Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation
diff.wikimedia.org
diff.wikimedia.org
Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through.
Even worse, the level of writing makes it almost impossible to comprehend. Articles are badly organized, unclear and explanations are missing or hard to understand. Again, any attempt to fix the form was rejected. Editors are much more interested in citations and levels of notability.
I gave up. I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts, I see a tremendous value in something like that, but alas the market was killed by the free Wikipedia.
Then there are also the people with ideological axes to grind, and the community's seeming belief that it's fine to merely reform a problematic user to just the barest level of acceptability.
Unless you find some forgotten corner, being a Wikipedia editor requires an inhuman level of patience or obsessiveness, which probably ends up turning off a huge number of potential contributors.
A Wikipedia deletionist resulted in a movie going without an article for months, despite my efforts to at least give it a stub page. The film was by no means an obscure arthouse production or anything like that, the not noteworthy objection was pure nonsense. Someone other than me eventually won that battle.
A StackOverflow deletionist deleted my question, fortunately after I got a decent answer, on the grounds that it was a duplicate of an existing question. The explanations in the answers were indeed similar, but the symptoms were quite different, especially from the point of view of someone who doesn't already know the answer. (It turned out I had made a false assumption about the way parentheses are treated in regex. Unlike in many contexts in many languages, it doesn't only affect precedence.)
You're assuming this is not enabled and supported by the WikiMedia foundation. I believe you are wrong. That is, what you see when you try to edit values are those "entrenched editors", but those are just the front lines.
Certainly, some policy and customs are set by virtue of being an active editor; but more fundamental and site-scale issues are just as certainly discussed, decided and acted upon - infrastructurally - by the foundation.
> I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts.
While you're entitled to your opinion, this is a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side".
I'm not a fan of the Wikipedia internal politics, but as a user, Wikipedia is one of the best showcases of the Internet and in my opinion the greatest collaboration project in human history.
For the first time we have knowledge available to all, for (almost) free. You want to pay because you're privileged, but that's not the way of improving humanity as a whole, rich and poor, privileged and stuck in a mud hut with a crappy phone.
Of course we can do better, but I find it incredibly dismissive not to recognise the incredible achievement Wikipedia is.
Blame the fact that as a species we're quite tribalistic and selfish, not the collective effort we're making while trying the hardest limit our biases and shortcomings as much as (humanly) possible.
Right now I do believe that free wrong info is actually more damaging than paid correct info. But I am open to and wish for a third option or a solution which is more inclusive and less "for the privileged".
That would give more credence to your arguments.
Maybe also link to your rejected contributions to show that you are not just disgruntled because your edits were reverted.
I do agree that there are lots of inaccuracies in articles, but having Wikipedia with at least somewhat helpful information is infinitely better than having nothing at all.
Summary: A user, Britishfinance (believed to be Paddy Cosgrave, disgruntled founder of the web summit, a major EU tech event that moved from Ireland to Lisbon as the Irish government wouldn't give him what he wanted) spent about a year primarily editing articles related to Ireland to make a link of claims about the country being a tax haven the most prominent feature of them. Case in point, look at the overview for the article on Ireland after the user edited it [2]. It's since been rolled back somewhat by other wikipedia editors who felt that was a disproportionate amount of space given to that discussion.
But Wikipedia isn't so well equipped to handle this kind of dispute.
1. Ireland certainly has benefited from its tax policies, including both competitive but undisputed to be the right of the country, like having a lower corporate headline tax rate than its neighbours, and
2. Ireland has been involved in tax loopholes, such as the now defunct double irish/dutch sandwich stuff
3. You can find sourced articles for all of this.
So at what point does putting this information as the most prominent information in a wide variety of Ireland related articles cross from being just adding facts to encyclopedia articles to being politically motivated? When one side is an active wikipedia admin and the other side is a bunch of casual editors or users who don't edit, who gets the benefit of the doubt?
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/bgyfet/til_theres_...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Republic_of_Irela...
I think it’s so rare these days to find people who can remain objective and leave their opinions at the door. Everyone seems fueled by rage, it’s like their political views are their purpose in life.
Maybe, at least as long as we still have a good ratio between reliable and unreliable info (whatever that ratio may be). But as long as someone can piggy-back on this reputation, and most people simply take all that info for granted, the effect of a disingenuous Wiki article is far higher than your average FB "fake news". It's that implicit trust that makes a Trojan horse more dangerous.
There is no action being taken to make this process of correcting information more open and transparent, and out of the hands of a few people. Especially since it's been shown in the past that this kind of power was sold for money in PR campaigns, or used for revenge edits.
Wikipedia doesn't profit by weaponizing misinformation. That's FB's business model.
All those people who stormed the capital. You think they were FB users or Wiki users? The thought of them diligently reading encyclopedia entries and becoming radicalized has me cackling.
I find "an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln" to be a ridiculous introduction; it should read "an American assassin who killed President Abraham Lincoln" -- the man's profession is completely irrelevant; he is notable for this one act.
It isn't even consistently applied: Ted Kaczynski is listed as a domestic terrorist, Sirhan Sirhan is "a Palestinian Christian militant," but then Charles Guiteau is a "writer and lawyer."
Charles Guiteau had a long career prior to assassinating Garfield, as did Booth before assassinating Lincoln. While both committed assassinations, there was no point in time where you could have hired either to assassinate someone for you, it wasn't either of their professions.
One sentence fragment conveys that Lincoln was assassinated, the assassin's nationality, and the assassin's profession in 67 characters. The other conveys that Lincoln was assassinated and the assassin's nationality in 58 characters.
You like the wrong sentence. It's stylistically kooky, too: you need to point out that an assassin killed someone? That doesn't feel a little redundant to you?
> the man's profession is completely irrelevant
Hardly. But mostly it's strange that you'd want wikipedia to make that determination for you. It's not necessary.
> "Standard wikipedia formatting" being burying the lead is not a compelling defense.
Burying the lede would involve putting the information you're burying somewhere other than the middle of the first sentence of the first paragraph.
I mention Bill Ayers specifically because I asked a friend if they had heard of the Weather Underground recently and they said "sounds familiar, remind me?" And I said "Google Bill Ayers" and they paused and then said "the elementary education theorist?" And I said "lol, yeah, that's funny." That first sentence is what shows in Google results on mobile devices - it matters.
Similarly, Donald Trump is described as an American politician and the 45th president in his opening sentence, with discussion of his past in business and as a media personality reserved for later in the article. The standard wikipedia introduction is to list common aliases, nationality, and their current/last profession.
I will also note that on my mobile device if you google Bill Ayers, the first two sentences of his wikipedia article come up. The entire second sentence is about his involvement in the Weather Underground.
I'm pretty sure the days of a general data encyclopedia are past us. The amount of data to gather to make it useful is going to insanely expensive, and will in general be available from many sources for free, thereby decreasing its value.
After being on the maintainer side, working my ** off and not getting anything but more work without recognition or even a "thank you", I can't say I'm happy or positive towards OSS or services that can't sustain themselves. The human cost can't be ignored.
At the same time, working for free is rarely conducive of high quality, even when good engineers are behind it. Even when the quality is good, you can't expect maintenance.
Most of the OSS I use is either unmaintaned, of questionable quality or fake OSS maintained by business to attract/retain developers. There are famous exceptions in OSS (eg. Linux) driven by a few exceptional (and well off) individuals, but that's not the majority of the community. Students doing CV building are another segment of people doing OSS and hoping to get paid in recognition.
If it wasn't for the low level OSS got us used to, it would be easier to have a market of small independent developers selling software and maintaining it.
The same goes for wiki.
That’s fantastic unless that ‘knowledge’ is wrong. We can get that kind of knowledge on Facebook.
There are some younger and less entrenched projects where one could make a difference without wasting time on BS (like Wikidata or Wiktionary) and there are less popular areas which aren't controlled by wikifeudals, but changing something otherwise requires too much effort for what it's worth, IMHO.
And yes, if there's any conflict of interest (usually political or ideological), the only thing you can trust is the links, and even those should be presumed to be selected in a biased manner. Of course, this also applies to any random article in 99.999% of the press, so it goes... It's still a valuable resource for topics not consumed with public controversy.
This echoed my experience before I left a Wikipedia project (one of its language variant). I have been vocal with the direction one of its most active admin is trying to head the project to, as well as the not-so-positive treatment of inexperienced users. Many of the legitimate complaints against this admin was pretty much ignored or stalled. Ultimately, I decided that it's not worth my efforts to try to push for a more friendly environment, and I have decided to leave. I still help with some offline activities and movement-related function, but chances for me to return to being the contributors again are slim.
That's one of the secrets for being left alone. Improving jealously-guarded pages - or bio pages that are overseen by PR folk - is like walking on thin ice.
Stay away from politics and celebs. There are lots (millions!) of pages in hundreds of topics that have been rated as high-importance and need lots of TLC ... and don't attract turf-guarders. There are lots of pages where people have added 'citation needed' (so easy) ... when they could have just added a good citation instead. Correct a spelling. Clarify a passage. Add a high-quality external link ... might save someone some research and let them spend that time improving the article. Might be better than the article will ever be. None of those are likely to attract attention, all improve the article.
Start small, build over time. You can draft something in a sandbox, then ask for an opinion before you invest hours. Yep, there are (many, many) rules - and they change over time. There are pages where you can ask for help. If someone reverts something, calmly discuss it. A copy of your work is never gone, it's in the history. Come back in a year and try it again!
I totally understand not having the time. I research a lot, and WP's very helpful. So I like to pay back, and if it takes me an hour to discover something, I might add that. Takes a minute. Stick a cite next to a couple of sentences, 99.8% solid. (Unless they have a secretary keeping an eye on their bio. ;-)
Look, anything you have time to improve ... 5 minutes ... can be helpful. I gave several examples. Adding a bit here and there is unlikely to attract 'petty bureaucrats'. They exist, but so do bees. I might hear from someone twice a year, and one of them will be a thanks. It's not like it was 10 years ago.
Anybody who complains, easy to look at their qualifications. Logged in or anonymous? How many edits lately? Sound reason for revert? If not revert back ... and walk away. If so, then: that's collaboration for ya.
When it comes to controversy, WP can be a best bet, in the citations. MANY eyes look those pages over.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249362832_Compariso...
And I'm not talking something like using a Dirac delta without referencing it; I'm talking about pretty esoteric notation that is really only relevant to the topic of the article.
And of course plenty of the math articles are just not very coherently written (and yes, plenty are quite good).
But I suppose that's an epistemological question, as to whether an article is a definition or an educational method.
I have seen occasional weird writing, but this is usually either some esoteric subject or just an initial writeup on a narrow topic -- that is, an inexperienced author trying to fill a void, not someone staking out territory or looking for recognition. Just my experience.
And to be clear, I am not talking about people staking out territory or looking for recognition. I am talking about articles being so badly written they are functionally indistinguishable from being "wrong". Yes, you can decipher them with enough outside knowledge and some other references, but it's pretty tough. And this is not a majority of mathematics articles by any means. But the problem is that if you don't know enough you can't tell whether you're looking at such an article or not, unfortunately...
P.S. I just took a quick look at just my recent-ish Wikipedia edits, and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Limit_superior_an... was correcting a small but obviously wrong claim. Which is, to be clear, not the sort of issue I was referring to in my comment about badly-written articles.
Maybe I should try the Simple English pages instead. :-/
Do you have any examples?
Looking at the edit history of the article, someone added it a year ago, and then 204.132.216.84 has decided recently that a genuinely informative section must be removed from the article, because they thought it's "self-promotion for browser extension".
Dear 204.132.216.84, you're wrong.
Btw, I'm a user of your extension ;)
There are also lots of situations like if you are looking for things such as statistics related to a war, if you use Wikipedia to start your research you will wind up clicking through to all kinds of trash sources that waste your time when there are compendiums of statistics through either government reports or print references that you could have just used with library access in a fraction of the time that you spent sifting through a sea of web feces.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software#...
Just an example, in my area of expertise. Some of the rejected edits were mine.
I have no idea why they don't meet Wikipedia's "notability" criteria or why such a 10 or 20 years old tool has or hasn't its own page - and I don't care. The list left (other than InstallShield and WiX) is a joke and you can plainly see that none of those editors has any expertise in the field. The end result is that that article is useless or worse for anyone reading it. Which I thought was the whole point of Wikipedia.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/deskto...
That you don't care about core Wikipedia values means that your attempts to edit it will always be frustrating for you. I get that they can be mysterious to outsiders, but unfortunately they're necessary. In particular Wikipedia isn't a place for people with expertise to come write things. It's a place where people with no particular expertise use expert material elsewhere to create an encyclopedia. That means every item must be traceable to reliable sources (which they call verifiable) and articles must have enough sourced material that you can write a basic article from it (which is what they call notable).
If you are an expert on this, then I'd suggest you write a signed article in some publication with a reasonable editorial apparatus, or in some other way that qualifies as a Wikipedia reliable source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Then you can mention the article on the talk page and a Wikipedia editor can look at incorporating the material. Or if you think a reliable source already exists, try mentioning that. But no, you can't just put in things you think are true on Wikipedia if you don't have sources. Because however much it might help for this specific case, allowing that generally would quickly make Wikipedia a garbage heap.
There are definitely pros and cons. My wife is a professional musician and teacher so at home we have a copy of the "New Grove" encyclopedia of music, which is the industry standard "proper encyclopedia" for music. Each article is written by a specific expert in that subject, This leads to them being tremendously detailed and informative. The downside is the process of compliation is slow and so even if you have a subscription to the electronic version it will be behind (sometimes years behind) the very latest research.
I would be interested in knowing your field of expertise where you find errors.
Just like HN comments :)
There are some inventions where I'm like "Ahh, if only I had thought of that" and wikipedia is NOT one of those. I'm totally confident that even if I had thought of it there's no way I'd believe for 1 second that it would work.
Wikipedia is a wonder of the world.
I read this twice just to make sure I didn't miss something, and I don't actually see a reason why.
(Stated right in the sixth paragraph.) I’m going to take a break, and a research fellowship, as a place to think about what’s next. It’s hard to think about your future when you’re fully in your present, and for the past seven years, I’ve been fully present for this movement. But as I look around, I see global challenges such as polarization, inequality, and climate change, as well as opportunities for generational renewal and optimism. As a Wikimedian, I lean toward optimism, and plan to head in that direction.
Yes they did.
Why do so many people try to act as if implication isn't a thing in online interactions?
Edit: her wikipedia page also uses "she" and "her" etc throughout.
If i replace she in op's line "She wants a break" it feels like they are writing about someone more familiar to them. "They" implies distance between the observer and observed.
"As for me, I’m going to take a break, and a research fellowship, as a place to think about what’s next. It’s hard to think about your future when you’re fully in your present, and for the past seven years, I’ve been fully present for this movement. But as I look around, I see global challenges such as polarization, inequality, and climate change, as well as opportunities for generational renewal and optimism. As a Wikimedian, I lean toward optimism, and plan to head in that direction."
My own opinion is that leaders ought to pre-announce their resignation date on the day they take the job in the first place, and that date should be not more than 5 years after they start. Five years on and you're running on empty. Time to move on.
aka Wikipedia.
How about eroding public trust? I can think of a lot more. Perhaps your imagination is subject to a hidden bias.
There does seem to be a line "Special event expense, net". I would guess parties go in there? It was reported as around $300K, or 0.2% of expenses, in the most recent fiscal year.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim..."
I cannot tell you how much they spend on office coffee though. I bet they're wasting it on unecological kuerigs and gourmet brands. It's probably a reason not to donate.
Parties do not have to be funded by the company. During my lifetime, I never went to a company-funded party. But I have been doing fine, funding my own parties. What do you need? A stereo and a disco ball. Anyway, how can you spend $9M on stereos and disco balls? It warrants scrutiny.
It is clear you don't trust how wikimedia is going to use your money, so you shouldn't donate to them. Nobody is forcing you, certainly.
I don't think any line-items or "declaring it up front" is going to satisfy you though. Most people don't seem to agree with you. I don't think it's really a reporting or "declaring it up front" issue.
Where is your "$9 million" figure coming from though?
It's... probably not the category that's relevant, since they're complaining about parties that happened at conferences, which would presumably be accounted under "travel and conferences" which is just $3m for 2019.
"Other operating expenses" _would_ probably include things like a staff party, based on the definition at the end of the document, but that's not where the complaint started. More to the point, it also includes "facility expenses, funding of the Wikidata project, staff related expenses, insurance and personal property tax expenses, and other general administrative expenses", so claiming it as a party slush fund feels rather weird when it's almost certainly the category that includes things like office rent.
(I know nothing at all about the WMF's accounting practices, so I'm just reading the document and extrapolating.)
Just the line "so many memories of so much dancing, from Accra to Berlin to Chandigarh"? When I read that, i was imagining her dancing just in clubs or at someone's house with other wikipedians, in the evening after a conference or meeting. I certainly do expect the CEO of wikimedia to do international travel to meetings and conferences of various sorts, it is a global organization! When I travel for conferences and meetings, there is usually entertainment in the evenings, whether formal (part of the program) or informal (people going out on their own with fellow meeting/conference attendees). That's a normal thing, I think?
But maybe the complainer has more info to think there were expensive parties going on? (I also expect wikimedia to have banquets and parties and such, yes, around the world, so that wouldn't especially disturb me, but not sure where the idea even came from).
This is really no different than people who whine about what people receiving public assistance buy. It is an attempt to leverage money in to control, and it is gross.
If you don't like what Wikimedia does, don't give them money. If you do, great, but donations don't buy line-item veto privileges.
Why have the party at all? Because spending €20 or whatever per employee/volunteer on an annual party has benefits beyond increasing everyone's salary by that amount: job satisfaction, employee/volunteer retention, knowledge sharing etc.
Fundraising events are parties for the guests, but work for the charity staff. (Attend the party, introduce Rich Person X to Foreign Princess Y who promotes our work and went to the same university, mention the proposed project in Country Z if she doesn't, etc.)
I think that Wikipedia just doesn't need that much money. If people just let them fail their fundraising goals, the core service will likely continue to get the same budget, but they'll cut their pet projects and parties.
I deeply dislike that these four things happens almost simultaneously :
- firing the people who create their biggest contributions to the free and open web ab also their main source of income
- supporting other efforts all over the place
- begging for money from the "community"
- while brushing me of in tje comments when I ask about progress on a 4 year old bug
You can support Servo Project independently now :
https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo
While it doesn't directly contribute to Firefox itself (for now) I think this is worth supporting
Already do :-)
As for her salary, I won't make a point out of that: she has already negotiated orders of magnitude more than that in income to Mozilla.
i sort of feel like an interesting experiment might be an idea where donating above a certain amount (say 5 dollars) should give someone "a years ownership" and a vote in major policy decisions for that year, sort of like a consumer cooperative
also, in that model, a company couldnt just buy more shares and get more votes (like a stock)... that might be a better model... maybe
You people will be dissatisfied so long as there is a nonprofit worker out there who isn’t subsisting on gruel.
Unless I'm misreading something, 64% of their expenses in 2018 went to salaries.
A few years ago, I certainly thought the funds went to development. And I can't say I'm a big fan of most of their initiatives (most of which have been abandoned Google-style).
I think with some charities (like feeding children), my expectation would be that the salaries would be very low, and the costs of providing the "good" would be the bulk of the expense.
But in the case of an advocacy/software platform, you're right that salaries would be expected to be a large part of the expense.
As someone who's used Firefox for close to 20 years, their recent activities have left a sour taste in my mouth, and I suppose I'm a bit biased as a result. For the last five years as everyone switched to Chrome, I continued to use Firefox, and encouraged others to use the same.
I believe that the Firefox project has been somewhat mismanaged, which has resulted in a large drop in users. For example, they could have started including an ad blocker by default - they would probably have killed Brave's business that way. If they care so much about privacy, it seemed like a no-brainer.
I guess I was reaching for reasons that their budget was lavish... but that wasn't true. My real concern is with the fact that donations to the organization don't, and cannot, go to the browser.
When I first saw a notice to donate in my browser years ago, I certainly thought my money was going to development. They want to encourage an "open web", privacy, etc, and I think those goals are all very important. The continued dominance of Firefox was probably the best way to actually achieve those goals.
Talk is cheap, and I'm a bit sad that the browser share is now dwindling. We have many other organizations making blog posts/activism for the open web, but Firefox was the only one actually doing something about it, which is 1000x as valuable as far as I'm concerned.
So when they encouraged me to donate, and I thought it went to development, and realized it was going towards this kind of "activism", I felt betrayed and tricked. I still stand by that sentiment. We have plenty of activists and journalists who fight for the open web via words - all for free.
I feel that by existing, Firefox took up most of the market share for that, and by encouraging donations, they created a desert for other browsers to rise up. If another organization had forked Firefox and taken over with hundreds of millions in donations, I doubt the market share would have dropped so sharply. For example, they wouldn't have been "forced" to do privacy-bad things like selling ads on the new tab page. By claiming to be "the" privacy-focused browser, they soured any efforts to make a new one.
And now it's probably too late: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
All this to say, I'm mostly sad about it. I miss Firefox, and I wish we had a strong fighter still in the arena. I'm doubtful Firefox can turn it's product and reputation around at this point given their corporate structure. Cheers.
Hmm. Maher earned about 375K in 2018 for presiding over a foundation with 145M in assets. I don't feel that's exorbitant in any way.
Looking through https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim..., wikimedia has enough income from investments to keep the wikipedia site running indefinitely should donations collapse.
I don't like these big budgets for foundations and groups for the public interest either, but in my opinion Wikimedia definitely shouldn't be compared to Mozilla here.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... (page 13)
Wikipedia's biggest challenge over the years hasn't been building or hosting its website. It's been convincing the world that an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone on the Internet is a credible and neutral source of information.
One of the ways you do that is by speaking at conferences, traveling to meet with people, etc.
> Wool wrote that Wales had asked the foundation to reimburse him for costly items like a $1,300 dinner for four at a Florida steakhouse. Wool alleged that at one point Wales was short on receipts for $30,000 in expenses before settling the matter with the foundation's lawyer and paying the organization $7,000.
> Wool added that Wales' foundation credit card was taken away in 2006.
[0] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-acc...
This is not wikimedia's job at all. The public can decide if they trust the content.
That seems... odd.
The WMF can certainly make their case and answer criticisms, but there are cost-efficient ways of doing that. I don't see much value in funding parties, conferences, etc. for a product that has already dominated in most markets.
> I doubly you will read it
Why do you feel the need to use ad hominems rather than simply making your point?
> Research by the WMF in 2019 shows incredibly low rates of awareness in large parts of the world
I wasn't claiming that Wikipedia is near peak global usage. My point was that there is no meaningful competition left, so usage should grow organically, as it did for EN-WP back when the WMF had a shoestring budget.
Can you identify some markets where Wikipedia is losing ground to an inferior competitor with more aggressive marketing? I'm not sure there are any.
And more recently, the US has more than four times as many pageviews as #2 (4B to Japan's 1B)[0].
So no, I don't think the work is done outside the US, and I think maintaining a leading position doesn't happen automatically, so I don't think the work is entirely done inside the US, either.
0. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/page-view...
If it was as corrupt as the NRA (which is why NY is moving to dissolve them), then I would agree with the sentiment but a few million sounds about right (About 9k per employee)
Anyone know if someone donates hosting resources to them? I simply cannot imagine serving that much traffic on < $3m.
I.e. that it has siphoned off a whole bunch of pageloads that otherwise would have cost money.
And if you've been on any of those conferences (it's not hard to get in, there are a lot of people invited) - they aren't exactly luxury affairs, they usually happen in a library or university and constitute of a crowd of geeks sitting in groups arguing or staring at computer screens, or sometimes presenting slides to other geeks. Those aren't exactly lavish affairs. Of course, some people get their hotel bill and travel paid for, but given those people help building such enormous site as Wikipedia, it's not that huge of an expense.
So if you see from the money side of things, you can get/keep (more) highly talented people for less money.
I'd be surprised if this is true for more than a tiny fraction of workers. Given the high salaries at Google, maybe it's more true there than at other places.
But I don't know. Maybe someone who has personal insight into the matter can chime in.
People quit because nothing at the company is enough to make them stay. “Enough” is a complex thing and often the oddest details can be the last straw.
I like to go to going away parties for people and listen to their reasons for leaving. I doubled down on better onboarding experiences when I noticed how often people were uncomfortable from day one on the job and they never shook that feeling. At a good employer, the only one who expects anything from you in your first week is yourself, but those feelings of alienation can stick around.
You don’t have to go to the parties, but other people need to. And really, you should go too. You’re missing out and driving yourself to burnout.
In nonprofits, burnout is the boogeyman.
Mind you, they wouldn't do this for free, and the money certainly helps. A lot. But it's not enough.
I think the working for more than money thing goes back to the 'do what you love for a living' advice that many of us think is actually pretty bad. Or at least a good way to get exploited, and ultimately burnt out.
1. I have relatives whose lives fall apart if they aren't working. One ended up working through retirement despite not needing the money. I appear to be somewhat similar. So I say I'm working 'for the money' but it's also to keep the wheels from falling off.
it is written by an HR - it is their job to sell such a proposition and they get recognition for supposedly successfully substituting larger expenses like salaries by the lower expenses like the parties.
> get/keep (more) highly talented people for less money.
exactly - HR is trying to sell themselves as those magicians who can do it, who can beat the power of raw compensation by some tricks and gimmicks and thus supposedly save company money.
Regardless, do you really begrudge the CEO visiting these places?
I get where you're coming from: it's easy to roll your eyes and dismiss this kind of thing as political correctness, pointless "diversity and inclusion" work, pandering to liberal friends etc.
But step back: Wikipedia aims to be the world's encyclopedia. I'm as much in awe as anyone of what a fairly narrow group of pretty obsessive contributors has been able to achieve (I just checked: I've made five tiny edits in 15 years, so not me). But Wikipedia will never succeed in its aim unless it has active contributors in places like Accra, Berlin and Chandigarh.
I honestly don't remember what the donation banners have said in past years. Did they imply they were funding servers and bandwidth only? Maybe they did. But if you actually believe in the mission of Wikipedia, you have to consider that servers and bandwidth will not be enough and that community—maybe including the odd party—is a core part of it.
In that respect, I'm not sure it's too helpful to lump it with Mozilla.
What kind of people do you want to attract? Do you think the best writers are attracted by the best parties?
Wikipedia has loads of contributors in Germany. That is because of a long history of German intellectualism, it is not because Wikimedia is throwing parties. If Wikimedia were as global as you suggest, where are the parties in Iran and Russia? Are these parties without alcohol? I hope so, because we wouldn't want to exclude the muslim world, right?
I say this as a Wikipedia contributor since 2005 with 16k edits.
What? They aren't a fraternity, so I don't think drinking is mandatory.
If you look at any large organization it has these kinds of frivolous events. Among other things, they let the leadership get a sense of the social environment and how it reacts to some of their ideas with less filtering. I personally don't attend most of these events, but it is really a silly direction to assume everything that is not technically necessary is a waste of money.
Though tbh "other orgs do it" is never a good argument, but it is especially bad here.
WMF's per-employee T&E cost is apparently $7k/year. Working in sales at a company you've heard of, I've flown single flights and attended single dinners that cost more than that.
They're an online wikipedia. Their costs keep ballooning, and not to pay for things that I care about when I donate money to support their core mission.
*online encyclopedia.
If you have a new point to make, it's best to make it as a top level comment rather than trying to prop yourself up as opposing a point someone never made.
From my experience, these organizations throw parties because they have to. This is how non-profits fundraise. I don't think there is a non-profit organization on the planet that has a significant impact and is funded only by small individual donations. Money is raised by throwing a party, presenting all the great work you're doing, and getting rich people drunk so they either give you right there and then or secure you a meeting with someone who will on the spot.
These events are funded by your small donations.
This sounds like a horrible amount of overhead, and it is, but that's how the world works. Most NGOs will say they have very small overhead, something silly like 5%, but that's because they don't count fundraising as overhead, or they put fundraising events into "programming" which again doesn't count as overhead.
You get many more people to participate by giving them hope for a better future, whatever form you’re pandering to.
Asking people to help divert a disaster smells of lack of planning, too. Even if it’s not your disaster you’re cleaning up, people start to wonder if they need to go up the chain to prevent the next one instead of fixing the current one.
http://2017.wikiindaba.net/index.php/Programme
Try not to tear the armrests off your chair in rattles of indignation.
> There will be live performances, karaoke and some pleasant taste of good music. This night promises to be super fun filled. Are you ready to sing and dance in representation of your country at a thrilling battle with the Ghanaians?
Yes, please invite me to your next party. I am a fun person.
It doesn't. That was the point.
They earned 9 millions more than last year, from 120 millions to 129 millions, and spent 21 millions more, from 91 millions to 112 millions [1], with an increase of 10 millions in "awards and grants". The donations grew by 10 millions. If I read the financial statement correctly (feel free to correct me, I'm not an expert), they currently have 180 millions in assets, which means if donations stop they can't even last two years. I don't see how this is a "deep and stable financial position that will help us grow and protect us from any storm".
Edit: as tux3 pointed out in their comment [2] there is a Wikipedia Endowment. I think I can now agree on the "deep and stable financial position".
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
Endowments and foundations are different things with different objectives. Many foundations may have endowments of their own, and may use them to issue grants to non-profits. From a legal and financial perspective though, there's a difference between a non-profit having an endowment itself which provides restricted funds for specific operational activities vs how foundations typically create and structure endowments for external giving.
Both concepts have been around for decades, so I don't think either is particularly disruptive.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia...
The Red Cross needs to stay frosty all the time. They get money every time there’s a disaster, but the money to deal with the current disaster needs to have already been spent before the checks clear. If we haven’t had a big disaster in a while, we all know there’s one coming, because they always come, and when that shoe finally drops it might be huge. But donations are down because nothing is blowing up.
We still need Wikipedia even if someone cures cancer. Because you don’t cure cancer, you cure a cancer, the moment you’ve cured two or three, an avalanche of money will arrive to fix the others. Money that might have gone to something else like the Red Cross, WWF, PP, Wikipedia, or really all of the above.
Meanwhile RC “has to” stash supplies 12 hours from everywhere in the world and then let most of them rot. Their overheads are huge, even before you get into any discussion of mismanagement.
If I have a real point here, it's that people all have different definitions of what important charities are.
I'm honestly not sure I've ever donated money to RC. UNHCR, yes, RC I don't think so.
Do you have a particular one in mind? I found [0] but as far as I can see, GiveWell.org doesn't advise against donating to them in general.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/05/red-cross-hait...
I suspect that the non-profit goodwill in the USA is changing a lot in the last year.
Edit: For a company - apart from Welfare you should have a plan as an individual
I was being a little facetious, but the point was more in response to the PC than as a standalone argument.
If you do these are really inefficient businesses.
If you do however decide to say they non profits should do that, then what’s the point of having that money in non profits if you could just put that money in a savings account and supply the non profit every year?
They seem to be making the same mistake as the Mozilla foundation. You’re living on your nest egg instead of the interest. Spending 4 times as much as you should.
That’s a very excellent start but I suspect someone will want to grow that later on. In fact they’re at 90% of their goal and less than 60% of their target date, so they could be looking for $150M as the stretch goal.
What do you do with the money, when people have stopped valuing Wikimedia enough that they are no longer paying for it to exist?
There will be times when Wikipedia is not sexy, but taken for granted. That’s when you need the endowment.
It might be valued as an institution with modest economic power, which doesn't seem to me to add anything to the world that isn't already there.
2 years of all current spending as a cushion seems like plenty to me (for Wikipedia, which has not faced any unexpected financial shocks, even in 2020). If you can't navigate shocks and downward trends with that cushion, then you probably ought not to exist.
Plenty of things have a huge impact on your life and yet nobody wants to pay for them. They're important, but they're not important. If you have an endowment, you don't have to keep wrestling with keeping the two in sync.
I imagine a political mess, of people trying to extract personal benefit from the remaining endowment.
WMF spent $52mm in FY 2014-2015. it spent $112mm in FY 2019-2020. is the core project really twice as expensive to run as it was five years ago?
There's pure hosting costs (servers and bandwidth), then there's staff to maintain those servers, staff to handle legal issues around a large community-contributed project, staff to do moderation and other community-relations work, staff to improve the mediawiki software that wikipedia runs on, staff to manage administrative stuff for those other staff, etc.
There's room to debate which of these are necessary to "run wikipedia", and how much of each of them is needed, but it's a lot more complicated than just keeping the servers turned on. (And if you do think that the Foundation could be just-paying-for-hosting, you're implicitly hoping that some people are going to be donating their skilled-work for maintenance.)
It depends on the company and the industry.
One industry I worked in, six months was considered the minimum cushion.
In a post-COVID world, though, I bet a lot of those industries will increase their padding.
What is this self righteous anger for? They're incompetent but somehow Wikipedia exists.
Is it jealousy?
I admit that I'm also full of wishful thinking. I said that once they go bankrupt, someone more competent will take over, but there's no guarantee of that -- instead, it is highly likely that some other skilled and well-connected grifter will assume control, will keep the "crying Jimbo Wales" ads to shame people into giving them money they spend on salaries and travel expenses of people doing things that do not need to be done, and often things that Wikipedia community doesn't even want done.
Thanks for that eye-opener.
Imagine you have a city, which has a non-profit foundation dedicated to maintaining and improving the city parks. The foundation has 20 people on payroll, $2M in annual spending on wages and materials, and is generally though to do exemplary job. In fact, people like it so much that they keep donating money to it, while the new directors of the park foundation use that money to advertise everywhere that they are starved for cash, and if every park goer donates just $10, they can meet their fundraising budget. After a few years, the revenue of the park foundation is $120M/year, they are still doing pretty good job maintaining and improving the park for $2M/year, and the rest is spent on C-level executive salaries, analyst reports, conferences, travel expenses, shovel R&D, and all kinds of stuff that the parks foundation doesn’t need to do, and which provides little benefit to the actual parks or park goers beyond the $2M they have always been spending, while enriching the employees and executives in the nominally non-profit organization. That’s roughly where the Wikimedia Foundation is today. I see this as profoundly bad state of affairs. I also find it pretty ironic that the goal of the nominally non-profit organization apparently seems to be to maximize the donations and the spend.
> compared to something more detrimental to society like Facebook?
Why would you compare it to Facebook? The choice is not better Wikimedia and Facebook. There are plenty of other projects that could use money better than either Wikimedia or Facebook.
I don't agree.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...
While some may object that this is just The Grayzone's biased take on their disagreements with Wikipedia's odd listing of them as not a reliable source it raises some interesting questions.
Seems like the upper echelons of the USA is just as loaded with political operatives as the old East Germany, USSR or China today.
Oh, and I love wikipedia. It is one of the best things to come out of the internet expansion. Even better than the old CIA World Factbook.
Wikipedia is anything but not an open platform.