Granted, it depends on how it turns out. But my first impression is that authoritative reference documents of MDN are going to become cluttered with comments and disagreements.

MDN has never been "authoritative reference documents". It's a wiki. Anybody can edit and republish pages, change examples, do whatever. I noticed somewhere about a year ago that it was a wiki, and have made minor changes to a couple of pages since then, when something was missing an example or something.

I change, I publish, it's done. And if my change was wrong, or opinionated, or bad, it's just like that until somebody else catches it and fixes it back.

Neither Safari, Chrome/Chromium, IE, old Edge, nor new Edge have substantial HTML and CSS developer documentation on their own web sites. Their vendors - excepting Apple and the WebKit contributors - all chose to work with Mozilla instead to put their docs on MDN: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/10/18/documenting-w...

It seems to me that as far as the browser makers are concerned, MDN is as close to authoritative as you can get without going to the standards documents themselves - and the standards don't give you browser compatibility matrices or make any note of browser-specific quirks.

MDN may be a wiki, but it certainly isn't treated like one by the people who are most interested in it being accurate and up to date.

I suppose I was reacting to this:

"Authoritative reference documents of MDN are going to become cluttered with comments and disagreements"

Which suggests previously authoritative docs are becoming less so due to being editable. I'm just pointing out they are and always have been subject to edits from the public. If anything the PR process will likely increase the reliability of the info because there would be a chance to do some vetting of changes.

I totally agree that MDN is as close to authoritative as you can get, but it's one (important) step away.

I think people put authoritative sources on too much of a pedestal because it's possible for someone to naively or maliciously edit wikis. People who write official docs are also frequently wrong, and the editing and review cycle there is far slower!

Every recent review I've seen of Wikipedia vs arbitrary big-a Authoritative sources has said that both have issues and overall Wikipedia is better.

I hope they don't suffer the same type of problem that caniuse has had since incorporating the MDN data. In that case, source data sets that were each well-regarded and, particularly in caniuse's case, well-curated on their own became overwhelming and harder to use than before once combined. The slightly different styles for each source and the partial duplication often seem to obscure the information I'm really trying to get to in the search results now. If MDN is now going to be community-led, I hope they manage to find some arrangement where there is still decent curation and not a Wikipedia/SO-style free for all followed by heavy-handed mod over-reaction.

Why is it now more likely to become cluttered than before?

I think you are both right. This is good for the future of MDN, but OTOH cutting cost is likely to be what motivated Mozilla to make this change.

They had already cut cost, I would phrase it as this change being now even more necessary.

With corporations, the cynical view is most likely to be the correct view. And I wouldn’t say MDN does very little for Mozilla; it’s the main part of their brand in developers’ mind share. If they want to have a browser without developers who like it, that’s their choice, but it won’t really work out well business wise.

As far as I can see, Mozilla have no reason to be losing money other than their own mismanagement.

This is an article about MDN, not Mozilla. How exactly does MDN bring money? Do you suggest MDN should be a revenue source? Or do you expect Mozilla to maintain the MDN for free eternally just because?

This is seriously entitled. Mozilla gave us an amazing resource, entirely for free. This attitude isn't right, it's toxic and harmful.

Mozilla is in a spot of difficulty, and instead of taking a resource that is operating entirely at a loss down, they're taking the engineering steps to ensure thez resource can outlive them.

That their mismanagement caused them the difficulty is entirely irrelevant here. It could have happened in a myriad of other ways. We should be praising Mozilla and the MDN tech team for the steps they're taking in making sure the MDN can live on.

It's stuff like MDN that attracts donations.

Fun fact: I have an open source repo with millions of downloads, tens of thousands of active users, and, for at least a year, a prominently displayed donate button. How much in donations do you think it took in over its lifetime?

Hint: it's less than $200.

Donations don't really work.

Thanks for the vim plugin for vscode! It's quite useful and usable. fwiw i don't think you get many donations because it looks like an official microsoft backed vscode plugin so why would people throw money at microsoft. that said, i do think you are correct in that people in general do not donate to open source individually that much.

We didn’t have many for Firebug either, though we appreciated those we got and funneled them to new contributors living outside the States where it made a difference.

>for at least a year, a prominently displayed donate button.

Just to be sure, are you referring to the "BuyMeCoffee" button on the GitHub page for the extension (https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim)?

Nah, we used to have a more prominent link. It's been removed since I stopped developing on the extension.

At the bottom of a long scroll isn't something I'd consider prominent. I'd probably change it to simply "Donate" as a button, and put it with the badges at the top. Red, purple or orange as a contrasting color from the blue and green badges.

Which one is it? Maybe you will win a handful of donations here.

I guess its https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

> Or do you expect Mozilla to maintain the MDN for free eternally just because?

That's what I expect of a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining one of the last two remaining major browser engines, yes.

I didn't know that becoming non-profit meant that money is free :)

What are their revenue streams?

Now that antitrust is happening anyways, Google's main reason for shoveling money at them is going away.

Well, the way I see it it was the financial problems who personally made the decision, so that complicated things somewhat.