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Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

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Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#161

Post by j-pb »

bawolff wrote: post #121
j-pb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y Like I said, gross overengineering. "You can save cents and seconds of time updating knowledge boxes, by spending millions and hours developing federated SPARQL query capabilities!"

More like, we put the facts and knowledge in a central (mysql) db, so that instead of updating them in 300 places (Wikipedia has a lot of languages), you just update them in one place. And since the data happened to be there anyways, we added an RDF export feature, and threw that into a BlazeGraph DB so that people could do SPARQL queries if they want. The (not really federated) SPARQL queries have basically nothing…

As if thowing the messy complexities of MySQL queries into the serene simplicity of static hypertext is somehow better.

How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated? How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies? How much effort is the code maintenance of the specialised editing system? How much effort is maintainance of the centralised infrastructure. How much effort is it really to change the data in multiple places, given that enough eyes every bug is shallow? What are the oppirtunity costs of not being able to properly distribute and share articles because they are suddenly tied to a very specific codebase? How much infrastructure cost do I have because I can't get volunteers to host my data?

Overengineering solving the wrong problems at it's finest, no wonder the software has stayed this bad for decades now.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#162

Post by taurath »

Clewza313 wrote: post #78
paxys wrote: post #75

> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March... ) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade…

Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.

I find it sad that this is a debate given how much of a public good it is. $10m is absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#163

Post by colonwqbang »

paxys wrote: post #149
marcan_42 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read their article? They mention how money they funnel into the fund is counted as "expenses", as is stuff like hiring 40 people just for fundraising. I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year.

> I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year. What exactly are you basing this on?

Here's their budget for 2020

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Mediu...

They budgeted $5M for "data centre expenses". We cannot know for sure how much it would really cost if WMF only focused on running their website. But $10M doesn't sound implausible to me.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#165

Post by NeoVeles »

Clewza313 wrote: post #78
paxys wrote: post #75

> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March... ) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade…

Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.

The thing that gets me is the Archive.org only has approximately $20 million USD of revenue and they run a system that is much more data intensive. The wayback machine alone is a data crunching monster and it is done for a small fraction of WMF.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#166

Post by TulliusCicero »

zozbot234 wrote: post #73
k1m wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia in my experience doesn't "take on" anyone. They have a list of sources of large information outlets that are marked, mostly arbitrarily, "reliable". With the media landscape being as skewed as it is (largely reflecting interests of media owners and advertisers, see Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model), Wikipedia has set itself up to reflect those same biases by relying on the same sources.

Or maybe they're marked "reliable" because they're less likely to make stuff up. I know that it is problematic when all the most obvious sources are slanted towards one political point of view, but citing the Daily Mail and other tabloids for stuff that the viewer's supposed to trust is even worse.

I mean there's definitely left leaning banned sources too, like Alternet.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#167

Post by martin_a »

bawolff wrote: post #154
martin_a wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they are definitely doing more now then back then And it's probably questionable if all side ventures are needed or if they could/should have sticked to the core project and developt it with little money. As mentioned further down: Do you really need 40 fundraiser positions?

The side ventures aren't the thing they are doing now that they weren't back then (Other then wikidata which started in 2012, all the other side projects are really old). Things they are doing now is stuff like having a website that stays up and is speedy. Software improvements for english wikipedia EN Wikipedia has always been where the lion share of attention was focused on (With wikidata and commons coming in seco…

One should expect that with improvements in software and hosting, the cost-value-ratio improves. Does not seem to be the case here, which is strange.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#168

Post by 0wis »

I don’t understand the hate here. Wikipedia clearly states that the point of donations is to create an endowment. They need to get enough money for their principal to generate enough money to ensure the project can live even in case of black swan events. [1]

They are still a long way from being independent from donors given their growth in projects, paid contributors (employees) and therefore expenses.

If you don’t agree with their governance or even specific ways they spend their money, stop donating, it is not like they are forcing you. You can even write an article an share it but don’t try to take shortcut like I feel it is done here. Money is a necessary ressource to survive, and if an entity have a lot of capital or spend plenty on projects or useful human ressources doesn’t imply evilness.

[1] : https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/endowment.asp

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#169

Post by xenator »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #115
Clewza313 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.

In June 2011 they had 11 million articles across all Wikipedias. As of now they have 55 million articles across all Wikipedias. [0]. I'd say this is pretty good even without considering any increases to viewership or size of existing pages. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons

There is no big differences for the database in these numbers. Wikipedia doesn't save lives here. They can have different shards for read only data and doesn't need to process millions of different signals every second. And worth to mention that site growth is predictable.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#170

Post by jiggawatts »

thoughty wrote: post #160
marcan_42 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read their article? They mention how money they funnel into the fund is counted as "expenses", as is stuff like hiring 40 people just for fundraising. I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year.

I would be very surprised if their spend was just $10M/year on their tech infra. That's very low. I expect it would be much higher. PS: I work for cloud computing company and have insight on how much costs increase with scale. edit: fixed typos.

Wikipedia is hosted on ordinary rackmount servers at a handful of colocation facilities: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

It does not significantly use cloud services, and as you can see by the picture of their racks, they use standard 1 RU pizzaboxes. Their workload is highly scalable horizontally, and doesn't even need much in the way of expensive "enterprise" hardware such a SAN arrays: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Wi...

If you buy beige box rackmount hardware with basic compute and CPU, it's pretty easy to spend less than $250K per rack, and the hardware can be kept for 5+ years. That's about 50K per rack per year. Double that for opex, and assume twenty racks distributed across a a handful of sites for capacity and availability. That's just $2M per annum.

Keep in mind they're a high-profile charity, so they get discounts and tax breaks.

(I'm not saying that's all there is to Wikipedia! There's software development, management, finance, etc... I'm just saying that the infrastructure alone is probably less than you think.)

PS: English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! There have been comments along these lines made in other forums, and the response was that it would cost more to rewrite the software than the maintain the hardware required for PHP. I don't remember the numbers, but I vaguely remember tens of millions for a rewrite, a high risk of breaking issues, and a significantly lower hardware cost.

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