At this point, Wikimedia the organization is parasitic on Wikipedia the open-source information project. The latter generates all the goodwill and the former fucks around doing vanity projects with the ensuing resources.
What's that pithy "law" about eventually any organization existing simply to perpetuate itself and serve the insiders who work there, rather than further its mission? Ironically what came to mind is Cunningham's Law which is the wrong one... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Doesn't this apply to any organization? If you care about the goals of an organization you are going to be promoted because of your value to that task nor would you seem it. Those that don't are going to care more about the organizations structure and focus on improving their standing.
> Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.
> This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.
I think the premise is wrong. Having a structure has many advantages and these advantages work favourably for companies in many cases. Clear hierarchy can immediately end a discussion and bring people to act.
Striving for objective news stories is highly valuable as well as social science regarding as many perspectives on different values as possible. That generates value. Otherwise you just iterate on stagnation. The comparison the author makes is a bit random here and I believe the motivation to define it as such is that she is not content with people making different decisions. Well, nobody truly is but there are different ways to deal with that.
What I agree with is that you should look at power dynamics. Competence is as often seen as a threat by you colleagues as it is seen as a positive. Why is that? Because people feel threatened by it and start to downplay its worth. All those that are threatened do indeed quickly form a structure because of their common goals. That said, there are managers that deserve the authority as they have a talent to keep people focused on relevant issues. They are often well liked and people gladly delegate decision making. But only in the scope of their mission which should be defined just as rigidly as groups are proposed to be here. Although I argue that the latter rigidity is not as relevant.
There are no non-hierarchal organizations, only ones that are written down and ones that aren’t. Even Reinventing Organizations talks about “fluid, natural hierarchies” - i.e. cliques.
I worked once for an organization where relative power was part of the culture. Supervisors literally sat at high desks facing the minions. In another, there was a power structure and folks directly accountable for certain things; but it was very collegial. Everyone treated each other as peers and the senior folks were more like mentors or folks with other responsibilities than bosses.
I messed up a bunch of words and it drastically alterted what I was trying to say. Here's the correction
Doesn't this apply to any organization?
If you care about the goals (engineer, metal worker, etc) of an organization you AREN'T going to be promoted because of your value and need for that task. For example the lead designer for BMW M cars has great value in non-managerial role.
Those that don't care about the goals can then focus on caring about the structure, the politics, fitting in, etc. They are going to be promoted because they are modifying their behavior for that purpose.
This doesn't apply in all situations but basically business people care about business and when they are successful end up in charge.
I think the point is a criticism of organizational bearucracy becoming an end in itself. Any organization can probably end up here, not all are at that point and some may have control to prevent bureaucrats from gaining total control. I don't have good sources but I imagine something along use lines is the common criticism of politicians that they become pure political operatives, disconnected from their constituents actual needs. I imagine an alternative to this would be sortition where randomizing the office holder theoretically minimizes their ability to perpetuate the institution for the sake of its existence.
The latest WMF "vanity project" is Wikidata, started in 2012. It is currently getting more edits than the most popular version of Wikipedia, and has been playing a pivotal role in the "open-source information" ecosystem. If that kind of thing is "parasitic" then maybe we should welcome such parasitism.
The Wikidata software is extensions to Mediawiki (which is maintained by WMF), and though the extensions are primarily developed by a Wikimedia chapter (Wikimedia Deutschland), it's disingenuous to say that Wikidata is fully maintained by them. Its operations, at the very least, are maintained by WMF, and quite a bit of development and a large amount of code review was done by WMF.
Similarly, the test/dev for Wikidata is part of Wikimedia Cloud services (which I created). That environment is also WMF run.
Can you cite any evidence (even in German)? The only thing I'm sure that was done by WMDE is about Wikivoyage (which is definitely more complicated than it seems, mainly because the English version was a fork of WikiTravel).
WMF has its issues, but "unmaintained" is over the top.
There was actually a time i would have agreed with this, and there are still under-maintained parts, but since the recreation of the platform team, i don't think its a reasonable position anymore.
This doesn't seem like a vanity project. The wikimedia projects I've come across usually seem useful, though not as impactful as wikipedia. What are some of the projects you consider mere vanity projects?
I have no problem with wiki trying to expand into other areas, that’s how a company grows. I don’t see any degradation in their primary product and the value they provide is immense. I’m more than happy to see what else they can do in other spaces.
Actually, they're spending less than 3MM per year for hosting. "Other operating expenses" are ~10MM, and everything else on the list has essentially nothing to do with Wikipedia.
However, at the current rate it won't take long until they actually do spend 100MM+ on their own salaries.
A friend of mine who worked there claimed the bulk of the funding is spent on paying attorneys to defend Wikipedia editors against hostile governments and companies that sue and imprison them for writing unflattering material.
Take it with a grain of salt, I guess, given the level of cynicism Hacker News seems to have about Wikimedia Foundation, and you could easily dismiss insiders defending their own organization as shills. I don't really see a way to tell from those financial statements. I'm guessing that would count as program expense and break down between salaries and professional services depending on the relative proportions to which they keep attorneys on staff versus contracting legal defense out to other firms.
>everything else on the list has essentially nothing to do with Wikipedia
I would say that engineer/product/analytics salaries are part of the cost of running and updating a webpage. Then you have HR which is needed to support those employees and Legal which is especially needed given the high risk nature of Wikipedia.
Good luck keeping Wikipedia up in a useful manner without those people.
edit: Then you need Finance to help handle the costs responsibly. Then you need Fundraising to help raise the money needed to pay for all that. Then you generally want some Marketing/Branding/Communications to help with the whole talking to external humans part.
Wikipedia could run with the company the size of craigslist but with all of the additional cash they choose to add layers of bloat without providing similiar value.
You're applying corporate thinking to this. Wikimedia Foundation doesn't need marketing or branding people, it really doesn't. Communications people I can understand because there will be journalists and others that need to be communicated to. But they don't need a marketing strategy nor do they need marketing collateral.
I'm curious if sites like the pirate bay are "high risk". If so, did it take $100M / year to keep them up with legal and HR teams etc?
These claims are often made, but I'm not sure they check out. Plenty of much much more controversial stuff stays online / is available. But supposedly wikipedia will be destroyed without these experts.
Pirate Bay is banned in many countries, was raided by the police multiple times, had its founders literally put into jail, had its domains seized, is blocked by Facebook, can't get donations outside of crypto, etc.
It's a pretty good example of why you need legal teams for any sort of sustainable effort.
I mean Piratebay is up right now. At least, if not literally, in spirit. I can get torrent magnet links off a site that looks exactly like the same Piratebay and probably not get a virus.
The Pirate Bay spent years hopping from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction because of all the suits and enforcement against them. Wikipedia doesn't, and also probably doesn't have any interest in pursuing any sort of expensive jurisdiction-hopping strategy that would also throw all of its employees and work into jeopardy.
Sometimes that can be the right call, if the other organization is doing something that benefits wikimedia.
That said the list at, https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund does seem a bit far afield, and personally i find the descriptions of what the money is to be used for too flowery and not concrete enough to be comfortable.
Sure. I was def exaggerating for effect — there does need to be an org running this project and as that org Wikimedia also does good things. But as with Mozilla, the decision-makers are too distracted by flavor-of-the-week bullshit.
I don't think it is parasitic per se but I do believe one of the problems is that it draws in people that have problems with others freely sharing knowledge if it is to their dislike. Same problem with some moderators and I think the best Wikipedia ever had left the project already.
Absolutely. Mozilla should have increased investment in the development, particularly rewriting the engine in Rust to improve the maintainability, rather than increasing CEO salary.
It seems like these kinds of reactions to WMF posts are always by the same handful of people, because it's like you copy/paste the same lies into every discussion.
If you're going to make shit up, at least link to the completely open documents they use for planning, funding, and accounting, so we're basing it on the same information.
Another point of reference is the principles for scholarly structure. It has clauses to prevent exactly mission drift and other ills. Not adopted by WMF or WMDE, but in the same approximate space.
Don't they have a really big endowment?
I feel like they're expanding to use it rather than expanding to bring in more money. Similar thing seemed to happen with Mozilla.
The endowment isn't that big, given the idea is you are only supposed to use the return not the principle. I think its size is in the neighbourhood of 100 million.
What's that pithy "law" about eventually any organization existing simply to perpetuate itself and serve the insiders who work there, rather than further its mission? Ironically what came to mind is Cunningham's Law which is the wrong one... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law