ValmondWhat's the status on Wikipedia donations?
I love Wikipedia and have donated a lot of time and money, but damn is their foundation wasteful
Every organisation appears wasteful. Whether it’s a non-profit, local club, or government organisation.
Source?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/…/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
This fails to convey how painfully tedious the communication is between the foundation and the community. At this point it feels like the tension between high executives and an union, with the executives having the deep conviction that they are good and that the union will magically recognize it, if only they could perpetually delay every one of their demands.
AatubeThe tension has decreased a ton with the CEO-ship of Iskander, with many long-requested features being delivered
In the current day and age of misinformation I think donating is more important than ever. It doesn’t need to be much.
dfyxNext time you think about donating to a foundation, look at their CEO‘s salary, then think again.
513k seems pretty low compared to most private sector CEOs
And pretty high compared to what most donors have.
TrickDacyWhAtAbOuT!
That sort of remuneration isn’t compatible with their yearly donation pleadings… and that’s not even looking into the benevolent work of all authors which actually drives the value of that supposedly non profit.
Other private sector CEO at least aren’t pretending…
If you don’t have good leadership then it doesn’t matter what the fundraisers do. It seems like the metric to look at here should be the average and median 501©3 CEO total compensation for similarly sized orgs and for whatever city they are headquartered in
How would you assess its size given that the bulk of the work is crowdsourced ? As for the city that’s awfully arbitrary… especially in these times where remote working is available and talents can be sourced from anywhere.
Maybe it’s different in American companies but in Europe the leadership is generally shared across a number of executives. Or even broader.
All in all I find it quite funny too see all the shielding when discussing Wikipedia’s ceo when any other ceo related discussion would have them hanged by popular demand.
the bulk of the work is crowdsourced
No. The WMF does not work on Wikipedia’s content. They focus on fundraising, hosting, software, legal, and the rare cross-wiki initiative.
That's super tame, though. A competent CEO is essential to an organization as important and as hated by powerful people as Wikipedia, and those cost a a pretty penny.
You gotta remember this is a massive website that doesn’t run on donations alone. It needs qualified people that have experience with websites of this scale.
Those people aren’t cheap.
Then pay the people who actually keep the website running. I bet they don’t earn half a million per year.
Who hires those people? Who gives them direction? CEOs don’t do nothing. They are overpaid in for profit companies, but this is probably what they should be making.
If you believe that CEO are doing that in vacuum you’re being very naive. They are for sure taking decisions but they take them most of the time based on shareholders constraints, external guidance or internal influences.
They don’t pay the people who do the actual work anything, though…
Did you think they run their servers using volunteers?
No I don’t but I think the articles are slightly more important, yet the writers get nothing.
The articles don’t get written without the servers running, and the writers are not forced to write them. Wikipedia is a free service to share information, so writers are using it as a service, not as an employee. They could have easily not used wikipedia.
Saying they should be paid is like saying developers should be paid for sharing their code on Github. What you actually want is to follow the FOSS model and donate to the Wikipedia writers directly, not expect the foundation to pay people who use their service for free.
I can download wikipedia to a usb drive and distribute via torrenting. The content is objectively more valuable than the website.
Where did that download come from? Who compiled all those written information into something that can be downloaded by you?
Try making a compilation of information directly through torrents from scratch and tell me how far you get with that. I’m sure you’ll find that most people do not want to go through that hassle.
You’re severely underestimating the value of making it easy to compile the information in the first place. And again, those information do not need to be compiled to wikipedia by the writers. They do so because of the value provided by the service.
The question is, do you think the writers will get paid any better by you sharing their work through torrents than through wikipedia? I don’t think so. If you actually cared about this, go and donate to the writers instead of devaluing the contribution of wikipedia in compiling these information.
Sure bud. Enjoy your empty website with nothing on it
Like I said, writers have no problem writing for Wikipedia. You can enjoy emailing writers to add to your torrent collection and donating to them directly.
I really love your fake concern about writers being paid yet never once addressed my points about donating to them. Guess it wasn’t that important to you, in the end.
Sorry, what is the actual thinking here? Anyone who earns more than you shouldn’t exist?
Without a highly paid CEO, wikipedia wouldn’t exist.
Without donations, wikipedia wouldn’t exist.
Therefore, if you want wikipedia to exist, you should donate.
khannieI think the thinking is that half a million is a disgusting amount for anyone to earn annually and I tend to agree with that.
For perspective, 500k is effectively the same as zero compared to what the likes of Musk, Bezos and Ellison make from their assets.
You and this CEO are basically equivalent in wealth to those guys.
You can take issue with the remuneration here, sure, but this person doesn’t have anything close to the economy breaking amount of wealth held by the actually wealthy
They are the ones we should be focusing our energy on.
Be angry at wealth, not income. That’s what’s fucking everything up right now.
Be angry at wealth, not income
I can think that both are gross beyond a certain point.
Does she really need the donations I’ve been giving to top her up to that level? Or is 300K more than enough for anyone? It would certainly be more palatable to those giving donations.
I think that utterly ridiculous wages at C level generally have become normalised and the amount of people in this thread defending a half a million salary is clear evidence of that to me.
Both can be gross sure, but even the biggest CEO income is not causing systemic economic problems because it’s generally taxed somewhat properly and is ultimately tied to some amount of time and effort being spent (however little)
Wealth? Basically not taxed at all. Requires zero time and effort to make income.
What do people who make millions a year from assets do with that money?
Buy more assets, beyond a point everything they could possibly have as a living expense is covered.
What does someone with a lot of money do when bidding against people with less for an asset?
Drive the price up
This is why houses are expensive and will keep getting more so
This is why food is expensive and will keep getting more so
This is why energy is expensive and will keep getting more so
This is why everything is expensive and will keep getting more so
What happens then? Housing, food and energy is increasing something the non wealthy can afford.
Keep it up and the 99.9% won’t be able own a thing and will ultimately have no power to change that.
Concentrated wealth is an existential issue
Oh I agree that gross levels of wealth are the bigger problem by a country mile. We’re in total agreement there.
People earning half a million a year are still raking in money from earned wealth from excess money. I suppose my objections are twofold; that it’s a donations based organisation and that wages just shouldn’t be that high (and I grant you hers are at the lower level of many large companies C level packages).
If someone offered you half a million a year you’d take it.
If other people with similar skills, experience, and attributes to yours were making more than you, you would want more.
It’s not really that much money. Your local family doctor can make that much. Surgeons and medical specialists certainly can.
My argument is that nobody needs 500k to do their job right and there is no justification for paying a manager five to ten times as much as an engineer, especially not on donation money.
I‘d rather give to a smaller project where the money actually ends up with the people who do most of the work.
Then go do that and stop loudly aligning with fascist goals of tearing down the last good part of the internet, weirdo
there is no justification for paying a manager five to ten times as much as an engineer
The justification is, the market is competitive. If you want someone with the right skills, you need to provide them similar benefits to what they could receive elsewhere.
Suppose you only paid CEO’s and other management the same rate as engineers. Do you think wikipedia’s performance would be equal to what it presently is ?
Have you a nice dark mode plugin going on that I should have?
Dark Reader!
It’s great. In some rare cases it breaks a website though, then you need to deactivated it.
Nice one. Will check it out.
ExtremeDullardI’m not giving money to Wikipedia anymore until they move out of the United States personally.
Sunshine (she/her)There is the concern of the us government getting your information through donations.
That is one of the reasons. The other reason for me is, Wikipedia’s stated values are incompatible with staying in the US. So as long as they’re there, they don’t meet my expectations.
Yeah I wonder why they don’t go anywhere else, as a non-profit, what incentives do they have to stay in the US?
BurgerBaronI was giving Wikipedia 5 bux occasionally and stopped.
I decided the same for archive.org. I’m amazed they got an extension at all under the Orange but I seriously doubt they’re long for this world and it’s probably not realistic they even could move unlike Wikipedia.
Remember that there is a lot of anti-Wikipedia propaganda going around these days. Most “outrage” against Wikipedia is created and pushed artificially.
It’s just that one dude here
ripcordIa it the.dude that’s downvoting everything here?
Wikipedia is being actively attacked by fascists who dont want it to exist or be well maintained. More important than ever. Criticism can be safely ignored.
“Fascists criticize Wikipedia, therefore all criticism is done by fascists”
No I’m saying even if it’s imperfect–they really don’t want it to exist, so it’s probably important that it does.
Obviously, preserving Wikipedia is important. Donating is not the way to do it though
If Elon doesn’t like it then you know Wikipedia is good.
passepartoutIdeally one pre-LLM. They have a snapshot from 2022.
I noticed an initial bump in LLM-generated text when ChatGPT first came out, but I think Wikipedia is starting to get a better handle on counteracting it. Better than a lot of other places on the internet, that’s for sure
Also donate to Kiwix
I’m also curious about this. If there are any transparency reports, I’d love to read through that.
The Wikimedia Foundation are trying to implement some AI solutions (for helping humans, not write articles/information), which is likely quite costly, unless someone donates it. However, I imagine many others’ scrapers for AI are constantly demanding a lot from the Wikipedia servers since some years ago, probably resulting in increased costs. Hopefully the AI builders use a local copy of the torrent instead, but I fear they don’t…
I’m still happily donating though, as I think the Wikipedia Foundation are still doing a solid job, despite me not always agreeing with their decisions.
eatyourgloryIf the only non-profit you care about is the Wikimedia Foundation, then yeah donate.
But otherwise, go donate to other non-profits as Wikimedia is the least needy of the foundations (they are one of the most “well off” of the non-profits in the world afterall
But otherwise, go donate to other non-profits as Wikimedia is the least needy of the foundations (they are one of the most “well off” of the non-profits in the world afterall