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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?

#181

Post by onion2k »

xenator wrote: post #169
rPlayer6554 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no big differences for the database in these numbers.

On big thing that changes as a site grows, and as it reaches more places internationally, is that it attracts more attacks. Stopping that costs lot.

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

#182

Post by gcthomas »

ramraj07 wrote: post #127
harikb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a ridiculous and ugly accusation to make. If you don’t know what it takes to run a globally available top site, it is better not throw stones at people.

Have I run a site comparable to Wikipedia? No. Do I know nothing about that topic? Debatable. Leaving that aside, Wikipedia was live and ticking when it had 1% of today’s coffers, so it’s hard to substantiate why they need money approaching a billion dollars for a non profit running a website all things considered.

I wonder how much Facebook spends on running _its_ website?

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

#183

Post by zozbot234 »

j-pb wrote: post #155
zozbot234 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikidata gets more edits per second right now than the English wikipedia does. If that's not "exploding overnight", I don't know what is. It's just that fewer people are aware of it, because it powers sily things like search engine infoboxes and AI assistants - in addition to fostering unprecedented cooperation among knowledge producers in the Linked Data/Semantic Web ecosystem.

Ah yes, and that's not totally skewed by the fact that an "edit" in a knowledge graph is at the granulatity of a triple while an edit in an article has the granulatity of a coherent piece of structurally meaningfull information. Piling onto the glorified garbage dump (just follow the isA edges of any concept you'll see what I mean) is a strawman metric.

It might be a "garbage dump", but it's one that large pieces of the Web are increasingly relying on. The pre-existing alternatives (mainly DBpedia - incidentally, based on scraping Wikipedia articles) were pretty disgusting hacks compared to what we have now.

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

#184

Post by mihaaly »

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…

You started to compare the (past approximated) site hosting cost to the running of an inflated (from 10 to 500) organization, where the former is part (apparently diminishing part) of the latter. It was also a rhetoric to start talking about other expenses and the present time.

Please do not bring disingenuous arguments in 'exposing' suspected disingenuity, it is counterproductive.

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

#185

Post by forgotmypw17 »

bawolff wrote: post #92
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #47

I'd be more interesting in knowing why Wikipedia is cutting off so many "<1%" users like narrow desktop screens, older browsers, no-JS users, mobile users with unsteady connections.

How are no-js users cut off? At least the desktop site should definitely work fine (I never use the mobile so i don't know). Hell, last i checked, wikipedia even worked if cookies were disabled (and you weren't logged in). I'm also not sure what the unsteady connections thing is about? Wikipedia doesn't modify the TCP stack.

By "unsteady connections", I meant inconsistent or unreliable connections, where you may not be able to stay online reliably.

On mobile, there is a new "feature" where each section is lazy-loaded, so if you do not expand them while you are online, you cannot read them once you're offline. Also, if the browser reloads the page from cache while offline, sections are also inaccessible.

The desktop site is inaccessible to mobile because the left column stays visible and floats over or squeezes the actual text.

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

#186

Post by j-pb »

bawolff wrote: post #172
j-pb wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inf…

> How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated? Numerical knowledge is not the only knowledge that is stored there. I'm going to go with update rate of often. It has a higher edit rate than english wikipedia does. > How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies? Sometimes that is true, other times it isn't. The system is used where it makes…

> I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation where it is likely to be hosted that way. The goals of (near) instant update time, as well as some central quality control and user blocking, makes distributed hosting pretty impossible.

Everything wrong with wikipedia summed up in one paragraph, nice!

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

#187

Post by Jyaif »

ideamotor wrote: post #174

Oh fuck off, Wikipedia is one of the very few ethical resources promoting factual information on our planet at this point. Seriously, fuck this “news report.”

I personally don't find 400k salaries in a non-profit to be ethical.

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

#188

Post by zozbot234 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #170
thoughty wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://up…

> It does not significantly use cloud services

They do host their own private "cloud", mostly used for research and project development.

> 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!

Nitpicking, page views from outside users are not supposed to hit PHP at all - those requests should be served by their caching layer. But yes, you're correct that they're relying on quite a bit of legacy tech from their early days, not just PHP but MariaDB as well even though many enterprises would now rely on Postgres wrt. these use cases. I suppose that they could rewrite the stuff piecemeal, and recent developments in PHP itself would make it easier. (Some things have been rewritten already, notably the wikitext parser. That's clearly one thing where you would want to avoid breakage at all costs, but they did get it done.)

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

#189

Post by KingOfCoders »

martin_a wrote: post #135
bawolff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had ~30 million in expenses in the 2011-2012 financial year: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL... Whether or not its 10x better service, I don't know, but they are definitely doing more now then back then. There's been lots of software development since 2011 (Some good, some not so much). Even just site speed and stability has improved significantly since 2011.

> 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?

Like many other such projects the project has been hijacked and used as a cash cow for things those people really want to do. See Firefox (though it is getting better there with them realizing that no investing in your cash cow is a bad idea).

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

#190

Post by yoz-y »

jiggawatts wrote: post #170
thoughty wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://up…

> If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server!

Hm, since Wikipedia dumps are public, has anybody tried? Moving wikipedia itself might be a large endeavor, but seeing some submissions on HN I think a very dedicated dev or two could possibly manage a rewrite to have a proof of concept.

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