Remember that this is what your money funds when you donate to it...
No wonder they've upped the guilt tripping this year. Wikipedia has enough money right now to run Wikipedia forever but it keeps wasting it on useless stuff and feeling like it needs more. The WMF cannot fathom how to operate without continuous growing wastes of money, and without donations, Wikipedia would die within two years. We need to starve the beast so it learns to live frugally again.
Jimmy needs his third yacht, dangit!
(Jimmy Wales did cash in on his reputation with some ads for luxury watches and idk what else he does for $).
Salaries at the WMF have absolutely exploded, though they started out very low given the location and the talent base they were competing for. You probably want the WMF to be a somewhat competitive employer, and Silicon Valley salaries are also through the roof across the board. So those $400K executive salaries are (grating my teeth) vaguely justifiable.
A volunteer-run page summarizes salary progression in key roles (up to 2024)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
So you can be assured your money isn’t going to the executives’ bank accounts, not directly anyway. However, this is precisely why non-profit organizations tend to get bloated. The executives can’t get away with a million dollar salaries and not other goodies like stock grants. But you can justify staffing up, which benefits the careers of the executives.
Compensation only started catching up in 2021-22 and even then is roughly comparable to what mid-career ICs now earn in the Bay, NYC, and Seattle.
Either they're really bad at picking, or the job is really bad.
Def the latter in the sense that it is a very high stress job with weak compensation and high risk of being targeted.
Also, these are not Silicon Valley numbers. Similar roles as those listed would pay 1.5-2x in the private sector here in the Bay.
Even Wikipedia Foundation's European salaries [0] are well above market rate in the geos listed (Italy, Germany) [1][2].
> They are not doing advanced R&D, or product dev that would justify big numbers or a very specific set of skills
Wikimedia's assets are some of the most heavily visited sites globally and are often a target for attacks (both nation state and independently led).
It takes a nontrivial amount of effort to maintain a platform like Wikimedia's.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/wikimedia-foundation/salari...
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany
https://wikimediaendowment.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20...
This is in addition to assets of around $300 million held by the Wikimedia Foundation. Form 990:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat...
For expenses breakdown see the most recent audited accounts:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki...
Long-term it'd be best for Wikipedia if it was self-funded through this, like Harvard, for instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
I've never worked in an industry where unionization was a thing, but my general understanding is that the unions are protectionist dreaming of things that were true before but not today, but they want to keep things as they were. Good luck.
I've benefited from Wikipedia, but I don't romanticize it. Either side of the table can't stop the AI onslaught, they are all out of jobs. Another Wikimedia will rise up from the ashes.
This mindset really baffles me, as a unionized guy with a white collar email job. Don't you, like, want things that your employer doesn't want to give you? Job protection? Better than CoL wage growth? Work from home? Internal job progression? Clear, understandable job factors agreed upon in advance?
The union negotiates for what its members want. There's nothing magical about unions that mean, like, a white collar union is going to be negotiating for all its members to get a new hard hat every year, just because that's what auto worker unions do.
I don’t know what the solution is, we’ve tried a few. Perhaps there are none.
Do you want to keep trying for your union to earn their seat at the table each year proving their worth, or “else”?
There is going to be another meeting where the bosses from each side will sip martinis and introduce their spouses and then they depart the galla in long black limos. It’s been written.
P.S. Your employer, your chosen object of warship, your partner or children, owe you nothing. Gotta find a way to reconcile that.
This governance question doesn't go away if another Wikimedia rises from the ashes. You still will still need a board making decisions, and someone needs to pick the members of the board. Right now there are 8 seats selected by "the community," 7 seats selected by the board, and 1 seat selected by the founder.
I've pledged my $3/5 a few dozen of times over the years, the banners guilted me into it, have you? I am amused by the idea that the thing grew enough to have enough employees to have a union and dysfunctional enough to have an internal dispute. It should be a national treasure on my tax return, or something I don't need to think about, like oxygen.
insane way to measure an organization
What organization and who cares? There are dozens of you?
Now the picture is getting more clear - denying a union is clearly big brother billionaire thinking, e. g. lowering cost while maximizing abuse of workers/employees.