I always toss $5 to Wikipedia when they do the annual donation campaign and I don't care where it goes. I like what they stand for and they made high school indefinitely easier for me, I owe em'.
Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
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Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#12Why edit the title? This article is barely about the hosting costs. And also yes, it's well-known wiki has very healthy revenue despite it's desperate sounding pleas for donations.
Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#13[deleted]
Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#14... I mean, _as you'd expect_, surely? I can't imagine why anyone would expect this to be a large part of their costs; it's largely a relatively easy sort of thing to optimise (I assume most page views are just served straight from a cache; most users don't log in), and they've had 20 years to do so. As you'd expect, the bulk of its costs are staff.
Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean how much they pay to Wikipedia's contributors?
Pretty sure they meant the people who write the software and operate the systems that actually host the site.
~100M seems a bit high for that.
WP seems to me to be the most cacheable site in existence, I wonder what 100M worth of staff are doing there.
Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#16Fun fact: All of Wikipedia (text only, compressed) is like 20 GB
Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#17This is why I don't donate.
Hosting costs are small for most sites not doing things like streaming video or data storage. Human costs are high - an average American software engineer is probably at 100k or more, and it takes many of them to operate a site.
This is like saying you wouldn't pay your doctor or barber because the electricity is only 1% of the total revenue.
Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#18If you're interested how they run Wikipedia, their tech docs are public: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Compared to many other stuff I read, it's mostly "boring tech".
Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#19See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
tl;dr: Wikipedia's expenses grow exponentially year-over-year and it's not clear where the extra money is going, since the basic experience of Wikipedia hasn't changed all that much in the past decade.
Year Support and revenue Expenses Net assets at year end
2003–2004 $80,129 $23,463 $56,666
2004–2005 $379,088 $177,670 $268,084
2005–2006 $1,508,039 $791,907 $1,004,216
2006–2007 $2,734,909 $2,077,843 $1,658,282
2007–2008 $5,032,981 $3,540,724 $5,178,168
2008–2009 $8,658,006 $5,617,236 $8,231,767
2009–2010 $17,979,312 $10,266,793 $14,542,731
2010–2011 $24,785,092 $17,889,794 $24,192,144
2011–2012 $38,479,665 $29,260,652 $34,929,058
2012–2013 $48,635,408 $35,704,796 $45,189,124
2013–2014 $52,465,287 $45,900,745 $53,475,021
2014–2015 $75,797,223 $52,596,782 $77,820,298
2015–2016 $81,862,724 $65,947,465 $91,782,795
2016–2017 $91,242,418 $69,136,758 $113,330,197
2017–2018 $104,505,783 $81,442,265 $134,949,570
2018–2019 $120,067,266 $91,414,010 $165,641,425
2019–2020 $129,234,327 $112,489,397 $180,315,725
2020–2021 $162,886,686 $111,839,819 $231,177,536
2021–2022 $154,686,521 $145,970,915 $239,351,532Re: Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined
#20Direct costs maybe but how much of the staff cost is staff required to make the site run?
Even staff is not that high. They have long ago eclipsed the cost of running it and now donate/fund causes that are in line with their views. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
Is there a good synopsis on their views and who they donate to? Preferably more than one. I don't typically trust wikipedia for things more controversial than climate data for a particular city, usually more like math or animal facts. But ut would be nice to know the typical biases.