Wikipedia and Wikimedia, Where's your money going Options

[Peter Damian]

How many people who donate to Wikimedia think that their money is going to Wikipedia. I never realised this until recently (not that I have donated any money anyway).

I am still struggling to understand what Wikimedia is for, other than hosting all those servers. In particular, now that Wikimedia UK is registered as a charity, I am wondering what the money is for.
Wikimedia UK has 'raised' £500,000, but I understand this is a cheque from the parent WMF. It took me a long time to find out how it is actually being spent, but the page linked to below explains some of it. I itemise them below (I didn't finish it, it being far too boring). The CEO salary is about right for London charity director, but I don't understand what he (Jon Davies) is doing, apart from raising money to pay his own salary. The Office Manager is also about right, but, again, what are they actually doing? The other stuff is impenetrable, apart from the second "Wikipedians in Residence" which is (because of the Bristol connection) is probably a nice cheque for Martin Poulter for being a good all-round nice guy.

The whole thing seems to be to raise money for 'mates' - the various ne'er do wells and useless people that hang around the WMF.

Further investigation, followed by a letter to the charities commission, would seem to be in order.

Chief Executive 60,000
Office Manager 25,000
Events Manager 30,000
Communications 20,000
Developer 30,000
Train the Trainers Programme 20,000
Outreach merchandise & publications 5,000
Extended Reach programme 10,000
Technical development to support cultural outreach 80,000
GLAM-Wiki Conference Autumn 2012 10,000
Outreach Events 10,000
Wikipedians in Residence 15,000
Digitization 20,000
World Wars I and II project 30,000
University outreach events 10,000
Wikipedians in Residence 10,000
[etc]

http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/2012_Activity_Plan

[EricBarbour]

Hah. Mitchell, that fat little chode, is arguing with Werespiel about Windows.
Both full of shit.

So far four operating systems have been mentioned, but only one is open source. I would hope that the trustees would first be looking at Open source solutions. As for the hardware, can I suggest that we try to be a little user friendly and get some mice, also a card reader would be cool - that way we could take images straight off someone's camera and load them up - great for outreach work.
WSC

No, no, no, no! We should focus on getting something that WORKS. If it's open source, that's fantastic, but the thing with mass-market closed-source products is that they get the job done, and are stable enough and easy enough to use that you don't have to have serious IT skills to use them.

Very rarely can the same be said of open-source products (though there are notable exceptions).
Harry

Some of them are babbling about Chromebooks. Yeah, sure, lock your asses into the Google Vise a little more.
Plus, Chromebooks are sometimes difficult to get, and the OS is deliberately designed to prevent installation
of applications that aren't web-based.

Remember there's always my lovely puppy linux from a CD if we want to
run a pre-configured reusable environment with handy open source tools
that attendees could even take home with them afterwards. ;-)

I'd like to see random nerds at a Wikipedia meetup try to use Puppy Linux.
That would be true comedy. Thank you, Mr. Van Haeften, for really capping off
the joke.

This post has been edited by EricBarbour:

[Peter Damian]

Hah. Mitchell, that fat little chode, is arguing with Werespiel about Windows.
Both full of shit.

What's really telling is that this thread - about operating systems - is the longest in months. Guys, I thought WMUK was about getting pictures of ancient hieroglyphs, medieval manuscripts, pictures, old books etc, onto the net. Why aren't you talking about that?

[lilburne]

Hah. Mitchell, that fat little chode, is arguing with Werespiel about Windows.
Both full of shit.

What's really telling is that this thread - about operating systems - is the longest in months. Guys, I thought WMUK was about getting pictures of ancient hieroglyphs, medieval manuscripts, pictures, old books etc, onto the net. Why aren't you talking about that?

With a little prompting one could get that thread to run for weeks. It will keep them out of every one's hair whilst they discuss the benefits of wine over something else, and which extensions to add, and what compiler options to use.