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Comment by heydenberk | Hacker News Reader

Wikimedia publishes independently-audited financial statements. Here's the latest one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...

It's clear that salaries and awards and grants are driving the increase in cost. Maybe this is damning evidence of a decadent culture, which the author of this op-ed clearly presume, but I doubt it. I would expect that Wikipedia's employees have been working very hard for a long time to keep the site running and they've cultivated expertise in governing the site in a way that avoids controversy and maintains credibility. I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are. It seems that they've done that, and they've waited until the organization was financially stable to do so.

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When I say "I want to know where Wikimedia is spending its money", I don't mean "is it on people or on bandwidth or on equipment?"; I mean "is it on Wikipedia or Wiktionary? how much money did they burn into the finally-launched WYSIWYG editor that their own research shows is barely used and solves the wrong problem? how little time is being spent figuring out how to handle a world with decreasingly reliable second-party sources, given their adamant refusal to allow reliance on first-party material? do they have any resources at all dedicated to dealing with deletionism?". I do not care if the people there are being paid a million dollars a year: I want to know their time is being used in ways that makes sense, and as far as I can tell almost none of their resources are being spent on anything which seems to actually matter. If they explained "actually, we added an automated model for verifying the value of an edit that our metrics have shown decreased the amount of time moderators have to spend watching the site while having minimal effects on new user retention, a project which used twenty engineers for five years to build" I'd at least shrug and go "huh, OK"; but as of right now I am not seeing it... it isn't that they overpay their staff, it is that they fundamentally don't have anything useful to do with staff but seem to keep growing their staff and then allocating them towards dumb things while telling everyone if they stop donating to this cancerous staff growth the site will go offline, which is a situation for which I simply can't attach enough modifiers to the word "lie" to to express the level of active deception at play.

Exactly. There's this folk belief that the main risk with non-profits is that that they will pay themselves above-market salaries or otherwise embezzle money in outright fraud. And when people criticize the non-profit for inefficiency, they often defend themselves by saying "Look! The salaries for our legions of workers are market rate and we have all these noble sounding projects."

But this is a red herring, because outright fraud is relatively rare. Rather, the much biggest issue is a terribly managed organization spending resources ineffectively. Non-profits shouldn't be judged on overhead or executive salary (who cares?), they should be judged on what they accomplish for the amount they spend. And WMF does terribly on this metric.

Great comments.

"spending resources ineffectively"

Often staff is taken on in order to fill vacancies without as much regard for skill levels. The marginal value of extra employees lowers and can dip into the negative. This is the sort of ineffective spending which is invisible to all but their closest colleagues -- who have too little political capital to do anything about it.

Where I feel a lot of the animosity from the Wikipedia community stems from is that the people who have "cultivated expertise in governing" are actually Wikipedia volunteers, not WMF employees.

I'd add: Let's not get caught in the trap of looking at good-paying jobs as a problem. Wikipedia employees shouldn't be expected to work for next-to-nothing or nothing and to make great sacrifices for the rest of us, which is what many open source leaders and contributors must do (a bad thing). Why shouldn't we pay then well?

That's a red herring; see jessriedel's comment above.

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