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Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

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Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#61

Post by coderintherye »

themitigating wrote: post #53
robonerd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Not necessarily no, not all organizations are hierarchal. "Reinventing Organizations" has some good examples of such.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#62

Post by nonameiguess »

formerly_proven wrote: post #45
onphonenow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are doing 100M+ per year to run the servers, manage PR / legal / HR issues.

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. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

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.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#63

Post by H8crilA »

For the critics, this is basically a way for Wikimedia to charge for high throughput access from commercial users, as well as normalizing the API. These corporations already crawl the entirety of this space, both the HTML and the wikitext. Why wouldn't they if the license allows it?

As long as dumps remain available for free (which as I understand they have to) the community loses nothing, and corporate actors get to contribute a bit more. I don't see things like Kiwix going away any time soon.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#64

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

danuker wrote: post #57
robonerd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quicker notifications means a tighter OODA loop, e.g. more control.

Time for me to look into downloading Wikipedia and using it offline.

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#65

Post by Miraste »

coderintherye wrote: post #61
themitigating wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily no, not all organizations are hierarchal. "Reinventing Organizations" has some good examples of such.

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.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#66

Post by echelon »

jimjimjim wrote: post #47
echelon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to fork it. It's a wiki with open licensed content and a bloated stack that could easily be hosted on pared down infra and staffing. Fork it and remove the largesse.

why haven't you done it already?

You laugh, but I actually did! [1]

Wikimedia was deleting all the video game guide content from their wikibooks project for god knows what reason.

I took it over and moved it to my existing wiki, https://strategywiki.org

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Copy_to_gaming_w...

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#68

Post by mhh__ »

colinmhayes wrote: post #46
andrepd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate, if there's one thing Wikipedia isn't is bloated. It serves one of the biggest websites on the internet with a fraction of the infrastructure of similar sites.

Wikimedia is certainly bloated. They're spending upwards of $100 million a year.

How much is the correct amount for a site that serves such a huge amount of the internet?

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#69

Post by dougb5 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #46
andrepd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate, if there's one thing Wikipedia isn't is bloated. It serves one of the biggest websites on the internet with a fraction of the infrastructure of similar sites.

Wikimedia is certainly bloated. They're spending upwards of $100 million a year.

Google spent nearly 2000 times that, and a great deal of its own value to the world is from indexing Wikipedia.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#70

Post by zozbot234 »

exolymph wrote: post #30

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…

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.
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