FYI, the documentary is called Inside North Korea, and the behavior in question begins at around the 40:00 mark.

I think there are at least three of us left...?

The point is that Wikimedia is building a war chest, not that they're overspending on salaries (though arguably they have hired a lot of overpaid developers, given what they've managed to actually produce). Jimbo Wales isn't paid directly by Wikimedia, he gets his money on the back-end as a paid public speaker and CEO of Wikia, which benefits somewhat from Wikipedia brand recognition.

The higher Wikimedia salaries are published in tax returns, and they're mostly in line with other Silicon Valley non-profits, but again, that's not the issue here. The issue is they're fundraising as if they're on their last financial legs, when in fact they're not even close to that point - if anything, just the opposite. If they minimized their staff and moved to a cheaper location, they could survive for 10-15 years without another dime and hardly anyone would notice a thing.

The more commonly-used term for what the person referred to was trying to do is "advocate" (on behalf of paying clients), not "advertise." Some folks probably won't bother with the distinction, but anyone who does actual marketing probably would.

Remind me not to hire you to cater my next dinner party!

The point of this whole exercise, which many (if not most) of the commenters here have unfortunately not understood at all, has little or nothing to do with the amount of damage that can be done by inserting any given false fact into any given semi-obscure Wikipedia article. The point is simply to disprove the bogus PR line constantly repeated by Wikipedians (and Wikimedia people like Jimbo Wales) which states that "vandalism is always fixed very quickly." The only "unwelcome edits" that routinely get reverted quickly on Wikipedia are the obvious ones containing obscenities and slurs and the like, as well as anything (vandalism or not) that's inserted into articles that are fully-owned by groups of users for ideological, political, or commercial purposes. True, there's luck involved too, but that enters into it a lot less than most people are led to believe.

You're probably thinking, "Okay, people are lying about how good their crowdsourced website is, so what?" I would have the same reaction, except that Wikipedia is so dominant because of their Google footprint, these kinds of problems (which I believe will only get worse) really have to be taken more seriously, especially by journalists. That's what happened here, and it's a good thing. Obviously there are worse problems in the world, but in the long term, this is something that will eventually have to be dealt with if we're going to continue to move away from paper-artifact dissemination of information.

It wasn't (isn't?) that bad. What would sometimes happen was, if you had a program in Delphi 7 that depended on a third-party component, and you upgraded to Delphi 2009 or later, and got a new version of that component that had been converted to Unicode support, your code might not compile unless you changed your string declarations. But if you only used stock VCL components, you'd almost never have a problem, or if you did it would be fairly trivial to fix.

Unfortunately, third-party VCL components were always one of the main attractions of Delphi, and a lot of third-party database components (including many of the ones available for xBase, which was still big back then) were converted to Unicode that way because (I assume) it was just impractical to try to have it access data files both ways. Another problem was components making Windows API calls. Delphi 1.0 Object Pascal strings were 256-byte arrays, and starting with Delphi 2, dynamically-allocated 32-bit arrays - but Windows API calls have always required null-terminated pointer strings (PChars). So if one of your older components made a WinAPI call, you'd sometimes get compiler errors/warnings about type incompatibility after an upgrade.

It was a PITA in some cases, but generally speaking you only had to fix it once. No fun, but as long as you had the source code for your VCL components, it wasn't so bad - I still thought it was better than Visual Studio, at the time at least. That was back in the COM days, and COM components had their own set of compatibility problems. (Still do, actually!)

It's not just you. Delphi 7 won't even install under post-XP Windows versions, though the applications compiled by it will still work.

Still, I wouldn't call it a "dead" or even "unpopular" language at all, personally. They've made lots changes since 2002, most of them good, that would have resulted all the compiler errors you encountered - the switch to Unicode was probably the biggest one, starting with Delphi 2009. And for years, every new VCL was incompatible with the previous one, so if you didn't have the source code to your controls, you'd either have to dump them or wait for the controls' authors to update them (assume they were still in the business). More recent upgrades have been a lot less painful compatibility-wise, though as you say, they don't seem to have to have put much of a priority on footprint-reduction.

Also, I should probably move to Atlanta.

Thanks, Dave.

Is this some sort of game to you? We're talking about people's livelihoods. If you want to indulge in sophistry and absurd strawman-making go ahead, but you're not likely to convince anyone with that stuff.

Any rational, thinking person understands what "intent" means in an artistic context. Of course, if Nikon were to give you a camera rig for free, fly you out to Indonesia at their expense, and tell you to take photos of monkeys, they could easily claim copyright on the resulting images - in fact, the music business, the motion picture industry, and numerous others do that sort of thing as a matter of course. That is how copyright works; the only reason you don't often see those practices applied to photography is because the gear is relatively cheap and easily operated by one person. And regardless, this situation has nothing to do with that, because it's assumed the monkey can't knowingly sign a contract or understand its terms and his responsibilities under those terms.

The real issue is, if I'm a judge, what decision would be in the long-term best interests of society? To set a precedent that might eliminate incentives for photographers to innovate, just to free up this particular set of monkey images? Or to keep that incentive in place at the expense of a few websites having to pay a few bucks to the photographer, even though he didn't personally trip the shutter? I'd be surprised if a judge (a real one that is) decides against incentives for innovation in any medium - even computer software.

Okay, you've just given libelers and tabloid journalists and revenge-porners an even greater incentive to lie about people, just so their "update" stories can get a higher PageRank. These people don't care about fairness or other people's reputations, they care about traffic.

Unfortunately, neither do most Wikipedians.

Exactly. He set up the camera. Do you always contradict yourself like this? And as for there being "no artistic intent," I suppose he went out and followed those black macaque monkeys around for three days just so he could have them nearby while he took photos of fallen tree limbs and snails?

It's not "difficult to prove" at all, particularly given that no sane person is going to sit in a courtroom and insist, under oath, that you didn't set up the motion-sensor for your camera, which you also set up, for some purpose other than to have it go off when something moved within the frame. Sheesh!

Admittedly, archaeology doesn't seem to inspire a great deal of petty, needless bickering, even on Wikipedia. I blame DNA testing and carbon-dating, personally.

But I married the Jamaican whore and recognized our love-child as my sole legitimate heir! What's more, he's now head of a major media conglomerate.

Fair enough, but if you've actually looked around at some of the post-conference coverage of Wikimania in the UK press, and most other Wikimedia-related stories in the last week or so, I believe you'll objectively find that most of it is rather negative. The Wikipediocracy blog post simply reflects that. (I've seen next to nothing about it in the US press so far, by the way, which may be an interesting point in itself.)

As for the monkey-selfie story, the press coverage there has been fairly neutral, or at least non-judgmental. You actually do have a decent case there for calling the Wikipediocracy post "slanted" - I think it was mostly a case of "someone has to take the side of the photographer, and if not Wikipediocracy, then who?"

Last but not least, what's obvious to me from the context isn't always obvious to everyone else, at least when it comes to people being long-term Wikipedians.