Wikimedia Executives Receive Six-figure Golden Handshakes (theregister.co.uk) 139
Andreas Kolbe writes: The Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) recently released Form 990 shows that the organisation has developed a practice of handing outgoing managers six-figure severance payments, The Register reports. The foundation, which relies entirely on unpaid volunteers to generate the content of its websites, has taken around $300 million dollars over the past five years through fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia. The WMF says it is "committed to communicating with our volunteers, donors, and stakeholders in an open, accountable, and timely manner", but has long been criticised for providing little transparency on the salaries of its executives, limiting itself to the legally required Form 990 disclosures that only become public two years after the event.
Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:5, Interesting)
I always thought it was interesting that the wikipedia fundraising banners always make it sound like they're running out of money to run servers, but not even 25% of the money raised is even for servers. It's mostly for all these salaries and side projects that are mostly pointless or meaningless.
Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, we can look a bit closer at that [wikimediafoundation.org].
WMF spends about 40% of its revenues on engineering. Hosting is just the small cost: I ran a video CDN for over 120 news stations, and the hosting cost was roughly $3,500/month. My salary was over 1.5 times that; and the whole thing was controlled by custom software developed and maintained at costs ranging around $300,000/year. That used a single, non-geographically-distributed database.
WMF has to engineer an enormous, high-availability network with hundreds of replicated caches, databases, and Web servers. It has to handle security, software upgrades, and basic administrative tasks across this infrastructure. Something as simple as keeping system patches up-to-date is an enormous undertaking in that kind of environment, largely due to the amount of risk carried. They don't have one guy running their databases; they have dozens of DBAs, hundreds of sysadmins in total. People who complain that they can't have a $144k salary because someone might hire an Indian for $85k to replace them.
Management and Governance is that whole "running a business" thing. It's the thing that lets you accomplish large tasks without expending enormous amounts of effort. Slashdot, Fark, Ubuntu, Debian, and the FSF all have governance; they don't all get paid for it, but they all invest time. For some organizations, like WMF and FSF, governance is a full-time job for several people, and so ... well, we pay them.
All of this means WMF has HR costs, management costs, and functional costs. It also sends 10% of its money to grants, so some millions are just going out to fund charitable efforts. WMF spends more on grants than on hosting; hell, they spend more on legal than on hosting, because they need to avoid enormous costs from frivolous lawsuits by people like Peter Thiel.
So it looks like it's actually kind of expensive to run WMF. They also need to float large amounts of cash holdings year-to-year in case of unstable donation-based revenue streams. As WMF grows in activities, that risk reserve needs to enlarge, so their bank accounts and cash holdings get bigger.
Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the "unstable donation-based revenue stream", revenue has been on the up and up for every year of the foundation's existence. And whenever revenue has increased, spending has increased proportionally. It looks to me the spending is not driven by need, but by the availability of cash, including cash to pay managers the payments disclosed in the Form 990.
It takes 20,000 people donating $10, in the belief that this money is necessary to "keep Wikipedia online", as Wikipedia fundraising banners have put it, to pay one manager $200,000.
To me, asking for that kind of payment seems sharply discordant with the generosity of volunteers and donors contributing freely in the belief that they are helping to build a common good.
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So that justifies needing more than $5 million. It doesn't justify needing $90 million, or paying executives a six figure exit fee.
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Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:5, Informative)
Much the same traffic? Does it have much the same content [wikimedia.org]?
Every article retains its full history, from its creation to present state. Every edit. That means their database must handle an enormous amount of data, ever-growing, edit after edit. It never changes; it adds.
In 2007, Wikipedia's english site had 1.5 million articles; in 2015 it had 4.6 million. That's three times as many individual articles, with every edit to every article stored forever. The number of pieces and sheer amount of data stored and indexed is a complex, temporal function. For the number of articles, it's (time x rate[article creation]); for the number of pieces of data created, it's (time x rate[edits per article] x articles). Because the number of articles is increasing over time, you're looking at an exponential growth function. Note that it's exponential and not geometric because the rate of edits is related to a polynomial exponent of t, since the number of edits per time increases with time thus (t*(t*r)).
WMF also runs Wikinews, which carries news articles in dozens of languages. It runs Wikipedia in many languages all over the world. Every time it adds a new language, there's a new regional user base. If each language Wikipedia grows as above, then you have cubic growth until the rate of new Wikipedia languages slows.
The volume of data managed, the computer power required to manage that data, back-ups, administration costs, all of that is growing. It's growing faster every day.
As for the "unstable donation-based revenue stream", revenue has been on the up and up for every year of the foundation's existence
As per IRS NPO rules, the organization must show stability in the face of reasonable risks. Revenue streams from donations are not predictable; a sudden recession can slow the revenue stream while not slowing the expenses. As such, Wikipedia is legally required to maintain cash reserves some degree beyond their yearly expenses. When those expenses increase, they need to carry bigger cash reserves.
It looks to me the spending is not driven by need, but by the availability of cash, including cash to pay managers the payments disclosed in the Form 990
Out of $83 million, managers get less than $1 million. Product manager ~$100k, software engineer ~$144k. Management? Executive director $344k; General Counsel (lawyer) $258k; Deputy Director $302k; VP of Engineering $282k; Chief Operating Officer $250k. The executive compensations total about $2 million.
They also spent $3 on a post-it note pad, because that's included in spending of course.
whenever revenue has increased, spending has increased proportionally
From a legal perspective, IRS NPO rules require retention of a certain risk buffer, as well as limits to the amount of cash holding. You can't have revenues that much larger than your expenses.
That's not why spending increases with revenue, though, is it?
Revenue comes from donations. WMF gets donations from users. Users only donate so much. More users means more donations--also, more load, more costs in running the service. Being driven entirely on donations from people looking right at your site, revenue would be directly tied to how much load is on your site and, thus, the cost to support that load, wouldn't it?
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Wikipedia is legally required to maintain cash reserves some degree beyond their yearly expenses. When those expenses increase, they need to carry bigger cash reserves.
Yes, and if you spend x% more each year, then naturally you must ask for x% more money next year, just to have a big enough reserve again. And then you can spend more again, and again, ad nauseam. :) That's exactly what's been happening. WMF asks for and spends about 30 times as much money now as they did ten years ago. If WMF follows that logic for another ten years, it will require 30 times as much money in 2027 as it does this year, just to keep the reserve high enough. That will be $2.4 billion. And aft
Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and if you spend x% more each year, then naturally you must ask for x% more money next year
They ask for the maximum amount of money donators are willing to give. Donators are site visitors. Where is this extra money coming from?
Are you telling me the same people are donating 30 times as much as they did 10 years ago? Like, did the 1,000,000 users who donated $5 each in 2007 instead donate $150 each?
Let's look at the part of my argument you ignored: the part about how they somehow managed to get this extra money. Where is this money coming from? Why are people donating more?
Running from October 22, 2007 to January 6, 2008, the 07-08 Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser led to contributions totaling 2.162 million dollars from nearly 45,000 donors worldwide.
Over a period of 50 days, more than 500,000 people from 150 countries donated directly to the Wikimedia Foundation, and nearly 200,000 people donated directly to 12 local chapters. During the 2010 Fundraiser, the Foundation received its millionth donation. Our messages were shown across Wikimedia projects localized into more than 80 languages.
# of donations, 2009: 243,668; total donations: $8,691,995; average donation: $35.67; campaign length: 67 days.
# of donations, 2010: 527,583; total donations: $15,026,289; average donation: $28.48; campaign length: 50 days.
Huh. In 2010, they spent 17 fewer days asking for money; they got less money per individual donations; and they got over twice as many donations.
International localization efforts increased substantially in 2011. Wikimedia volunteers showed their support by translating fundraising messages into over 100 languages to reach hundreds of millions of people. The Wikimedia Foundation integrated with a new payment processor to be able to process donations in 80 currencies, accepting 12 payment methods from countries worldwide.
Twenty more languages in 2011.
# of donations, 2011: 1,130,131; total donations: $24,018,004.28; average donation: $21.25; campaign length: 46 days.
Fewer fundraiser days, more donations, less per donation again!
The Wikimedia Foundation raised $51 million USD in the 2013-14 fiscal year, including $37 million from more than 2.5 million donors through the foundations' s online fundraising. Online funds were raised through desktop, mobile and email campaigns worldwide, making this Wikimedia’s most successful fundraising campaign to date. The overwhelming majority of the Foundation's funding comes from individual Wikipedia readers from all over the world giving an average of $15 USD.
# of donations, 2011: 2,666,167; total donations: $51,070,659.50; average donation: $19.14; campaign length: year-round rolling worldwide, approximately 14 days per country.
More donations, less per donation again!
More than 4 million donors around the world donated $75 million USD to make the Wikimedia Foundation's 2014–2015 fiscal year the most successful fundraising cycle in our history.
Four million donors!!!
Yeah, see, it looks like they're getting more money by getting more people donating. Bigger audience.
Commons content has grown significantly, and it does have large files. As far as I recall, it doesn't account for very many pageviews though, compared to Wikipedia.
You completely ignore that large file content is nothing compared to the entire history of all pages on every Wikipedia ever. Again: Wikipedia pages get edited constantly. The articles about Slashdot and Diazepam have been edited 50 times since August, 2016; the pages about Gravity and Epipens has been edited 250 times in the same period; the page about Donald Trump has had over 500 edits since 27 April 2017; the page about Ronald Reagan has ha
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In 2007, Wikipedia's english site had 1.5 million articles; in 2015 it had 4.6 million. That's three times as many individual articles, with every edit to every article stored forever. The number of pieces and sheer amount of data stored and indexed is a complex, temporal function. For the number of articles, it's (time x rate[article creation]); for the number of pieces of data created, it's (time x rate[edits per article] x articles). Because the number of articles is increasing over time, you're looking at an exponential growth function. Note that it's exponential and not geometric because the rate of edits is related to a polynomial exponent of t, since the number of edits per time increases with time thus (t*(t*r)).
Wrong. Even if I don't dispute your assumptions (constant rate of new article creations, constant rate of edits per article), the resulting function is quadratic, not exponential.
Also, the majority of historic versions is probably seldom viewed, so they do not contribute to site load much.
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The rate of edits per article per unit of time is a fraction of what it used to be. Basically, many articles are fairly static compared to ten years ago, when new content creation was at its peak.
And you're right; the vast majority of old article revisions are n
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Re: Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:1)
They deserve it, honestly. Look at all the garbage companies in Silicon Valley (pretty much all of them) with as much or more operating capital. Meanwhile Wikipedia has created a resource by leveraging crowdsourcing which you'd by hard pressed to find a person who hasn't benefited directly from.
Re: Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:5, Insightful)
They deserve it, honestly.
Since they are not transparent about what they spend the money on, you don't know if they deserve it or not. All you know for sure is that WMF's foundation thinks it is best to obscure the truth.
There are several organizations that rate charities. You should do your research before you donate. Many, many non-profits are not what they seem. They divert huge amounts of money into salary, perks, and fund raising, while only a small fraction is spent on the supposed beneficiaries. I once visited the United Way offices in Alexandria VA, and marveled at all the beautiful Italian marble tiling. How many children went hungry to pay for that?
Re: Intentionally misleading fundraising (Score:4, Informative)
They deserve it, honestly.
Since they are not transparent about what they spend the money on, you don't know if they deserve it or not. All you know for sure is that WMF's foundation thinks it is best to obscure the truth.
There are several organizations that rate charities. You should do your research before you donate.
At the very least you should do this. But charity ratings have serious limitations. They are limited mostly based on certain standardized transparency criteria - budget reporting and the like, to ensure that the money is not just being deposited in someones private bank account, for example. Wikimedia has a high charity rating, which puzzled me since I could not find out what they were actually doing with the money they bring in. Digging a little deeper, I concluded that Jimmy has broken new ground in "charity engineering", working out how to structure the organization to get a high rating - but rendering those standards absolutely meaningless.
Consider all the money being spent on "engineering".
Is any meaningful engineering actually being done? Where is the value being added? What deficiencies in Wikipedia were that have been remedied by this "engineering"? What enhancements? Since this is charity for educational purposes, maybe all the "engineering" could be put on Github, or open sourced like for-profit companies are know to do. And then they could leverage volunteer developers like Linux and other open source projects do, and make Wikimedia's funds go farther.
If that "engineering" even exists.
But if instead fat "engineering" salaries are being paid out to FOJ ("friends of Jimmy") for doing nothing, the charity rating organizations would not know or care, and would (and do) give them high marks simply by providing that line item in public reports. And as the business with the 990 forms shows, Wikimedia only seems to "care" about transparency when it is just checking off the list of things that charity raters use for compiling scores.
Looking at Wikimedia's "roadmaps" that they share over the last several years a key point are plans for 20% revenue increase every year, year after year. No rationale is offered for why this aggressive growth is "needed". This is a plan for an aggressively expanding start up, not a charity.
Many, many non-profits are not what they seem. They divert huge amounts of money into salary, perks, and fund raising, while only a small fraction is spent on the supposed beneficiaries. I once visited the United Way offices in Alexandria VA, and marveled at all the beautiful Italian marble tiling. How many children went hungry to pay for that?
The United Way has long disturbed me. It is not really charity itself, it is a "bundler" for other charities. I have worked at companies where United Way was the quasi-official charity for the company, which sponsored contribution drives, and pressured employees to donate. In recent years Untied Way has paid incredible salaries to its CEO, at a time of poor organizational performance.
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They do. It's called the "Form 990" and it's right here. (Exec compensation is on page 51.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/44/Wikimedia_Foundation_2015_Form_990.pdf
If you're dumb enough to donate to Wikipedia, well, I've got another couple of "charities" you might be also interested in.
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If you're dumb enough to donate to Wikipedia, well, I've got another couple of "charities" you might be also interested in.
They're the only company in Silicon Valley I'd consider a net win for Humanity by their existence. They deserve more to be honest.
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Given that contributors donate their time, given that readers donate money, isn't there a moral case to be made that departing managers should not ask to be handed a six-figure sum upon leaving, enabling them to do nothing for two years?
You get kids donating a bit of their pocket money to Wikipedia, believing the site is in f
Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get it, do you? I'm a retired mathematician. I have contributed quite a bit to their site, in time, money, and knowledge. I haven't done so, in a while, but that is for other reasons.
I volunteered this. I did this expecting nothing in return, not even gratitude. I did it because I wanted to. I did it because I could.
When I donate, it is a gift. Gifts are given without expectations of recipricocity, or even gratitude. When I gift something, it is a gift without strings. They may do with my gift what they want. They can throw it away, even. They don't even have to like it, or appreciate it.
I did these things, and more, knowing this. Volunteering is just another form of gifting.
If I give you something, it belongs to you. Do with it what you will.
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You say you "did this expecting nothing in return, not even gratitude". Doesn't it strike you that the attitude of WMF managers, involved in building the same project as you, yet asking for $200,000 over and above the rightful compensation they received for their work – all paid from those donations – is strikingly different from your attitude?
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Wait, what?
I don't think I've ever thought WMF was in financial trouble. That's kinda why I donate - so they won't be in financial trouble. And no, no - I'm not bothered by the executive salaries, bonuses, or departure compensations. Not even a wee bit.
I'd take issue with your use of the phrase "rightful compensation" but I doubt that's going to be a productive conversation.
Yeah, I'm okay that they get paid - and get paid well. I'm grateful for the services rendered and haven't any issue with them being pai
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I don't think I've ever thought WMF was in financial trouble.
Then you differ from many people. There are countless expressions of concern online from people who've seen the fundraising banners. Moreover, many Wikipedia volunteers over the years have expressed concern that the fundraising messages make it sound like there is a financial emergency when in fact there isn't. Over the years, it's been a recurrent topic of conversation on the Wikimedia mailing list, every December.
I'm okay that they get paid - and get paid well.
I am okay with that too, though I draw the line at severance payments of this magnitude. YMMV
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I don't actually think of that as being a whole lot of money, certainly not when compared to many others. I can do dig up some numbers, if I can find publicly available data, but (at first blush - and only going by memory) that's a paltry sum, when compared to many other organizations - both for ant not-for profit. It's really not that much and I'm not even a wee bit bugged by it.
I kinda doubt that I'm in the minority. I just expect you're going to see the most comments from people who are displeased. Had t
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Well said. Wikipedia is in great financial shape, and this somehow gets turned around as a bad thing. I think precisely the opposite.
I donated some amount to Wikipedia a few years ago, and had no expectations beyond that I wanted to support a site that, for many years now, I've considered part of the critical infrastructure of the internet (StackOverflow is another, as I'm a programmer, and Google Search makes up the trifecta, allowing me to find data on those sites).
The fact that they're doing so well fi
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Right? LOL
As I said in a different comment, I've never been under the illusion that they were hurting financially - only that they needed continued donations to keep the project in good shape. I *like* that they have extra money. This isn't going to stop me from donating, not at all. That they gave someone(s) a parting bonus, not even a very large sum, is immaterial.
As a rough guess, since the early days, I've donated a large five figure sum to WMF. I consider it money well spent - and I kinda hate spending
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You'll need to clarify the last statement, if you want me to understand.
To be clear, I don't mind them profiting handsomely. I'd quite prefer they be well rewarded. There are other worthy groups and I donate to them as well. (If you're curious, I'm partial to the ACLU and Heifer International.) If you mean the volunteers at WMF, I'd mention, again, that I've volunteered in the past and consider that to be a gift, as well. Volunteering is gifting - if pay is expected then it isn't volunteering. I don't gift
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The money the WMF raises does not go to the contributors who create the content. (Okay, some volunteers apply for grants for something or other, and get them, but that is a very, very small percentage of contributors.) The broad mass of volunteers does not get anything.
The WMF does not write the content, and does not check it. They don't even purchase accounts for volunteers to access paywalled sources. (Ther
Wish I Could.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I beg to differ - I've left a lot of jobs and never gotten six figures for it. Not even if you count the decimal places.
Clearly it's not as easy as that - making that kind of money by quitting is predicated on getting one of the tiny percentage of jobs with such generous departure packages in the first place. And that is NOT easy - in fact by comparing the tiny number of such jobs to the total number of people in the workforce, it's clear that it's not only difficult, but outright impossible for most peop
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Ah, you're talking about incremental salary increases, not severance packages. My mistake.
Duh (Score:2)
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Get some real world experience. Executive board members are not doing much of anything other than bullshitting most of the time, making a very small number of high level decisions that get pushed down to the people actually running the company and either golf 280 days a year or serve on several other boards (because they have plenty of time when they don't have a fucking job) doing the same thing.
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Yes I have a problem with this... (Score:5, Interesting)
...and you should too.
My problem with this stems from the piss-poor job that has been done dealing with the king-of-the-hill mentality among frequent editors, basically those people who have made Wikipedia their hobby and will edit-out other peoples' contributions simply because they do not like them. The upper management of the Foundation is making far too much money for the lack of oversight of what's going on at the edge where the actual action happens. Frankly, from the outside it looks like the wild-west, where there is no oversight and those trolls who camp on articles. For all it looks like from the outside there may as well be one guy with an office outside the datacenter keeping the servers and connection working, and leaving the whole built-architecture alone.
I don't have a problem with good salaries, but I expect good results for those salaries. I expect management to be poking-in and tweaking things and making things run well if they want donation dollars to pay them to keep their money-sink running. It's rather insulting to be begging for money from the public to then go around pay pay themselves handsomely while doing a poor job of running the entity that the money was given to support.
Re:Yes I have a problem with this... (Score:5, Interesting)
hasn't this "king-of-the-hill mentality" been an endemic so-called problem with wikipedia for the past ten-plus years, during which, of course, wikipedia has been functioning well enough for almost everyone (and certainly no worse than it has ever actually functioned; wikipedia is only bad when compared to what might possibly have been in a thought-experiment world)? as long as people like, presumably, you keep fighting, there's enough churn to keep the outskirts from totally locking up and the system will continue.
i don't know; is WMF even meant to deal with this supposed problem in the first place? maybe they actually do a lot of good work on issues of copyright and censorship, which could at least potentially be existential threats to wikipedia's existence, as opposed to an inevitable side-effect of using an anarchic egoist model to solicit content from people for free.
WMF declares their purpose (in a large textbox at the head of their front page [wikimediafoundation.org]) to be "... encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge," and further that they "operate... Wikipedia" toward this purpose. In short, their objective is much broader than just micro-managing the edit turf wars which, as much as you dislike them, are business-as-usual for wikipedia, if not its foundational principle. WMF may still be failing at their stated purpose; i don't know anywhere near enough to know whether this is the case, let alone to start assigning blame.
Re:Yes I have a problem with this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it hard to complain about this issue.
If Wikipedia truly was awful in some general way, the idea that somebody got $xxx,xxx severance while the organization kept pleading for money in a very obnoxious way I might be annoyed.
But generally speaking, the content is amazing in its depth and breadth on so many topics for the general reader (and possibly even for people who are in-field experts) and the "fund raising" seems so infrequent that it seems hard to complain.
The very fact that it exists at all with that much good content is pretty astonishing.
If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, I would have to lower the 5 star rating of the entirety of the Internet (content + functionality) by like an entire star due to its loss. At this point, it's literally one of the single highest value sites on the network. No ads, very little obvious bias even on controversial subjects and astonishing breadth and depth of information. For free.
It's so good that I laughed at myself for being annoyed about something missing. I had been watching a fairly awful movie (The Brad Pitt Jesse James movie) and was distracting myself by reading the Wikipedia entries of the real-life people presented in the movie. A bunch of minor historical characters in the movie all have entries, but the woman who owned a farm/rooming house where the gang hid out in later years doesn't have a page. And then I thought to myself, this is a problem? This woman is kind of a foot note to a foot note of history and there's probably near zero primary sources about her, but Wikipedia is so good that you just expect you can drill down into so much minutia and actually read something.
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yeah, i have to agree.
a few years ago, i thought that the general Bayesian Statistics article was silly because it was being lorded over by a demi-intellectual in love with his own non-standard generalization of the binomial distribution that made it overly technical for a general reader while being merely a mechanical, albeit complicated, exercise for a skilled practitioner. but that's how shit works in wikiworld; it's not like this guy is being paid and, apart from this silly indulgence, he was maintainin
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There is little need for money to fuel Wikipedia content production. Ten years ago, when content production was at its peak, the Wikimedia Foundation had 11 employees and a twentieth of the budget it has today. Wikipedia looked and worked much the same then as it does now
People, by and large, donate "to Wikipedia" (but in reality to the Wikimedia Foundation) because they believe there is a shortage of funds to keep Wikipedia up an
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wikipedia doesn't have any ads except occasionally for itself, and i don't know what you mean by "a little easier"; it would take hours or days to collect and collate even half the information in a good wikipedia article, which is usually well-cited, so at worst you can just use it as a "meta-search engine" if you want.
i think you're just complaining for the sake of it. the amazon/uber part literally makes no sense at all.
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and how much money do your bosses make?
i sympathize with the angst, but every non-profit spends at least some money on governance, and executives always make more money than plebs (unless it's a PR campaign where they take a symbolic $1/year or other dumb shit).
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Content production, curation, quality checking etc. is all left to unpaid volunteers. That is by design – the WMF doesn't want to be a publisher or arbiter of content. In part, that's because they would then become potentially liable for defamation, errors, etc., whereas now, they're just an online service provider protected from any such liability by Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act. Contributors themselves a
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My problem with this stems from the piss-poor job that has been done dealing with the king-of-the-hill mentality among frequent editors
What is your solution? Maybe it could earn you a nice salary and then a six-figure severance after you realize there is no reasonably easy way to deal with the problem and move on.
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is to run a not for profit.
...and have hordes of kind people working on your project at "no profit".
Healthy reminder (Score:2)
They have competition [infogalactic.com]. Why waste money supporting them when you can send it to a lean organization that is run by people who are ruthlessly dedicated to not repeating Wikipedia's mistakes?
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Hardly a neutral point of view, there
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The only site beating wikipedia for not being neutral is rationalwiki.
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You forgot Conservapedia, they have their shit together /s
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high-risk social technology fork (Score:2)
Would you put it on an Infogalactic fact page that the original Nupedia editors were anything less than "ruthlessly dedicated"?
No, you would not.
This is a high-risk social technology fork.
Their ruthless
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Just look at Goodwill... (Score:5, Interesting)
Non-profit doesn't mean charity in the Christian sense.
Goodwill's CEO took over $700k in compensation in 2015, and the eight execs below him took close to $200k each on average.
https://www.goodwill.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Goodwill-Industries-International-Form-990-2015.pdf/ [goodwill.org]
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In other words, if the execs aside from the CEO went to Series A startups, they'd be making the same amount of money, but they'd get stock as well. And those startups would be a lot smaller and thus a lot simpler.
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This seems to contradict your assertion that employment law dictates s
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And there also is no legal requirement under California law that employers provide severance pay to an employee upon termination of employment.
Re: Cost of Doing Business (Score:2)
Employment law in the US generally does not dictate severance pay exist at all, much less how it should be calculated. Do you think some specific law covers these executives?
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I must agree with the others - there is no legal basis for requiring severance pay in the US. Court-mandated "severance pay" is restitution imposed by the court specifically in cases of a termination that violates the law and/or the employment contract, and is not relevant to normally terminated employment.
Furthermore, especially in the case of executives, such severance packages become clearly self-serving as it's the executives themselves who establish the policies that determine what they and their coll
So... that's where my donation to WikiPedia went (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've donated regularly, but this year they annoyed me so much with their campaign that I stopped. I now understand they became so obnoxious to be able to pay their managers. I think I won't donate next time either.
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Sorry. I discount your comment based on the link you provided. Got a more reputable news source than Fox "News"?
I wouldn't have used that link if I didn't think it were OK in this instance. The article I cited has links to CBS News and Charity Navigator on this topic. So, I guess it's your ignorance that you continue to foster. Funny that you are so afraid of reading something you might disagree with. Welcome to your filter bubble.
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Sorry. I discount your comment based on the link you provided. Got a more reputable news source than Fox "News"? I don't read propaganda.
This is the sort of news you'd expect Fox News to suppress. The fact that it's from Fox makes it more believable, not less.
Is this number high or low? (Score:5, Insightful)
Potential employees at a nonprofit expect to receive salaries, and executives are no exception. If you don't pay them market-competitive salaries, then you are likely to get less talented workers. On the executive level, this means yes, you do have to worry about bonuses. The question is, how much responsibility did these executives have? How do their salaries and bonuses compare to their peers in other organizations? The bonuses could be too high, but they could also be too low. Of course, transparency is needed to know which of these it is.
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Something nobody is questioning or debating.
No, that's not the question at all. The question is, what are these executives doing that justifies these salaries?
That is the heart of the matter - what are the donors to the Wikimedia Foundatio
Lack of Moral Authority (Score:3)
Potential employees at a nonprofit expect to receive salaries, and executives are no exception. If you don't pay them market-competitive salaries, then you are likely to get less talented workers.
The problem with this is that if they are not willing to give up a large fraction of their clearly enormous salaries they immediately lose their moral authority to ask others who earn far less than them to donate.
It used to be that big jobs like this were either an opportunity for someone up and coming to gain the experience to gain a big management position in a major company which they earned them the big money. Alternatively, it provided a corporate executive nearing retirement a way to use their ski
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In 2007, for example, when Wikipedia was already a top-10 internet site, the WMF had less than a dozen employees (compared to something approaching 300 today). How much value have the $350-odd million in donations and the hundreds of employees added since then, over and above
I am mixed (Score:2)
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200K is not a lot for a top executive. If they were working at a for profit outfit they'd be making far more.
This isn't about the salary, but the severance bonus they get for leaving.
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When bullets would've been so cheap...
I mean, for that money you could axe them with a Tomahawk.
for their high life I should donate? (Score:1)
Devils Advocate, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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