3 ms·

As a regular donor, I'd like to address your concerns. I gave them the donations. They are gifts. They can spend them on hookers and blow, I don't care. I dona

by KGIII 9y ago

As a regular donor, I'd like to address your concerns. I gave them the donations. They are gifts. They can spend them on hookers and blow, I don't care. I donate because I appreciate their service. I appreciate it enough to where I'd kinda like them to be making mad loot. I will continue to donate. I don't give gifts with strings. Gifts with strings are payments. My donation was a gift. Hell, I don't even write it off.

Markoff 9y ago
it seems you don't realize your donations have pretty much nothing to do with service you use, created by volunteers, running on software provided by volunteer i would not be surprised if you would just give money also to homeless for booze
- orf 9y ago
  You keep repeating the "by volunteer" line over and over again. They pay people to head the development of the wiki software, including paying developers and managing the project. The same goes for them managing the huge portfolio of Wikipedia sites. They run one of the most visited and iconic websites online today in a way that is totally unique at that level. If you want to run a smear campaign against them, in here of all places, you need to do better than "it's a community driven OSS site, and they accept donations!"
  - Markoff 9y ago
    the issue is, the site itself they could run with 10% of current employees and they would have funds to run it for years without threatening donation banners each year
    - orf 9y ago
      You've postured a lot in this thread about the number if employees Wikimedia has. So, put your money where your mouth is and defend your position. Which 90% would you cut, and why? Here is a list of their employees: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors Perhaps they could tighten their belt a little bit, but to think that you can run a foundation with the size and scope of Wikimedia with ~30 employees is naive at best.
      - dkruger 9y ago
        > Which 90% would you cut, and why? (Senior) Software Engineers : The site already exists. What could they possibly be engineering? Clearly all these positions can be axed and replaced by a few volunteers or an intern for the occasional maintenance patch. Even that is probably unnecessary - the site generally works fine for me. QA : See above Product : This isn't a product, it's a website. Obviously this entire section is superfluous. Discovery : An entire division for legal discovery? What kind of pork barrel waste is this. Easy cut. Mobile : I built an Ionic app this weekend, and these jokers need a whole team for this stuff? Now with flux.io, they have no excuse to employ more than 1 dev. Cut! Research : What do they need to research? The website runs fine and all the content gets created for them. These guys are obviously playing ping pong all day. Cut. Security : Nobody cares about hacking an encyclopedia. They're paying an entire team to play around with splunk all day. Cut! Search Platform : I can spin up an Elasticsearch instance in an afternoon, and they need a whole team for this? Cut! Traffic : The site already gets traffic. What are these guys doing? Cut! Cloud Services : There's no such thing as the cloud - it's all on someone's PC. Obviously a fake division. Cut! Fundraising : Now that we've eliminated the whole company, we don't need to fundraise anymore. Easy peasy.
        freneticfox 9y ago
        SE/QA/Prod/Mobile - No piece of software can see such broad use by millions without constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of users, the ever-changing blend of user agent / browser software, and the ever-changing and hostile environment of the internet itself. If you think you've ever seen a complex internet-based software project simply become perfect and then need no further changes for a decade or more, you clearly don't understand software engineering. Discovery - This is about discover-ability of the content itself, e.g. search engines both internal and external, and other related matters. Research - Try branching out a bit from the links and information at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Research_and_Data https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Research_a... for a more informed opinion Security - Actually, a lot of people care about hacking an encyclopedia. Just on the server side they care about hacking the ~1000 servers that are servicing or operating on the private data of millions of users. Traffic - It's a sub-set of Operations that deals specifically with the edge of the foundation's network (e.g. CDN-like things, for which they don't outsource a commercial CDN mostly for privacy reasons: spreading edge caches around the world, low-level performance optimization, SSL encryption, etc). Cloud Services - This is where the foundation hosts virtual server resources for community volunteers to experiment with and run projects and products of their own that are relevant, e.g. "bot" software that patrols articles for likely vandalism attempts and such.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aluhut 9y ago
You can be sure that you will have to give them more if they start spending it on hookers because they would lose donors faster than they can come up with threatening banners.

by KGIII 9y ago

Markoff 9y ago

it seems you don't realize your donations have pretty much nothing to do with service you use, created by volunteers, running on software provided by volunteer i would not be surprised if you would just give money also to homeless for booze

orf 9y ago
You keep repeating the "by volunteer" line over and over again. They pay people to head the development of the wiki software, including paying developers and managing the project. The same goes for them managing the huge portfolio of Wikipedia sites. They run one of the most visited and iconic websites online today in a way that is totally unique at that level. If you want to run a smear campaign against them, in here of all places, you need to do better than "it's a community driven OSS site, and they accept donations!"
- Markoff 9y ago
  the issue is, the site itself they could run with 10% of current employees and they would have funds to run it for years without threatening donation banners each year
  - orf 9y ago
    You've postured a lot in this thread about the number if employees Wikimedia has. So, put your money where your mouth is and defend your position. Which 90% would you cut, and why? Here is a list of their employees: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors Perhaps they could tighten their belt a little bit, but to think that you can run a foundation with the size and scope of Wikimedia with ~30 employees is naive at best.
    - dkruger 9y ago
      > Which 90% would you cut, and why? (Senior) Software Engineers : The site already exists. What could they possibly be engineering? Clearly all these positions can be axed and replaced by a few volunteers or an intern for the occasional maintenance patch. Even that is probably unnecessary - the site generally works fine for me. QA : See above Product : This isn't a product, it's a website. Obviously this entire section is superfluous. Discovery : An entire division for legal discovery? What kind of pork barrel waste is this. Easy cut. Mobile : I built an Ionic app this weekend, and these jokers need a whole team for this stuff? Now with flux.io, they have no excuse to employ more than 1 dev. Cut! Research : What do they need to research? The website runs fine and all the content gets created for them. These guys are obviously playing ping pong all day. Cut. Security : Nobody cares about hacking an encyclopedia. They're paying an entire team to play around with splunk all day. Cut! Search Platform : I can spin up an Elasticsearch instance in an afternoon, and they need a whole team for this? Cut! Traffic : The site already gets traffic. What are these guys doing? Cut! Cloud Services : There's no such thing as the cloud - it's all on someone's PC. Obviously a fake division. Cut! Fundraising : Now that we've eliminated the whole company, we don't need to fundraise anymore. Easy peasy.
      - freneticfox 9y ago
        SE/QA/Prod/Mobile - No piece of software can see such broad use by millions without constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of users, the ever-changing blend of user agent / browser software, and the ever-changing and hostile environment of the internet itself. If you think you've ever seen a complex internet-based software project simply become perfect and then need no further changes for a decade or more, you clearly don't understand software engineering. Discovery - This is about discover-ability of the content itself, e.g. search engines both internal and external, and other related matters. Research - Try branching out a bit from the links and information at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Research_and_Data https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Research_a... for a more informed opinion Security - Actually, a lot of people care about hacking an encyclopedia. Just on the server side they care about hacking the ~1000 servers that are servicing or operating on the private data of millions of users. Traffic - It's a sub-set of Operations that deals specifically with the edge of the foundation's network (e.g. CDN-like things, for which they don't outsource a commercial CDN mostly for privacy reasons: spreading edge caches around the world, low-level performance optimization, SSL encryption, etc). Cloud Services - This is where the foundation hosts virtual server resources for community volunteers to experiment with and run projects and products of their own that are relevant, e.g. "bot" software that patrols articles for likely vandalism attempts and such.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

aluhut 9y ago

You can be sure that you will have to give them more if they start spending it on hookers because they would lose donors faster than they can come up with threatening banners.