Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Quit jobs every couple years and get 6-figures.
...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.
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/
I no longer plan to donate to the project. (this reminds me of the Wounded Warriors fiasco )
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.
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.
is to run a not for profit.
...and have hordes of kind people working on your project at "no profit".
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
And there also is no legal requirement under California law that employers provide severance pay to an employee upon termination of employment.
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 too am disappointed about this news and will probably find a "better" place for the technology donation I usually make later this year.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
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.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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).
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.
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.