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.
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.
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.
Probably any tech company of note is paying "executives" far, far more than that, at least in the US.
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 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.
Most in-demand, skilled labour is much more pricey than what the average person makes.
True, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's a realistic hypothetical at all.
They are all a bit over-the-top.
In fact, I would argue that an executive at a small operation has more responsibility than one at a large operation.
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.
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.
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?
They're not though. Especially not multiple of them providing the same service.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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?
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.
Which is way way below industry average.
>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.
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.
Seems like anywhere else it would be pretty insane money for nonprofits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
YouTube however is a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is a tech company.
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.