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Wikimedia Executives Receive Six-figure Golden Handshakes (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the what's-happening dept.

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.

7 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Intentionally misleading fundraising by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 3, 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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  2. Yes I have a problem with this... by TWX · · 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.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:Yes I have a problem with this... by retchdog · · 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) 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.

      --
      "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
    2. Re:Yes I have a problem with this... by swb · · Score: 4, 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.

  3. Just look at Goodwill... by bagofbeans · · Score: 4, 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/

  4. So... that's where my donation to WikiPedia went by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I no longer plan to donate to the project. (this reminds me of the Wounded Warriors fiasco )