On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Casey Dentinger cdentinger@wikimedia.org wrote:
and in technology we're years behind the curve
I think this is a reductive view of the technology at WMF. It is true that many systems have been around in name for a long time, but that doesn't mean they haven't been evolving under the hood (as Ori describes) to scale with demand at the same (or better) pace as our trendier peers (who are often married to fly-by-night technologies). In an era of 10s pageloads hauling megabytes of trackware, WP's stats are actually pretty stellar.
True, by all means. But my point (clumsily phrased) was that we will not likely be considered more technologically advanced than Google or Apple, while we really ARE more proficient in terms of the social systems and community collaboration. My only regret is that we way too rarely reiterate how amazing we are. The fact that we do a lot of great tech stuff, too is a reason to celebrate (and my apologies to anyone who read my comment as disparaging our work there).
Let me put it this way: it is great we have the tech as robust and advanced as it is. This is awesome. Let's also recognize the fact that our communities, working together with the WMF, is something unique, to avoid the narrow vision of "evil foundation" vs. "unreasonable and random crowd".
dj