Wikipedia : An IT outsourcing success story

ihotdesk — IT News
Business managers weighing up the advantages of in-house technology teams against the benefits of IT outsourcing have been urged to look at one of the web's …

Wow, what a remarkably idiotic article, comparing Wikipedia's crowdsourcing process for producing content to IT outsourcing. I mean, the quality of work you sometimes get out of an outsourcing supplier often isn't as good as you might get in house, but is it really THAT bad? Let's be reasonable.

The weirdest thing is this article seems to want to compare "outsourcing" paid jobs, to letting volunteers do them. They just aren't comparable. For one thing, if you outsource a job to somebody that you pay to do it, you still own the product. If you have volunteers do it for your nonprofit company, you don't-- it's still owned by the nonprofit and you can't get your grubby capitalist hands on it. Wikipedia has nothing to teach business IT managers who presumably would like to get paid in something other than speaking fees.

I'm still trying to imagine the Wikipedia equivalent to an IT department. I think it amounts to something like putting up signs at the local mall saying "Come play with our computers, they're broken and we want you to fix them. You can give yourself little badges for each computer you fix." Sadly, there are people who will show up under these conditions, but they're not the sort of people you want rummaging around inside your business' infrastructure, at least not without pretty heavy supervision.

Maybe I'm a bit touchy on this issue, since this is my area of specialty, but wow, what an ignorant load of twaddle.

Yes, I hadn't really thought about that. I suppose outsourcing is only safe if it has to do with something that you have backups for, much like allowing volunteers to edit WP (if they screw up, they can't do permanent damage).

In the same way, WP may outsource SOME of its IT to India or Poland, but it will always be in the role of backup or server farm node, and if the Indian guys screw it up, it won't take down the website, just the servers in India.

I'm still waiting to see what form things take, when Jimbo and his Pals with Money decide they're really going to twin WP and make off with a for-profit scraped version they can put ads on. US laws require that a public nonprofit site be left behind, and no doubt will still be called "WMF." But will it be running only on some servers in India, watched by some guys named Chander or Kamal? While all the server support for Wikia is someplace else more watchable, and starting to run the scrape? Think Jimbo and Friends will bother to take Blofeld's stupid stubs? No. Probably just WP 1.0 when things finally reach that stage.

Somey has been talking about the lifecycle of WP. And we are seeing "aging" as the organism approaches peak article creation, and now starts to fill up with crap/junk, and can't get rid of it. It's time for death or reproduction, or both. I think at some point in the future, we have to see WP "fission," followed shortly by something like abandonment of the moribund non-profit twin. Appeals for donations will stop, or they will somehow fail. Outages in service will occur. Some site with ads will now offer a more reliable version of what WP once was, perhaps as a "rescue venture" Oh, we should all be grateful that some venture capitalists have SAVED Wikipedia! . And so the for-profit clone wakes.

An outsource move is the perfect way (indeed maybe the only way) to attempt to hide such a process. It's like some mad SF cloning film-- A WP version of The 6th Day, complete with corporate badguys and memory transfer. Just wait. But it will not take WR by surprise. We'll still be here, giving you the blow-by-blow.

It depends on what you mean by "safe." Security-wise, Indian outsourcing companies like the one for whom this particular spamblog was posted are really just as trustworthy as anyone else when it comes to sensitive information like customer lists and intellectual property. Beyond that, it depends on the nature of what you're hiring them to do... help-desk is a logical thing to outsource because it's almost a pure cost center, and I generally don't blame companies for outsourcing things that are pure cost centers. But anything to do with key systems, though, particularly software development, ehhh... not so much. That's R&D - a smart (and not to mention patriotic) company keeps that close, if at all possible. Otherwise you're likely to get a sub-standard product, you risk wasting valuable time, and you'll be paying to train your future competitors into the bargain, at the expense of your own local economy.

But that's capitalism, or rather, big-corporate capitalism. Large enterprises are under such pressure to cut costs that their managers happily sabotage their own operations for short-term budget reductions, mostly just to hold on to their jobs. But sometimes it backfires on them, and they outsource themselves right into the unemployment line.

Anyway, Kelly is absolutely right, this article is pure twaddle - in fact, it's worse than twaddle, it's just a big freakin' lie. (FYI, I define "twaddle" as spurious claims made with flimsy evidence, whereas this spamblog entry consists of spurious claims that contradict nearly all reliable evidence.) Unfortunately, dishonest lying spamborgs like this one - "ihotdesk" - are often able to get themselves listed on Google News because, well, Google just doesn't care enough, they've got other fish to fry.

Ironically, though, the article is partially right about Wikipedia - you do get what you pay for, on the internet as well as in real life.