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I spent over four years as an engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, which trained me to expect the double-take most people do when they hear the name for the fi
by atdt 8y ago
I spent over four years as an engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, which trained me to expect the double-take most people do when they hear the name for the first time. They either think they misheard you, or worse: they think you represent a knock-off entity that is trading on a misleading brand similarity, and they squint at you with suspicion. It's as if you told them you work at "AmaZone". So you can immediately forget about any bragging rights. The conversation has barely started and you are already at a trust deficit.
It's almost worse when the other party has heard of Wikimedia, because then your (by-now rehearsed) introduction comes across as wooden and weirdly defensive.
And if you think all that is bad... the annual conference for the Wikimedia community is called Wikimania. Try explaining that to passport control.
- perfmode 8y agoThat’s a shitty situation. Sorry to hear that. You were doing the lords work. did you ever consider saying that you work at Wikipedia?
- benjaminikuta 8y agoThat might be pragmatic, but it would unfortunately just contribute to the misconception.
- uranusjr 8y agoI have a friend working at Canonical, and whenever he introduces himself he always includes a brief mention that Canonical makes Ubuntu. I felt it’s very strange (and certainly felt it a little offensive when I first knew him), but came to understand it after a while. It is not common for people to make connection between Canonical and Ubuntu (even IT people!). He needs to establish himself, otherwise many people won’t take him seriously when he talks about Linux stuff. It’s quite unfortunate.
- mprev 8y agoWhy did it feel offensive?
- scoutt 8y agoI wonder if someone working at Alphabet Inc. suffers the same anonymity.
- vanderZwan 8y agoArguably that disconnect is intentional (not for the employees, but for the companies under the Alphabet umbrella themselves)
- majewsky 8y agoAlphabet is only a holding. I wouldn't expect many people to work for Alphabet directly.
- andrewshadura 8y ago‘Yes, I work for Collabora. No, I'm not a LibreOffice expert. Oh, we do pretty much everything with Linux but LibreOffice, they're a separate company actually.’
- profalseidol 8y agoPersonally, I see this "MediaWiki" logo on this wiki full of ads: https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Path_of_Exile_Wiki https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Path_of_Exile_Wiki Then somehow, my brain connects this to Wikimedia and thinks it's for-profit?
- ThePadawan 8y ago> this wiki full of ad Wow, you weren't kidding. This is genuinely the first non-pornographic website in years that has ads which are so aggressive that they make it past my uBlock Origin.
- profalseidol 8y agoBack when I was playing this awesome game. I tried to create a tool that webscrape this wiki (on the client side), so you have faster (I had a not-so-good internet) access. The game is so complicated that you need wiki almost all the time. But then most of community saying, the site needs to make money from ads so it can maintain it, etc etc. I should've replied back - but not this much ads. And they use FOSS software anyway.