71–79 of 79 posts
Weirdly for me, it seems to have been rolled out inconsistantly - maybe it's in progress? For me right now, the Emacs page is new, while the GNU Emacs page is old, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs
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They have been known for continuously lying in their banner advertisements for donations so I wouldn't be surprised if they ever finally sold out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
I disagree with the very premise of this essay. > Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it? No, it sounds like running one of the most popular websites on the Internet requires well-paid employees, benefits, and infrastructure investment. 300 employees is two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Microsoft laid off this week. 300 employees to run one of the most trafficked and useful websites ever created is a strikin…
Not a single cent goes to the people who actually add value to Wikipedia, i.e. the contributors and admins. They are all volunteers.
The only work that Wikimedia does is keeping the servers on, which is not work for many people, certainly not more than a few.
I can't help but think Wikipedia would be a better product if it was still run on a shoestring budget. The cash overhang of the Wikimedia Foundation means that the internal incentives are to overhire, and for those overhired employees to make work for themselves.
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Because filling the space with overly long lines, as it used to do, makes for a horrible reading experience.
How? By making text flow to 100% of the width you can easily resize the browser window for everyone's perfect reading width. I usually run my browser tiled to 50% of the screen, the new design wastes a lot of space at that size (you have to shrink to really narrow width before it enters 'mobile mode' and uses 100% of the width again - I mean it's pretty insane, you can see more text at say 30% width, but at 40%-60% i…
I totally agree with you: I like to use my browser at ~50% of screen width on a 27" screen, so it looks terrible there because of all the wasted space. If they made it work at 50% width like it does at 30% width, I'd have no complaints.
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I disagree with the very premise of this essay. > Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it? No, it sounds like running one of the most popular websites on the Internet requires well-paid employees, benefits, and infrastructure investment. 300 employees is two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Microsoft laid off this week. 300 employees to run one of the most trafficked and useful websites ever created is a strikin…
> given the sheer amount of value that they create with it Not a single cent goes to the people who actually add value to Wikipedia, i.e. the contributors and admins. They are all volunteers. The only work that Wikimedia does is keeping the servers on, which is not work for many people, certainly not more than a few.
And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
I can't help but think Wikipedia would be a better product if it was still run on a shoestring budget. The cash overhang of the Wikimedia Foundation means that the internal incentives are to overhire, and for those overhired employees to make work for themselves.
Maybe I'm misinformed, but I thought most of that cash went to fund stuff that had no relation with the Wikipedia site at all, not for make-work employees.
Regardless, it is extremely hard to see how they could be providing additional value for their rapidly growing expenditures.
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> given the sheer amount of value that they create with it Not a single cent goes to the people who actually add value to Wikipedia, i.e. the contributors and admins. They are all volunteers. The only work that Wikimedia does is keeping the servers on, which is not work for many people, certainly not more than a few.
You have a wildly distorted view of what it takes to keep the lights on for a heavily trafficked website. All of the people you mentioned might be volunteers, but they only volunteer because the platform exists and works well. And it continues to exist and continues to work well because people are paid to do it. And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
In 2005, Wikipedia ran on $5000 with one employee and over a billion views just fine. People did, in fact, contribute to it despite money not being thrown into mud.
> And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people? At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.
Your view of the world seems strongly distorted by zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.
Weirdly for me, it seems to have been rolled out inconsistantly - maybe it's in progress? For me right now, the Emacs page is new, while the GNU Emacs page is old, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs
They're both using the new design for me.
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You have a wildly distorted view of what it takes to keep the lights on for a heavily trafficked website. All of the people you mentioned might be volunteers, but they only volunteer because the platform exists and works well. And it continues to exist and continues to work well because people are paid to do it. And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
What? How much work do you think it is to run a HTTP server that serves static content in a datacenter? I've ran moderately popular websites before and it's zero work most of the time. In 2005, Wikipedia ran on $5000 with one employee and over a billion views just fine. People did, in fact, contribute to it despite money not being thrown into mud. > And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websi…
It's not static content!
> I've ran moderately popular websites before and it's zero work most of the time.
I run a service that gets ten million requests on a bad day. There's almost always work to be done.
> Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people?
Most static websites don't allow anyone to sign up for an account and mutate the content.
> At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.
Most SaaS companies aren't serving a multi-terabyte mutable dataset to billions of people a month. They also aren't dealing with tens of millions of pages of user-generated content. Or a huge volume of legal requests because of all of their user-generated content.
> zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.
Which FAANG company has only 300 employees?
Seriously, 23 billion page views per day. That's like if each of their employees oversaw a service that got 76M page views per day. That's a quarter million page views (not requests!) Per second. Half a billion pages on Wikipedia alone: that's a few million pages per employee.