Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

Just take a look at this graph. The salaries have been bloating whilst hosting expenses are flat and plummeting as a proportion of all expenses.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Wikimedia_Foundation&#x27;s_expenses_evolution_by_rubrics_in_US_Dollars.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Fi...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Wikimedia_Foundation&#x27;s_expenses_percentage.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Fi...</a><p>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&#x27;t cough up.<p>It gives me an uneasy feeling that the ex-CEO went to work for a think tank. I hope they&#x27;re politically neutral.<p>Obviously it&#x27;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.

They aren&#x27;t the ones bringing the value. It&#x27;s the volunteers, which don&#x27;t get a penny. They have received enough money to sustain Wikipedia almost indefinitely, I have no idea why they are still begging for money. I haven&#x27;t heard of a single thing that&#x27;s good excuse for that money in years.<p>And a corollary would be saying that GitHub deserve money because otherwise there would be no open source.<p>Wikipedia&#x27;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 &quot;non profit&quot; that&#x27;s getting all the credit.

It looks like the CEO of Wikimedia gets paid roughly as much as a Staff&#x2F;Senior Staff-level FAANG engineer. That looks about right. And they got 6 months severance. Also comparable.<p>I don&#x27;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.

Why are they actually getting any severance at all? It looks like they resigned to take new jobs. They weren&#x27;t sacked or made redundant.

From what I could find, Wikimedia employs about 250 people in total. The compensation paid to the CEO of Wikimedia is about what a senior SWE makes at Facebook.<p>I don&#x27;t see what&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.

Is this some sort of scam? I don&#x27;t understand why they would receive such huge amounts of money, for doing nothing other than choosing to leave their jobs.<p>It seems especially bizarre for a non-profit organisation where the bulk of all the actual work is done freely by volunteers.<p>What is actually going on here?

This is what our donations are paying for? I&#x27;ll be thinking twice before donating again.

One thing to consider is that katherine became CEO at a very turbulant time at WMF. The previous ceo (lila) was extremely unpopular and facing a staff revolt [1]. Morale was terrible. Maybe katherine had a big severence agreement because she was walking into a shit show.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mollywhite.net&#x2F;timelines&#x2F;wikimedia&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mollywhite.net&#x2F;timelines&#x2F;wikimedia&#x2F;</a>

Man, I&#x27;ve been <i>fired</i> by for-profit companies and felt lucky to get four weeks severance. It&#x27;s upsetting that people working for a non-profit are getting 1.5x their salary, but I guess this is kind of what we get for believing that a non-profit is going to act better than an evil corporation.

Granted, I&#x27;m looking at these salaries, from over in the healthcare sectors where CEOs and executives (whose value many of us find questionable) make $5 mil salaries, even for being CEO of a &quot;nonprofit hospital&#x2F;foundation&quot;, and have way larger golden parachutes to boot. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s (relatively) admirable the Wikimedia board is stressing out about severances from $300-500k.

...while they bang on my email server&#x27;s door for donations because wikimedia is &quot;struggling&quot; so badly. what a crock of shit. i told you silicon valley is made up of con-artists. i&#x27;ll put money on it.

Ignoring for now the severance package, the salary seems pretty low for a CEO of such a large foundation. $400-500K is about the salary range of a senior-staff engineer at FAANG and their responsibility is way lower.<p>One of the issues with non-profits is that people expects the employees&#x2F;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<p>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?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Katherine_Maher" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Katherine_Maher</a><p>&quot;Maher states that she focuses on global digital inclusion as a way to improve and protect the rights of people to information through technology.&quot;<p>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 &quot;neutrality&quot;, and assert this as truth. Wikipedia is part of a broader propaganda drive to export US cultural mores to the rest of the world.

I’ve been an editor on Wikipedia for nearly 15 years. I reckon I’ve easily contributed tens of thousands of dollars worth of value during this time. To be clear, I don’t expect&#x2F;want any compensation (I firmly believe in the free knowledge for all mission), but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting to see others profit handsomely off of my hard work.

One thing I do respect is that this article is hosted on Wikipedia. Not many corporations nor non-profits would host an obviously self effacing article.

&quot;I think that&#x27;s also not sustainable to just expect that rich people who don&#x27;t need to care for their bread in the morning can just come and work for us.&quot; - Nataliia Tymkiv<p>Call me crazy, but $623,286 USD will buy a LOT of bread.<p>&quot;Putting food on the table for your family&quot; phrases start to become almost comical when they&#x27;re made by people earning good portions of a million per year.

What concerns me more is Wikimedia Foundation was apparently until recently led by someone now on the payroll of Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. Must have done wonders to neutrality at Wikipedia.

They are doing a great job, but any organization who can pay US$623,286 in severance pay for 1 person shouldn&#x27;t be putting out sob stories asking for donations IMHO. I&#x27;ve made donations in the past, but I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;ll be making any in the future, if there is where it is going.

This reminds me a bad experience.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;s a good life lesson though

To put into perspective: the Wikimedia Foundation manages one of humanity’s greatest achievements.<p>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…<p>I mean come on, look at some of the comments posted here. “Con artists”, are you serious?

If the Wikimedia Foundation were incorporated in California, the CA Attorney General would like investigate these payments, which appear to be out-of-band from similar organizations.<p>But Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated in Florida (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov&#x2F;api&#x2F;report&#x2F;GetImageByNum&#x2F;244142135123189171054228164010114232204080233146" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov&#x2F;api&#x2F;report&#x2F;GetImageByNum&#x2F;24...</a> direct pdf download), which lets nonprofits do whatever they want.<p>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&#x27;s commitment to proper governance.

Wikipedia is an amazing resource that I use all the time, and currently the best (or least worst) model for curating such a massive knowledge base. For these reasons I have $100&#x2F;mo recurring donation set up. $240M is less than two years of expenses but I do think they could do a much better job explaining their budget&#x2F;expense growth.<p>I tend to view math&#x2F;science pages most of the time and it&#x27;s rare to see any non-neutroal POV issues on most of those kinds of pages.<p>Even for topics that are contentious today, the system <i>should</i> converge towards neutrality over long time frames. It&#x27;s just unrealistic to expect that hot&#x2F;political topics would be perfectly NPOV in the short run.

Newsflash: nonprofit company that forms a linchpin of digital knowledge is doing well enough to pay severance packages in the (... checks notes ...) six digit range, sets up policy to do better in the future! Cue HN rage machine.

I always try the Buzzword Bingo game on all these corpy pronouncements, and <i>finally</i>:<p>I have bingo! for<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan&#x2F;2023-2024" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...</a><p>Here&#x27;s the card:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;d&#x2F;1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp0DqAK&#x2F;view?usp=share_link" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;d&#x2F;1B_KuFNSB9CXEZuPUoIVy6tZEZfp...</a>

(&#x2F;me looks around at comments)… The logical fallacies abound. It is nice when people think slowly and deliberately. It doesn’t seem to happen often. Much of what is happening here seems to be emotional reactions followed by attempts at reason. Glad to know things are about the same, otherwise I might be worried that the HN conversation is <i>progressing</i> too rapidly.

Do not donate to Wikipedia.

I mean, can&#x27;t we form a web3 dao to perform acquisition of WMF (or a hostile-takeover?), if it works out donors get to vote next leadership, etc etc, drive cost low and make sure things are in good hands, if it doesn&#x27;t work out then just return the cash back, plain and simple.

The CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation moving to a higly opinioned think tank with a clear agenda worries me.<p>I agre with Atlantic Council on a number of issues so I am not expressing a bias against Atlantic Council but on principle.<p>She is certialy enttited to work whereever she wants and I wish her well.

The arguments are attacking the people but it&#x27;s the organisation that should be questioned. If I am a private company and I am struggling to keep profits, I can justify an expensive Director, ideally with good experience, whose relatively large salary will result in very large profits. Of course it doesn&#x27;t always work and those people will have asked for big penalty clauses if you decide they didn&#x27;t do well enough but that is the risk in capitalism.<p>Not-for-profit is something else and should have a different enough culture that you aren&#x27;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.<p>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?<p>It just all smells really bad and as others have said, it has been toxic for ages and doesn&#x27;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.

I thought severance payments went to employees that were laid off? I believe both the people mentioned chose to leave the foundation?<p>Is severance payment a bonus you accrue by working there?<p>Only time I have gotten it was when I was laid off. I guess the C* have it better?

Are they hiring? lol

Imagine donating to this corrupt organization

Unfortunately, this is one of the reasons I would never donate to wikipedia financially or with edits &#x2F; my time.

How can this foundation be held accountable?

How exactly does Wikipedia make its money? Is it exclusively through donors? If so, who are the top donors?

Utterly unacceptable for a nonprofit allegedly serving the greater good. Disgusting to beg for &quot;just even a single dollar&quot; as they do on meraphorical hands and knees, with plea after tortured, heartfelt plea from Jimmy Wales whilst doing this on the back-end. I already knew about how flush for cash the Wikimedia Foundation was, but this really is astonishing behavior.

This I why I don&#x27;t donate to wikipedia anymore; I found out they actually don&#x27;t need it.

So I see people scoffing at the way the English Wikipedia is run, and people referring incorrectly to &quot;What Wikipedia does&quot; when the Wikipedias are just one aspect of the WMF&#x27;s activities. So do you really know what the WMF does?<p>The encyclopedias, and MediaWiki software, are the flagship projects, and they come in hundreds of languages (I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s what it&#x27;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...<p>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&#x27;ve already mentioned that MediaWiki is an open-source, in-house platform, and it&#x27;s constantly under active development. Anyone may create an account and submit an issue in the Phabricator bug database.<p>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.<p>All projects have separate sets of administrators and unique policies and guidelines. If all you know is English Wikipedia by reputation, you&#x27;ve barely scratched the surface.

Why can&#x27;t the Wikimedia projects just be forked by some more normal people?

This is why you shouldn’t donate to Wikimedia

This is why I refuse to donate to WikiMedia.

Cheers, I&#x27;m never donating ever again.

This is why I use ublock to hide their ridiculous requests for money. Among other reasons.

Reminder that 99% of donations to wikipedia are funnelled to shareholders and executives. Those tragic appeals they put out are lies.

These are the smallest parachutes to make headlines.

&gt; <i>After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language Institute&#x27;s Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative experience that instilled a deep love for the Middle East. Maher subsequently studied at the Institut français d’études arabes de Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia. In 2005, Maher received a bachelor&#x27;s degree from New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.</i><p>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&#x27; money were spent to bankroll her salary.<p>What a waste!

There&#x27;s nothing intrinsically wrong with nonprofits paying high salaries to senior leaders. You will find very well compensated people at the top of many large charities. That&#x27;s because they are big orgs with hundreds of employees, with all the same problems as similar-sized big orgs. They employ a lot of people, and the job of managing and leading a lot of people isn&#x27;t easy. It&#x27;s in the charity&#x27;s interest that the job is done well, and so they pay well to get the best talent, because they&#x27;re competing with for-profit orgs for this same talent. And yes, severance is negotiated as part of the employment contract - it&#x27;s a tool to attract talent.<p>There are a lot of armchair CEOs who think leadership is trivial and doesn&#x27;t deserve high pay. All I can say is: try it, and then decide whether you feel like doing it for a pittance.<p>Maybe you think running a large-scale website is a solved engineering problem. But Wikimedia is more than a website. It&#x27;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?<p>Now, if you want to direct your discontent somewhere useful, their grant money spending could use some scrutiny:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grants:Start" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grants:Start</a>