Comment by bawolff
9 days ago
To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things:
- Fired one of the original developers of MediaWiki (the open source project that powers wikipedia) - Brooke. This person was at one point in contention to basically be BDFL of MediaWiki. She is somewhat less publicly prominent now compared to back in the day, but to a lot of oldhands this is shocking.
- Laid off community tech team. This is a team that basically did development work by popular demand (literally people voted to decide on what they would work on). In many ways the existence of this team was a band-aid on the problem that many Wikipedians felt WMF was not being responsive to their needs or working on things that were important. The team was extremely popular, and disbanding it felt like a middle finger to many. In particular to many people (including me) it seems extremely cold to lay people off during a reorg instead of reassigning them.
On top of that both were involved with unionization activities, which further fueled concerns that this might be some sort of retalitory step.
The onwiki discussions are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
The organization mitosing from the product
Wikimedia is already way past that if you look at their expenses.
From Wikipedia for sure, but feeling like the ongoing cell division has them nearly fully divested from most of their stated mission and "What we do" pages.
Reaching the metastatic end stage of all organizations where the org exists for no purpose beyond continued existence of the org.
Prop. AB 1940?
[flagged]
I think a lot of the objections come from the proposed replacement which does not sound very promising.
A friend of mine is fond of the quote "Change happens at the speed of trust". There is not an overwhelming amount of trust between the parties
I think it might be worth remembering that we are talking about human beings not spare parts.