The linked article doesn't even come close to suggesting money laundering. It really just argues that Wikimedia is similar to virtually every other successful organization on earth and that its bloat grows with its resources.
Wow insightful.
The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!
Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.
Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation". At least among the general public.
I worked in AML tech for a bank earlier in my career. I put up a fight against this misuse of terminology for a while, but eventually just gave up. Just embrace that everything is money laundering to many people and life is easier.
Words in general don't really mean much anymore, online anyway.
It reminds me of when health fads take off. Everyone "has OCD" or whatnot. I'd talk to people and they've given me a rundown of who they claim they were, but lol, they weren't that person.
Everyone can identify and use words however they want. Once it goes viral the meaning of the word changes. It's difficult to parse who people are nowadays cuz of it.
There's no sense fighting it. Someone will tell you you're wrong, you're out of touch, you just don't get it, or "your vibe isn't right".
I don't think he thought that, he was probably expressing the view that he doesn't think the representative person's understanding of the term is the same as yours.
I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.
The root of this thread literally uses it in the way I observed. So...never? It's literally right there! I see similar uses everywhere (speaking specifically of the general public, not financial industry professionals), calling every misallocation, misspend, or even simple fraud money laundering. Reddit, HN, Facebook, LinkedIn...everything is money laundering.
Again, I'm kind of an expert in AML, so I probably pay attention to it way more than you do, and probably have a much better perspective on this. I constantly see people refer to almost all misuse or misallocation of funds as money laundering.
Maybe you just don't know what money laundering actually is? Because the vast majority of the public certainly doesn't.
People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"
"Bureaucracy" has been an entire field of study for more than a century at that point. But WMF is not bureaucracy any more than the FIFA is bureaucracy. It is curruption; That of the stated ideals of the origin: non profit, decentralisation and democracy.
People have been told for so long that private companies are more efficient than government that they have started to simply believe it, as if the problems of large scale organisation aren't universal.
Some cracks have emerged in that, at least in the UK. Trains, water companies, etc, all used as solid examples of private sector waste and extractiveness.
Another word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.
With “enshittification”, Doctorow meant something specific, where a platform rises to popularity by serving its users, then betrays those users to its business partners to make more money, then finally betrays even those business partners to keep most of the value for themselves.
Anyway I guess Doctorow brought this on himself by choosing a word that’s fun to say but isn’t clear about what it refers to.
Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.
Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale organized crime (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.
I could not find any indication that the purpose of this ever-increasing spending (while alarming) is money laundering in the essay you linked. Can you provide any other source to back up this claim? Money laundering is illegal, while spending money in of itself is definitely not.
I'm generally critical of WMF and think (1) they waste significant amount of resources on mis-managed projects, and (2) are not very honest or transparent in donation communications.
But to play devils advocate, a lot of this depends on your views of what WMF should be. Some see WMF as "keep wikimedia sites up and healthy". But the foundation is much broader:
> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
As an example, one of the hundreds of projects that WMF funds is the WikiPortraits Photo Service (https://photos.wikiportraits.org). Take this with a huge grain of salt, but Sol found ~$500K of direct grants in the past 3yr; with 50k Creative Commons or public domain portraits taken as a result.
Some people might be shocked at this, and feel scammed that some of their donation to WMF is funding photographer's hotels/flights/compensation to Cannes, Fifa World Cup, etc; instead of servers or infra or 'KOTL employees'.
Others might think it's an incredibly great use of money; at just $10/photo; while contributing novel, high-quality, human-authored, freely licensed content to the world
That $500K over three years represents 0.08% of the foundation’s budget in that time period. The question is, what are they spending the other 99.92%? There is a significant small chunk spent on crucial infrastructure, but it’s mostly a slush fund for board pet projects.
Yes, that is a good example. I used to be cynical about these uses of money until I met a 70-year-old volunteer who regularly attends international cycling championships to take pictures of the cyclists. She is totally devoted to documenting the sport and is not by any stretch of the imagination getting rich doing that or living in luxury. So I've changed my mind: her being able to do that is a good thing for her, for Wikipedia and for the sportspeople involved in these championships. YMMV.
Fair compensation is a legitimate reason for unions.
I don't know much about this situation, but I know it is possible for unions to basically be a group of drama-oriented bullies that pressure their coworkers to join. A secret ballot seems like the right way to ensure it actually reflects the will of the employee base.
Wow insightful.
The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!
Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.