Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-05-22/News_and_notes

by akolbe • 3 years ago

412 390 3 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

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• 3 years 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.

superchroma3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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!

jtefera2• 3 years 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.

tombert6• 3 years 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.

jackvalentine3• 3 years 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.

tombert6• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

WeylandYutani3• 3 years ago

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

Clent• 3 years ago

Champions of executive's compensation is what the working class is fighting against. You lack of beef would classify you as their class traitor.

jzb2• 3 years ago

"I have no beef with people getting treated well"

Nor I. But there's being treated well and then there's being showered with cash, which is how I'd read getting a severance package in excess of 1.5 your base comp for a full year when walking away to take another job.

Generally speaking, if I leave my current job for another job I don't expect any severance at all. If I was laid off I'd feel pretty good about getting six months of severance. There's no reality where I expect 18 months severance walking away to take another gig.

FredPret• 3 years ago

While I think Wikipedia is highly suspect given its ample reserves and continued begging, it should not be upsetting for you. It should bring you joy that someone got treated well.

tombert6• 3 years ago

When a for-profit company gives someone a huge severance/golden-parachute, that's fine. Fundamentally I was giving them money for "whatever they want", and if that's how they felt they should allocate those funds then fair enough.

However, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and their messaging in their donation drives always sort of implied that they really needed these donations. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit, I do have higher aspirations of how they're going to allocate their funds: chiefly in making the highest quality freely-available knowledge resource even better.

If they had given these people a three month paid severance, I would not criticize them at all. That's very generous and there is value in making sure employees are treated well. 1.5x your annual salary though? I'm sorry, but there's "generous" and then there's "shady".

tester457• 3 years ago

A little too well. This thread has taught me not to donate to Wikipedia.

anonymouskimmer• 3 years ago

It should bring you joy that someone got treated well.

It highlights that it's not the standard. I don't feel particular joy that a person who is already treated well continues to be treated well. I feel joy when a person who isn't already treated well is treated well. Joy is not my default state; I don't feel it about status quo human situations.

pessimizer4• 3 years ago

If you like that, I've got a non-profit that pays 100% of net income out as a severance package for its ex-CEO, who is currently helping as the interim CEO (and only employee) for a token $1/year. I will accept all donations in the spirit of joy in which they were given.

lynx23• 3 years ago

Its not so much about non-profit vs evil-for-profit. Once certain people from certain money-cultures enter management of a for-profit, it is going to hell. Sure, they will give the speeches which are expected, promising to the lowly contributors that everything will stay cozy and nice. I guess vampire-management is a good word?

xpe9• 3 years ago

Here we go with this good versus evil thing. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t put any corporation on any kind of pedestal whatsoever. But when I hear a good versus evil, it doesn’t indicate to me that the speaker is thinking clearly; it seems like they’re thinking imprecisely.

I could be wrong; you could have a religious view that suggests that Satan works his malfeasance through corporate influence.

We’re seeing human nature at play in the context of organizational dynamics. That’s hardly evil.

gtirloni2• 3 years ago

It's upsetting that you only got 4 weeks. I'm happy WMF is not so shitty. I think it's more productive for everybody if the bar is raised, not lowered.

smsm427• 3 years ago

Not so shitty towards the CEO and COO. I wonder how much severance the rank and file people who were fired got? Like, the ones mentioned here: https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-lay...

bulion• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

humanistbot3• 3 years 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.

laratied• 3 years ago

I just don't donate to anything anymore. So many non-profits and charities are total scams that it pulls down the whole space.

When you have cancer and missing children charities giving 2% to their cause and spending the remainder on bullshit it is trivial to make your charity not look as bad.

If you really dig into it, a huge % of charity money is just funding the insiders travel and lifestyle in the name of "fund raising".

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

George837284• 3 years ago

I take your approach to large charities, but not small ones. I feel comfortable donating to small locally run charities for which I can personally observe their works. Particularly, my local volunteer fire department. I can see what they're buying (they show it off proudly) and talk with the people who actually do the work there, so I feel that I can trust them to use the money wisely. Sure as hell, nobody there is getting 6-figure severance payments...

camel_Snake• 3 years ago

Gonna go ahead and plug https://www.givewell.org/ here, since they do an obscene amount of research to verify the cost-efficacy and trustworthiness of all the charities they funnel money to.

scrollaway• 3 years 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?

tombert6• 3 years 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.

Clubber2• 3 years 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?

rob74• 3 years ago

One of humanity's greatest achievements, built by unpaid volunteers - so yes, some might find it shocking that none of the money from the donations that Wikipedia asks for year after year goes to these volunteers, while quite a lot of it is spent on large salaries and even larger severance packages.

chasd00• 3 years ago

The money we donate also goes to lots of random causes not related to wikipedia. I wonder what percent of the budget goes to actual wikipedia hosting and maintenance costs.

MagicMoonlight3• 3 years ago

If people donate 100m to an organisation claiming to be a charity and 99m goes into the pockets of the people running it then they’re going to question their donation.

Why are donations being spent on enriching people instead of improving the project? Millions of dollars would pay for a hell of a lot of articles written by experts in their field.

Akronymus4• 3 years ago

Wikipedia is explicitly against articles written by experts. Because those are primary sources while wikipedia only allows secondary ones (IMO the biggest mistake, as it allows the HUGE bias it has)

acadapter• 3 years ago

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

andersrs6• 3 years 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/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• 3 years 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.)

tombert6• 3 years 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.

andersrs6• 3 years ago

I was referring to salaries on the big picture financial reports. It could mean more people.

cornholio2• 3 years 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.

skeeter20202• 3 years 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.

ska2• 3 years ago

In my limited experience 1.5x annual is pretty normal for senior executives.

t8sr8• 3 years 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-an...

thecopy• 3 years ago

politically neutral

What does politically neutral mean?

Towaway692• 3 years ago

Taking a more holistic view perhaps.

WeylandYutani3• 3 years ago

The answer to that differs on your political perspective.

miah_• 3 years ago

Siding with whoever in power meets your financial goals.

vkou• 3 years ago

I call anyone who agrees with my politics, or keeps quiet about theirs politically neutral.

ThrowawayTestr4• 3 years ago

Both sides think you're biased. That's how the BBC does it.

version_five• 3 years ago

It's not possible if you want to do any analysis. Maybe if you just report statistics and limit your reporting to a set of uncontroversial fields. Best you could hope for in a think tank would be setting orthogonal to the main thrust of either side, like libertarian or something - some version of free software advocacy could also work.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in essence - dealing in facts, not editorializing.

rsynnott3• 3 years ago

For a think tank, presumably completely disconnected from the world, meditating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (Though possibly that sort of awkward theology, too, is political; it's not something anyone ever did, rather a bit of anti-Catholicism from the reformation).

More seriously, when someone says "politically neutral", they typically mean "agrees with me". It's otherwise meaningless for basically anything which engages with the real world.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

It means the green-username parent commenter is trying to derail the thread.

Bran_son• 3 years ago

Not serving on the US Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board would be a good start. To be fair, Katherine Maher took that role after her time as Wikimedia CEO. But landing such a role implies one is well connected, and she interned at the CFR [1] before her time at Wikimedia. In other words, she seems far too well connected to the US government to be called "neutral".

In the words of the New York Times, "Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics. Staff members are entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality" - https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journali...

[1] The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an American think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations. [..] Its membership has included senior politicians, numerous secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, corporate directors and CEOs, and senior media figures. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations

f6v2• 3 years ago

I hope they're politically neutral.

Wikipedia is definitely not.

pklausler• 3 years ago

When political parties have distinct relationships with objective truth, stating objective truths becomes political.

rsynnott3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

qingcharles4• 3 years 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.

adastra222• 3 years 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.

lozenge• 3 years ago

But the editors and moderators aren't paid.

akolbe11• 3 years ago

Did you really not know that the editors and "moderators" (a term not used on Wikipedia) are unpaid? The Wikimedia Foundation intervenes very rarely in content. Essentially, it only takes action on content if there is a court order to that effect. ALL OTHER CONTENT CURATION IS DONE BY UNPAID VOLUNTEERS.

The Foundation "does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects", as they are happy to tell you themselves here:

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno...

Even most of the emails sent to the Wikimedia Foundation are answered by unpaid volunteers, the Volunteer Response Team:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Volunteer_Response_T...

Sorry to sound harsh, but you are laboring under a misconception and spreading it.

costco2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

ilikehurdles• 3 years ago

In that time it’s become increasingly challenging to contribute anything to The People’s Encyclopedia.

I wanted to update a local wiki page with newer data from its original sources, but apparently I have become blacklisted because I use/used Apple’s private relay and safari’s privacy measures by default in all my browsing. Disabling them didn’t fix it. I would love to sign up as a fallback measure to be able to contribute, and verify my account by whatever means necessary, but apparently in the 2020s that’s just not something Wikipedia supports (as I’m also black listed from signing up despite never contributing to Wikipedia.)

Increasingly I see out of date and opinionated articles and I wonder how many of us have meaningful contributions ready but are forced to sit on the sidelines because there’s no “way in” with this product.

Joeboy2• 3 years ago

2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758

$200k less than Beeple's "Everyday" NFT sold for.

bawolff6• 3 years ago

What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?

Assuming this is not rhetorical - everything is in git so you can look at the git log. Although it is spread through many repos, and not all contributors are paid by wmf.

https://github.com/wikimedia

ilyt• 3 years ago

And I preferred previous theme anyway...

And it can't be set without being logged in ;/

t8sr8• 3 years ago

Their costs went up about 100%. The cumulative inflation over those 6 years was about 25%. The US averages 6% salary growth yearly, which over six years is about 42%, and would have been much higher in the tech industry. California averages a cost of living increase of about 8% annually, over six years that's 58%.

So if you adjust for the rising costs of doing anything in tech, their operating budget has increased by much less than would seem - only about 20%.

In those same six years, they've had to deal with a rise in misinformation campaigns, spam, infosec threats and recently ML models.

Call me crazy, but dealing with all of the extra complexity 2022 has over 2016 on a 20% budget increase is pretty great.

kylec• 3 years 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

tptacek3• 3 years 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.

airstrike2• 3 years ago

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

patrec3• 3 years ago

Telling yourself that no matter how many parasitic grifters the surplus gazillions attract, wikipedia will be "fine" won't make it so.

kajaktum2• 3 years ago

not giving money to one of the few online that provide free access to billions of people without ads

So what would you give your money to? inb4 typical homeless/war/refugee charity. People give money to way greater evil than Wikimedia. For example I myself bought expensive as shit coffee (not even worth the price) twice for the past 2 months. It's an overpriced garbage that I regret buying every time, but I never donated to Wikimedia either. I am sure you and many others share the same experience.

With regards to money, they can put all that to an investment company or something and continue to make more money. Why not? So far they have much better track record than any other organizations/companies that I can think of.

smsm427• 3 years ago

I hope they're politically neutral.

WMF is definitely not politically neutral, neither is English Wikipedia (don't know much about the rest).

t8sr8• 3 years 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.

noobermin• 3 years ago

To be honest, this more highlights how far out of step tech salaries are with...well everyone else.

cubefox5• 3 years ago

They obviously don't need 250 to 300 people. They need a few server admins and software developers, but no thinly veiled activists.

superchroma3• 3 years ago

Yeah but this isn't Facebook, it's just a free encyclopedia.

bomewish2• 3 years 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.

ThinkBeat3• 3 years ago

It says 700 employees and contractors in 2022.

I wonder what the biggest departments are.

Do you think Sysadmin / tech / development is the highest? followed by editors?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

droptablemain• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

What does political neutrality mean to you? Nothing in this world has no slant.

max_• 3 years ago

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

andersrs6• 3 years 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-annu...

It's mostly corporations but a lot of them are employee matching schemes.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

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

MagicMoonlight3• 3 years 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.

IceWreck2• 3 years 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.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

You're upset that a nonprofit org employs people?

JCharante• 3 years ago

They spend more money on travel than they do on hosting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...

pmoriarty• 3 years ago

How can this foundation be held accountable?

dougmwne2• 3 years 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.

oefrha3• 3 years 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.

gumby3• 3 years 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?

oefrha3• 3 years 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.

WeylandYutani3• 3 years ago

Reminds me of articles written by American think tanks trying to convince me a multipolar world is bad.

xpe9• 3 years ago

I think you might be confused about different meanings of ‘neutral’.

Wikipedia’s policy of a neutral point of view (NPOV) is not “neutral” in the broad spectrum of political philosophy. The underlying principles of Wikipedia draw very much from something akin to anthropology; namely, describe what exists and what is happening according to some culture or point of view.

There are plenty of regimes in the world that do not tolerate Wikipedia’s values.

MagicMoonlight3• 3 years ago

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

gumby3• 3 years ago

Shareholders? It’s a non-profit.

b3lvedere3• 3 years ago

Great financial packages for a non-profit

Akronymus4• 3 years ago

I thought most of it qent to donations to other "charities"?

lallysingh6• 3 years ago

[citation needed]

circlefavshape• 3 years ago

Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to shareholders and executives.

Reminder that the above is total horseshit.

Towaway692• 3 years 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.

dougmwne2• 3 years ago

Most of this is required public reporting for non-profits.

Vuizur• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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_deus2• 3 years 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.

humanistbot3• 3 years 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

machina_ex_deus2• 3 years 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.

hammock• 3 years ago

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

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

mjhay• 3 years ago

They have plenty of money. Why do they need to hire expensive executives to sweet-talk large donors? This line of justification is similar to that used to justify administrative bloat in universities.

jamilton3• 3 years ago

I agree that freelance-style paid editors isn't a great idea, but it's not the only option for paid editors.

whamlastxmas• 3 years ago

Something something block chain

hackernewds• 3 years 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

PrimeMcFly• 3 years ago

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

lallysingh6• 3 years 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.

detaro2• 3 years 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?

bradfa• 3 years 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.

cgio• 3 years 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.

lallysingh6• 3 years 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.

tchaffee4• 3 years 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.

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

You’d struggle to find one that doesn’t.

ajross• 3 years ago

Where are you getting 10-100x? None of the salaries in the linked article are even over $1M. As the upthread poster explains, these numbers are merely FAANG-competetive. None of these Wikemedia execs are making more than they would in a routine private sector position of the same seniority.

akolbe11• 3 years ago

18 months' severance.

US$623,286 when their last full year's base compensation was $400K.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...

lallysingh6• 3 years ago

Oh yikes, staff with a larger severance. I'm not surprised, I can't imagine it's easy to find a new CEO job after losing your last one.

morsch• 3 years ago

Were they fired or did they quit because they got a better job? Do people usually get a severance in the latter case?

concordDance4• 3 years ago

People are upset because it was working fine 10 years ago when execs were paid a fraction of the amount. They're upset because wikipedia asks for donations every year even though they've collected enough money to run wikipedia off interest from treasury bonds.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

What was FAANG developer salaries like 10 years ago? Was that 'working fine'?

nickthegreek• 3 years ago

then don't donate?

smsm427• 3 years ago

I don't think I ever heard any engineer leaving WMF, voluntarily or not, getting 18-month severance. I'm not sure why the CEO should. It's not like she is going to be destitute otherwise. I mean good for her for getting cool half mil just for leaving, but I don't see how it makes any sense for WMF. It's not like "nobody is going to want to be WMF CEO unless they are promised to get half mil for leaving", is it?

Generally WMF's salaries are on the low side - their VP Eng was getting 220K in 2020, and 255K in 2021, which is kinda low for a VP of a decent-sized engineering org - but that doesn't answer the question of severance.

mtttpt• 3 years ago

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• 3 years 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__• 3 years ago

The English-speaking world is not a monolith. They have the tilt of a fraction of the English-speaking world.

itronitron• 3 years ago

Are they hiring? lol

fuzzfactor• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

lbriner• 3 years 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.

jtefera2• 3 years 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?

barrkel3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

And you don’t think Wikipedia has that level of impact?

jillesvangurp• 3 years 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. I've been there. Nice place.

Look, this is just the tip of the ice berg: 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

These are the smallest parachutes to make headlines.

gcau• 3 years ago

Do not donate to Wikipedia.

Drblessing• 3 years ago

This is why you shouldn’t donate to Wikimedia

gadders5• 3 years 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.

bawolff6• 3 years 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.

gadders5• 3 years 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/quang...

akolbe11• 3 years 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...

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/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@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.

mikeryan2• 3 years ago

Executive compensation packages work differently and tend to be much more bonus driven.

Frequently these types of severance packages are to make up some sort of assumed bonus and ensure no compensation based contract disputes later.

gadders5• 3 years ago

Even if you quit voluntarily?

fcol• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

gamblor956• 3 years 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/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• 3 years ago

Imagine donating to this corrupt organization

caycep• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

America has an income stratification problem to go with it's wealth problem

bawolff6• 3 years 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/

hermitcrab• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

This is why I refuse to donate to WikiMedia.

weystrom• 3 years ago

Cheers, I'm never donating ever again.

fastily• 3 years 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.

xpe9• 3 years 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?

akolbe11• 3 years 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

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_twenty2• 3 years 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

gtirloni2• 3 years ago

They're laughing in mansions with brand new cars and sending their kids to Ivy League schools etc etc

C'mon. This is not Reddit.

HDThoreaun• 3 years ago

This doesn't seem productive

xpe9• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

akolbe11• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

andersrs6• 3 years 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.

Alpha30312• 3 years 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.

t8sr8• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

AlbertCory• 3 years 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_...

Here's the card:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp...

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years 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.

ThinkBeat3• 3 years 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.

ThinkBeat3• 3 years 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?

Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

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