This was two years ago. Some of these salaries rose by over 20 or 30 percent in the space of two years, when annual US inflation was at 2%. I fully expect to find even greater salary rises since – once the Form 990 for this year is published sometime in 2024 – as US inflation went up during the pandemic.
>But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.
you were raising an irrelevant point, because the salaries of the direct managers of the operations team is not what's under discussion here. They wouldn't need such a deep organizational structure if they weren't paying a bunch of people that take no part in running the site.
What do you think an appropriate number of people is to run the sixth most popular website in the world?
Even if you cut everyone doing software development (which would in itself probably cause a collapse since that is critical to keeping wikipedia running), cut all the lawyers (also pretty important), cut the trust and safety people, etc - you are still left with quite a lot of sysadmins, more than can reasonably be handled by a single manager.
They are paying 350k for a ceo, who is a manager of a manager of an ops manager.
Which is way way below industry average.
By 2020, the latest figures we have (page 48 of the Form 990), there were 8 people whose total compensation exceeded $300K. The CEO was at $423k:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
This was two years ago. Some of these salaries rose by over 20 or 30 percent in the space of two years, when annual US inflation was at 2%. I fully expect to find even greater salary rises since – once the Form 990 for this year is published sometime in 2024 – as US inflation went up during the pandemic.
Then when you said
>But surely the managers of people who maintain those servers are part of the cost of maintaining those servers.
you were raising an irrelevant point, because the salaries of the direct managers of the operations team is not what's under discussion here. They wouldn't need such a deep organizational structure if they weren't paying a bunch of people that take no part in running the site.
What do you think an appropriate number of people is to run the sixth most popular website in the world?
Even if you cut everyone doing software development (which would in itself probably cause a collapse since that is critical to keeping wikipedia running), cut all the lawyers (also pretty important), cut the trust and safety people, etc - you are still left with quite a lot of sysadmins, more than can reasonably be handled by a single manager.
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