Why has Danny desysopped and destewarded himself?

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I dunno... People change jobs in the IT sector all the time. I suspect he just got a better offer from a more established, better-paying company, like McDonald's.

I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with the relentless pressure applied over the last several months by Joel Leyden due to Danny's deletion of the "Israel News Agency" article...

Danny forgot to edit this one.

Hmm. Looking into this a little further, is it possible Danny actually did quit over not being considered for the WMF Executive Director job?

There's some info about the job itself in this Foundation-L post from Florence Devouard. Florence expresses a certain amount of disappointment with the Foundation's recent fundraising activities, and since Danny was the Grants Coordinator, he presumably would have been heavily involved with that.

Of course, Danny shouldn't be blamed for lackluster fundraising results - let's see, just in the last few months we've had the plagiarism report, Qatar being blocked, a WP revision page used to spread a virus, Microsoft's pay-for-editing debacle, the Middlebury History Department, Stephen Colbert, Conservapedia, Fuzzy Zoeller, Essjay, and of course the deaths (real or otherwise) of Steve Irwin, Ken Lay, Sinbad, and I suspect various other people too. And I'm sure I've left stuff out...

Almost everyone works for free at Wikipedia. Some people get too busy. For instance, Aevar's userpage says he doesn't develop as much anymore because he has a paying job now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=116935847

Danny Wool was one of the few paid workers at the Foundation. No one seems to know why he left.

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with Danny's departure but Cary Bass aka User:Bastique is the newest paid employee of the Foundation.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/found...rch/028385.html

I haven't started digging through the WikiMedia software (yet), but does anyone know which actions place the largest load on their server infrastructure?

Good question!

But I doubt any of us here are sufficiently experienced with the kind of bandwidth and disk-usage requirements something like WP would require... Still, I doubt that MediaWiki, slow as it is, is likely to be the source of bottlenecks. The Apache PHP interpreter is actually quite fast, whereas MySQL still has a few performance issues, supposedly... I believe the rule of thumb is that any database write operation is likely to gobble up at least 10 times the resources of a read operation, mostly because reads can be cached. And the bigger the write, the more resources are gobbled up.

Not that I'm suggesting that anyone should write a program that would post multiple large articles in quick succession as some sort of exploit or attack, mind you!

I'm not talking about anything that would be an "attack". I was just wondering which "read-only" actions, like log dumping, searches, or what, place the highest loads.

Note that PHP can, and probably is, accelerated by Zend and possibly other tools. MySql, well-structured, doesn't need to be a bottleneck, but hardly anyone does. Note that Yahoo! runs on PHP and MySql.

But in the end, you're no doubt correct. The heaviest load would be something that touches lots of rows and columns, something that writes a database element without being an "attack", and requires synchrony, so it cannot be easily cached. Anyhow, just ruminating ... back to the woot-off.

Oh well. I used to like Danny, but I don't believe he behaved responsibly with all the power he was given.

Everyone is guessing about Danny Wool leaving, and I don't know anything more than anyone else. My wild guess is that there are two possibilities.

1. Danny has really resigned from the Foundation, and no longer receives a paycheck from them. In this case he might have a better job offer, or just became disillusioned. His official "grants coordinator" position involved sending out grant applications to foundations and/or corporations. The people who read these applications, trying to decide who gets their money, are very conscious of their own image, and tend to be very conservative. The Essjay and similar scandals have thrown a wrench into Danny's ability to send out grant applications at this time. And it was Danny who originally steered Stacy Schiff to Essjay, which certainly contributed to his disillusionment. He was right in the middle between what Wikipedia pretended to be, and what it really is in terms of being able to attract grant money.

2. Danny still gets a paycheck, but his role is redefined so that he cannot be seen as a WP:OFFICE "content enforcer" — a role assigned to him by Jimbo last year. Jimbo is no longer signing his paycheck, so to speak. (It's probably Mike Davis who signs the paychecks, but that's okay with the Foundation because Davis doesn't play with the content.) By removing all of his sysop bits, Danny becomes a Foundation employee who doesn't make decisions on Wikipedia content. He could still answer phones, but now his role is indirect — he refers complaints that need action to a "community volunteer" who has the sysop bits. Basically this would amount to a legal fiction that is consistent with the wishes of the Board majority, which needs to distance itself from content issues.

The big elephant in the room for the Board majority is Jimbo, who is generally recognized by the "community" as the court of last resort on content issues. Jimbo is still a trustee of the Foundation. But that could be fixed quietly in order to give the Board more distance from content issues. Jimbo might have concerns about any action the Board takes to formally distance itself, because that leaves Jimbo standing alone, without any Section 230 tricks up his sleeve. He'd be a target for lawyers.

The baby elephant in the room is the fact that the Foundation owns the servers and pays the developers to maintain the structure of accountability — namely, the distribution of sysop bits. Ownership of the servers is not the problem, it's the structure of sysop-bit distribution itself that's the problem. It's hard to claim that you're a service provider rather than a publisher, when so much of the content contributed by "interactive service users" is shaped so directly by the accountability structure that's part and parcel of the entire Wikipedia experience.

You can read up on all of this on Wikipedia. Look for the pages on the technical structure of Wikipedia. It's not a secret.

That dreadful task (answering the Office phone) has gone to Bastique... according to Bastique on IRC.

Danny does not work in the office anymore from everything I've heard.

Everything i've seen/read/heard points to possiblity #1.

Don't be toooo sure about that Somey. Not everything I do is in a "in your face" for "For Immediate Release" manner.
Much is going on. And there is still much to do .... by us all!
The Wikipedia Contest is just a few days away.

It would appear danny has quit his job with the foundation but intends to continue with the project... he's up for Adminship again...

I noticed. He's already at WP:100 and will surely break WP:200 at this pace.