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Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

wikimediafoundation.org

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Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#121

Post by bawolff »

wmfanon9973 wrote: post #55
onphonenow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are doing 100M+ per year to run the servers, manage PR / legal / HR issues.

They have so much more money than they need, they're giving away donor funds to other organizations: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...

Sometimes that can be the right call, if the other organization is doing something that benefits wikimedia.

That said the list at, https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund does seem a bit far afield, and personally i find the descriptions of what the money is to be used for too flowery and not concrete enough to be comfortable.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#122

Post by bawolff »

modo_mario wrote: post #112
hourago wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the organization is parasitic on Wikipedia They get are trying to get financing for their organization offering a service. That is the most win-win situation that you can get. I am all for adding an Internet-tax to finance projects like Wikipedia, but it is politically easier if it can finance itself.

Don't they have a really big endowment? I feel like they're expanding to use it rather than expanding to bring in more money. Similar thing seemed to happen with Mozilla.

The endowment isn't that big, given the idea is you are only supposed to use the return not the principle. I think its size is in the neighbourhood of 100 million.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#123

Post by bawolff »

colinmhayes wrote: post #74
mhh__ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is the correct amount for a site that serves such a huge amount of the internet?

Depends on their services? Wikipedia serves static sites. Their hosting costs are 3 million a year according to their accountants. They have no real recommendation engine, or really dynamic content at all. 100% of their content is free for them. They can easily store their entire site in ram on a small cluster. Given that I'd say 10-30 million would be reasonable.

Did you know that wikipedia's tagline is "anyone can edit"?

That makes it not static.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#124

Post by bawolff »

endisneigh wrote: post #7
cgb223 wrote: post #5

So now, if a Google related Wikipedia article has something added to it that Google doesn’t like, they can suggest to Wikimedia they might not renew their contract unless things are “made right” Google is just one example of this. Any company now has a pathway to do so. I think this is terrible incentives, and destroys the goal of having an Encyclopedia free from interference where only truth can come through

Google could already do this per your hypothetical given that Google donates millions.

[Citation needed]

Pretty sure google is not a big enough donor to really matter.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#125

Post by bawolff »

cgb223 wrote: post #5

So now, if a Google related Wikipedia article has something added to it that Google doesn’t like, they can suggest to Wikimedia they might not renew their contract unless things are “made right” Google is just one example of this. Any company now has a pathway to do so. I think this is terrible incentives, and destroys the goal of having an Encyclopedia free from interference where only truth can come through

Wikimedia foundation does not have editorial control of wikipedia.

Google can demand all they want, even if they somehow got WMF on board, WMF couldn't do anything about it.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#126

Post by bawolff »

hansword wrote: post #114
ryan_lane wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop spreading misinformation. The budget data is open. You're discussing server costs, but need to also consider hosting and data center costs, as well as employee salaries. Running Wikimedia is a pretty decent percentage of their budget. Part of the reason for other parts of the budget is attempting to increase editor numbers in a world where direct readership is declining (because of products like Google's knowled…

Yes it is open, and for some reason you forgot to link it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim... As you can see, from 112M total expenses, internet hosting is 2.4M (or 2%), and 'other operating expenses' is 10M (or 9%). This is 11% of expenses. This compares to 56M for salaries and 23M for awards and grants. Where is the misinformation? (Conflict of interest statement: I am an editor on Wiki…

Servers don't run themselves. I'm not saying everything wmf spends money on is useful, but servers are useless without sysadmins.

Keep in mind part of the reason server costs are low is because wikimedia owns its own servers. Lots of people rent servers (e.g. AWS) where the cost of hosting will be higher because the cost of some of the sysadmin duties are covered by the AWS fee, where at wikimedia that is a salary that has to be paid.

[Coi: ex-wmf contractor but its been a while]

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#127

Post by endisneigh »

bawolff wrote: post #124
endisneigh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google could already do this per your hypothetical given that Google donates millions.

[Citation needed] Pretty sure google is not a big enough donor to really matter.

They’re a non profit, you can go and see Google’s contributions easily yourself. Google is one of the biggest single entity donors

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#128

Post by colinmhayes »

bawolff wrote: post #123
colinmhayes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on their services? Wikipedia serves static sites. Their hosting costs are 3 million a year according to their accountants. They have no real recommendation engine, or really dynamic content at all. 100% of their content is free for them. They can easily store their entire site in ram on a small cluster. Given that I'd say 10-30 million would be reasonable.

Did you know that wikipedia's tagline is "anyone can edit"? That makes it not static.

I don't really agree with your definition of static. Wikipedia has no request time processing on their pages. If you request the english version of the hacker news article it'll just grab the HTML from ram and send it over. Of course there's an api for posting edits, but that's as simple as updating a few rows in a database, and only happens once, when the edit it posted.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#129

Post by bawolff »

endisneigh wrote: post #127
bawolff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Citation needed] Pretty sure google is not a big enough donor to really matter.

They’re a non profit, you can go and see Google’s contributions easily yourself. Google is one of the biggest single entity donors

Where? All i could find is they donated > $50,000 but i dont see how much more. I guess it depends how much more, but that doesn't particularly seem like a lot relative to WMF's annual budget.

Re: Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

#130

Post by bawolff »

colinmhayes wrote: post #128
bawolff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that wikipedia's tagline is "anyone can edit"? That makes it not static.

I don't really agree with your definition of static. Wikipedia has no request time processing on their pages. If you request the english version of the hacker news article it'll just grab the HTML from ram and send it over. Of course there's an api for posting edits, but that's as simple as updating a few rows in a database, and only happens once, when the edit it posted.

In the ideal case yes - and a significant portion of requests fall into that case (varnish cache), but its also the cheapest case by far.

Wikipedia gets edited a lot, and a single edit can often affect many pages (in extreme cases, millions of pages). Keeping up with content churn is where a lot of the computational resources are directed.

Now sure, this is still a lot easier than if every page view had to be rendered on demand dynamically. However a truly static site where things don't change at all is trivial compared to wikipedia to host.

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