261–270 of 619 posts
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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.
If WMF would only run the website, the content would only be advertisment and propaganda.
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So which one would you cut out? The hosted pictures, media? Or the database syncing factual data across languages so that a smaller language’s article won’t get factually wrong information because a data was spotted to be incorrect only in the large English version?
How about the 20 million they spend on awards and grants? It doubled between 2019 and 2020, isn't it weird that they spend 10x as much in awards and grants than they spend on hosting everything?
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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…
MediaWiki repository size is about 1.4 GB and according to phploc it has closer to a million lines of PHP code. Sounds like fools errand to rewrite it.
Outrage where there is no reason for it. Wikipedia is using the University Endowment model to fund its work. They are creating a permanent source of funds that will finance its work for the long run(forever?) and are using special fund raising for special projects. There is nothing wrong with that. It's a form of non-profit funding that will ensure it continues to function. Management should be congratulated for foll…
I think people wouldn't feel off about this if the fundraisers presented themselves as such. When you see them asking for donations, it is typically worded in a way it says "no one donates! if you don't we are on the brink of going bankrupt and shutting down the site! stop, don't scroll away!" and I think if they are sitting on a pile of cash (however noble their intentions are) some people might feel off about how they are being manipulated. Because that is not what they are asking the money for, at this moment. It is disingenuous to make it seem like they are asking for donations for covering the immediate day to day operations. Yes, it probably allows them to gather more donations that way but some people are not comfortable with being a target of manipulative ads. Immediate gains vs. poisoning the well situation here.
> 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…
1/ Ŕunnign a website requires constant change just to stay still. Technologies change, usage changes and user needs change. There is need for experimenting, dealing with drama, and getting funded.
2/ WMF cost per user is very reasonable for the amount of usage. If WMF would run as a subscriber based service, it would cost just $0.5 per month/per user (rough estimate). Total expenses:$112M, 330,000 active users editing site. >800 million monthly unique devices (en-wiki alone).
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> 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!"
Sounds like you have no clue what engineering is.
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> 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!
I mean, if you want to make a website with different goals and properties than wikipedia, by all means go make one. Wikipedia is just one way of doing things. Its hardly the last word on how to make an online encyclopedia, and quite frankly, some competition in this space would probably be good for everyone. But disagreing with wikipedia's goals as a product is very different from a claim that the solution intended t…
How are centralization, real time editing, and user blocking properties toward the above goal?
You probably know full well that network effects are prohibiting any other collaborative knowledge base from from ever croping up again.
All big companies link against wikipedia because the network effect, all funding and donations go to wikipedia due to the network effect, all editors spend their time on wikipedia due to the network effect.
Wikipedia is eating it's own childen, and if we ever want to get something better, it either needs to grow up and start acting like a responsible adult (which we know it won't because at it's core is the failed web equivalent of the stanford prison expetiment), or die and make space for a new genration of tools.
> 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…
The expenses for operating Wikipedia.com would be around $10m. Their $112M expenses include the sky high executive compensation, money sent to the fund, millions spent on fundraising itself, and financing a host of programs not directly related to Wikipedia. I stopped donating because of this - definitely want to contribute to keeping Wikipedia online, I don’t necessarily want to give my money to a larger foundation…
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How about the 20 million they spend on awards and grants? It doubled between 2019 and 2020, isn't it weird that they spend 10x as much in awards and grants than they spend on hosting everything?
So you'd want them to cut the item in their budget that most directly rewards and supports their volunteer editors' work on the projects? That would seem to be unwise.