Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

cyounkins.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 217 posts

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#191

Post by ff317 »

bryans wrote: post #122
ff317 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to: Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity. The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good use. Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The tech stack runs on its own bare metal…

Except the organization already has liquid assets nearing twice its annual expenses, on top of the endowment, and >20% of the revenue is simply redirected to other organizations. It's also a little ridiculous to suggest that the infrastructure is substantial, given that the costs are only I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which the rest…

I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of a robust and functioning organization, the total headcount still seems reasonable.

Yes, the engineering "efforts" are exciting and interesting to learn from. They're also a continuous process that requires a heavy human investment in the form of staff (and staff retention!), and those salaries and benefits are relevant to the bottom line.

On the parts about annual expenses: keep in mind this is a long-term movement and foundation with long-term aims. Being sufficiently financially stable to run another year or two isn't really a win. It still leaves a rather important institution and its projects subject to lots of short-to-medium term existential risk.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#192

Post by tomjen3 »

legitster wrote: post #142
nobody_nothing wrote: post #115

> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before. Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the…

A large part of my job managing email systems is dealing with unsubscribe issues. If the unsubscribe button doesn't work, it's probably one of these issues: - "Unsubscribed" is not persistent. If they have a logic that subscribes you to their emails (filling out a form), you will get resubscribed. - You are unsubscribing a different email than you subscribed with (This is like, 75% of cases we deal with. It could be…

Honestly I just press the unsubscribe button in apple mail or the link in the message and if those don’t work, mark it as spam.

I also consider having to make any extra action on the website as the link not working.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#193

Post by bashmack »

squarefoot wrote: post #178
colechristensen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff. I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that. That much spend seems unsustainable long term.

> I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? Just take a look at how fast people around the globe are editing it. https://wikistream.toolforge.org/ Not that I like those tactics to beg for money but, yes, keeping it running while ensuring accuracy requires a lot of staff.

Keeping Wikipedia accurate is the volunteer's job. You can tell by how easy it is to find errors.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#194

Post by bashmack »

Beldin wrote: post #162
tablespoon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Between content moderation....I can easily see how Wikipedia can grow to 500 people. IIRC, nearly 100% of all content moderation is done by Wikipedia volunteer editors, so that's not actually an operational expense of theirs.

True, but I don't think you can keep the volunteers if you're in maintenance mode. The scale of volunteers needed requires some responsiveness, some support.

It's the best kept secret of Wikipedia that the volunteers generally despise the Foundation, and their long history of being unresponsive to their concerns and slow to act on their priorities while forcing the volunteers to adapt to what the Foundation finds things to spend all this money on, is a big reason for it.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#195

Post by bashmack »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #103
toomuchtodo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, OpenStreetMap has roughly $800k in reserves and their expenses are a couple hundred thousands dollars per year. I agree there are probably more justifiable expenses at Wikimedia than that, but that there is a middle ground between the high water mark they're targeting and what other non-profits are operating with. The Internet Archive's annual budget is ~$10 million. EDIT: @dylan604 (replying here due…

Alexa rank for wikipedia is 13, OSM is 4550. It's not on the same planet. No, not on the same galaxy. Wikipedia is not only read and written by the entire planet of humans, including the smallest 3rd world countries, it's also a bot feast, and busy powering APIs all over the world. It got hundreds of links in some articles, which are automatically connected to all other articles in a gigantic graph of data. Oh, each…

"MediaWiki is free software. No guarantee or warranty of any kind is provided." Sounds about right!

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#196

Post by bashmack »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #66
colechristensen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff. I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that. That much spend seems unsustainable long term.

It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise. And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!

"It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise." {citation needed}, as they say. Some parts of the Wikipedia "global" movement are so small, they didn't even realise for example, most of "Scots" Wikipedia was pure gibberish. The so called movement is a galaxy of tiny rocks revolving around one massive black hole, English Wikipedia, and even that project is so small as to feel quite parochial. As a result, there are backlogs everywhere, especially in important but difficult work, like copyright problems.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#197

Post by bashmack »

moralestapia wrote: post #123
colechristensen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff. I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that. That much spend seems unsustainable long term.

>I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? Maybe we could ask Mozilla. /s At least Wikipedia is not actively working on sabotaging their flagship product.

I wouldn't be so sure. Many flagship software projects launched the Foundation have been greeted with outright hostility by the volunteer community, precisley because they don't seem to be of much use, and in some case often hamper, the basic task of writing and maintaining English Wikipedia.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#198

Post by bashmack »

belval wrote: post #81
ZetaZero wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? It takes a lot of people and money to raise $150m/year ;->

According to their 2019/2020 statement they spend 5M$ in "donation processing" and an additional 5M$ in wages for the donation campaigns. 10M$ in expenses to get 120M$ really isn't so bad. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...

I wonder if that also includes all the work done simply to figure out the best way to solicit for donations?

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#199

Post by bashmack »

coldpie wrote: post #113
andrewstuart wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the page. It's very angry about Wikipedia's finances. I still don't resent their asking and I still donate. Wikipedia is a truly worthwhile service and I'm happy they have much more money than they need to scrape by. You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by. I think that is a bad way to run any operation.

Yeah. I always wonder if the complainers do the same deep analysis and whining about how for-profit companies spend their income, or if they just plunk down $120 for Xbox Game Pass and leave happy. Is Wikipedia worth $20 a year to me? Yeah. So they can have it and spend it how they like. Just like Microsoft can with my Game Pass subscription.

You aren't paying for a product. It's crazy people don't even realise that Wikipedia isn't free because they're just nice people who prefer prefer run on donations not capitalism. It's free because they don't own a single word of their encyclopedia. That was how it was set up. They knew they couldn't charge for it, because they weren't paying anyone to write it, and aren't offering any guarantee that you can trust it. It can be copied and hosted freely by anyone. Wikipedia can do what it likes with your money, except, of course, pay someone to write and maintain a trustworthy encyclopedia. Not by choice, by law.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#200

Post by bashmack »

joshmanders wrote: post #110
andrewstuart wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the page. It's very angry about Wikipedia's finances. I still don't resent their asking and I still donate. Wikipedia is a truly worthwhile service and I'm happy they have much more money than they need to scrape by. You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by. I think that is a bad way to run any operation.

My thoughts too, "living paycheck to paycheck" doesn't sound like it ensures Wikimedia's survival. We'd all be shouting "Save Wikipedia!" if they have a bad year were expenses are up and donations are drastically down and they end up going offline due to not having enough reserve to help it.

The $100m Endowment was their hedge against donations drying up, being a big enough cash hoard to allow them to stay online indefinitely if donations dropped to zero. It is now fully funded. I wonder how many people even realise this is the case, and will carry on donating under the false impression Wikipedia needs their help to survive.
Post reply on HN