Huib Laurens wrote:
Marcus Buck I don't agree with you.
The developers work for the Foundation and have to report to the foundation, the don't work for our community and don't have to report back to us.
How can everybody be so right, and still the sum is wrong?
Marcus has a valid concern, regardless of his clumsy way of presenting it. People have come to rely on Wikipedia, not necessarily on the factual content, but on the service being available, including database dumps being produced, the API functioning, including the various scripts on the toolserver. Many people don't realize how much of this still depends on voluntary efforts. Perhaps we've failed to tell them this. The annual fundraiser was a success and brought in $6 million. But that doesn't pay for the toolserver (does it?) or the s3 replication. When such things fail, it is very frustrating.
We could go further: People complain about uncivilized admins, scaring newcomers away. But the fundraiser doesn't pay for keeping Wikipedia civilized. Perhaps it should, and that could need an annual budget of $60 million rather than $6 million, a staff of 200 rather than 20.
Should we put up red warning signs on the services that are not provided by paid staff? Or the opposite, a small logo telling which services are run by paid staff, paid by donations to WMF? It would make the WMF tech staff look more like a corporate IT department. If it's not on the list of approved services, paid by the annual budget, we shouldn't expect it to work.