The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages

Translation: business-types are salty about Wikipedia not toeing the line on the fiction that executive pay "needs" to be obscene in order to "attract talent."

Those are very reasonable salaries to me. What's insane and should never exist is those who make $200 million a year. Like who needs this much money? What are you gonna do with all of it? Does it even matter how much money you have after a certain amount? I think at a certain point it becomes some kind of disorder or a mental illness to pursue more and more money. Give me $100k a year and I'll be a happy, very happy camper.

Edit: to be more clear, I'm talking about where I live currently. $100k where I live would put me in a very comfortable spot financially. My bad, everyone.

In times like this, especially when the original twitter post gets ratio'd to shit, it's important to evaluate where they're getting their numbers. I see they post a link to Rumble. I've never heard of this before, what is it?

Rumble
Rumble is a video platform where you can watch live and on-demand content from various categories, such as news, politics, gaming, sports, viral, power slap and finance. You can also discover new creators, join communities, and support your favorite channels on Rumble.

Um... I don't know what Power Slap is but ok, it's a youtube clone.

All Videos
ALEX JONES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! Elon Brought Him Back... What's Next?!
Pentagon PANIC, Trump "Happening", Obama FEAR push, Cyber PUSH, Focus, Pray!
"HE'S BACK!!" Musk RESTORES Alex Jones On X…
NEWSMAX2 LIVE on Rumble

Oh fuck me it's a right wing nutjob site. This post is fucking dogshit, trashing Wikipedia because it helps counter their propaganda. Fuck that noise.

Happily other people noticed this fucking nonsense:

So I have no idea what the Lunduke Journal is, so I spent a couple minutes googling it to find its run by a Qanon guy and they themselves say their "tech satire" so... Maybe not someone you should trust with facts.

He says elsewhere that it’s a “liberal cesspool” so you know where is problem really is.

So they're making $150-300k per year, with more for severance. That is indeed relatively low compared to major tech companies.

The article's examples were Docusign (CEO made $85M) and Google (CEO made $225M).

If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.

These are eminently reasonable salaries. Compared to some of the parasites that I work with who get paid > $300K to do fuck all.

We'll look at that. I'm even MORE incentivized to donate, now

Mozilla's CEO is paid $7m for running the "charity".

US salaries are just completely bonkers. 500k is "mid-level facebook"? What the actual fuck? Europeans are getting completely shafted. They are the cheap, qualified, tech labor of the US.

deleted

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Wikipedia's pages are created and edited by a community of volunteers, while the Wikimedia Foundation manages the website's technical backend.

Mind you, it's about doubled since, but they don't publish breakdownsThey have enough cash to operate wikipedia for more than 100 years according to the public IRS filings.

On the lower end, vice presidents Carol Dunn and Margaret Novotny were paid $241,438 and $242,379 respectively, the filing shows.

wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet, contains terabytes of information, doesnt host ads, and is entirely free to browse.

The CEO of Docusign, a company that JUST signs documents for you, made $85,940,000 this year," wrote another person, whose post garnered over 22,000 likes.

The encyclopedia is also one of the most important sources of training data for AI tools like ChatGPT, Nicholas Vincent, a professor at Simon Fraser University, told The New York Times.

The original article contains 606 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Thanks for the reminder! Just donated!

The CEO made $780k with $600k of that being severance. She left Wikipedia a lot bigger and influential than when she started. Sure that is still a lot but there are much bigger fish to fry.

It used to be that Wikimedia projects had lots of volunteers willing to maintain the projects, but the WMF didn't have a lot of money. Now the WMF is swimming in money (which it uses to do more and more "office actions" bypassing community processes), but editor numbers are staying constant or even shrinking. People nowadays like to spend time a lot more pretty much everywhere else on the Internet than on Wikimedia projects.

It is time for free knowledge to transition to a concept where people get paid, not the wiki concept that worked fine to start out in the beginning, but whose limits have now become clear.

like most posts against wikimedia, this article is garbage

And they are in my annual giving so I also have reservations

I'm all for CEOs and executives limiting their pay, ideally based on what they pay their regular employees, but of all the companies in the tech space to get mad at, they choose one that's actually doing a significant public service?

And I know people are gonna say it's the volunteers that do the real work but people still had to build and run things. I dunno, I respect them getting luxury pay more than anyone at Facebook at least.