Miraheze is not shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Miraheze is not shutting down

meta.miraheze.org

88 pointspabs319 comments

I saw the comment on the prior HN story from the person who has stepped in and I'm glad he was able to. It wasn't clear at all why they had decided to shutdown when they had money to continue. Someone had alluded to an internal argument. It seems a real shame the current leadership couldn't work past that, but also a shame that they couldn't find a hand-off of some sort themselves before someone else stepped up, as they would have caused a lot of anxiety among the users that the organisation is ultimately there to serve.

If you have money to pay the bills for infrastructure but not money to pay someone to take over when a person who's not getting paid stops being interested enough to prop up the project, then you don't have money to continue.

As far as i understand, the new people aren't getting paid either unless i missed something, and the new people aren't exactly "new" either just a different subset of organizers.

> the new people aren't getting paid either

This changes nothing about what I just stated. Why is the general tone of your comment written as if it does?

Well it does because it shows there are people willing and able to take over without being paid, therefore your comment about not having enough money because they cannot pay seems redundant.

Your statement assumes they need to pay someone to keep going, which as the previous poster points out is not true if they can find new unpaid volunteers, as indeed seems to have happened.

And since we're talking wikis here, please https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith when people comment on what you've written.

From my experience talking to bawolff on WMF's Phabricator, we can definitely assume good faith.

> Your statement assumes they need to pay someone to keep going

No it doesn't. A person who says e.g., "If you have diabetes, you need to mindful of your insulin and blood sugar levels", is not assuming a given person has diabetes. That's not how conditional claims are read.

> [and it's] not true if they can find new unpaid volunteers

Wrong; even if they can (and have), what I stated still remains true.

> And since we're talking wikis here, please https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith when people comment on what you've written.

Wikipedia's "Assume Good Faith" guideline is exactly that—a Wikipedia guideline—and has no intrinsic connection to wikis.

Aside from that, the tendency for Wikipedians to admonish their opponent by citing WP:AGF specifically for the purpose of implicitly accusing the other side of (willfully or not) choosing not to observe/respect the rules of decorum—and thus themselves operating in contravention of the very guideline they're citing—is perverse but unfortunately entirely too common. Invoking the shibboleth is certainly one of Wikipedia's most baffling traditions.

The biting antagonism of your message's tone undermines it's content.

Even so you've chosen to die on a strange hill. What you seem to be arguing for is conditional on how "money to to continue" is understood in this context. While I believe I understand your point: it's moot. A continuation has occurred. A continuation is occuring. If your assertions were correct that would not be possible.

Whose strange hill are we talking about?

> A continuation has occurred. A continuation is occuring. If your assertions were correct that would not be possible.

Again, wrong. I'm pretty well-acquainted with what I said. Go reply (antagonistically) to someone whose remarks actually contain the defects you so badly wish mine contained (to the point that you're willing to ignore what I've actually written and substitute whatever it is you're imagining me to have said in its place).

You can reason perfectly and still be wrong - because you have applied the logic wrong in some way.

That's a true statement. It, like other statements that have been made in this cursed thread, isn't something that moves the needle on whether what I said is actually wrong or not, though...

But it is a true statement!

There was discussion of bigger issues.

Such as large numbers of volunteers leaving to start an alternative beforehand.

Data loss that apparently had no backups leaving thousands of pages gone to the dust in the case of a single wiki. Then restored randomly some night months later from a backup that now popped up out of nowhere, which then also made all newly added and replacement pages created in the months between the loss and restoration disappear. (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36363433)

I did see those comments, but that seems more like a good reason to tighten processes and consider if a different volunteer might be more suited a particular sysadmin role. Fuckups happen and more so in a community run project. I'd rather be hosted on something that had a major incident in the past and they've communicated how they'll move on than a project that has not yet had an incident, unless it was quite mature and proven.

We're just about to appoint an outside analyst looking at our technology stack and processes over the next few months to make recommendations on how we can improve things. This too is a volunteer, but someone with both FAANG and Mediawiki experience.

Also, users can create their own backups of wiki content and export it. This doesn't excuse our history with backups at Miraheze, but with good backup practices on the user's side it can greatly reduce your risk. You are not dependent on Miraheze's backups, as you would be at certain other wiki providers.

You should write to the users choice(s) of s3 compatible buckets. 10s of providers here.

Recent and related:

Miraheze to shut down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36362547 - June 2023 (80 comments)

Also very relevant is Brent's comment on that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366883

reminiscent of the "I'm not leaving" scene from Wolf of Wall Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g07Xxr20L9s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com