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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.

4 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.

  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
  3. 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 )