Haven't read it yet, but here it is.

Nothing terribly earth-shaking. She's just spouting the partyline here. I wonder what she'd say over a nice dinner and a couple of glasses bottles of wine....especially if we could swipe Jimbo's credit card....

Sometimes I am amazed that this woman was the chair of the Wikimedia Foundation.

What other major nonprofit would hire dingbats like Tim Starling, David Gerard, or Angela Beesley?

Florence is about the only one of them I still respect. Maybe because she's one of the quietest ones, though .

The only dingbat in that group is David Gerard, and I wasn't aware the foundation had hired him. Angela and Tim are quite sane and very smart, which is probably why they left the on-wiki politics years ago.

If Riff Raff's "position" with UK-WMF is what is referenced I don't think that is with WMF nor is do I think it is paid. That is more like a fan club or something, AFAIK.

Neither David Gerard nor Angela Beesley have ever held paid positions with the Wikimedia Foundation: David is a self-appointed busybody and Angela was an "elected", noncompensated board member. Tim Starling was hired because he was Angela's boyfriend at the time his employment came up; she used her inside information (obtained as a board member) to enable him to maximize his salary in what would have been illegal inside dealing had they been married at the time. She resigned from the Board before they got married, quite likely in order to avoid the conflict that this would have created. That said, Tim has unquestionably earned his pay from the Foundation: he is a talented developer, and his talents are quite frankly wasted working in the technological backwater that Wikimedia has turned into over the past few years. It's not his fault that Wikimedia's timid leadership is unwilling to invest in the technological improvements needed to make Wikipedia technologically competitive with modern websites.

Tim's a bit of a jerk, but not terribly much so, and compared to some of the asswipes at the Foundation he's a decent person indeed. He was never very much involved in the wikipolitical scene. Angela, on the other hand, always gave me the creeps; she has the same "dishonest" feeling about her that Jimbo exudes, and I am always left with the feeling that she cannot be trusted.

As an aside, of sorts: Many Wikipedia improvements have been blocked for being "too difficult to implement", mostly because of the limitations of the underlying MySQL database engine. Facebook moved past these problems years ago, and today they handle a significantly higher request volume than Wikimedia, without relying on a kludged caching solution that deeply limits their ability to offer reader-option-sensitive content. However, I'm sure Facebook spends more on development in one year (and in fact probably one month) than Wikimedia has in its entire existence. If Wikimedia were to commit even a tiny fraction of the surplus funds it intends to raise on software development, I'd be a lot less disturbed by the surplus they're targeting. However, Jimmy and company believe that software development ought to be crowdsourced, and thus refuse to pay more than a pittance for it. Why pay for the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Okay, who would you point to at the Foundation, other than Sue and Erik, and say "asswipe"?
(And limiting yourself to people on the actual payroll, or past and current board members.)


If anything destroys Wikipedia in the long run, it might be this attitude. For example, if a developer far smarter than anyone at WMF devised a wiki-like framework that made Wikipedia look like Windows 3.0, that could be the death knell for WMF's "developer system" (if you can dignify it with such a name).

It took Facebook less than 2 years to totally eclipse Myspace and Livejournal--mostly because it was easier for laymen to use. To this day, Myspace's code is an ugly mess. (And Murdoch paid $1 billion for it. Why didn't he hire some decent coders and clean it up? Too "costly", I bet. Murdoch is a mercenary, somewhat like Jimbo. Mercenaries create nothing, they just exploit and move on.)

Just hacking MediaWiki to use HBase as a back end would likely yield a substantial performance improvement. (Edit: Apparently Mahalo has already done this.) That, and writing a parser engine that doesn't suck (but that is hard to do while remaining compatible with the abortion that is MediaWiki markup). However, the real problem here is that, by and large, people have come to realize the rather substantial limitations of wikis, and so the only "large wiki" out there is, and will always be, Wikipedia.

There are some pretty sweet looking public MediaWiki installs out there (This Might Be A Wiki is one of my favorites), virtually all of them are either extremely tightly controlled sites that are just using MediaWiki as a quick and dirty CMS (public editing is either disabled entirely or very tightly controlled), or else wikis that service an already-established community with norms, standards, and community discipline practices already in place. And none of them come even remotely close to the database size, view rate, or edit rate of even a midsized Wikimedia wiki.

The real gruntwork for wikis today is for internal communication; if you look at the extensions registry you'll see that's where most of the work on MediaWiki is going. Very little of what comes out of that activity ends up being useful for Wikimedia. That's the problem with Jimmy's "parasitic milkman" approach to development: Wikimedia's needs for the development of MediaWiki are pretty much sui generis to them; the only way they'll be met is if they push the development themselves, which they are too cheap to do.

Yeah, the WMF's investment in software development is a joke. Even with their limited resources, they could certainly do far far better than the Blue Peter effort they currently offer.

Take the supposedly important priority of flagged revisions, which was supposed to be the BLP panacea. When, over a year ago, I asked what the hold up was, I almost choked at the reply..


...apparently, it had been delegated to some guy called Aaron, who couldn't work any faster because he was sitting exams right now...

I mean, wtf?

Do they get some some girl named Agnes to do their accounts and then find out the returns are late because Agnes had to work some extra shifts at the hairdressers that week?

Amateurs.