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

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.

Comments

Intentionally misleading fundraising

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

Actually, internet hosting costs them only $2 million a year. See page no. 3 in this document. Total support and revenue, for comparison, stood at $81.9 million last year. So 2.5% of the fundraising income is spent on hosting.

Re: Intentionally misleading fundraising

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually, we can look a bit closer at that.

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

In 2007 Wikipedia was a top-10 website with much the same traffic as today and got by on revenue of $5 million. Today it asks for – and gets – 16 times as much. Content creation costs nothing and is done by volunteers, who also retain legal responsibility for the content they contribute. The WMF itself has always been protected from liability by Section 230(c).

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.

Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising

[DuckDodgers]

Do you have metrics for the traffic? I have a hard time believing the volume of data they stored and served in 2007 was even 10% of what they have to handle today. And even though hardware has gotten cheaper over that time, scaling horizontally is not trivial.

So that justifies needing more than $5 million. It doesn't justify needing $90 million, or paying executives a six figure exit fee.

Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising

[bluefoxlucid]

Much the same traffic? Does it have much the same content?

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?

Re: Intentionally misleading fundraising

[ShanghaiBill]

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

Pagecounts. Admittedly, traffic was somewhat less in 2008 (that's as far back as that graph goes), but it has more or less plateaued for the past four of five years (while annual revenue more than doubled over the same period).

Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising

[Andreas Kolbe]

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 after another ten years, $72 billion. I think something will give before then. :)

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.

Wikinews is practically dead. (English Wikinews, at any rate; I don't think it's any different in the other languages.) So are many of the other Wikipedia language versions. A slide shown at Wikimania 2014 said that of 284 Wikipedia language versions, 12 were "dead" (locked), 53 were "zombies" (open, no editors), and 94 were "struggling" (open, less than 5 editors). 125 were described as "in good or excellent health" (that number included every Wikipedia language version that had 6 or more editors).

In my opinion, a Wikipedia language version that has 6 volunteers working on it could not be described as in "good health".

But 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.

Re: Intentionally misleading fundraising

[crunchygranola]

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.

Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising

[bluefoxlucid]

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

Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising

[tajribah]

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.

Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising

[Andreas Kolbe]

In fact, Wikipedia's edit rate has dropped significantly since its high-point in 2007. In May 2007, it took about 5 weeks for 10 million new edits to be added. Presently, it's 9 weeks; the number of edits per unit of time has approximately halved.

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 never looked at.

Wish I Could....

[Luthair]

Quit jobs every couple years and get 6-figures.

Re:Wish I Could....

[Immerman]

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 people to get such a job even once.

Re:Wish I Could....

[Immerman]

Ah, you're talking about incremental salary increases, not severance packages. My mistake.

Duh

[110010001000]

Duh. They aren't doing it for fun.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Duh

[110010001000]

That does under the "duh" file too. You don't think tech board members actually do any work do you? They are just riding the wave of money that is in tech.

Yes I have a problem with this...

[TWX]

...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...

[retchdog]

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.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[Andreas Kolbe]

The Wikimedia Foundation does not participate in content production at all.

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 are legally responsible for any content they add to Wikipedia.

So I don't think you'll ever see the WMF intervene in content production.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[hcs_$reboot]

Similar to geocaching (the guy at the top makes a fortune)

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[swb]

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.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[chispito]

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.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[orgelspieler]

I have made hundreds of edits to Wikipedia over the years, thousands if you count minor changes. I have never had a well-sourced edit get reverted. In fact the only two reverts I can think of were instances of me trolling anonymously. Maybe I just don't wade in the same waters as you. I know there have been edit wars. I know there are some people who think they own articles. I just have never experienced it. There are procedures in place for these sorts of things, and normally the community handles it in an equitable fashion. With a project this size and scope, it's not surprising that some things get missed.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[retchdog]

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 maintaining an article fairly diligently, a challenge to which i was not willing to aspire, so i just let it go. over-active egos in human orgs are like air bubbles caught in your shoe: you can't easily get rid of them without cutting up your shoes, and at best you just mush it around to somewhere you don't notice it as much.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[Andreas Kolbe]

And all of that amazing content is brought to you by unpaid volunteers.

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 and running and, like you, would not like to see it disappear. But the Wikimedia Foundation isn't in financial trouble; it is swimming in cash, and has been less transparent about many things, including executive compensation, than it could be.

In my view the WMF could do more to demonstrate that it is spending these increasing amounts of money on things that actually benefit readers and volunteer contributors in some palpable way (including how much was spent on each of these). Cost/benefit statements, so people can see that their money has been put to good use.

There are many reader- and contributor-facing things the WMF could do, but doesn't, to my knowledge. For example, they could pay to provide volunteers with free access to paywalled sources, to enable them to cite better references, and create more reliable content (present initiatives in this area seem rudimentary). They could provide readers with tools enabling them to gauge the trustworthiness of an article, based on its sourcing, or how much healthy community involvement it has seen (what information there is now is so impenetrable that no casual reader can make sense of it). They could communicate more openly about known problems in Wikipedia projects that readers should be aware of. Example. Things like that.

Many volunteers – content writers – are quite jaded about the WMF, feeling the WMF get free money off the back of their volunteer work and spend it on stuff that doesn't really help. Spending money in ways that produce little benefit has been an acknowledged problem in the past.

It is difficult, because both contributors and readers are an amorphous mass, and the WMF has perhaps tried to listen more of late under the new CEO. But when I see managers with a checkered work history receiving six-figure windfalls, or wanting to spend $32 million of donated funds on building a Google competitor, or the WMF clamming up and being unresponsive to reasonable questions, or putting out misleading fundraising messages as they have in the past, I am not convinced that this does justice to the mission people gave money to support. The money given to the WMF is given to them in trust, and in my opinion they need to do more to earn it. That's what this is about, not whether Wikipedia is useful or not.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[retchdog]

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).

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[Tristfardd]

In many ways Wikipedia is a depressing creation. The Internet is a sea of information. The search engines are quite good. If you search on a word or an event, you get good information. In areas, particularly commercial, you have to wade through crazed advertising. In areas political you have to wade through swamps filled with monsters. So what? Wikipedia doesn't do any better in these areas. Instead Wikipedia presents dumbed down versions of things and because it is a little easier than using a search engine, people use it. How is it different from people using Amazon though it destroys their local jobs? Or using Uber no matter how it behaves? People will flock to things perceived as easier or cheaper. People will continue to use Wikipedia. Saying that its loss would lessen the value of the Internet shows a lack of understanding about the Internet, yet does show an understanding about people. John

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[retchdog]

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.

Re:Yes I have a problem with this...

[Tristfardd]

Not complaining for no reason. Wikipedia really does bother me. An article written in Britannica is normally written by a single person and the article has a 'voice'. The articles in Wikipedia all come across as an attempt to present information. But human beings want their information presented in context, the human context. It is great to read an article written by an enthusiastic person. That enthusiasm, that the writer really considers the material great stuff, makes it more of 'great stuff' to me, the reader. The Wikipedia articles do not come across this way. They present the information. Period. It is not that hard to find information on a subject. Sometimes you have to include "-amazon" and a few others in the search field. There are also whole categories, such as medicine, that people can find the best information elsewhere. I guess I came across as ranting and apologize for that. John

Re:Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> it might be nice to know how they're gonna spend it

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.

Healthy reminder

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

They have competition. 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?

Re:Healthy reminder

[jpatters]

Hardly a neutral point of view, there

Re:Healthy reminder

[Mashiki]

The only site beating wikipedia for not being neutral is rationalwiki.

Re:Healthy reminder

[Paradise Pete]

If infogalactic intends to be taken seriously they should move away from that "galactic" stuff.

Re:Healthy reminder

[lactose99]

You forgot Conservapedia, they have their shit together /s

Just look at Goodwill...

[bagofbeans]

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/

Re:Just look at Goodwill...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[Andreas Kolbe]

Well, Wikipedia is entirely written by unpaid volunteers (excepting the odd paid PR writer).

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. (There is the Wikipedia Library, but as far as I know, that relies on donated accounts.)

So... that's where my donation to WikiPedia went

[QuietLagoon]

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

Is this number high or low?

[bluegutang]

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.

Re:Is this number high or low?

[DerekLyons]

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.

Something nobody is questioning or debating.
 

The question is, how much responsibility did these executives have?

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 Foundation getting for their money?

Re:Cost of Doing Business

[Andreas Kolbe]

Could you explain this in more detail? The US Department of Labor states, "Severance pay is often granted to employees upon termination of employment. It is usually based on length of employment for which an employee is eligible upon termination. There is no requirement in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for severance pay. Severance pay is a matter of agreement between an employer and an employee (or the employee's representative)."

This seems to contradict your assertion that employment law dictates severance pay on an increasing scale.

Re:One of the best ways to make personal profit

[hcs_$reboot]

is to run a not for profit.

...and have hordes of kind people working on your project at "no profit".

Re:Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[NicknameUnavailable]

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.

Re:Cost of Doing Business

[TheSync]

And there also is no legal requirement under California law that employers provide severance pay to an employee upon termination of employment.

Re:Value delivered

[Andreas Kolbe]

Given that all of the content of Wikipedia, Commons etc. is contributed and curated by unpaid volunteers, the question is how much of the "value" is due to the paid staff. Because the staff take no part in writing or checking content.

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 the content freely contributed by unpaid volunteers, and was the money spent efficiently to create the most value for readers and contributors?

In 2005, Jimmy Wales was proud to tell people:

“So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that’s essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee We actually hired Brion [Vibber] because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.”

It's a very different animal today.

Re:This is new terminology for me...

[slashdice]

pretty much the same thing, except instead of getting pissed on, you do the pissing. while your friends laugh and hand you a briefcase full of $100 bills.

Re: Cost of Doing Business

[Entrope]

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?

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[Andreas Kolbe]

Tell this to the unpaid volunteers who write the content that you and others appreciate so much. They get nothing under this arrangement, while the WMF sits by a faucet spewing money.

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 financial trouble. You get people in developing countries donating $5, which to them is a lot of money. It takes 40,000 such people making that sacrifice, believing they are contributing to a better world, to pay one manager that extra $200,000.

In my view, it stinks.

I am mixed

[paiute]

I don't have a kneejerk bad reaction to this news. Maybe there is justification for it. But I am not going to give them my $50 annually anymore.

Re:I am mixed

[110010001000]

Why would you donate any money to a tech company? They are rolling in money.

Re:So... that's where my donation to WikiPedia wen

[cmeans]

I too am disappointed about this news and will probably find a "better" place for the technology donation I usually make later this year.

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[KGIII]

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.

Re:So... that's where my donation to WikiPedia wen

[Xenna]

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.

Re:Cost of Doing Business

[Immerman]

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 colleagues will receive when they inevitably depart.

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[Andreas Kolbe]

You gave your time freely. Donors gave their money freely, believing Wikipedia to be in financial trouble. That's generous.

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?

for their high life I should donate?

[ReneR]

Thanks, but no thanks!!! Vote with your wallet, don't donate,

Re:Executive compensation

[arth1]

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.

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[KGIII]

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 paid well.

Re:Executive compensation

[Opportunist]

When bullets would've been so cheap...

I mean, for that money you could axe them with a Tomahawk.

Re:Something wrong with your link

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Devils Advocate, but...

[101percent]

Six figures really isn't much these days. Marissa Mayer got eight figures and by metrics the wikimedia projects are just as popular if not moreso than yahoo (I know its a bad comparison between serving static pages and running all the services of yahoo).

Re:Devils Advocate, but...

[captaindomon]

Agreed. For an extremely low paid CEO in the US, it's maybe a couple of months? For a high paid CEO it's a couple of hours? I'm not saying we shouldn't look at CEO pay in general, but this is so extremely modest as US CEOs go it's almost embarassing.

high-risk social technology fork

[epine]

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?

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.

When in doubt about how to apply the rules or interpret the philosophy, ask your fellow Galaxians. If they don't know the answer, ask a Starlord.

Their ruthless dedication to going boldly forth with new, improved post-cosmic-rapture mistakes is alarmingly evident.

I've personally never held the WMF up as a paragon of wart-free social order. In the end, they're probably far less corrupt than many upstanding institutions with a long history of presenting a clean front.

Superforecasters always ask themselves this question: what's the base rate?

* How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business

Well, it's not good. Not good at all. And I didn't even regard this as being more than a single bogie, as these things go. There needs to be an offshore bank account involved just to add one more stroke.

Corruption is an exponential scale.

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[Andreas Kolbe]

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.

Re:Golden Handshakes

[slickwillie]

A Golden Shower with a shaky hand?

Lack of Moral Authority

[Roger W Moore]

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 skills to do some good for society after they had already earned their big money.

If a non-profit CEO thinks so little of the cause that they are not willing to accept a lower-than-market salary in return for the non-financial rewards of such a position they are in no position to ask anyone else to donate.

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[Dutch Gun]

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 financially is just proof to me that, whatever sort of internal problems they may have (because, you know... people), they're serving the public well enough to easily sustain themselves on pure donations. That means they're doing something right, and I think it's fine to pay their executives competitive compensation.

Then again, I don't lay awake at night gnashing my teeth, worrying about how other people earn more money than me.

Re:So... that's where my donation to WikiPedia wen

[PoopJuggler]

Why? Because they paid people to make it all work? Where did you think your money was going? Even if everyone there worked for free, they still have to pay for services which means someone, somewhere is getting your money...

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[KGIII]

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 the subject not come up on Slashdot, it's rather unlikely that I'd be seeking out a place to write about my lack of displeasure. So, yeah... Of course you're going to see comments from the displeased. Content and happy people don't really take the time to go out and tell folks they're not unhappy.

It does make me question how much it'd take, in renumeration, for me to be angry - or to cease donating. I don't have an exact figure, not that I can think of. It'd probably take a sum that's significantly greater than this. $200,000 really isn't all that much. In the late 90s, I employed senior developers and some of them made figures similar to that. Maybe that'll help you see it from my perspective?

I'm not even a wee bit distraught, by this. I will continue to donate yearly. I typically send them a goodly sum and will continue to do so.

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[KGIII]

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 money, unless I have to. I'm also pretty sure they'd have done even better, financially speaking, at for-profit organizations. If I give someone a gift, it belongs to them - it is their property to do with as they want. If I'm telling them what they have to do with the money, I'm not giving them a gift - I'm paying for a service.

Unfortunately, all people are (mostly) hearing is the voices of the angry. I'm going to guess that the vast majority of us aren't angry. I've even seen folks complain about not knowing the specific executive salaries. Nope. That didn't deter me, upset me, or even make me do more than take a quick look to check the veracity of the claims. The job gets done and I am grateful. I give them money. They can do with it what they want - including stop doing the job. (I'd stop donating at that point, of course.)

If people go out seeking umbrage, they'll find it.

I might be too old to understand the outrage culture that we've developed.

Trivially related, I think that'd make an interesting essay topic.

Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia?

[KGIII]

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 WMF all the funds that I'd donate, I can donate to multiple groups. I'm not (yet) convinced that I shouldn't donate to WMF, and this information doesn't make me think I should stop doing so.

I'd say that this information doesn't even concern me, but it obviously concerns me enough to respond. It doesn't concern me in the direction that others seem to be concerned. It concerns me enough to feel obligated to share my individual view on the subject, lest people think those of us who have donated are all unhappy.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Something wrong with your link

[swillden]

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.