Tell me if I’m wrong… isn’t Trump not in charge until after the inauguration is over? I feel like he and Johnson shouldn’t be in charge of this.

(I am kidding. Of course the flags will be raised. It honestly makes sense. For an event the whole entire purpose of which is the symbolism of it, the symbolism of having the flags down is unacceptable, even if it would be entirely accurate in this case.)

McVoy first blustered and threatened, but ultimately chose to go home and take his ball with him: he withdrew permission for gratis use by free software projects, and Linux developers will move to other software.

If I remember it right, he did a lot more than that. He tried to say that one particular kernel developer who he viewed as disobedient to him would be punished by no longer being allowed to use the software. When people pointed out that this behavior was insane and would cause significant disruption to the project, he didn’t care. Then, they made the absolutely predictable choice to abandon him. Then he took his ball and went home, after everyone had already moved to a nearby park and started a new game without him.

I might be misremembering, but that’s how I remember it happening. Instead of using git, we could all be using BitKeeper, and paying McVoy our $5/month or whatever for the privilege, because it was just as much better than everything else as git is now. But he didn’t want that, if it involved not having everything exactly the way he wanted it.

I know of no faster way to relegate your project to the dustbin of history.

It happened with X. XFree86 was the graphics system you used on Linux. One developer had constant friction with the core XFree86 people, but he was also a guy who kept coming up with good and innovative ideas and making them happen, and had a lot of respect from the wider community, and so for a long time there was this uneasy tension. Finally, things came to a head:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/dispute-divides-key-open-source-group/

I think it took about a week after that before Keith was leading a new core group of developers and sensible people, and everyone was simply totally ignoring XFree86. All the distributions switched to Keith’s fork, xorg, which they continued to use for about 15 years, until Wayland came along.

It stands alongside Larry McVoy telling the Linux developers they needed to jump through hoops to use his version control system, because they had no alternative, in the absolute hall of fame of completely unforced own-goals that changed the landscape of software in ways that are still felt today.

Edit: Typo

why would you be searching for it? You already have it!

Because the search UI is how Lemmy chooses to expose the concept of resolving a network resource which you may or may not already have synced to your instance. That’s, arguably but not definitively to me, a design bug separate from the original design bug I was talking about, or whatever it is that’s causing it not to work right now.

You can see by opening up the developer tools and doing a search for world@lemmy.world. It’ll submit two requests: One to /api/v3/search, and one to /api/v3/resolve_object. For whatever reason, that second call is only returning the user @world@lemmy.world, but not the community, for me right now. Am I misremembering somehow? This is how I have always located communities, to subscribe to them, when I’m not sure whether they already exist on my server. Typing the full URL https://lemmy.world/c/world still works, and returns what you would expect in the response.

I didn’t choose to put that functionality in the “search” UI. The Lemmy developers did. I kind of get the idea behind it, I’m not 100% sure it’s a design flaw, but it was definitely surprising to me to find it there, originally.

So tell me: If I “already know the user or community I’m looking for,” I know what to type, but it might not exist on my server… how do I subscribe to it? What UI do I use? I know of one answer; if you know of a different answer than the one I’m aware of, it will be news to me.

It actually couldn’t find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that’s about

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Notice no community result.

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Also no community result. On my instance, I could scroll to the end of the list, and when the call to the resolve endpoint returns, the user but not the community gets added as a single entry to the very end. Like I say, no idea what that’s about, although it seems to be a bug distinct from the bug I’m describing,

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fc%2Fworld&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Also doesn’t work? That’s a little strange, honestly. Like I say, no idea. I’m just describing the somewhat different but also wrong behavior I see on my instance.

Just wanted to let you know: I was trying to resubscribe to !world@lemmy.world so I could say something. I went to the search box, typed “world@lemmy.world”, got a bunch of results including world@lemmy.world at the end, clicked on it, but it was the user @world@lemmy.world, not the community. I couldn’t find the community in the list.

It’s no kind of difficulty to work around the problem, of course. But it was a clear instance of me wanting the software to do something, the software messing up because it’s allowing multiple entities with the same identifier to exist, and me having to go back and try another way. It actually couldn’t find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that’s about. But yes, it’s a cause of minor malfunctions like this.

I should have realized that whenever Trump gets hyper-focused on some niche issue that isn’t on the tiny list of stuff his brain comes up with by default, someone smarter than him told him about it and hyped him up about what he should do.

When I imagine Trump in six months ordering the US military to invade Greenland and take it over, a small hopeful thought occurs to me that maybe this will be the wake up call that the aware-of-reality people really needed. That it isn’t going to be okay if we just keep doing the system because it’s always taken care of us so far.

Maybe it will turn out to be a good thing, in the long run. Maybe not.

Somehow I don’t think taking to the streets and escalating the political violence between the people with all the money and power, and the rest of us, is going to lead us to the bright future I would like to imagine.

There’s a reason the American Revolution wasn’t organized along the lines of assassinating Tory leaders at random, and hoping that would do it. Freedom of association, protest, organization, and the press are guaranteed for a reason, and freedom to take shots at the leaders you don’t like is not, also for a reason.

It bothers me quite a lot that all across the world, the masses are showing unified discontent with liberal governments and friendly acceptance to fascism or fascism-light.

Canada, France, US, UK. All places that are notable opponents of the people who are good with seizing the reins of Western social media and bending it to the opinions that they’d prefer that people hold about their liberal governments.

Correct. Gmail is doing it right, by anticipating how their server’s behavior might confuse people or lead to email going to the wrong mailbox, and making extra complexity to make sure the behavior makes sense. Lemmy is doing it wrong, in this instance.

I made an SMTP server that treats email addresses as case sensitive. When it gets mail for Philip@ponder.cat, it refuses to deliver it to philip@ponder.cat, and it allows users to create himbo@ponder.cat and Himbo@ponder.cat as two distinct addresses. Within my server, it’s not confusing at all. Outside of my server, there be dragons.

What should happen: The backend checks if you’re trying to create a community that has the same name as a user, or vice versa, and refuses to do it because that would be confusing, since a lot of ways of referring to an entity on Lemmy use the exact same format for the user and the community.

What does happen: Have fun with confusing!

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311370/wikimedia-foundation-annual-funding/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311451/wikimedia-foundation-annual-expenses/

They raised more money, so they spent more money. That’s how it’s supposed to work when you’re a nonprofit. At no point did they spend more than they made. They used it to employ some people and fund some research. So in your mind, in order to avoid “limitless expansion” and “I don’t agree with the financial decisions of Wikipedia’s management”, they should have just kept it in the bank? Or told people not to donate? The last time people donated, we got Wikipedia for it. That sounds great. I’m in favor of giving them more money so they can keep doing more stuff like that, because it seems like it’s working.

Your complaint makes absolutely no sense, and I just sent them another $20.

Their financial statements are public: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

There’s no profit, since they are a nonprofit. They have a couple of years’ operating expenses saved up, which is nice. They’ve been giving away a lot of it to various research projects, and they pay everyone a comfortable salary, which is also nice. People in the comments have been assuring me that this is a sign that they’re incredibly corrupt, for example describing the research project thing as a bad thing (sponsoring “weird” research) or saying it’s a problem that they paid the CEO around $700k in one year.

Actually, they started out with the earlier claims like that they were friendly with fascists or that $300M went missing every year, and then only switched over to “their financials are good and they pay salaries, and that’s a problem, all they should need to pay is hosting” once all the earlier stuff failed to hit. It doesn’t sound like they’re hurting for money, but maybe being aggressive about soliciting donations is the reason they’re not hurting for money. They don’t get substantial income from anything other than donations, it looks like. But yes, if you wanted to support a project that really needs it, maybe the Internet Archive is a better place to start.

Quoting myself from elsewhere:

This is how modern social media propaganda works. One person says wikipedia is kowtowing to fascist governments and doxxing its members. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that $300 million “excess” went missing and no one knows where it went, implying that someone is skimming off money and we shouldn’t be donating because the whole thing is corrupt. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that wikipedia is slanting all its coverage to a pro-Western, pro-Israel slant and covering up the truth through a narrative enforcing task force. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion, someone else combs through their financials and finds out that the CEO is making some money, and uses phrases like “bleeding the foundation dry” or “all while content is created by volunteers.”

You can look through my profile to see the exchanges where people say all of those things and then I respond, if you want to see in depth where and how people are saying it, and my arguments for why it isn’t true.

It is the universal cry of the loser that everyone else is a loser, too. It makes them feel better.

Correct. The Evil Slavic Menace is banning it outright, instead.

By Zachapertio - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153366379

Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline.

Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?

What a bad-faith argument.

I’m just going to let that little exchange stand on its own.

I took a look at the most recent 990 form you reference, and it lists compensation for a mere 13 individuals, with a total compensation just over $4-million in sum.

Hm, you’re right. I had looked at some kind of summary that listed people for every year, and somehow thought that it was breaking down salaries for everyone, but it’s only the top people.

Let’s look a different way. https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf&page=9 says that there are 233 people who earn more than $100k (so basically, full-time people in a white-collar role). So if you make a ballpark estimate that for each one of those people, there’s one other person doing janitorial work or similar that makes average $50k/yr, and average out the $88M they spent on salary in 2022 over all those 466 people, you get $327k per year for the white collar people. Presumably there’s also some amount on part-time work, or grants, or something like that. But the point is, it’s not that there is some absurd amount of money going missing. It’s just that they employ a few hundred people and pay SF-tech-company salaries.

This is in no way counter-evidence that spending (ultimately due to the decisions of these executives) is at runaway levels. Salaries and wages have increased 22% compounding year-over-year for the last four years on average. This is a 120% increase in only four years (from $46,146,897 to $101,305,706).

These trends have been continuously called out for almost a decade now, but this exponential growth continues nonetheless. All while expenses for core responsibilities remain flat.

Didn’t you just get super offended that I pointed out that paying the people who work for you is, in fact, a “core reponsibility”, and so this argument doesn’t make sense?

I’m happy with Wikipedia paying their people. If there was one person making $5M per year, then I’d be fine with that, even though there isn’t. If there was one person making $50M per year, maybe I’d have some questions, but nothing like that is happening.

Wikipedia should be setup to succeeded indefinitely at this point if it weren’t for these decisions.

You said I sound hostile. Stuff like this is why. I’ve been dealing with maybe 5-10 different people who all have some kind of different reason of bending their way around to the conclusion “and so Wikipedia sucks.” I don’t think spending money that’s coming in, on paying people to do Wikipedia work, spells doom for Wikipedia. I don’t think that makes any sense. And, there’s been such a variety of “and so that’s why Wikipedia sucks” comments I’ve been reading that all don’t make any sense if you examine them, that it’s made me short-tempered to any given one.

I like Wikipedia. I think it’s good.

It’s not any kind of judgment about right or wrong. It’s just an observation that some nutty behaviors like kicking someone out of your web forum the instant they dissent in any way, or openly defending your chosen government even when it’s killing people like they’re spraying for weeds in the garden, are unique to far-right individuals and tankies, and unknown and abhorred pretty much everywhere else.

but I have no way of checking it since they don’t provide a breakdown of the salaries involved

Yes they do. It’s named by the individual, their position, and the exact salary they earned in each year. Look up the form 990s.

The main issue I take with your opening post is its vagueness. You don’t mention any details in it, so it effectively acts as a cue for people to discuss anything at all controversial about wikipedia.

Completely true. I decided that being vague wasn’t great but it was better than brigading against the person I had in mind when that wasn’t the point. I figured people who had seen the stuff would know what I was talking about and figure it out, which mostly turned out to be accurate.

The narrative that led me to make the post was that Wikipedia is doxxing its editors to any fascist government that asks. I talk more about it here:

https://ponder.cat/post/1100747/1312503

And the way you frame the discussion is that such narratives “are fundamentally false” because Wikipedia “is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others”

Not quite. Personally, I think WP is a force for truth in the world, but that wasn’t why I am justifying this, it’s just me talking.

Also, I had legit forgotten that the government that WP has been fighting in court not to dox its users to, is India. I connected it to a later person who sent me a source from India.com, after spending so much time talking to people who think Israel is nuking Syria or Wikimedia is skimming $300 million of “excess” money off every single year (see the link above where someone references that misinformation and then I address it). Part of the reason I am short-tempered about false claims that make Wikipedia sound bad is that I’ve been talking with people who are making 4 or 5 different big ones just in these comments alone, and they all turn out to be bullshit, but the sum total of all of them getting repeated, I think, can be significant.

Just to be clear, I’m not necessarily saying you are one of those misinformation people. But the claim that Wikimedia has so much money that donations are unnecessary, putting “salaries” they’re spending donations on in quotes, things like that, is definitely one of those misinformation claims.