toot by @MissingThePt@mastodon.social
Well the Wikimedia foundation does indeed not need this amount of money for wikipedia.org alone, they have copious amounts of money and their “asking for donations” is in some countries straight up “Wikipedia will shut down if you don’t pay” and seeing that as questionable behavior is absolutely ok.
However… WE WITNESSED A MURDER.
Some of their staff are paid pretty high salaries ($300-400k), but its still nothing like what most business executives get paid and not much of their total costs. And while they have a lot of money right now, that could quickly change if people stop donating. Its best to be on the safe side with such a valuable resource.
On the other hand, I see the Internet Archive as just as valuable or more, and I think it deserves a lot more money and attention than it has been getting. Of course it doesn’t have to be one or the other, I just think that Wikipedia gets a disproportionate amount of donations compared to the Internet Archive.
https://youtu.be/d9UgRIPWP4w?si=gm8v6wCvQ7vLzo34
Video is in German but it has subtitles, its a in depth analysis of it.
Internet Archiv is absolutely great and nowadays probably worth more than Wikipedia when it comes to information. I wouldn’t want to be in a world without a Wikipedia, but what Wikimedia does is sketchy often.
I endorse this post.
Wikipedia is great, and they do have real operating costs, but hosting all the data is about 2% of their budget. All the admins and editors and contributors are volunteers. Most of the money is spent on projects not related to the encyclopedia and donations to miscellaneous social groups.
Their accounting is public: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
Also, what phone does he have with multiple terabytes of storage if he’s downloading it on his phone…?
He’s right that you can actually fit the entire text of wikipedia on your phone. Wikipedia let’s you download a copy and it’s not that huge.
But obviously Wikipedia has a huge image and audio library and those make up the majority of storage space.
If you don’t download the history, and only download one language, sure, but that’s not Wikipedia
He sounds like some upper level management I’ve known. “Why does this cost so much, you’re just displaying a couple of web pages? Backups? Disaster Recovery? Bandwidth charges? What are those?”
The insane thing to me is that even if MediaWiki shut down completely with no warning, I bet we wouldn’t lose anything. We got people backing it up instantly
A sales exec at a place I worked at, asked me how companies like Apple made their products look so so much more professional than ours. Umm, billions of dollars in revenue and hundreds, if not thousands, of developers and artists, I replied. Yeah he wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box and I’m glad he retired where he couldn’t cause any more damage.
“Make it look like google.”
Sure. Do you have a billion dollars for this project? No? Okay. You get one half resource junior UI designer.
The UI design of Google isn’t very hard to emulate, even by a junior frontend developer. It’s the backend that’s the really compel stuff.
Don’t forget to mention said resource was unable to get hired at a job that paid better than your company… (which, no offense, isn’t likely to be very good if you’re having this kind of conversation)
He sounds like the kind of guy that was shutting down random servers and firing people until things visibly stopped working.
You would think that to lead an IT organization you should know something about IT.
Sadly, management cluetards “think” otherwise. And Musk the fool is leading the charge into oblivion.
I don’t think you necessarily need to know about the IT aspect if you have enough knowledge in some of the other aspects of running the business. However, if you don’t know the IT aspects, you should absolutely have a right hand person who is very familiar with the IT aspects and manages that and updates you on that side of things.
Musk has fired enough people who voiced criticism that I think he is only left with yes-men, not experts who can freely offer meaningful guidance and be taken seriously.
musk is dumb as a brick
This is intentional. He attacks anything that provides a benefit he thinks should be Capitalized upon.
Maybe they meant anything that can be subsidized by the government.
Tesla and SpaceX take in tons of government subsidies, either directly like SoaceX, or with car enables to artificially make their cars more competitive in the market.
I’d prefer “dumb as a husky.” Which is to say, smart enough to get into relatively creative predicaments but too dumb to get out. The dunning kruger zone.
I mean it’s a major improvement to the platform, that’s for sure. Now anybody being a dick just gets corrected. All you have to do is tone your schtick down the littlest bit and it looks like you were asking for people to fill you in.