I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled by these heart-wrenching fundraising messages to donate. Here is a senior with $18 to his name promising to donate as soon as his social security check arrives:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#S...

The Wikimedia Foundation has also just been fundraising in India and South Africa, again asking people there to donate so Wikipedia stays online for them, ad-free, subscription-free and independent.

None of these executives have anything do with the Wikipedia content. All of that is written by unpaid volunteers in their spare time. When Wikipedia first became a top-10 website, the Wikimedia Foundation had less than a dozen staff, and annual expenses of $2 million. I am not saying lets go back to that; I'm only saying this to make the point that the success of Wikipedia was not dependent on highly paid executives. It happened when there weren't any. The main value of the site comes from the volunteers.

Wikipedia should not beg for donations. They should sell ads.

Being envious of something doesn't make it cheaper.

Most in-demand, skilled labour is much more pricey than what the average person makes.

You're answering a point no one made. It has nothing to do with "being envious".

Imagine you were asked to donate to "keep the animal shelter open", and went you went there you found that they were using gold water dishes for the little critters. You would be within your right to complain. You thought you were donating to keep it operating, but now you find that they're using funds on frivolous expenses. Is there something a dish made out of gold does that one made out of plastic doesn't, to justify the expense? Is there something a $350k executive does that a minimum wage one (or even none at all) doesn't?

Any organization that asks for donations would be subject to criticism if it doesn't optimize its operations as much as possible.

> You're answering a point no one made. It has nothing to do with "being envious".

Then what is the relavence of saying "I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled ..."? The donors dont do work similar. The only reason i could possibly imagine bringing this up would be something to do with envy between the average person's salary vs the salary of a high skill position. If not that, what was this sentence trying to say?

> Is there something a $350k executive does that a minimum wage one

350k executives exist. Minimum wage one's don't.

Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.

The relevance is that some of those donors are donating the little money they have because they think there's a chance Wikipedia might cease to exist otherwise, not knowing that the WMF is actually using that money on gold water dishes rather than saving it for a rainy day.

Simply put, if Wikipedia asks for donations to continue operating, 100% of those donations should go towards server costs. That can include the hardware costs, the power, the bandwidth, and the people who maintain those servers. Using the money that was raised to keep it running for any other purpose is at least deceptive.

>Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.

Now imagine that the shelter spends only 10% of its donations on dog food and other dog-related costs, and the rest goes to salaries for people who aren't caring for the dogs and to awareness campaigns. (I'm not implying this is the breakdown in Wikipedia's case; it's just an example.) Even if you think these are worthwhile uses for those funds, don't you think donors should know that their donations will be spent this way before they donate?

But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.

I know people like to complain that managers are useless, but if they really were, every company would get rid of them.

The cost of managers is what is being complained about in this thread. There might be other superflorus things wmf might spend money on which i might agree with you on, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.

If they're paying 350K for an ops manager, that's definitely too much.

They are paying 350k for a ceo, who is a manager of a manager of an ops manager.

Which is way way below industry average.

By 2020, the latest figures we have (page 48 of the Form 990), there were 8 people whose total compensation exceeded $300K. The CEO was at $423k:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...

This was two years ago. Some of these salaries rose by over 20 or 30 percent in the space of two years, when annual US inflation was at 2%. I fully expect to find even greater salary rises since – once the Form 990 for this year is published sometime in 2024 – as US inflation went up during the pandemic.

Then when you said

>But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.

you were raising an irrelevant point, because the salaries of the direct managers of the operations team is not what's under discussion here. They wouldn't need such a deep organizational structure if they weren't paying a bunch of people that take no part in running the site.

What do you think an appropriate number of people is to run the sixth most popular website in the world?

Even if you cut everyone doing software development (which would in itself probably cause a collapse since that is critical to keeping wikipedia running), cut all the lawyers (also pretty important), cut the trust and safety people, etc - you are still left with quite a lot of sysadmins, more than can reasonably be handled by a single manager.

Even if you had multiple operations teams, you could still get away with a fairly flat organizational structure. Not every organization needs to be a top-down hierarchy, and a flat organization makes sense if your funds come from donations and you don't want to pay for too many people who won't directly produce anything.

Now, if your primary objective is not to run a website but something else entirely, then it does make sense for your infrastructure and the salaries of the people maintaining it not to be the largest part of your budget.

I honestly question the value added by these execs. The other day, you and I discussed some of the expensive C-Suite disasters Wikimedia has bought. They actually set Wikimedia back by years. Dozens of valuable, experienced staff left.

And Wikipedia became a top-10 website in 2007, when there was no C-Suite. There seems to be little awareness these days that the main value of the site to the public was and is built and maintained by unpaid volunteers.

Whether or not a particular set of executives (who have all left at this point) are shit at their jobs is a totally different question to what is a reasonable salary for an executive.

As far as early days of wikipedia. I agree the community is what provides value. But at the same time i think there is a lot of rose coloured glasses for that era. I remember there being a lot of downtime and slowness on the site in that era.

Sure. And I complained about how ArbCom volunteers had to deal with child protection issues etc. A lot has become better. But there seems to be an automatic assumption that any executive has to be someone in SF, with the salary costs that go along with it. If they work remotely what does it matter? Wikimedia wants to become more global. Why then not a European, Asian, African, Australian, South American ...? None of them will have salary expectations like someone in SF.

>Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange.

It's not, really. It's about how you frame things, and the follow-up tweets touch on that:

>You wouldn't think so from the fundraising emails currently being sent out, telling people to donate "to keep Wikipedia online", saying it's "awkward to ask", etc. A recent poll of Wikipedia volunteers condemned these emails as unethical and misleading

>If people want to throw money into a bottomless pit, fine; but let's not pretend that the money is needed "to keep Wikipedia online".

>And that story is not the story told to prospective donors. Wikipedia and its unpaid volunteers – the people who actually write and curate Wikipedia – deserve better.

I'm not disagreeing with the overall premise of the tweet chain. I'm just saying that $350k is pretty cheap for an exec at one of the most viewed/important websites on the planet.

$350k salaries _are_ lavish, though. It seems strange to me that people would argue otherwise.

In a sense they are, but comparable to executive salaries at companies with roughly comparable tech/services, those salaries are probably very low.

Probably any tech company of note is paying "executives" far, far more than that, at least in the US.

I don't think it's valid to think extravagant pay rates are not extravagant simply because other executives are also paid extravagant rates.

They are all a bit over-the-top.

Extravagant is a subjective term and for pay it's relative to the location, position, experience, etc.

It may be lavish, but if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap.

Of course, judging performance like that is very difficult, and predicting it in advance is even harder, so it's possible that the highly paid executive would actually perform worse than a volunteer (or a random number generator), but if the complaint about "lavishness" is really about inequality (i.e. the executive's standard of living being much higher than they need / the median citizen's) then that criticism should probably be directed at the tax policies of the relevant governments.

> from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap

But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive.

The difference is who is in control and what are their priorities and influences. Since "the organization" is making the decisions - and, completely incidentally, "the CEO" is the head of "the organization" - it just so happens that "the organization" finds that "the CEO" should be paid lavishly.

Rich people gonna prioritize rich people.

> But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive.

Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?

The normal person knows that just having big paycheck does not make an executive more competent. We have all seen people with huge paychecks fail spectacularly.

Are you saying there's no correlation between salary and performance?

There's no direct correlation, yes. If you took two executives (or really two people in any profession), one making 10x as much as the other, and swapped their positions, you would not see one position dropping to 10% performance and the other rising to 1000% performance. In all likelihood, they would both drop to 50-70% for a while and then stabilize to their original values.

Individual persons are not orders of magnitude more productive on their own, they're just in environments that allow them to be more productive, for example by giving them control over more resources.

It matters because "normal" people are the ones paying those extravagant salaries in the end.

Those normal people should know that $350k is a steal.

Indeed.

Only if you insist on hiring in the US – while at the same time talking all the time about how you want to fix the fact that you're underrepresented in many parts of the world, by asking some really expensive US staff to fix it ...

> if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap.

True, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's a realistic hypothetical at all.

Some of the most expensive WMF execs have been complete disasters, exiting after a year or two and leaving the entire organisation in disarray.

Maybe they should spend more than $350k and find someone more competent.

That reminds me of the saying, "We have the best politicians money can buy."

Can you provide an example?

I don't see any reason for an executive to be less likely to make a mistake. And considering that the core business is rock solid and didn't change much in last many years, I don't even see a potential for such mistake.

> It may be lavish, but if an executive paid $350k is 35% less likely to make a mistake that would cost the organisation $1m (which is about 1% of their budget), compared to a volunteer working for free, then maybe, from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap.

They're not though. Especially not multiple of them providing the same service.

I suppose they meant relatively speaking. Taking into account how massive of a project Wikipedia is and hence how much responsibility the position has.

I don't understand this. Do you think that an executive's responsibilities scale with the size of the enterprise? I don't think that's true.

In fact, I would argue that an executive at a small operation has more responsibility than one at a large operation.

Sundar Pichai gets ~$250M. Parag Agrawal gets something like $30M.

Apples and oranges, you should instead compare it with other non-profits. According to top links in search for 'non profit ceo salary' give me average salary numbers about $150k

I'd say it's still a tricky comparison because the WMF is (reductively) a tech company, and tech sector salaries remain pretty high. For a lot of roles they need to fill, they're competing with other tech companies for those employees, not just other nonprofits. A salary that's fantastic by average-nonprofit standards might be vastly underpaying someone who's deciding between a job at the WMF or Google.

WMF is not a tech company, and their value is not in their tech. Their value is in their user created and populated content .

WMF is a company that's mostly engaged in maintaining a tech product, and much of its hiring needs are for people who'd otherwise be working in tech. If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.

> If it's not in the tech sector then there's not any meaning to that category.

They're not in the business of selling/providing tech and there's nothing technologically novel about what they do. What they do is providing and managing an encyclopedia. Their value proposition isn't some tech, it's their content.

In fact you've got it the wrong way around, because if the bar to being a "tech company" was using or maintaining some sort of technology, then pretty much every company would be a tech company nowadays. In that scenario the category would be truly meaningless.

The easiest way to spot a tech company is looking at their R&D spending: a tech company is constantly exploring instead of just maintaining.

Neither Google nor Meta are tech companies, either. They're advertising companies.

So youtube isn't a tech company?

It's not. YouTube is an online video platform.

YouTube however is a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is a tech company.

Why not hire in Europe, or Asia? Almost all of them work remotely.

Compared to other non profit tech companies

People working for them earn 100k+, Wikipedia has volunteers writhing the content for free.

If you want to compare it based on the people working for each company:

Parag has around 3900 employees. Wikipedia has around 550. Around 7x multiplier.

$30m / 7 = ~$4.3mil

Sundar has around 135k employees. 245x multiplier.

$250m / 245 = ~$1mil.

$350k seems like a steal no matter how you put it.

How about comparing it to the Internet Archive (2019)? 169 employees, $11M salary costs:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

Wikimedia Foundation (2019): 291 employees, $56M salary costs.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...

Less than twice the US employees, more than five times the salary costs. (Both orgs also have some non-US employees included in the salary costs total, but they are a small minority of the staff.)

$11mil / 169 = ~$65k / employee. So average pay at Internet Archive is barely over the median salary in the US? That's not good.

Salary costs don't need to be looked at as something to aggressively push down. You can treat your employees well while still being a non-profit.

(Though I'm not claiming wikipedia treats their employees well, I have no idea.)

Well, ask yourself which org needs donations more urgently. (Last I looked the Internet Archive were being sued for lending scans of books – books they had physically bought – to one user at a time online.)

Please focus on one thing at a time. I think you're starting to come around to the idea that maybe Wikipedia has an appropriate amount of funding and is spending an appropriate amount of money?

You can just keep moving the goal posts every time you get proven wrong.

Also, you were complaining about Wikipedia being in the US/SF, when the Internet Archive is also in SF.

Not in SF. Maybe there is a case to be made to move Wikipedia operations outside Bay area.

Maybe there is a case for moving much of it outside the US? Lots of staffers work remotely anyway.

Yes. OTOH, United states has one of the best free speech protections in the world. It would make sense, to have the key people and data centers in the US. EU, however, has better privacy protection initiatives.

Agreed, but staffers can be abroad (there are a few even now).

Uh, what?

SDEs with a few YOE are getting this no problem at top companies. Why wouldn't the CEO of the fifth biggest website on the internet?

But that's apples and oranges. People who work at those companies are presumably being paid that because they are (or at least believed to be) making more in profit for the company than they are being paid. It's the same reason why professional football players and movie actors make so much. But consider ballet dancers or stage actors -- they may be just as athletic or as good actors as the football players or movie actors are, but they are in a far less profitable field. So they make less. The people in these jobs are just motivated by their passion rather than by salary.

Those SDEs are also paid extravagantly.

Its SF salaries. Why are these nonprofits based in SF anyway? Same goes for Mozilla.

Seems like anywhere else it would be pretty insane money for nonprofits.

that's a lot of salary for something that is going broke and needs donations now.

Is requesting donations better or worse than selling advertising?

Better. The real question is, is this way of soliciting donations better than another way of soliciting donations? Answer to that is not clear.

How about they start spending their money wisely instead of growing infinitely? That way they can keep Wikipedia up and running for the next decade or so without bothering us with these solicitations.

What do they do, though?

I wonder how much the contributors are being paid...

It's pretty lavish for a nonprofit.

It's lower than total comp of senior engineers in the bay area, just to give a point of reference.

It's about twice the salary of the Nordic prime ministers (not combined though) as another point of reference

Is the PM's salary before- or after-tax? Do they get free housing as the prime minister? How's the housing market in their cities? In SF, where Wikipedia is based, it's completely whack. What else does a PM get? Household staff, personal assistants, drivers etc?

The executives don't live in Norway, they live in the bay area; hence my (relevant) particular point of reference.

In that case, maybe they should only ask for donations from people in the bay area.

Which seems to be pretty problematic.

100% agreed. $350k salaries for people that have basically built and maintained the modern-day Library of Alexandria is a pittance. These people deserve it.

Most of them are recent hires. They have built nothing. Wikipedia was built by volunteers.