Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

Hosting costs for Wikipedia are "only" $2.3m, but imagine the legal expense they have, fighting likely millions of takedown requests, malicious lawsuits, complying with local laws and regulations in China, Russia, etc, paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime), a security threat model that includes nation-state actors, and the responsibility that if they fail (by being hacked, or sued, or DDOSd, or whatever), they will have let humanity's library be harmed.

I just can't understand how any casual bystander can complain about Wikipedia or their funding/organizational model. If you don't like it, just don't donate money.

Wikimedia Foundation is not fighting any takedown requests. Wikimedia Foundation had exactly ten DMCA requests last year[1]. That’s a bit short of “millions” you believe it does. It does not comply with any local regulations in China or Russia, or elsewhere, because it does not operate in China or Russia (or really anywhere outside US, except caching servers in NL and Singapore). Wikipedia is actually completely blocked in China, and the fact that you did not know that signals your utter unfamiliarity with the realities of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation.

> paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime),

It was already a top visited site when its development team consisted of a single person, Brion Vibber. There have been very little significant development since then, and if there had been zero development since then, you’d probably not even notice.

Now, to be sure, at this scale, it needs some full time round the clock reliability engineers, but you can easily see that their headcount keeps growing, but their site and infrastructure is mostly unchanged.

[1] - https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:DMCA_2019

The second member of the development team was hired in 2006 [0].

In these ~14 years, quite a few things happened.

Three projects joined the Wikimedia galaxy: Wikiversity in 2006, Wikivoyage adopted in 2012, and frickin’ Wikidata [1] in 2012 − which has deeply reshaped many aspects of the other projects, particularly Wikipedias and Commons.

On the multimedia side of things, we got InstantCommons in 2008 [3], thumbnailing infrastructure changes in 2013, various file format support (TIFF in 2010, FLAC and WAV in 2013, WebM, 3D formats in 2018 [4]) new upload wizard in 2011 [5]. The Graph extension [6] and Wikimedia Maps [7] in 2015. Structured Data on Commons in 2019 [8]. New default skin (Vector) in 2010 [9]. Unified login in 2008 [10]. 2013 brought OAuth [11], Echo notifications [12], Lua scripting [13], VisualEditor [14]. iOS and Android apps [15]. The Wikimedia Cloud Services starting 2012 [2].

(And in terms of size: article count went from ~5M to ~50M [16] ; Commons went from 1M files to 50M files [17])

And that’s just what I’m putting together in a few minutes (Besides my own memory, I’m indebted to [18], a curated timeline up until 2013).

Of course, these may or may not justify the staff size in your book ; but I’d say discounting all of that (and the rest) as “very little significant development” is a bit pushing it. :-)

(And fairly sure that “you’d probably notice” if Wikipedia was still using good’old Monobook skin ;-þ).

[0] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Additional_... [1] https://www.wikidata.org/ [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/ [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/InstantCommons [4] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/02/20/three-dimens... [5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload_Wizard [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph [7] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps [8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data [9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vector [10] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login [11] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:OAuth [12] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications) [13] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lua [14] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor [15] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps [16] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table [17] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Milestones [18] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gpaumier/wikipedia-infogra...