Comment by arjie
9 days ago
Surely the purpose of Wikipedia is not to pay Wikipedia employees except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge. If a team is no longer required or is not fulfilling a function required of the organization, it makes sense that it should be eliminated. It doesn't seem that the correct structure of the team is functioning usefully, and it seems that the members of the team are being offered jobs appropriately in the rest of the org. As far as I can tell, nothing here seems particularly interesting. The Wikimedia Foundation's endowment is not for the purpose of enriching its workers. It should pay people what is an appropriate market rate and comply with local labour laws, of course, but there should be no greater requirement on it to preserve jobs for their own sake.
Reading some of the content on Jimbo Wales's user talk page[0] it seems this is an internal organizational change and I really can't find myself getting heated up about this.
Of course, I'm a small-time Wikipedia editor and so on. It will be a pity if Wikipedia fails, and I'll be sad because I built my blog on Mediawiki thinking it was eternal, because I don't think Grokipedia is going to correctly fill the hole.
> except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge
Right. Exactly! They should use notepad.exe and be _grateful_ they get to participate at all. What more do you need to "collect knowledge?"
> a function required
It's a non-profit. Very little is actually "required" of them.