Мы не рабы, Рабы – немы

So we have one more scandal in WMF, this time it's it.wiktionary's turn to get the news. It appears someone nominated his Own Fat Royal Self Bureaucrat of all Wikiditionaries and started to fire everybody else right after that. Just like that. He's firing people. Well, for self-evident technical reasons he couldn't nominate himself to anything more than being a user. To get a bureaucrat flag someone must give it to you, so here we have some questions: Who did it? When? Why?

We don't need to be Citizendium accredited specialists in Human Resource Management to grasp the concept that if you nominate an administrator who starts up such a loud quarrel in a project you're probably meant to report to your shareholders. Maybe He came in as invited... did He? I wish we could know what exactly stinks in Denmark instead of simply writing it off as a usual political intrigue in a Latin country. It's always really hard to judge by looking only at the final scene of a movie, so please let's have as much data as possible. If after this open request we get no answer at all we are obviously entitled to presume the worst, but until then let's hear the story in detail.

Yet, there ARE parts of this event that are subject for judgment right now. Mainly it's one concept: Power & Duty.

We aren't slaves
Slaves cannot speak
Freely adapted from Vladimir Majakovskij

If you were wondering what the title means, the quote up here is the answer. What the whole philosophy of a wiki is about is breaking the traditional chain of information transmission and generation. We have been informed (put in shape, if you accept the literal Latin root lying under the expression) by Kings, Queens, Governments and Big Companies for thousands of years. Then at a certain point someone thought he could turn the chain upside down. They called it democracy but it never worked properly in many places, because whenever a society does not have a wide Power Distribution in its roots that society is bound to use any democratic rule just to reflect its own basic oligarchic nature.

When confronting the wonderfully written South American Constitutions with the sad history of most of those Countries you get immediate evidence of this. Same applies to many a European Country that went thru Fascism. The very same scene is everyday life through all of the post-soviet space. No matter how literally you translate the policies you should never expect them to be applied with the same final results by all local cultures. People have different cultural roots and may interpret policies according to them. So let's look for a language that will pass the cultural divide and remain untouched. Money seems to be a good candidate for this role, so let's see how much is WMF in euro.

The reason why WMF is so influential is that it can deliver an amount of labor whose market value is hard to estimate, but it evidently exceeds what just ANY government or company can do. Say we have a conservative grand total of 10k users working 8 hours/day. It's more people, actually, yet most of us work less than 8 hours, and it's always prudent to keep a low profile.

Many of our competences aren't what you call low wage stuff. Programmers who develop the stuff behind World Site #10 do not get a basic wage from Big Companies, just to point to an obvious truth. Yet, for modesty's sake let's pretend we are all starving EU residents and we are ready to accept as little as 900 euro/month in exchange for our time, which makes ~2500 for the company once they paid for insurances, taxes, etc. According to these very conservative figures WMF delivers as much as 350 million euro in raw labor per year. THIS is our influence on reality. The simple fact that we can invest in culture much more than any government/company on earth can.

No Citizendum Big-Hunka-DamnGood-Certified-Expert-with-Triple-SpaceBalls will work for Larry in exchange for such a misery, so add a zero for a more realistic figure. It will tell you how much it takes to become our competitor for a profit based organization. That's why we all ARE wmf shareholders and we all have the full right to make questions and get answers, whenever just a leaf moves. We have the right to know because that stupid leaf moves ONLY thanks to the big bucks we all threw in the game.

Now who and how makes decisions on how this load of money is going to be spent? Admins do. At least, many admins think they do, therefore the way in which adminship is formed in EACH project is a matter of public interest and no secret diplomacy can be allowed. Hopefully things can be sorted out without major earthquakes, but there's no doubt that we should know everything in detail. We are very good in publishing all kind of itchy bits of international politics, there's no need to hide our own dirty laundry. Honesty is a value, after all.

Periodically we are confronted with the fact that some of the admin (or the paid staff, but that peculiar staff has already resigned, thank God) start to give orders. They evidently interpret their role as that of a CEO of a regular .COM. Well, .COMs pay wages to people, my dear Men of Blue Administrative Blood, the wmf does not. The wmf GETS PAID!

When I accept a job I sell part of my time to a buyer. We sign a contract and there's written on it who is supposed to do what, when and how. It's also written who is supposed to give orders to whom. If I don't like it I can resign, if they don't like me they can fire me. Yet what gives them the right to give me orders and to fire me is the contract they BOUGHT and PAID FOR. So when some funny Mr. W**l orders you to sit on your back pawns and bark you can simply tell him to go hang himself. All he can do in response is... eventually fire his Own Mighty Corporate Self, which he did.

Not sure this applies to what is happening in it.wiktionary (as I said we need lots of clear details for us to judge), but I saw it happening a number of times already in other places, and I'm simply fed up with it. All these Big-Hunka-Boys actually do, apart from exhibiting their penises for a public size context, is sending resources away from their projects. They build their big fat egos at the expenses of our shared capital assets and no more than that. So the one damn concept ALL of us stupid admins MUST swallow is that we do not happen to be nobles, kings or emperors. We are but humble recruiters, i.e. people who try and sell the concept that one can work for free to provide a service to the whole planet. Acting like The Big Buncha Muscles from the Capital Who Came to the Village to Settle Things Right is simply ridiculous.

What happens when admins act like that is that they either turn their projects into small fanatical religious sects, whose brainwashed members must ritually kiss the image of the local fat God/Goddess each every night before going to bed, or they turn it into a desert. Yet the latter is usually avoided, because it would force Their Divine Majesties to get their hands dirty by making at least ONE edit themselves. I don't know who's got how many edits in it.wiktionary, but possibly checking this very figure would make for a simple start in our judgment. Shouldn't it?

So never forget a simple rule for users' self-defense: what this sort of almighty admin fears is... being left alone with lots of things to do and no humble labor on which to redirect the problem, as not pertinent to His/Her Social Condition within the Community. When they get too rough you can simply walk away to another project and let them clean doggy-does with their own posh hands. They need slaves to be powerful, take away the slaves and the King is Naked. And... Thank God most admins aren't like that, which is why the 350 millions keep coming. I wouldn't get this mad about this issue if it wasn't for the fact that I'm myself an admin and I don't want this crap to damage a family of projects I am a part of.

No, this has nothing to do with politics and/or ideals and utopias, this is about simple manners and human relations. If you smile to me, then I'll smile to you; but if you punch my nose then I'll smash yours and it will be so painful that you won't need Citizendum to verify it. That's me. But you bet your last dime that lots of the labor bucks invested in this project come from freaky unpleasant psychopaths like me.

And finally... yes, this incidentally happens to be a frank answer to a question that sounds Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? People do, my young friend, simple people. Yet your question is understandable, since it comes from a man in whose priority list simple people tend to come waaay after Coca-Cola and the likes. Well, just add the numbers, it's simple mathematics. They tell you who gives money (and therefore orders) to whom. They tell you WHO is in control, always has been and always will be. I hope a simple sum is not too low class for you, is it?

We got new thoughts, new ideas it's all so groovy
It's just a shame that we all seen the same old movies
Private affair - The Saints - 1980

So much for the general abstract principle. Now I do hope I'll read some crystal clear reports telling us what the hell is happening with it.wiktionary.