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The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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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!
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.
They'd just do what they always do and make the money elsewhere (mostly using accounting tricks), and claim they made $0 in income.
Good luck going tit for tat with capital. The house always wins.
I don't think the raises would be as big as you think.
Look up mondragon Spain. Its a town in Spain whose economy was struggling after WWII. They turned it around by adopting a cooperative business model. This means all employees are owners.
All employees get to vote how the company operates. Executives work for share holders right? With cooperatives, the share holders are employees creating a business Ouroboros where the boss and their boss have an interest in keeping employees Happy. Employees are invested in keeping the company profitable.
They have padded rules like CEO pay is tied to the lowest salary in the company. It can never be more than X amount of the lowest salary. If they want it to raise they have to increase all salaries in the company first.
They don't get filthy stinking rich. But what they have shown is that the people living there score happier than most. They also show that they are economically more resilient. For close to a 100 years they have withstood recessions and economic down turns.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/07/mondragon-spains-giant-cooperative
In addition to Mondragon, look into co-determination laws in places like Germany, where they have profit sharing, and a certain % of a company's board needs to be made up of actual workers.
This can be done.
And congressman/representative salary should be pegged to minimum wage.
Why?
You've use the word "should", which means you're applying a value judgement. On what metrics are you basing this value judgment? Does a company perform better using this guideline? Do they lower any risks? Does this increase retention? Improve cross-team communication? Reduce waste or losses?
While I also personally think these salaries are insane, without answering about a thousand more similar questions, there's no justification for the metric you've provided.
Another way to look at it: if a company could hire someone for less, and get similar results, wouldn't they?
so heres where I disagree, if you're paying the minumum you're attracting the minimum, the reverse can be said for the worker, why work here when I can get more elsewhere? with pegging the top and bottom rungs of the ladder and spreading the income everyone is motivated to come in to work everyday because they know that if they take care of their work, their work will take care of them. I don't think thats radical. everyone wins.
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.
How much of that success was a direct result of the CEO, though? The more time goes on, the more any company depends on the historic collective achievement of humanity. The company couldn't have succeeded at all without an educated workforce, infrastructure, "the economy", or a million other general social, economic, and political factors completely outside the company's control.
Think of it like this... Most of math as we know it, and by extension computer science, wouldn't exist without Euler. Does that mean Euler, or Euler's children, should own all value generated by Euler's math? How about if he started a company that copyrighted those algorithms? All tech companies in perpetuity? How about the VC that conducted the hostile takeover with other people's money? Should the CEO who leads the robotics company that replaces the human workforce, rule ALL of humanity for the remainder of eternity?
Even though my examples are fucking ridiculous, the way the world actually works is that any CEO who started an ultimately successful company, regardless of whether or not they were pivotal or hindered the company, and even average executives who jumped in for a year just before IPO, frequently end up wealthier than hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people — wealthier than entire nation states — weather than people who had many orders of magnitude more influence in the success of the company than they ever did...
Ultimately, no matter how much you do or achieve individually, human civilisation and all its achievements could not exist without the collective effort of billions of people (and counting). In the grand scheme of things every hot shot CEO is just an inevitable statistic fulfilling a role that someone else would have fulfilled if they had never been born.
You’re preaching the choir. I agree he (and others) is overpaid. I solely reacted on weird spike thrown at docusign.
Where in disagree is on your very generous of billions in humanity’s achievements ; pretty sure a lot of us didn’t pitch in. Pretty sure my own name isn’t appearing in the credits for example. But I salute your optimism.
Have you ever worked for a company that did something? Then your name should be in the credits. You probably did a greater amount of directly value generating labor than the executives did.
Yeah, until we find out it doesn't when they inevitably get hacked. Like the credit reporting agencies. I'm sure those CEOs were (and still are) doing just fine.
Hardly an argument ; it can be said just about every company… and also unrelated to their CEO to a large extent.
I mean I'd argue that the Wikipedia execs are still paid too much given their actual productive output.
Why is this such an unpopular take? Is it because Lemmy is largely comprised of tech bros who make too much money? I just don't understand how people are justifying any salary above 200k, and even that's a huge stretch.
Yeah I mean the point I'm making isn't that Wikimedia execs are paid too much, it's that all executives are paid to much. The workers actually create value, all an executive does is direct that value generation and claim the rewards for themselves.
IMO income below something like $200k shouldn't be taxed at all - workers below that range are sacrificing their time (and sometimes their physical health) to earn money. Above $200k income should be taxed heavily. People who make more than that are typically doing less while earning more - what they earn is disproportionate to the amount of effort they put in.
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