Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...
Net assets are sitting at ~$240M about 10x what they were a decade ago. Yet they roll out a sob-story banner on every page insinuating that they might cease to exist if you don't cough up.
It gives me an uneasy feeling that the ex-CEO went to work for a think tank. I hope they're politically neutral.
Obviously it's become a gravy train. At a certain point they should have stopped the begging because clearly they have the resources to run the site several times over.
In theory, people could have joined Wikimedia at a low salary while they were still struggling, and as they've become way more stable the salaries have gone up as a bit of a correction.
That said....1.5x your annual salary as severance sort of spits in the face of that bit of apologia.
A non-profit is not your future cashcow, you don't own it, you either work for current salary or you forgo payment because you believe in the cause. There is no scenario where non-profit workers get to cash out to compensate for previous struggling - except when that non-profit has been captured by a group of money grabbing profiteers who operate it for their own personal benefit.
The Gates foundation pioneered this approach and imho it's the right way to operate in the sector.
EDIT: Found at least one source on US non-profits that excludes healthcare and university roles which skew numbers: https://analytics.excellenceingiving.com/2021-2022-nonprofit...
Suggesting $364k compensation for the CEO a nonprofit with $50M+ revenue. Wikimedia Foundation reports $150M+: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
Specifically a great executive will personally move the fundraising needle in organizations (+1-5% or more) and mediocre executive can cause losses/missed opportunities in the opposite direction of a similar magnitude. The conventional thinking is the relative fundraising impact of a great vs a good executive may 10x their total compensation, so it's probably worth trying to retain the best.
Anecdotally, I know of a not-for-profit COO who offended an NBA player killing the relationship. His successor COO repaired the relationship, ultimately resulting in multiple millions of new donations and a co-marketing agreement with the team. When the COO was hired there were rumblings because he'd negotiated +$50k over his predecessor.
With no equity and the poor optics of commission compensation or cash-bonuses, big severance packages are one of the few ways an organization can reward employees following years of great service.
I could probably COO on the non-fundraising side, but I'd be an absolute fundraising failure. Non-profit C level execs are fundraisers.
Explorative projects like their New Editor Experience[1] were interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful moonshots. That one wrapped up (without anything to show for it, as far as I can tell). They didn't take the hint and downsize, they doubled down.
This is an incredibly common problem for organizations - "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" as was put by Oscar Wilde.
1. for regular employees. 2. Assuming market rate is fair and not minimum wage
There is no reason executive pay needs to follow market rate dynamics at a non profit. Otherwise you’ll have underpaid and free labor while executives milk the cow at 100x median pay rates and generous golden parachutes.
I hear this all the time for not-for-profits and government roles, it sounds good but just doesn't hold up. The leaders in these roles are not measured or held to the same metrics as private companies, they're not competing for the same jobs and they're not the same pool of candidates. The results prove this out: the metrics and tenure of "high paid" bureaucrats are no better than lower paid leaders at the orgs. The "we have to pay the same high comp to get the same high quality leaders" fallacy is misleading.
The best example is probably Singapore, which is surrounded by corrupt neighbors, and deeply involved in industries that thrive on corruption (shipping), but is notoriously a place where officials follow the rules.
A risk, but there's plenty of good managers, and money can only do so much to find someone that performs well.
> martyrs
This one isn't obvious, please explain more.
> having the vision co-opted by the wealthy who can afford to be underpaid
If you pay this much then you guarantee the person you hire has much more money than they need.
> the young who leave disillusioned
Why would paying... let's say 90th percentile US wages ($135k) disillusion anyone?
I've been involved in a non-profit startup before. There are potentially ways around restrictions (like licensing), but they're difficult and fraught with other issues. You can't "cash-out" at a non-profit.
Regardles of the legal structure, it's always about power: who has it and who they are responsible too. For a largely unaccountable entity like Wikimedia, with the power to print money by simply placing a banner on the site, it was only a matter of time until it was to be captured by a self serving clique.
It isn't? They seemed like pretty normal market salaries for the type of position.
"Google gave top executive $90m payoff but kept sexual misconduct claim quiet – report"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/25/google-an...
Paid from money donated to Wikipedia – unlike the Google executive. I think it is normal and legitimate for donors to Wikipedia – whether they've donated labour or money – to have a qualitatively different kind of interest in the former case than the latter.
People seem to have a weird expectation that if you want to work on something useful you should expect to be paid well below market rates. (In this case, 50-70% below market!)
Why? I can think of no system of ethics that says someone working on addictive mobile games should be making more than the CEO of wikipedia, but that's exactly what's happening. And still people are mad about it! Apparently suckers who want to do something nice for society should do it for free.
What does politically neutral mean?
I think that sums up US politics pretty well since 2016
'Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.' Hillary Clinton 2001-09-13
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_t...
Your solution on how to cover a topic in a neutral fashion when there are more than 2 political parties is to move to a country where there are more than 2 political parties?
That doesn't seem like a productive comment.
I guess I didn't include enough elaboration in my comment...
There are 3 major federal parties (Liberals, Conservatives, NDP), who received 33%, 33%, and 18% of the popular vote respectively.
There are two minor federal parties (Greens and the People’s party) who together took around 7% of the popular vote, and
Finally there is the Bloc Québécois. It is a federal party but it exists only in one province. It grabbed around 8% last time.
Of course those percentages aren’t entirely representative, because seats are won in a first-past-the-post style in each riding.
There is no reason to make long-term decisions based on the current short-term circumstances of a two party dominance.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_elec...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_elec...
It's also very hard to change because both major parties benefit from the existing system and are protective of it, knowing full well that proportional representation would cost them a lot of votes. Republicans usually trot out the old "but small states!" canard, while Democrats are getting creative and claiming that IRV and RCV are racist because e.g. "majority voting may seem innocuous, but if the vote is racially polarized, “runoffs discriminate against Blacks because they are a minority of the voters.”"
Given that Congress has the final say on how federal elections are run, I find it rather unlikely that this is going to change anytime soon - at least, not as long as federal politics is consumed almost entirely by polarization and voting against rather than for.
Really, since America had a meaningful national government with the Constitution rather than being a loose federation of states under the AoC.
The Federalists and Democratic-Republicans both were establisged, as was their duopoly, by 1792.
But speaking to your point, there is no reason at all why a two party system is required to have a rule of thumb that if everyone thinks you're biased you're on the right track...
From a (BBC) radio sitcom from the 80s:
> [interviewer to Director General of BBC] Director General, everyone seems to hate you. How would you respond?
> [DG] Well, I think that shows we have the balance about right.
It's normal for news organizations to be accused of bias in the conflict, as you say, if both parties think that, that's normal.
But BBC has the lovely distinction of also being accused of anti-Semitism, which is a badge of honor that most news organizations have not received.
More seriously, when someone says "politically neutral", they typically mean "agrees with me". It's otherwise meaningless for basically anything which engages with the real world.
This is an empirical statement. What experience underlies it?
My experience (working across many sectors, including tech, government, and not for profits), is quite different.
I think it is better to say this… There are various possible meanings for ‘politically neutral’: A person or organization that
(a) is not tied to political organizations (for some definition of political);
(b) doesn’t take a position on political matters;
(c) does work that is both unaffected by politics and does not attempt to influence politics (IMO, impossible practically, but could be interpreted as a matter of degree)
To clarify: endorsing the status quo is a political position. Not saying something is not identical to that. It of course can have probabilistic implications. In other words, silence doesn’t necessarily mean an entity (a person or org) is content with the status quo. It can be a strategic decision.
― Desmond Tutu
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men." - Abraham Lincoln
"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." - Elie Wiesel
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy
Generally: For almost every piece of advice there are useful contrasts. More than useful, actually: necessary. Ideas that seem reasonable (even wise) in isolation often don’t ‘survive contact’ with broader thinking. In other words, an isolated idea may not prove applicable for a particular context.
Here are more quotes that can help weigh your choice to speak:
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy." - Howard W. Newton (not Isaac Newton)
“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Specifically: The early and outspoken critics sometimes get their heads cut off. Sometimes this galvanizes change. Sometimes this just helps the decapitator find his enemies more efficiently. Sometimes it is wiser — and more ethical — to quietly (even secretly) organize and act when you have a critical mass.
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." - Japanese Proverb
“A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle." - Japanese Proverb
In the words of the New York Times, "Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics. Staff members are entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality" - https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journali...
[1] The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an American think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations. [..] Its membership has included senior politicians, numerous secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, corporate directors and CEOs, and senior media figures. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations
Wikipedia is definitely not.
The media rarely lies - this is a key issue at play - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
>But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.
WP doesn't permit primary sources (usually), many right wing publications inc Fox News are banned - for not being a "Reliable Source", actually that activists will push source bans via wiki-lawyering (see the talk pages). I've been subject to Wiki-lawyering because a topic I contributed to became politically contentious, and activists jumped in the thread to revert disagreeable sources.
Wikipedia permits breaking rules if it "makes wikipedia a better place", and do not permit (WP:POINTY) you to try to enforce the same rules equally on other pages. The rules are often arbitrary and political articles are hijacked by activists - typically an active, small minority. The co-founder, Larry Sanger noted this in the earlier days as academics sitting on pages of their discipline, then as Wikipedia became a key source of information, editors were hired to represent certain causes (they are supposed to disclose them), and it became a hive of political activity.
Example - recently a user "TheTranarchist", a main contributor to gender pages, wrote about how she fights bigotry with her Wikipedia edits. She was tempbanned with pushback for those posts - the Vast Majority keeps quiet.
Next we have people like GorillaWarfare who see a hitpiece on people without WP pages - e.g. the CEO of cloudflare - and create a wikipage sourcing just the hitpiece.
WP:GOODBIAS - says bias is a good thing, using uncontentious examples (we are biased to a heliocentric, not geocentric model), but WP:GOODBIAS is actually used to explain away political activism on fuzzy issues.
WP:TRUTH - verifiability, not truth. There is provably false information on Wikipedia which can't be pointed out (except in the talk threads) because the sources referenced are either banned, or it falls under WP:OR (no original research). E.g., a man disappears, there's an article written that he's dead, source the article saying he's dead, turns out he's alive and pictures of him are posted on Twitter, can't edit the page until a new article comes out retracting the death. I could continue with all the nonsense I see on there, but I'll leave it at that.
I mean, over the last five years, you could say that of practically anyone who employs a bunch of engineers. Tech sector wage inflation was absolutely enormous; it seems to be stabilising now, but still at a pretty high level.
I'm throwing my money at the screen right now.
I'm still happy to let them do it simply because of the love I have for all their work on Wikipedia. They can spend my money on crazy if they want, as long as it makes the right people happy.
The fact that the (essentially) negative article about severance payments exists on Wikipedia itself is at least a good sign that they're not trying to hide what other nonprofits would gladly want to sweep under the rug.
It’s Kars4Kids levels of charitable fraud.
The Foundation "does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects", as they are happy to tell you themselves here:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno...
Even most of the emails sent to the Wikimedia Foundation are answered by unpaid volunteers, the Volunteer Response Team:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Volunteer_Response_T...
Sorry to sound harsh, but you are laboring under a misconception and spreading it.
What Wikimedia have done is create a platform and mission and steered that mission to produce a culture that has bred the unpaid editors and kept them on-mission and stopped too many of them going rogue. That platform steering is not to be underestimated. Too many sites with user-generated content descend into insanity within a short amount of time.
To what extent do you think it is the Foundation that keeps this culture and mindset going these days? And does more money and higher pay help them to do so?
I would say the culture you mention was bred in very early days of Wikipedia. Editor activity peaked in 2007, when the annual budget was ~$2m. The prior year was <$800k.
2022 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $145,970,915
I love Wikipedia but I don't see how this cost explosion can evenly be remotely justified. What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline
For an exercise, try mentally replacing terms like "alt-right movement" with "woke movement", "alt-right pipeline" with "woke pipeline" etc.
There could also be an article about a "woke pipeline" if that's a concept label people are taking about.
You couldn’t report on that and simultaneously be on the side of reality without also being against the Trump campaign.
Also, is alt right a slur? Cause woke isn’t.
> Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative.
The same thing can be said about progressives. Nonetheless, the above example would be seen as highly biased.
I wanted to update a local wiki page with newer data from its original sources, but apparently I have become blacklisted because I use/used Apple’s private relay and safari’s privacy measures by default in all my browsing. Disabling them didn’t fix it. I would love to sign up as a fallback measure to be able to contribute, and verify my account by whatever means necessary, but apparently in the 2020s that’s just not something Wikipedia supports (as I’m also black listed from signing up despite never contributing to Wikipedia.)
Increasingly I see out of date and opinionated articles and I wonder how many of us have meaningful contributions ready but are forced to sit on the sidelines because there’s no “way in” with this product.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay has some context and list potential problems that might arise (and do in your case).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_Re... is the related discussion page if you want to ask more.
Back in the old days, we maintained a list of trustworthy http proxies for which we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information). So the sole thing we see is the Apple relays IPs and if those are a source of vandalism for sure the community will block them from contributing.
There is a more or less similar issue with TOR exit node for which the issue is described at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editing_with_Tor
Given the relay is only enforced by Safari (as I understand it), you can use the IOS Wikipedia application for editing: https://apps.apple.com/app/wikipedia/id324715238 , though that will not pass through the Apple relays and leak your IP.
Not exactly true - the "Proxy Protocol" [1] was invented for that purpose. Wikipedia as an entity should be large enough to ask Apple if they can implement support for it - the question is if they want to.
[1] https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/latest/load-bala...
We do have direct point of contacts with engineers at Apple, Facebook, Google etc and do collaborate with them on a wide range of technical topics. The foundation has a dedicated team to vandalism, blocking etc https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-Harassment_Tools . I forwarded your remark and maybe they can update the wiki page at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay (it is mostly from November 2021 and looks like it might use a refresh).
Basically any change you make it insta-reverted by some bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.
I think some editors decide that they "own" certain pages or group of pages and install themselves as some sort of authority/gate keeper/moderator. If your edit does not please them, it's gone. Instantly. You only get to edit the pages if you are in the editor's cabal of friends.
If you don't have an account, or you do have an account but perhaps have only made a handful of edits, you are instantly distrusted and assumed to be malicious.
Of course, you can never prove that you are not malicious, because there is the default stance of immediate-distrust for anyone, so your edits are constantly undone and you never get to build up enough credibility to appease the editors who control who gets to edit "their" articles.
I gave up years ago after a small edit-war with someone who kept reverting changes about a UK politician who was in national news at the time. No amount of references or citations from e.g. the BBC or the Guardian was good enough as I guess the verifiable truth didn't fit with their view of what this page should selectively say about that person, and so they banned my IP as a "vandal". I gave up (but got a new IP after redialing so it was pointless)
'Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors Researchers found that 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors, and they think this is probably for the best.'
You sound like someone who was pushing a particular point of view about politics, which is precisely the kind of edits that are set up for organ rejection given Wikipedia's strict stance on neutrality, sourcing, and the fact that politics are naturally contentious / prone to edit warring.
There are between 1.5 and 2 million anonymous edits to Wikipedia every month. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contrib... A lot of them are in reality vandalism, spam, and garbage by passersby, but they aren't all reverted.
It was one of the first culture war battlegrounds... And it's been owned for a while now.
Looking at these gross payments (and executive migration to think tanks), are you really pretending things aren't political?
They mention the topic of the Gaza flotilla raid in the video. If you read the actual article on this topic, it's pretty balanced, and mentions in the introduction that Israel was condemned by the UN Human Rights Council and their use of force was called excessive and unreasonable. Hardly a Zionist propaganda piece.
Tried a few times and realized it wasn't worth the effort.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-edit...
Every Public Relations agency claims to 'manage' the content on clients' Wikipedia pages.
$200k less than Beeple's "Everyday" NFT sold for.
So those values can be more about money laundering or poor signaling than any indication of real worth.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...
But I don't think anyone is disagreeing that Wikipedia is offering good value for money, just that some people might be justifying that to excessively compensate themselves for an operation that requires very little to run and depends almost entirely on unpaid volunteers.
"well, our service is a boon to mankind, therefore it warrants skimming a bit off the top"
And that could be a problem in the long run.
Assuming this is not rhetorical - everything is in git so you can look at the git log. Although it is spread through many repos, and not all contributors are paid by wmf.
And it can't be set without being logged in ;/
Redirect: https:\/\/(.)\.wikipedia\.org\/wiki\/([^?])(?!=\?useskin=vector)
to: https://$1.wikipedia.org/wiki/$2?useskin=vector
Applies to: Main window (address bar)
[EDIT] Fuck me! It does work both on wikipedia and the Arch wiki. So long.
Special:Version (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version#mw-version-ski... )
An API query: * direct: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&... * demo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=quer...
Which yields the code name of each skins installed (eg: vector-2022, vector, monobook ...).
BTW, to make it work I had to change:
(.) to ([^.]*) and ([^?]) to ([^?]*)
So if you adjust for the rising costs of doing anything in tech, their operating budget has increased by much less than would seem - only about 20%.
In those same six years, they've had to deal with a rise in misinformation campaigns, spam, infosec threats and recently ML models.
Call me crazy, but dealing with all of the extra complexity 2022 has over 2016 on a 20% budget increase is pretty great.
Unless someone here really thinks it's important for Wikipedia to pull in 9 figures in grants and donations, I'm not sure there's as much to argue about here as it seems. Organizations expand to fit their budget constraints, and fundraising success has expanded those constraints for Wikimedia. Seems straightforward.
Wikipedia indeed has some unique aspects that give it additional resilience from hostile takeovers, such as public auditability (via edit history etc.), forkability, and finally the fact that the bureaucrats have unusually little leverage over the lives of those who do the actual mission-aligned work.
But universities also enjoyed some unique protections (tenure etc.). The end result was that it just took a bit longer.
So what would you give your money to? inb4 typical homeless/war/refugee charity. People give money to way greater evil than Wikimedia. For example I myself bought expensive as shit coffee (not even worth the price) twice for the past 2 months. It's an overpriced garbage that I regret buying every time, but I never donated to Wikimedia either. I am sure you and many others share the same experience.
With regards to money, they can put all that to an investment company or something and continue to make more money. Why not? So far they have much better track record than any other organizations/companies that I can think of.
WMF is definitely not politically neutral, neither is English Wikipedia (don't know much about the rest).
Firing everyone and moving to a cheap country doesn't seem feasible, and they already are apparently moving a lot of their hiring to Germany.
I don't really see what's outrageous here?
> Obviously it's become a gravy train .
Oh come on - their CEO manages 250 people and gets paid what a SWE with 3 years of experience gets paid down the street. Their engineers are paid like a third of what they could be making at Amazon. Nobody is doing this for the money.
EDIT: As a comparison for people unaware of the cost of living in SF, a bus driver makes about 80k a year. A senior SWE at Wikimedia makes about 120k, according to levels.fyi.
It maybe highlights that salaries in the US are higher than in much of the rest of the world, but I don't think that's Wikimedia's fault.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
As for the other side of the equation, revenue, most of that is from readers' donations. And most of that comes from North America, Europe, Australia and East Asia.
But the Foundation also shows its fundraising messages and sends its fundraising emails begging readers to chip in in places like India, Brazil and South Africa:
And I'm not sure what you're saying - should they only ask for donations in the US? I mean, they could, probably, but why is it a problem that people in poorer countries also donate, proportionally I assume much less?
Now I live in Asia only the very senior people will make like around 100k.
I have had several leadership roles still not make as much money as a SWE in America.
Now I bought land and build a nice house on it, with a big garden, pool and big garage for my motorcycles. All out of my own pocket without going into debt. Think in the end it is not the size of the paycheck that matters. But quality of life is calculated with cost of living and your paycheck.
But tech salaries are just based on supply and demand. If there were more good coders in supply, salaries would go down.
So what exactly does "out of step" mean? Everybody's free to try to learn how to code and get those salaries.
And so it's not clear what Wikimedia is doing wrong with salaries, if it's paying what's required to get programmers of the needed ability.
Supply & demand is an explanation, not an excuse, and it is a problem that can be fixed (if there's political will).
If you want to fix it, I'd ask you this: suppose there are 20 million people who know how to code worldwide. But that if coders were paid the same as bus drivers, there would be 100 million coding positions available worldwide. How do you decide which one-fifth of companies get coders, and which four-fifths go without?
Currently we allocate the fifth to the companies who want to pay the most*, because we've decided that's where they're most helpful in general, because those are the companies building the most potentially profitable products that provide the most economic efficiency (lower prices and/or higher value for consumers). And this is why coders are paid more than bus drivers.
So what's the alternative allocation you're suggesting? To achieve what alternative goal? Because it's not helpful to say "it is a problem that can be fixed" if you don't also provide the fix.
----
* There can also be non-monetary factors (nice office environment, purposeful mission, good vibe with team) but they can be converted into estimated monetary values for purposes of comparison -- it doesn't change the argument
It says a lot about Western society that people only really feel incentivized to be a doctor or lawyer or engineer or coder if the money is right. Not about passion, or wanting to help people, or solve a particular societal problem. Just a bunch of individuals on a hedonistic treadmill making line go up.
There are tons of criticisms for the USSR and PRC, the two big examples that come to mind. But within living memory (my grandparents) both countries went from backwater agrarian feudal states to global superpowers. That amount of progress in so short of a timescale is dizzying to think about, and if we want to talk about the human cost of that progress (worthwhile) we should maybe recount the human cost for liberal representative democracy to reach where it is today.
How should labor be allocated? It's a great question. I think personally that having to sell your body to a capitalist in order to meet your basic needs is only a few polite steps removed from serfdom. When it's not regulated it clearly veers in that direction (scrip, company towns, etc.), and the only alternative is for you yourself to acquire/borrow capital and hope to enter the rent-seeking class. An alternative could be to simply meet people's basic needs without the fanfare. Let people work on solving real problems (climate change, carceral system, education, etc.) instead of optimizing ads and telemetry for the latest planned obsolence plastic box. We live in a post-scarcity society where food and clothes are destroyed so that the "underclass" can't at least enjoy the scraps.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops". - Stephen Jay Gould
It's like how the price of strawberries this week in the supermarket is determined by the supply of strawberries, demand from customers, and the price at neighboring supermarkets. It's not set by anything to do with the supermarket's profitability.
You see this dynamic in markets fairly frequently and the profitable goods and services will be promoted more heavily. One can get philosophical about what is supply and what is demand, but middle man profitablity is a factor in those things as they're at once a customer and a seller.
TLDR supermarket profitablity definitely drives pricing as well. Just another component.
> [supermarkets]
All supermarkets have to pay the same price to buy strawberries, regardless of their individual profitability.
I make like 0.5% of that before tax.
The last fact is why FAANG pays a lot -- to stop people from starting companies.
Tech people just get advantages due to supply and demand that normal labor used to get from their unions and reasonable representation in Congress.
The world would be better off if people were happy to donate to useful products like Wikipedia, and encouraged high pay there (because with a large enough denominator, it's an insignificant amount of money to users), and more upset about the exploitative practices of mainstream companies. Then we might see more open and straightforward services like Wikipedia, and fewer creepy and insidious businesses like Facebook or Google (thinking specifically of YouTube and it's attempts to drive 'engagement' here...)
And for doing that she was paid what a staff software engineer makes for taking 6 months to change the shade of blue of a button in gmail.
I wonder what the biggest departments are.
Do you think Sysadmin / tech / development is the highest? followed by editors?
And a corollary would be saying that GitHub deserve money because otherwise there would be no open source.
Wikipedia's code and data is open source, even if they somehow ran out of cash for hosting, which would never happen, people could easily set it up again. And they obviously would. I would donate directly to the people doing the actual contributions, not to the joke "non profit" that's getting all the credit.
If you were a regular Wikipedia editor, you'd know there is a ton of resistance among volunteers to directly paying volunteers to contribute. It gets proposed every now and then, but the consensus is that this would short-circuit the motivation and lead to a bunch of people currently on Mechanical Turk flooding in to try and make a bunch of edits to get paid. If you saw what happened with Hacktoberfest offering free tshirts to make PRs to popular open source projects, you'd be worried about that too.
And a lot of the money goes directly to volunteer-directed projects, like meetups. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start
Nothing Wikipedia currently does with its money justifies the sums they are getting.
If they decided to use that money to generate content, I'd imagine that would work more like normal encyclopedias instead of volunteer based. Where they would seek out actual experts, and only in scientific fields and other areas where there is a knowledge gap rather than opinions. You know, like companies can pay engineers to work on open source projects. Doesn't stop volunteers from volunteering. But you obviously don't throw away money at everyone, you pay for specific work.
Honestly, only the math / scientific parts of Wikipedia are good, there's opinionated garbage in controversial areas. And it's better than books usually because it's easier to click and jump between definitions than the usual book or encyclopedia. If someone compressed all math and physics books into the Wikipedia format with links, I'd barely use Wikipedia again.
Wikipedia is what it is because of volunteer editors like me. It is not feasible to convert it to be majority "expert" so if it attempted to do so, the cost would be exorbitant and the users who prefer "expert-written work" will not be satisfied until it is complete since the presence of volunteer work will be considered by them a bad thing.
Those users will be concerned that they do not know which articles are "expert"-written and WP will lose volunteers who get upset that they can't correct "expert" works.
It's best that Wikipedia not attempt to be a thing it is not.
Encyclopedia Britannica does exist. There is no reason that Wikipedia needs to enter that space.
There are already paid Wikipedia editors, they tend to be working for PR firms. A non-profit doing the same thing for altruistic purposes sounds feasible and good to me, it wouldn't even need to necessarily be part of the Wikimedia Foundation.
It's better this way with a clear separation of wiki and expert.
I believe they will, because the quality will be higher. They shouldn't employ experts as a marketing campaign, they should employ experts as a way to keep interesting entries from devolving into trash heaps. I'd honestly prefer those experts to be research librarians and experts on parliamentary procedure or statistics, rather than subject matter. Instead all editorial decisions are made through trials adjudicated by a few people who happened to walk by, and other people paid to be there by private organizations and/or governments.
A higher-quality Wikipedia needs defenses against paid and deeply-invested mobs.
I think the Expert Wikipedia would be a bad use of resources because most people do not desire this and because experts will not deliver better articles in general.
We have completely expert written media in Encyclopedia Brittanica, so that's probably the best place for people who don't want to use WP because it's insufficiently expert-written. It doesn't make sense to go join that market.
Kind of makes me think about the debate on elected officials' salaries (and the ban on Congressional insider trading that never seems to pass)
At this point, Wikimedia is just a facade for socialite activity.
I don't get why people are upset. Somehow everyone working for a nonprofit should bring home less money to their families. In truth what that assumption would mean is that nonprofits get less skilled people.
It's not really a business.
Non-profits shut down all the time. If you're concerned about a lasting impact you'll pay for a talented executive team.
The biggest set of responsibilities charites I didn't list is sales (aka donations). But Wikipedia doesn't do more good work (as donors think of it) the more money they get. It doesn't scale up much that way.
US$623,286 when their last full year's base compensation was $400K.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
False.
I could move into a very nice apartment in any city in the world for less than $5,000/mo. I have no doubt that with that kind of cash, I could move in today. Surely after making $300,000 you would have enough left over to do the same!
If not, then you are obviously not qualified to be making that kind of compensation in the first place.
Generally WMF's salaries are on the low side - their VP Eng was getting 220K in 2020, and 255K in 2021, which is kinda low for a VP of a decent-sized engineering org - but that doesn't answer the question of severance.
[1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/quang...
"The Board has done its main job - changed the CEO."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village...
Victoria explicitly referred to the Knowledge Equity Fund in that post, which appears to have been Uzzell's and Maher's brainchild.
The Knowledge Equity Fund became very controversial last year when people realised it was set up to funnel millions of dollars of Wikipedia donations to non-Wikimedia social justice causes via Tides Advocacy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Janeen announced on 14 May 2021, two weeks after Katherine had left, that she was going to leave the WMF and devote herself to racial equity and technology causes:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
She started as CEO of the National Society of Black Engineers on 7 July 2021, just one week after her last day with the WMF.
Including the $325K severance, she pocketed over half a million dollars for half a year's work and went straight to her next job.
Frequently these types of severance packages are to make up some sort of assumed bonus and ensure no compensation based contract disputes later.
But generally yes, if much of your compensation is bonus based most executive contracts will have a mechanism for pro-rating or just paying out future bonuses.
This sounds a bit like it was something of a mutual parting of the ways so sometimes boards will payout other bonuses like Retention Bonuses (A bonus for staying at a position, frequently with another job offer at hand) even though the person is leaving. It could also just be a bonus triggered by the board choosing to part ways with her that was part of her executive contract. Proving a firing is "for cause" is frequently difficult so sometimes if there's a desire to replace a senior executive it's easier to just pay them off.
I don't see what's outrageous here - they are amazingly efficient. Someone managing 250 people at a for-profit company across the street would make 3-4 times as much, and, I mean Twitter had 7,500 employees.
Yes, the CEO got 18 months severance which is on the high side, but her compensation to begin with was very low for the Bay Area.
I think the scandal here is just people in the rest of the world being outraged at median salaries in California. But remember, the cost of living is also stratospheric.
It seems especially bizarre for a non-profit organisation where the bulk of all the actual work is done freely by volunteers.
What is actually going on here?
Firing people is not fun and is emotionally difficult. I would love to give 1.5x salary but there’s usually some controller restricting me to something I don’t like but can’t change.
Wikimedia doesn’t have a duty to maximize shareholder equity and they have tons of money, so they can. I wonder what else they spend similarly on.
I typically donate to wikimedia and behavior like this makes me rethink. How many more people need to donate to allow these people their money?
Sorry for the negativity, feeling bitter about it.
Also, there is bloat in non-profits, but it isn't like everything is done by volunteers. Volunteers don't run the servers, they don't handle donation processing, they don't respond to lawsuits from people upset about how they are portrayed on Wikipedia. Then all those employees need HR, IT, janitors, etc., and then there are executives who run the organization.
When you have cancer and missing children charities giving 2% to their cause and spending the remainder on bullshit it is trivial to make your charity not look as bad.
If you really dig into it, a huge % of charity money is just funding the insiders travel and lifestyle in the name of "fund raising".
This payout is nothing on a relative basis compared to other non-profits and that is the real issue.
Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text so they pocket almost all of the money.
Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text.
Wikipedia is not static text. It runs Mediawiki which runs on PHP and requires a database, plus all forms of caching. They also serve media (images/video) have users, discussions, comments, etc.
And at wikipedia's scale they're not trivial problems to solve and dont cost peanuts for hosting.
2022/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
2020/2019: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
And they were the same a decade ago:
2012/2011: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL...
Admittedly, this doesn't include salaries.
Okay well maybe that's not fair. They did recently update the CSS for Wikipedia itself ... I don't know how many millions of dollars they spent on that...
I'm not gonna do another deep dive on the org structure, because I've done it before when these topics come up ( like this one half a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 ), but I'll provide my overall view as a 10 year engineering veteran at the WMF who has fought many battles in this org, which you can take or leave:
There are problems at the Foundation, like there are everywhere. Resources are not allocated as well as they should be, which is also common just about everywhere. However, by and large, the money is put to good use, and the employees of the Foundation are doing good and necessary work, and there's no way to run today's Wikipedia on today's Internet for anywhere close to $3M/year total organizational budget, so it's pretty disingenuous to use that as a comparison point.
Go look at budgets for any other org which runs a top-N important site on the Internet for comparison. Consider that we adhere to stronger values and principles around rights and privacy and open source, all of which /increase/ our operating costs.
WMF runs on a shoestring, relatively-speaking. WMF just had a ~5% layoff over budget reductions ( https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-lay... ) in response to a community outcry about our fundraising. We (the engineers) regularly run into budgetary and/or priority constraints pursuing new useful SRE-level projects that increase scalability, reliability, or directly improve user experience (e.g. latency for readers and editors, rendering speed, better APIs for various consuming parties, more edge caches, more hardware redundancy, etc). We also don't get paid industry equivalent rates, or get the stocks or bonuses that we'd get elsewhere.
You can make all the arguments you want about some past or present form of grift at some upper organizational levels, but I'll still contend that most of the money is going to good use, that it's very expensive to run Wikipedia responsibly and reliably, and that the foundation doesn't have the cash pile necessary to stop relying on donations for the long-term sustainability of its projects. Even if the budget we have was allocated perfectly, I'd still be arguing that we need more to do the job right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
The Foundation's cash pile (not all in actual cash, of course) is currently at around $350 million, $100 million of which is in a completely non-transparent fund held by the Tides Foundation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
There have been promises made for years and years that this fund would soon be converted into a standalone 501c3 and start filing an annual Form 990. Still has not happened. Even though the 501c3 has existed for almost a year now, the money is still with Tides and still nobody has ever seen an audited statement of what goes in and out.
This said, I agree with you that WMF engineers do a lot of good work (much of it not necessarily apparent to casual readers as opposed to editors). It is noticeable that the site is more cared for.
A new employee joined from one of the big tech players. They got hired for a role with X technology. Upon joining the thin team of 4 or 5 persons, including the double hat manager/engineer, the person legitimately though the whole team was SOLELY in charge of said X technology. That is how their previously larger employer operated with multiple such teams scattered around the world. To their demise, the person was now more or less the lone tech lead for X and Y, with a worldwide and leadership responsibility for both. With of course shared responsibility with other tech managed by their teammate.
Thankfully we have grown a little bit since then and the kind of position I described is less of an occurrence nowadays (but still is for some area). That is far from lavish for sure.
If it were, I don't know, three months severance, that would still be very generous, and I don't think most people would be very upset. We've all seen a ton of banners vaguely implying that Wikimedia is strapped for cash and needs your help, but they have enough to spend an extra six hundred grand for someone quitting?
I'm not saying this to diminish what the Wikipedia does, nor to suggest the pay was not earned. These people almost certainly could have earned more elsewhere, yet decided to align themselves with an organization that serves the greater good. What I am saying is it is (or should be) easy to see where these sentiments come from.
90% of households actually. Most people aren't USAians.
Nor I. But there's being treated well and then there's being showered with cash, which is how I'd read getting a severance package in excess of 1.5 your base comp for a full year when walking away to take another job.
Generally speaking, if I leave my current job for another job I don't expect any severance at all. If I was laid off I'd feel pretty good about getting six months of severance. There's no reality where I expect 18 months severance walking away to take another gig.
it might be completely misplaced though.
but more transparency might help in this case too. make the job have some standard salary, make the contract public, and allow people to submit their resumes and let the board pick the best candidate. again, this might be super naive (it is!), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work.
of course if it's a requirement to have the CEO live in the Bay Area, continue growing the WMF (and in general do a lot more than keeping Wikipedia working well), then it's not surprising that the candidate pool is drastically smaller, and the money involved is a lot more.
(of course, again, maybe it's worth talking about what the public wants Wikipedia and the WMF to be, but ... maybe it's up to those who donate?)
However, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and their messaging in their donation drives always sort of implied that they really needed these donations. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit, I do have higher aspirations of how they're going to allocate their funds: chiefly in making the highest quality freely-available knowledge resource even better.
If they had given these people a three month paid severance, I would not criticize them at all. That's very generous and there is value in making sure employees are treated well. 1.5x your annual salary though? I'm sorry, but there's "generous" and then there's "shady".
It highlights that it's not the standard. I don't feel particular joy that a person who is already treated well continues to be treated well. I feel joy when a person who isn't already treated well is treated well. Joy is not my default state; I don't feel it about status quo human situations.
I could be wrong; you could have a religious view that suggests that Satan works his malfeasance through corporate influence.
We’re seeing human nature at play in the context of organizational dynamics. That’s hardly evil.
One of the issues with non-profits is that people expects the employees/management to be there for the cause and to be happy with lower salaries. This seems to incentives IMO one of the following: - only already rich people to apply - high turnover - people with less experience or options to apply
Having a generous severance package that for example requires you to work for at least x amount of years might solve some of those pitfalls?
500K would be about our staffing and office cost here in Berlin. We're a mere eight people.
And Wikimedia actually has an office here. One of their largest offices outside of SFO according to this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_offices. I've been there. Nice place.
Look, this is just the tip of the ice berg: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
This spells it out. This is foundation is spending tens of million on salaries and sitting on a quarter billion in assets. That's some spectacularly inefficient spending no matter how you look at it. I would call it shameless. And then they do the yearly thing of holding out their hand for donations because boohoo all the money is gone. Again!
But at least they are transparent about enriching themselves.
"Maher states that she focuses on global digital inclusion as a way to improve and protect the rights of people to information through technology."
Yet the actual mission of Wikipedia is something quite different to this. They push a particular point of view, wrapped up in the false cloak of "neutrality", and assert this as truth. Wikipedia is part of a broader propaganda drive to export US cultural mores to the rest of the world.
English Wikipedia is going to have at the very least an English-speaking world tilt to it. Are the others similar?
In any case, others being paid doesn’t diminish your contributions. You know that you’ve helped and benefited others. (Wikipedia redefined my view of networks!)
Quantifying your impact may be challenging, and this is frankly one of the best things about volunteering. Doing something for the process, not e.g. for some downstream effects that are not under your control.
<puts philosopher hat on> Sometimes it’s nice just to do and not think about consequentialist ethics.
Let us know something non-financial we can do to help you or your causes out?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
As that video demonstrates (a Capuchin who was happy to perform a simple task in order to get a piece of cucumber goes crazy when another monkey is introduced who gets a grape for the same task) this notion of fairness is so basic, it is pre-human. According to the video, it's even been replicated with dogs and birds.
C'mon. This is not Reddit.
Anti-WMF sentiment is surprisingly common on some Wikimedia projects.
This is one of the longest pages I have seen on wikipedia for a while.
Call me crazy, but $623,286 USD will buy a LOT of bread.
"Putting food on the table for your family" phrases start to become almost comical when they're made by people earning good portions of a million per year.
Wikipedia has a much more admirable history in this regard than the major for profit online companies.
What about any senior exec position at Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, or Microsoft? I hope you don't believe those organizations are 'neutral' either.
Those corporations are not exactly shining examples of neutrality, but by simple virtue of being multinationals which do business in many countries, cooperating with and abiding by the laws of many governments, they are more neutral than the State Department itself. They are not explicitly and overtly set up to serve a single particular government, although there is good and ample reason to believe they covertly do so. I don't think anybody believes these corporations are strictly neutral, but to claim they're less neutral than the State Department is quite absurd.
Do you think it should be essential to someone who works at Wikipedia? Even after they leave? Why exactly? Make the argument if you want to persuade. I think I speak for a lot of people in saying that such a claim is overly strict.
Have you reviewed various forms of moral relativism recently? If not, I think the ideas will be fruitful.
There is an idea that I’ve stolen from Robert Kane (a philosopher) that I want to share any chance I get: a quest for knowledge means starting with an open mind — but it does not mean stopping there. Neutrality can help you weigh ideas more objectively. But the process of weighing them will show that some ideas are better than others. Therefore, neutrality as an end state of knowledge or ethics is not a wise goal. Foolish neutrality is unethical.
Wikipedia’s policy of a neutral point of view (NPOV) is not “neutral” in the broad spectrum of political philosophy. The underlying principles of Wikipedia draw very much from something akin to anthropology; namely, describe what exists and what is happening according to some culture or point of view.
There are plenty of regimes in the world that do not tolerate Wikipedia’s values.
I worked very hard day in and day out for a startup and then quit bcz of bad management and got no severance (not blaming anybody). At the same time not good engineers got fired, they all got severance packages.
It's a good life lesson though
I thought it was an open secret that they’re pretty flush with cash overall despite the constant nag for justadollar’. I dunno, maybe I’ve been desensitised but these numbers are not horribly shocking to me, and when put in the context of the immense value the project brings to the rest of the world…
I mean come on, look at some of the comments posted here. “Con artists”, are you serious?
They will have messages like "If everyone reading this right now gave a buck then this donation drive would be finished in five minutes". In hindsight, it feels a bit deceptive even if it's not an outright lie.
Should anyone go to jail for this? No, I think that would be ridiculous, but it does kind of erode a bit of the trust that I had for Wikimedia.
I'm not trying to straw-man, I'm genuinely not sure what I'm responding to.
No, I'm saying having a large amount of cash on hand is a hedge against drought periods. I suspect they have a certain monetary goal during donation drives, so meeting those goals is part of their funding strategy. Some drives exceed goals, some don't. They need to account for runway or future lack thereof.
Replying specifically to this:
>They will have messages like "If everyone reading this right now gave a buck then this donation drive would be finished in five minutes". In hindsight, it feels a bit deceptive even if it's not an outright lie.
FWIW, 1.5x severance doesn't seem excessive to me, I wish that would be the industry norm for everyone. If it were, there'd be a lot fewer stressed out people right now.
Why are donations being spent on enriching people instead of improving the project? Millions of dollars would pay for a hell of a lot of articles written by experts in their field.
But Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated in Florida (https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/api/report/GetImageByNum/24... direct pdf download), which lets nonprofits do whatever they want.
A nonprofit organized in a state other than where it is headquartered (unless the incorporation state is Delaware) is a huge red flag with respect to the organization's commitment to proper governance.
I tend to view math/science pages most of the time and it's rare to see any non-neutroal POV issues on most of those kinds of pages.
Even for topics that are contentious today, the system should converge towards neutrality over long time frames. It's just unrealistic to expect that hot/political topics would be perfectly NPOV in the short run.
I have bingo! for
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
Here's the card:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp...
I agre with Atlantic Council on a number of issues so I am not expressing a bias against Atlantic Council but on principle.
She is certialy enttited to work whereever she wants and I wish her well.
Not-for-profit is something else and should have a different enough culture that you aren't looking for people who require large salaries and big contract penalties. What are you solving (and wikimedia particular is famous for being really involved with almost everything except what most people think they do: wikipedia). If you are Oxfam, you might want to pay for someone with lots of experience in poverty scenarios. If you are Save The Children, you might want a Doctor with lots of experience helping children in poor countries etc. and those might cost you money.
What do Wikimedia want? People with contacts? People who they can hold up as some kind of political statement? Someone who knows how to migrate PHP to something else? Who knows?
It just all smells really bad and as others have said, it has been toxic for ages and doesn't deserve to go out with the begging hat when most work is done by a very small number of paid staff and mostly unpaid volunteers.
Is severance payment a bonus you accrue by working there?
Only time I have gotten it was when I was laid off. I guess the C* have it better?
Otherwise they wouldn't need much of a severance package.
It's mostly corporations but a lot of them are employee matching schemes.
The encyclopedias, and MediaWiki software, are the flagship projects, and they come in hundreds of languages (I'm watching what happens on the Nahuatl project right now). There are also many Wiktionaries, where words are defined in any language you can name. There is Wikidata, which interfaces in a machine-readable way with every other Wikipedia. There is Commons, which is one of the world's largest repositories of freely-licensed media. This is the first place I search if I am looking for a PD or CC-licensed image. That's what it's there for, in addition to serving media for all the other projects. There is Wikisource, a large repository of freely-licensed text. See above. There is Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikinews...
The WMF does not simply run web servers, they run a cloud platform. WMF is a player in Big Data, and the WMF Cloud supports developers of bots, tools, database queries, scripts, and all sorts of widgets that interface with at least one project. Software development. I've already mentioned that MediaWiki is an open-source, in-house platform, and it's constantly under active development. Anyone may create an account and submit an issue in the Phabricator bug database.
Outreach. Wikipedias coordinate with college instructors who are teaching how to edit Wikipedia as part of a class. There is a standardized and recognizable process for this now. WMF holds conferences worldwide, to get people interested in editing, learn how to do it, and keep them engaged.
All projects have separate sets of administrators and unique policies and guidelines. If all you know is English Wikipedia by reputation, you've barely scratched the surface.
Reminder that the above is total horseshit.
I wonder how could she serve the Wikimedia Foundation and what background she had that helped her do so. ~600K USD in severance and much more of donors' money were spent to bankroll her salary.
What a waste!
There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial and doesn't deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance.
Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It's a global top 10 website, and that puts a target on their back. They have lawyers. They have an HR department. They have a Finance department. These departments do complex real-world stuff that needs planning, management and strategy. Maybe you know how to scale an SQL database, but do you know how to sue the Turkish government?
Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful, their grant money spending could use some scrutiny: