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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?

#271

Post by ratww »

saurik wrote: post #253
zozbot234 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia, and provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself.

> provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself I don't think I agree with you at all here, given that I grew up wanting the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Wikipedia refuses to offer it... seemingly in no small part because the founder of it makes money off of Wikia. But, I believe regardless: if someone goes to an encyclopedia and is told "this encyclopedia needs yo…

The Wikia part is a very important point.

At some point in the last 10 years Wikipedia managed to purge as much content as it could about fiction because this was Wikia's turf. There was just an order from above and overzealous mods willing to do the work, even when the content wasn't readily available.

Now the content is in a website that's closed, slow as hell, littered with ads, tracking and autoplaying video.

Maybe Wikia should be the one footing the whole bill for Wikipedia, instead of Wikipedia spending 12% of donation money on fundraisers.

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

#272

Post by zozbot234 »

jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #270
zozbot234 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scratch "directly", there is nothing direct about intransparent rewards. Again this sounds ominous for non-profit building on volunteer work

Their grant-making process is quite transparent. Much of it is documented publicly at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants

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

#273

Post by Wowfunhappy »

marcan_42 wrote: post #83
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…

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 agree with you, however:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#274

Post by roelschroeven »

zozbot234 wrote: post #198
NeoVeles wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Archive.org is a lot less people intensive than what WMF does. Even the book scanning work they support is mostly done by third parties, and they largely focus on hosting the resulting content. Wikipedia can't work like that, no matter how much some people wish it could.

As opposed to Wikipedia where the content is written by third parties, and Wikimedia largely focuses (or should focus) on hosting the resulting content?

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

#275

Post by afc »

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…

> 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!

This type of comment betrays a complete lack of knowledge about how large scale internet systems operate (which is something I've worked on for the last 10+ years) and comes across as incredibly naive. I can immediately point out huge flaws in your thinking:

* You're assuming that traffic is constant through the day (that you can divide daily traffic rate to get a sense of daily peak; or, in other words, you provision for mean usage, not peak)

* You're ignoring the problems of unpredictable hotspots (single articles suddenly becoming orders of magnitude more popular than the median in relatively unpredictable and spikey ways; think World Cup final or major earthquake)

* You're not reserving any safety margins for unexpected traffic growth, so you'd likely run into cascading failures

* You're assuming that the entirety of Wikipedia can be held in ram. Including all the history and such. Or, if not, that a single server has enough drives that spindle capacity won't be a problem.

* You're not even considering networking/bandwidth costs. How many network cards would your server need?

* You're ignoring any problems with replication/redundancy (e.g., no backups?) so your site would be a nightmare in reliability terms. Of course, once you do that, you'll need to reason about consistency problems.

I think your logical fallacy is that you're thinking that because your can't understand something (that running Wikipedia could cost so much), it must mean that the thing you can't understand isn't true. Instead, I'd suggest that you'd get further by focusing on discovering the limits of your understanding and genuinely asking yourself: "How could it be that it costs so much? What may I be missing?"

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

#276

Post by 6510 »

mhh__ wrote: post #230
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…

People seem to want these foundations to not only spend the absolute bare minimum but also don't like them paying their staff properly or even at all. So many times I've read people grumbling about expenses, only when you work out it out per employee it's completely reasonable for a small business let alone one of the largest brands in the world.

> People seem to want these foundations to not only spend the absolute bare minimum but also don't like them paying their staff properly or even at all.

Not at all would have my vote. I would donate for that.

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

#277

Post by zozbot234 »

ratww wrote: post #271
saurik wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself I don't think I agree with you at all here, given that I grew up wanting the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Wikipedia refuses to offer it... seemingly in no small part because the founder of it makes money off of Wikia. But, I believe regardless: if someone goes to an encyclopedia and is told "this encyclopedia needs yo…

The Wikia part is a very important point. At some point in the last 10 years Wikipedia managed to purge as much content as it could about fiction because this was Wikia's turf. There was just an order from above and overzealous mods willing to do the work, even when the content wasn't readily available. Now the content is in a website that's closed, slow as hell, littered with ads, tracking and autoplaying video. May…

They purged content about fiction because it was pointless cruft, often had no independent references, and was generally indistinguishable from undue promotion/advertising of said fiction. The increased focus on stuff that's neutral and properly verifiable seems to have been good for Wikipedia itself.

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

#278

Post by bomdo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #269
jiofih wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wikipedia is not a dot-com. And their executive compensation is hardly "sky-high"; it amounts to a FAANG middle manager 's salary, for a positive impact on the world that's easily as high as that of any FAANG.

For others interested in this, Wikimedia salaries are all public [0].

[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

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

#279

Post by xvector »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #257
zozbot234 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. "Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on gi…

QED.

I do not see why it needs to be easier than making a PR. What would you propose?

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

#280

Post by jbuhbjlnjbn »

I find it curious none of the comments touch on the subject of wikipedia's edit wars, propaganda and dubious decisions related to any information that is not scientific consensus.

It is not the free information space assumed. There is lots of politics and misinformation going on.

Big funding comes from sources creating direct conflicts of interest.

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