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."
- They don't like it when real life counters their narrative, and this shows that corporations can pay reasonable salaries to their executives.
- I still think the "low" salary of Wikimedia is obscene.
  There is no way even that figure is proportionate to what these people actually do day to day.
  
  700k? For being in charge of one of the biggest websites in history?
  That doesn't seem awful at all.
  
  And you know what they do day to day because you're who again?

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.
- yup. wikipedia's salaries aren't 'too low'--the others (mostly-publicly traded or dreaming-of-an-ipo) pay their top executives way too fucking much.
  
  They are probably still a little low - but there’s a giant gap between $400k and $200M.
  If you believe that a lot more lower level people should make $150-200k, their manager should probably make more, and their manager should probably make more, and their manager should probably make more, and the CEO should probably make more and all the sudden there isn’t a wide enough gap to pay those people more. Would you want to manage a bunch of people for $5k/yr more?
  Money that isn’t paid to employees is paid to shareholders or squandered on stupid stuff.
  Their CEOs should make more, and their regular employees should make more.
- Honestly, today, with a family, house, car, etc... 100k isn't as much as it sounds.
  
  Dog I make less than 40k, it's exactly what it sounds like.
  
  $250-$300k is the new $100k from the 90's imo. It's rough out here.
- $100k used to be a number to aspire to, growing up in the 90s and early 00s. But, nowadays (depending on location), $100k is not as much as you think. Especially if you're trying to support a family on it.
  
  True, I should have been more clear that I'm talking about where I live currently. $100k would definitely put me in a very comfortable spot in life, but I get what you mean :)
- $100k
  Havs you done any math on this for where you live?
  How about Dallas? Atlanta? Philly? Baltimore?
  OK, let's pull the big ones: DC? Anecdote: was once offered a job inside the beltway for a little over $100k. Fuck no. $100k in DC is nothing.
  How about San José? LA? San Fran? NY? Again, more places where $100k ain't much.
  Single metrics don't tell us much.
  
  I agree with you 100% $100k in some states like NY or California don't mean shit, but where I live, I'd live a very comfortable life if I made $100k.
- All that extra money seems to be a detriment. People seem to be less empathetic and just use that money to get more money.
  
  Reminds me of what Warren Zevon had to say about rich people problems, off Preludes. It came out a few years after his death, and the back half of the album has snippets from some radio interview(s?) he did. Neat musings by a complex dude: he was creative genius in a lot of ways, and a titanic asshole in a lot of other ways (he asked his ex-wife to write his biography, and to not go easy on him - alcoholism, violence, absentee parenting...it's all there).
  Anyway, that's a preface for the folks who don't know about him: he probably could have been a bigger financial success had he not been a disaster of a human, but maybe his dirty life and times gave him enough material to feed his creativity...who knows.
  WZ: I was real lucky, because I always had some kind of work that came along - at the last minute, anyway.
  I was always able to make some kind of living as a musician
  I also never really got rich, and that might have been lucky too, ya know?
  Interviewer: in what way?
  WZ: Well, because the less time you spend with the issues of being rich
  they're like the issues of being famous
  they're not real issues
  so they're not real life.
  Interviewer: And it leaves more time to be creative?
  WZ: There's more of an exchange - a human exchange of ideas and feelings to be had on the bus stop than over the phone with your accountant, and if you're rich you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant. it's necessary, I believe.
  I know I'm happy and that means I must be lucky. That I know.
  EDIT: this is not to say I wouldn't be grateful for more money, myself, but I chose the life of a biologist - in ecology and evolution, no less. I'm happy to make a living, and it's always a little shocking to see folks make double/triple what I do and say it's "not much these days". Those of us scraping by have a wildly different perspective, and I'd love to give folks a tour of what it looks like long-term.
  
  Yup, it's like it washes off their souls out of their bodies. I wouldn't wanna be in that spot to be honest.
- 100k would ruin me!
  Move?
  No!

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.
- Also the CEO makes $400k if anyone just wanted that information. I had to listen to 60% of that dudes video to get to that point.
  This doesn't seem insane to me. It's high for the average joe, but it's not competitive at all with other big tech CEO total comp.
  
  Everyone is pointing out the comparison of Wikipedia's salaries to other tech companies, but they're missing the point that the person they're arguing with is NOT coming from a good faith position. They are hoping to feed on your distrust of the rich and powerful, in an attempt to convince you to work against your interests and the common good.
  They hope their calls of "Wikipedia owners make too much money!" leads to "We should dismantle Wikipedia by boycotting donations!" and then to "We should sell Wikipedia to the last surviving Koch brother!"
- This lunduke recently posted the same shit against Mozilla, and sadly a lot of ppl here in lemmy are buying their crap and started bashing Mozilla for everything, at least in the posts I saw recently. I think ppl still believe that free software should be made from free labor.
- The dude does not even seem to know what a nonprofit is.
  Their calculation of Wikipedia being able to run for 100 years is if you removed everyone's salary. Not sure you would get many people working 40+ hours a week for free voluntarily.

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).
- $150-300k makes sense. $225M does not. It's obscene and absurd.
  
  the difference between $225M and 300k is $224.7M
  
  Hell, even low 7-figures could make sense. Though even that's still high.
  But Jesus Christ with these hundreds of millions, it's obscene.
- It's important to note that most of what they "made" is actually just the stock that they already own or the stock options they received.
  In general the actual cash that they receive is less than $500k.
  Taxes are calculated differently on stock sales vs wages.
  
  So?
  
  You're right that their salaries weren't $500k plus, those numbers included severance. Actual salaries were in the order of $150-300k (with the highest salaries paid to the owners).
  Wikimedia doesn't have stock AFAIK.

If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.
- I don't care what their executives earn, but if those companies paid their taxes and stopped interfering with unionization efforts that would be nice.
  
  Por que no los dos ?

These are eminently reasonable salaries. Compared to some of the parasites that I work with who get paid > $300K to do fuck all.
- So eh, you guys hiring?
  
  Sure, but you actually have to work hard for your $60k. Don't want the $300k people to feel bad for firing you for not supporting their salary.
- Every large corporation is like this too. Even after layoffs, they seem to mostly just get rid of the low pay workers. The high pay morons are still around.

We'll look at that. I'm even MORE incentivized to donate, now
- Yeah donating is a lot easier to understand when wages are (low) 6 figures instead of 8 or 9.
- I've been meaning to for years! I will as soon as I'm able to.
- Yeah, someone complained that they have funds to operate for 100 years. First, I doubt that if you account for inflation. Second, it's one of the most valuable resources ever created. I hope it lasts at least 100 years.

Mozilla's CEO is paid $7m for running the "charity".
- So? If that’s what she’s worth then you either hire her, or put up with second best. You may think CEOs are paid too much overall - I’m not disagreeing, but let’s not pretend people who work for charities should all take charity salaries. If you want to build a world class product, hire world class people - they’re not cheap.
  I cannot fathom the indignation.
  
  If the first one on the list was so expensive and so counterproductive, I can't imagine the rest...
- She's CEO of Mozilla foundation (charity) but also Mozilla corporation (normal business).

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.
- One reason tech companies are able to give absurd salaries is to suppress competition. If they can price everyone else out from good engineers, they can keep competition low.
- Well, we don't have these kind of tech...uh..."foundations" in Europe. But execs in other companies are getting 500k...
  
  Last I checked GAFAM exist in Europe but don't pay close to what they pay their US counterparts. European companies also have CEOs that earn millions but still pay their software devs way below 100k€/year.

deleted
- and are now injecting its extension directly into the browser! Firefox?
  
  deleted

Thanks for the reminder! Just donated!

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!
- 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.
  That just shows how grossly overpaid other executives are. The problem isn't that Wikipedia execs aren't paid enough, it's that other executives are paid way too much.
  
  I stand by my opinion that CEO pay should be pegged to the "lowest" employee on the totem pole, everyone should ride the wave and spread out the earnings. Its just gross how it currently is.
  
  Fair point. I find it interesting that there’s such an emphasis on « just »; it takes some efforts to get to a point where as a company you can trust the process to the extent we trust docusign… it’s not exactly trivial. Still waaaaaaay overpaid indeed but still.
  
  I mean I'd argue that the Wikipedia execs are still paid too much given their actual productive output.

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.

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.