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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

Useless signaling. Wikipedia definitely doesn’t need any more money. This $1M will be burned on salaries of Wikimedia Foundation employees, majority of which do nothing useful. Look at their financial statements and see for yourself. Wikimedia has enough cash already to find operations for a decade or two, and they spend most of it on salaries of people running programs you never hear about, and which have no bearing on the way most people actually use Wikipedia and Commons.

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> Useless signaling.

Their contribution to Wikimedia sends a positive signal to potential customers that is very possibly less useless than the more typical form of corporate signalling: advertising.

Do you think that advertising is also useless signalling?

I think advertising reaches way more people and generates income, thus isn't useless.

Useless from the point of view of the recipient. I believe GP meant "useless" as in "PR stunt"; certainly not useless for their public perception, unfortunately.

Useless for Wikipedia readers, not for the donor nor for the Wikimedia foundation members who will spend the money.

Wikimedia salaries: https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...

Interesting. Does this page show that they have had a CTO for just 3 of the past 10 years? Or only that they paid a CTO for those years?

Not sure. They announced Victoria Coleman as their CTO in 2016[1]. But she isn't listed in their 2017-2018 Form 990[2]. Odd, since all "company officers" are supposed to be listed, even if paid nothing[3].

[1]https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/11/02/victoria-coleman-chief...

[2]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/67/Form_...

[3]https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-990-part-vii-...

These are only some of the salaries of a small fraction of the employees for which the salary number is even avaiable. WMF employs 5 or 6 times as many people, and it’s not clear to me what half of them are even doing. I was an admin on Wikipedia in 2007-2010, when WMF was tenth of its current size, and the Wikipedia community never felt the lack of manpower on the foundation side. Now they are an order of magnitude bigger, but in terms of end to end impact it hardly changed at all.

It's the salaries disclosed in their form 990, so yes, not all salaries.

Here's the 990 for 2016-2017: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/67/Form_...

Those salaries seem low, are they not based in SF?

They are, but they are a non-profit, not a VC backed unicorn.

Useless signaling? 1 million is definitely not useless.

It is absolutely useless to Wikimedia, since it already rakes in around $90M a year, and only manages to spend $70M of it, most of it on useless projects that don't make any difference to actual day to day operations of Wikipedia, which is done 95% by unpaid volunteers (the remaining 5% is paying for servers and network, and maintaining software, which costs much, much less than $70M).

Wikimedia clearly doesn't need as much money, but since it gets it, it grows to spend as much of it as it can. If they scaled back to their spending in 2012 (when they already were high up in the top 10 most visited websites), and did fundraising for only extra 2 or 3 years, they would have enough endowment to fund their operations in perpetuity, and not need to run sad Jimbo face on Wikipedia ever again. Alas, the foundation will expand to fill the available space, wasting millions in the process.

WMF is essentially in the agency-budgeting phase. They always need a larger budget and they always find a way to (almost) blow through their previous budget to have an excuse to ask for a bigger one next year round.

> We've been selling cocaine for the CIA so they could buy arms from Iran? Did we at least free some hostages?

> No, this was about our annual budget.

> What?

> If we don't spend it this year we can't get an increase next year.

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