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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?

#301

Post by hugi »

sorenjan wrote: post #295
zhdc1 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was expecting to see semi-outrageous, border line unjustifiable executive salaries after reading this comment and clicking on the direct link below. I guess there's a chance that executive compensation went up significantly after 2018, but nothing I saw looks out of place for an organization as large as Wikipedia. ~300k for a San Fransisco-based CEO and an average salary of ~120k for all employees employees seems f…

What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? What important strategic decisions are there to make at Wikipedia? Why do they have to be San Francisco based? The annual real median personal income in the US in 2019 was $35,977[0], how can anyone think that $120k isn't a lot? Why should people around the world donate their hard earned money so that some employees in America can have Silicon Valley salaries? [0] https:…

I think it's absolutely great that Wikipedia is able to pay competitive salaries in a good location. It's probably one of the reasons why they can run such an amazing site. I consider my donations well spent.

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

#302

Post by dalbasal »

ramraj07 wrote: post #31
zozbot234 wrote: post #21

Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. They have hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia itself, and many related "sister" projects, with perhaps the most clearly impacting being Wikimedia Commons (a huge repository of free-content media with a focus on educational use - including much media in the public domain) and Wikidata (a project that has now emerged a…

Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.

>> (money) amassed and still hiding it? Asking for money is disgusting?

Disgusting?!! They ask for money. They don't sell your data, which is what most sites/apps you use do. They don't abuse their position, as an important information source. Disgusting compared to what?

Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some of the most accessible financial information of any comparably sized organisation on the planet. This is why the get so much heat. The financials are easily understandable, which means a financially literate journalist or commentator can understand what's going on and take a cheap swipe in under a minute.

You can literally understand wikimedia's finances better in 10 minutes than you could after weeks of studying any other non profit, publicly listed company, NGO or government organisation. There is no attempt to hide any controversial element... Asset accumulation, clearly and deliberately highlighted. Expense growth, ditto.

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...

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

#303

Post by emilfihlman »

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…

And wikipedia also stopped listing where it spends money and how much.

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

#304

Post by kaba0 »

mlang23 wrote: post #233
kaba0 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about considering it not cancer but necessarily inefficiency? Like, are you angry at your car for not being 100% efficient?

"necessarily inefficiency"? what sort of legitimation is this? Besides, I dont own a car.

Okay, your computer is far from 100% efficiency, nor any appliance in your home, nor for-profit companies, nothing is. Why are we so outraged when a non-profit company doing great work is also inefficient a bit?

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

#305

Post by detaro »

croes wrote: post #192
colonwqbang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much does WMF spend to prevent the content being "only be advertisment and propaganda"?

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

#306

Post by jiggawatts »

afc wrote: post #275
jiggawatts wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 immedi…

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I would host a site like Wikipedia on a single server, I'm saying that it's more than possible.

Also, don't assume I'm speaking from a position of ignorance here, I know more than a little about how Wikipedia works. I've perused the source, played with the database dumps, etc...

I find comments like yours amusing, because I hear similar things in the industry all the time! People like you are not wrong, it's just that correct knowledge is very rapidly outdated in this industry. It's shocking what exponential growth really means! As a random example, I once had an engineer going on and on about their "powerful" email server that cost them six figures. I pointed out that it was slower than the Blackberry phone it was synchronising the email to. (No, really!)

You really underestimate the spec of a modern, 2021 era server!

You really are.

You can buy, right now, for "normal" money, a server with two 64-core AMD EPYC CPUs. That's 128 cores that are the fastest individually of pretty much any server CPU. This platform provides 256 hardware threads. Right there, you're looking at something like 12 requests per second per thread. As long as you can serve them in under 85 milliseconds each on average, that's plenty!

I've written a Wikipedia clone for an in-house CMS. The content generation was so fast that for laughs I compiled it to javascript and had it run per keystroke for a live preview in the browser. This worked fine for content up to about 64 KB. This was in 2008, by the way. Things have moved on in terms of performance. Try this with Rust and some judicious use of high-performance AVX-enhanced parsers, and you could generate a typical Wikipedia page in under 10 ms, no sweat. Then there's output caching to get it even lower...

That server can have something like 4 TB of memory in it. The entire Wikipedia database is just 5.6 TB uncompressed.

Yes, you really can fit most of Wikipedia in memory!

Bandwidth? Mellanox makes 200 Gbps Ethernet cards. They're dual port, so that's 400 Gbps. That's enough to handle the bandwidth of a decent sized regional telecommunications company through a single box. I should know, I've seen the network diagram of mine, and they have only 100 Gbps inter-city links!

Spindles!? Are you kidding me? There are gaming PCs being built right now with 2 TB NVMe drives in them that can individually put out 7 GB/s and 1M IOPS! Who the hell puts servers on spinning rust in this day and age? That lone, single NVMe drive is putting out 56 Gbps by itself. Throw in a smidge of caching, and it could saturate those aforementioned 2x200 Gbps ports.

So no, I would not put the entirety of Wikipedia on just one server, that would be silly.

I would put it on two.

Okay, maybe three, for redundancy. Just in case.

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

#307

Post by kaba0 »

xvector wrote: post #283
kaba0 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not just running a website?

Then their donation banner should reflect the true purpose of the donation, rather than misleading readers into thinking it’s necessary for Wikipedia.com.

It is necessary for Wikipedia.

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

#308

Post by cutemonster »

cromulent wrote: post #252
mhh__ wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I must admit I like the idea of the WMF having a grand vision for the future and raising money for it (and I'm a bit puzzled by the people who want restrict it to where it was 10 years ago). It's their foundation to run, they have big plans, and it you don't like it you can ignore it. If people feel that they were somehow tricked into their donation, they have instructions on how to request a refund. It's an interest…

> It's their foundation to run, they have big plans, and it you don't like it you can ignore it.

(Some of) the execs are manipulating people to donate, many of the donors wouldn't have donated, had they known that there was enough money already for Wikipedia.

> If people feel that they were somehow tricked into their donation

Problem is, they are unaware about having been tricked.

They generally don't know about this discussion at HN.

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

#309

Post by speeder »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #290
bomdo wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For others interested in this, Wikimedia salaries are all public [0]. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

As someone who worked in a sandwich shop to survive while going to college($7.5/hr, 30 hrs/week), I can't imagine the universe some people live in where an income of $375,000 doesn't seem sky high. It's like there is a section of people who live in a different world. I understand that it isn't much for an executive, but then that stuns me even more. Edit: median US salary is around $70k. This executive's pay is over…

I don't understand why people are downvoting you.

I am from Brazil, mentioned in the article. I see wages of 60k USD year as a dream job (by the way, if you need a C or Lua dev, and don't want me to relocate to an expensive place to live, I am for hire, for that price tag, I really need it. I currently make around 11k USD year)

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

#310

Post by sorenjan »

hugi wrote: post #301
sorenjan wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is that CEO doing for that money? What important strategic decisions are there to make at Wikipedia? Why do they have to be San Francisco based? The annual real median personal income in the US in 2019 was $35,977[0], how can anyone think that $120k isn't a lot? Why should people around the world donate their hard earned money so that some employees in America can have Silicon Valley salaries? [0] https:…

I think it's absolutely great that Wikipedia is able to pay competitive salaries in a good location. It's probably one of the reasons why they can run such an amazing site. I consider my donations well spent.

The average software developer salary in Germany is €50 000 per year, just to take one western country as an example. I doubt Wikipedia would be much worse with European developers. American IT salaries are not the norm, and they're a bit insane. When your budget consists of donations, I think it's disrespectful to spend it on frivolous things like San Francisco salaries.

The average programmer salary in Sweden is $50 000. Why should I donate to people who earn more than twice my salary?

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