Objective proof that WMF software development is a literal scam

[Bbb23sucks]

Out of the 13,410 valid bug reports reported to the WMF, over 31% percent (4,168) of them have not been addressed. Including many that are 15+ years old. Compare that to a functioning organization like the Blender Foundation:

Out of the 70,790 (that's over five times more than the WMF) bug reports opened since the creation of Blender's bug tracker (which was around the same time as MediaWiki), less than 3% (2,102) are still open. That means that Blender is over five times better at fixing bugs by shear volume and over ten times better percentage wise.

But it gets worse! If you went by the WMF's development costs, you'd assume that Blender would have to be spending billions to get this good results, but nope! The Blender Foundation only spent a little over two million last year, while the WMF spent over $145 million. That means that the that WMF is spending 67 times more money and getting cataclysmically bad results.

Multiply all those numbers together and you'll get the astonishing result that the WMF is over 4,000x worse per dollar than the Blender Foundation. There's no other way to describe that than an outright scam. And that's probably an underestimate given the fact that Blender employees significantly more non-developers and the report I used included more of the additional costs than the WMF's, and it didn't even include how anything about software functionality, design, code quality, low vs higher level languages, or the amount of time bug reports are resolved in. Add those in and I'd say it easily gets into the tens of thousands.

To rub more salt in wound, Blender's oldest bugs are only three years old, compare that to MediaWiki's, which still has many bugs from 2005 - 18 years ago. And those are just the oldest bugs, bugs in MediaWiki are in general not addressed, and even if they are, they usually take years. Most bugs in Blender are usually addressed quickly, and if they aren't, there's usually an actual reason.

Sources:

MediaWiki open bugs (4,168 as of September 22, 2023).
MediaWiki closed bugs (9,242 as of September 22, 2023).
Blender bug reports.

[ericbarbour]

To rub more salt in wound, Blender's oldest bugs are only three years old, compare that to MediaWiki's, which still has many bugs from 2005 - 18 years ago. And those are just the oldest bugs, bugs in MediaWiki are in general not addressed, and even if they are, they usually take years. Most bugs in Blender are usually addressed quickly, and if they aren't, there's usually an actual reason.

I can believe this. MediaWiki is "free" therefore lots of assorted webhosts use it. Bugs, they live with and tolerate, because FREE. I know of many. The sysop of the Mod Wiggler forum installed and tried to run a MW system so his users would assmble a database of analog synthesizer information, way back in 2008. And gave up and shut it down in 2013. And I quote him (again):

"Well, sometime in the last month, all the content on that wiki (ALL of it) was destroyed by spammers, and replaced with crap weblinks. Canadian pharmacies, resorts in Thailand, Russian porn sites, stuff like that. I was amazed--they were using some kind of bot to generate large numbers of user accounts, probably a Wikipedia account-creator bot. Then the accounts cheerfully destroyed all the legitimate content, and posted idiot spam instead."

"After warning him last week that the wiki was hosed, he tried to restore it, then completely pulled it down today. This is an exact quote from his email to me."

"Just nuked it."

"I did back everything up so that I can restore everyone's work if I get a stable and secure install."

"Been reading up on Mediawiki config - the thing is a piece of shit! If you want to disable public editing you need to edit code, the functionality is not built into the UI."

"Dozens of 'essential' functions are like this - nowhere in the ui."

"Garbage."

They won't discuss it, but even Jimbo's Wikia/Fandom.com gave up on stock MediaWiki, while continuing to claim they are "using it". They made major revisions--all "secret" and possibly violating the original license.

[Bbb23sucks]

"Well, sometime in the last month, all the content on that wiki (ALL of it) was destroyed by spammers, and replaced with crap weblinks. Canadian pharmacies, resorts in Thailand, Russian porn sites, stuff like that. I was amazed--they were using some kind of bot to generate large numbers of user accounts, probably a Wikipedia account-creator bot. Then the accounts cheerfully destroyed all the legitimate content, and posted idiot spam instead."

Seems to be a fairly common phenomenon. I've seen Reddit threads on it before. https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comment ... undreds_of

They won't discuss it, but even Jimbo's Wikia/Fandom.com gave up on stock MediaWiki, while continuing to claim they are "using it". They made major revisions--all "secret" and possibly violating the original license.

If they are really doing, they are 100% violating the license. MediaWiki is licensed under GPLv2 which mandates that modifications to the source code (and extensions) be provided on request (if not made public outright). There have been similar lawsuits over with "less severe" violations. Example: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/gpl-o ... n-9594215/ The SFC might sue John Deere soon too.

Knowing the WMF and Jimbo though, they would probably just grant "Fandom" an exemption.