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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.

9 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: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    2. Re:Intentionally misleading fundraising by Andreas+Kolbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Wish I Could.... by Luthair · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Quit jobs every couple years and get 6-figures.

  3. 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
  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 )

  5. Is this number high or low? by bluegutang · · 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.

  6. Re: Is this report as reliable as Wikipedia? by KGIII · · 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.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."