Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS by Jo Freeman:

> Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.

> This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

Doesn't this apply to any organization?

If you care about the goals (engineer, metal worker, etc) of an organization you AREN'T going to be promoted because of your value and need for that task. For example the lead designer for BMW M cars has great value in non-managerial role.

Those that don't care about the goals can then focus on caring about the structure, the politics, fitting in, etc. They are going to be promoted because they are modifying their behavior for that purpose.

This doesn't apply in all situations but basically business people care about business and when they are successful end up in charge.

Its not like its 100% exclusive, but the majority of wikidata engineers are wm-de. Operational responsibilities are a bit more shared.

Also i hardly would call it a vanity project given how popular it is.

I also dont recall wikivoyage having that much to do with WM-DE.

If you want a source, i guess you could look at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/Plan_2... but its a little light on details

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE

I had trouble finding info on how much they spend on that, but https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Legal_Fees_Assistance_... suggests the budget is carefully considered.

These claims are often made, but I'm not sure they check out. Plenty of much much more controversial stuff stays online / is available. But supposedly wikipedia will be destroyed without these experts.

And thus diluting and losing sight of their original goals. This isn't a corporation driven inherently by eternal desire for more profit.

I think the opposite is true. Consider examples like broke lottery winners, the resource curse [1], and the long history of startups getting lots of money and then cratering, from Webvan to WeWork.

With Wikipedia in particular, I'm concerned that the more money there is, the more attractive it is to people who want to be near large streams of money for various reasons, including living large and diverting money to their own friends, pet projects, and grand visions. I'm also concerned that even if they are able to avoid those people entirely, large budgets pose other risks, including inflexibility in downturns, which I think increase the odds of a setback turning into a full collapse.

Corruption, like cancer, is statistically inevitable for organizations. The only question is whether they have the right mechanisms to detect and exercise the tumors when they're small. But the scrappier Wikipedia stays, the less we have to worry about that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

And you can be corrupt without money, true. But corrupt people tend to avoid organisations that don't have a lot of money, they all try to work where the money is. And the do-gooders that are the other group of people likely to push into an org like Wikimedia tend to be particularly defenseless against the first kind.

They’ll definitely see short term profit gains. But they’re losing sight of their original goals and risk losing their long term market.

But they've done exactly that since day 1 by refusing to show any ads.

The hard part of making a real fork of wikipedia is scale of the entire thing, and traffic level the original gets.

Keep in mind part of the reason server costs are low is because wikimedia owns its own servers. Lots of people rent servers (e.g. AWS) where the cost of hosting will be higher because the cost of some of the sysadmin duties are covered by the AWS fee, where at wikimedia that is a salary that has to be paid.

[Coi: ex-wmf contractor but its been a while]

I believe the parent already answered your question:

> You're discussing server costs, but need to also consider hosting and data center costs, as well as employee salaries. Running Wikimedia is a pretty decent percentage of their budget.

The numbers you presented confirm this statement: 56M (salaries) + 2.4M (hosting) + 10M (other operating expenses) = 68.4M (61%)