I didn't know my Wikipedia donations funded parties in Accra, Berlin and Chandigarh. I think that should be been in the fundraising statement.
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.
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
[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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.