipeline" if that's a concept label people are taking about.
          • cubefox 3y ago
            It demonizes right-wing YouTubers with the slur "alt-right". There could absolutely no such article exist about a "woke" pipeline. Anti left-wing bias is not acceptable in Wikipedia. Anti right-wing bias is not much of a problem.
• kylec 3y ago
  Yeah, I love Wikipedia, but it's been a long time since I've donated because they clearly have more money than they know what to do with
• tptacek 3y ago
  Just don't donate to them. My feelings about Wikipedia come pretty close to reverence, and I've never even considered sending them money. They'll be fine no matter what. By all means, advocate against donating to them! They don't need the money. Unless someone here really thinks it's important for Wikipedia to pull in 9 figures in grants and donations, I'm not sure there's as much to argue about here as it seems. Organizations expand to fit their budget constraints, and fundraising success has expanded those constraints for Wikimedia. Seems straightforward.
  • airstrike 3y ago
    "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
  • patrec 3y ago
    Telling yourself that no matter how many parasitic grifters the surplus gazillions attract, wikipedia will be "fine" won't make it so.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      Saying it won't make it so, true. And yet, it is so.
      • patrec 3y ago
        Are the universities fine after the decades long algae bloom of administrators? Has admission become more merit based, tuition more affordable, inquiry freer, and the pace of scientific breakthroughs faster?
        • tptacek 3y ago
          Wikimedia, as you may have noticed, is not a university.
          • patrec 3y ago
• smsm42 3y ago
  > I hope they're politically neutral. WMF is definitely not politically neutral, neither is English Wikipedia (don't know much about the rest).
• t8sr 3y ago
  I mean, Wikimedia has about 250-300 employees and what they pay their CEO is about what Facebook and Google pay a senior SWE. They seem to run pretty lean to me. Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany. I don't really see what's outrageous here? > Obviously it's become a gravy train . Oh come on - their CEO manages 250 people and gets paid what a SWE with 3 years of experience gets paid down the street. Their engineers are paid like a third of what they could be making at Amazon. Nobody is doing this for the money. EDIT: As a comparison for people unaware of the cost of living in SF, a bus driver makes about 80k a year. A senior SWE at Wikimedia makes about 120k, according to levels.fyi.
  • bomewish 3y ago
    the reason people find these massive pay packets unbecoming is because it's a nonprofit. Companies can do what they like -- but these folks are going hat in hand to civilians and asking for handouts, which they then use to people these people 700k. Are you happy to subsidize that? I suspect many normal people donors would not be.
    • ertian 3y ago
      This seems to me like a strange and counterproductive attitude. People are fine with Facebook or Google manipulating them and extracting vast amounts of money from them and handing it out to their employees, but get upset when an extremely useful product simply asks for voluntary payment from time to time to pay out a fraction as much in order to retain talent? The world would be better off if people were happy to donate to useful products like Wikipedia, and encouraged high pay there (because with a large enough denominator, it's an insignificant amount of money to users), and more upset about the exploitative practices of mainstream companies. Then we might see more open and straightforward services like Wikipedia, and fewer creepy and insidious businesses like Facebook or Google (thinking specifically of YouTube and it's attempts to drive 'engagement' here...)
      • bomewish 3y ago
• droptablemain 3y ago
  The Atlantic Council is far from politically neutral. It's very much a neoliberal swamp creature closely tied the U.S. state department's international influence operations.
• zarkov99 3y ago
  They are clearly not politically neutral, unfortunately, whether by accident or design. And I say this as someone who has been a supporter for years.
  • vore 3y ago
    What does political neutrality mean to you? Nothing in this world has no slant.