What do people have to hide with any 'public' metadata?
This argument you're using with Wikipedia is basically the same one US government is making that this metadata information is public so they should be free to vacuum all of it up, including Americans. Even though we would never allow the police, or basically anyone else, to tap this at will and this information only exists in private pipes that must be tapped.
The leaked documents have shown a lot of this metadata included data that was included in unsecured HTTP POST headers, such as the multitude of mobile apps that broadcast user information over clear text, such as the various examples in PowerPoint screens shots of real 'metadata' that showed GPS coordinates being pinged back to servers via HTTP along with email addresses.
We can pretend all we want that this is public data because these sites are access publicly but any basic level of analysis into what 'metadata' contains it's quite obvious this doesn't hold up. Especially considering it includes individual interactions with web servers with private data.
You may not care about your private interactions with Wikipedia being scanned and stored in databases forever, but it's hardly just Wikipedia and I'm happy that Wikimedia is standing up against this stuff for all people.
It's not too much to ask to hold security services to the same privacy standards we've held all government agencies for two centuries.
As a regular donor, I'd like to address your concerns.
I gave them the donations. They are gifts. They can spend them on hookers and blow, I don't care. I donate because I appreciate their service. I appreciate it enough to where I'd kinda like them to be making mad loot.
I will continue to donate. I don't give gifts with strings. Gifts with strings are payments. My donation was a gift. Hell, I don't even write it off.
You can be sure that you will have to give them more if they start spending it on hookers because they would lose donors faster than they can come up with threatening banners.
You keep repeating the "by volunteer" line over and over again. They pay people to head the development of the wiki software, including paying developers and managing the project.
The same goes for them managing the huge portfolio of Wikipedia sites.
They run one of the most visited and iconic websites online today in a way that is totally unique at that level. If you want to run a smear campaign against them, in here of all places, you need to do better than "it's a community driven OSS site, and they accept donations!"
the issue is, the site itself they could run with 10% of current employees and they would have funds to run it for years without threatening donation banners each year
You've postured a lot in this thread about the number if employees Wikimedia has. So, put your money where your mouth is and defend your position. Which 90% would you cut, and why?
Perhaps they could tighten their belt a little bit, but to think that you can run a foundation with the size and scope of Wikimedia with ~30 employees is naive at best.
SE/QA/Prod/Mobile - No piece of software can see such broad use by millions without constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of users, the ever-changing blend of user agent / browser software, and the ever-changing and hostile environment of the internet itself. If you think you've ever seen a complex internet-based software project simply become perfect and then need no further changes for a decade or more, you clearly don't understand software engineering.
Discovery - This is about discover-ability of the content itself, e.g. search engines both internal and external, and other related matters.
Security - Actually, a lot of people care about hacking an encyclopedia. Just on the server side they care about hacking the ~1000 servers that are servicing or operating on the private data of millions of users.
Traffic - It's a sub-set of Operations that deals specifically with the edge of the foundation's network (e.g. CDN-like things, for which they don't outsource a commercial CDN mostly for privacy reasons: spreading edge caches around the world, low-level performance optimization, SSL encryption, etc).
Cloud Services - This is where the foundation hosts virtual server resources for community volunteers to experiment with and run projects and products of their own that are relevant, e.g. "bot" software that patrols articles for likely vandalism attempts and such.
This case is not specific to Wikipedia, it questions the legality of all NSA Upstream surveillance.
It's time to get rid of these wire taps. The past year has repeatedly shown US intelligence agencies are not as secure as they imagined - some of these taps are no doubt being leveraged by the Kremlin, China, and other sophisticated enemies of freedom.
The mere threat of being surveilled already does a ton of damage to readers and editors. (although Wikipedia was in one of the NSA's leaked slides as a target [0]) It has a chilling effect [1] on users. A study even found that traffic to terrorism-related articles plunged after the Snowden leaks. [2] You might ask why this is a problem. The populace needs to be adequately informed about the facts about terrorism in order to deal with them rationally rather than stay perpetually afraid and let the government pass things like the Patriot Act that erodes their civil liberties. [3] (you hear the joke a lot that "this probably put me on a list", which is a pretty shocking demonstration of how normalized we've become to surveillance and being treated as bad guys for merely mentioning or looking at sensitive topics) Additionally, while non-registered editor locations are public (attached to a geolocatable IP address), those of registered users are not and I don't think any reader wants what they look at shared with other parties. While the specific case is against upstream surveillance by the NSA, I think the general idea is for Wikimedia to put their foot down against the encroachment of three-letter agencies on our domestic freedoms.
