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Comment by akolbe | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's not how human psychology works. You didn't have managers earning $400,000K+ at the Wikimedia Foundation then. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg

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If I make edits to Wikipedia, it's because I want to share them with the world. I couldn't care less for the managers (from a purely technical perspective), as long as they do a good job of keeping Wikipedia running.

So pay them less, fine whatever. But let's not pretend anybody was duped about anything here. Not one single person has ever been forced to make a Wikipedia edit. That "labor" was given freely under the term of the license, it's at best incredibly disingenuous and naive to pretend you're owed anything for it.

Who said anyone got duped?

This argument would work better if the editors were paid in the first place, and then they see an increase in the executives' salaries and get jelous or feel it's unfair. Clearly not the case, since they already knew it's all volunteer work.

The editors argument would work better if they would say: "we donated (time, work, knowledge) and are not happy with how foundation spends its resources (money)". The whole "pay gap" thing is muddying the water. One comes closer to the truth when abstracting donations and resources.

Edit: Looking at the video with the monkeys two posts up: there could still be a point to it, if we look at the total earnings and total work of a person, instead of just looking at wikipedia: an editor who earns 100k with their day job and donates work to wikipedia can still feel it is unfair when wikipedia management earns four times as much.

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