On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 3:02 AM, Amir Ladsgroup <ladsgroup(a)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.