On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 3:02 AM, Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
You talked about things that I'm in no place to comment but I want to emphasize on this part of your email: "For the last 8 years, just two things have been working without problems in WMF: Money and tech infrastructure (servers, "plain" MediaWiki, optimizations etc.)." We hear about technical issues of Wikipedia a lot. We hear Wikipedia is behind in technology, that it's underperforming. etc. etc. It's not just you. It's a lot of people in the community of editors too. I highly doubt that I can comment on this matter, there are definitely better people but I can't keep it anymore. Maybe my perspective as a non-WMF employee who works in technical issues would be worth publishing. ...
Just to be clear, as mails like my previous one could be wrongly understood, obviously.
I said "without problems" vs. "with problems", not "competent" vs. "incompetent" or "good" vs. "bad" etc. Both money and infrastructure have been no issues for almost a decade (servers longer than money). I am not waking up with the thought that Wikimedia won't have enough money or that servers wouldn't work. (OK, there are some invisible things, like accounting, which obviously haven't been a problem at any point of time.)
Everything else has been a kind of problem, but I wasn't going into details. If we are talking about MediaWiki itself, the core is going with infrastructure and it's no issue. In relation to the features, which are the problem, it's related to the articulation of the needed features and allocating resources to create them. Thus, it's the problem of upper management. I know we have a lot of quite competent developers.
But I didn't want to go into this kind of analysis. In some cases the causes are obvious, in some other they are not. I just wanted to detect that, besides very limited number of no issues, we have tons of problems, the most of them being the same as a decade ago.