9 ms·

Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth

150 points by hk__2 9y ago

Animats 9y ago
Wales wants a private jet.[1] Not going to happen from Wikia.[2] [1] http://gawker.com/5192786/jimmy-wales-definitely-not-getting-his-wikipedia-jet-now http://gawker.com/5192786/jimmy-wales-definitely-not-getting... [2] http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/revenue-financial.wikia_inc.7c0c60deea305554.html http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/revenue-financ...
- cagenut 9y ago
  I miss gawker.
  - theWatcher37 9y ago
    Gawker somehow managed to be worse than the daily mail.
- snakeanus 9y ago
  I had no idea that he was also the owned of wikia. Quite disappointed.
  - dandare 9y ago
    Didn't he establish Wikia after he donated Wikipedia to non-profit? I see nothing bad in Wales making few bucks form Wikia after what he helped to create. The Wikipedia spending problem is a different story.
    - FireBeyond 9y ago
      In itself, no. But there was a lot of issues and conflict in relation to how the creation of Wikia affected policy, and suddenly a lot of things that had a "home" on Wikipedia were now being pushed to Wikia for a variety of reasons, some valid, and some a lot less so.
      - dandare 9y ago
        Can you share more details or resources? I would like to learn more about this.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Why?
- cooper12 9y ago
  Do you not know what flirting is? He was obviously joking.
  - trentmb 9y ago
    > He was obviously joking. As was Animats.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Isn't that what kills most charities that don't starve?
- Alex3917 9y ago
  Wikipedia isn't a charity, it's a non profit. Their financials look fine, they have over a year's budget in reserves. Not seeing the issue at all here.
  - fatbird 9y ago
    The issue is that the organization and spending have grown, but the mission hasn't, and they're not obviously doing better or more than they were a decade ago, except for a list of failed projects like Knowledge Engine that appear to be badly managed internal efforts that had little hope of succeeding. And all this is against a backdrop of continuing to present themselves as a scrappy do-gooder surviving on fundraising and volunteer efforts. The threat Macon identifies is that the bottom will drop out of the exponential growth in revenue and spending, leaving them no option but to sell out to Google, Facebook, or another party that will simply buy and monetize them, destroying the basic value that Wikipedia does still offer. I don't know how worried to be, but I was genuinely shocked to find out how much money they take in and how many staff they have, without fundamentally being much different than I remember from a decade ago.
    - nqzero 9y ago
      the project that i'd like to see is a beta area where the notability requirements are relaxed, with some sort of semi-automated process for promotion, with the ultimate goal of covering a much larger corpus wikipedia is great for mainstream stuff, but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page. and i'm sure the problem extends well past tech
      - hk__2 9y ago
        > but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page Do you mind mentioning some of them?
snakeanus 9y ago
Related http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pay-us-our-salaries/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-fr... and https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia... Also, look at how much they spend for nothing https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  How are salaries nothing? Those don't even seem that extreme compared to what someone with that skill set might make elsewhere in the private sector.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
film42 9y ago
> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting... Wikipedia also keeps "revision history" and a "talk" section for each page. Those original pages created before 2005 can still be modified, potentially adding to the overall cost. Breaking news stories can cause massive amounts of churn which I imagine has increased with the site's popularity [1]. So really 11x pages = 33x higher hosting costs doesn't seem unrealistic considering how much metadata is associated with each page. That's not to say there isn't a problem, but "page count" might not be the best metric. I wonder what average number of revisions per page looks like over the last 12 years. [1] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Talk:2017_Las_Vegas_Strip_shooting https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Talk...
- revelation 9y ago
  You're right, page count is not the best metric. Instead you can just look up the hosting costs in their yearly report and find out it's a pittance compared to all their other spending and declining in relation.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Could you link me to that?
    - hk__2 9y ago
      https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim... Page 3. In 2016 they spent $2M in hosting vs. e.g. $2.2M in "travel and conferences" and $3.6M in "donations processing expenses".
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Well, shit. That’s horrendous, half of the money is just going to salaries.
II2II 9y ago
The numbers are alarming, but the argument needs to be more persuasive. For a proposal like this, I would expect to see a breakdown of where the money has gone and realistic projections of futures expenses. Simply providing alarmist statements based upon linear extrapolations (after being adjusted for inflation alone) then proposing an even more alarmist buyout (when the only thing of tangible value is the domain name) is not enough when proposing potentially crippling changes to funding.
- hk__2 9y ago
  > For a proposal like this, I would expect to see a breakdown of where the money has gone and realistic projections of futures expenses The Foundation’s financial statements are online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer#References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
  - elect_engineer 9y ago
    I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". I have included links to all of the financials that I could find in my essay, and I have repeatedly asked for more transparency regarding how the money has been spent. Just to take one example, Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation executive director from 2007 to 2014, received $100,000 pay rise and was secretly kept on as a "special advisor" after we were all told that she stepped down in 2014. This was kept secret for years, until it turned up buried in a required financial disclosure. I also would like a breakdown of where the money has gone and realistic projections of futures expenses. What you see is my best effort to provide that. If anyone has more information, I will be glad to add it to my essay.
njharman 9y ago
"Sounds like cancer doesn't it" Causes me to immediately stop listening and start doubting everything you said and claim, questioning your motive. It is an emotional appeal. Which 1) insults my intelligence, thinking I'm stupid an unaware enough to fall for that. And one or more of the following 2) you're too stupid or poor at arguing that you don't know you're doing it 3) the facts don't support your side so you try to rile up the ignorant and gulliabl to win 4) you don't care about argument / have other motives like fame, clicks, distraction from other issues.
- lisper 9y ago
  It's also an insult to people with actual cancer.
  - libria 9y ago
    Why is that? People with deadly viruses aren't insulted that we call malevolent programs computer viruses. Equating my laptop with a human would be insulting, but I don't think that was done here.
    - lisper 9y ago
      Because real cancer kills people. Wikimedia spending more money is not going to result in anyone actually dying. Calling it a cancer trivializes the pain and suffering of people with actual cancer and their families.
      - elect_engineer 9y ago
        I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". For the record, I am myself a cancer survivor, and I have received multiple emails from other Wikipedians who have cancer saying that they have no problem with my essay title.
        lisper 9y ago
        I've been very fortunate never to have had cancer, and to only ever know one person who did. But she'd dead now so I can't ask her for her opinion. I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree about this.
jessriedel 9y ago
See extensive discussion on HN (1054 points, 406 comments) of this issue back in May. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235
- hk__2 9y ago
  Thank you; I looked up that post’s title on HN before posting it but got no result.
  - elect_engineer 9y ago
    I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". The previous discussion led to a version of my essay that was published with my permission in the Wikipedia Signpost. That version was dumbed-down a bit by the signpost editors, In particular they removed most of the references that document that my claims are factual. This version is the version I keep updated as errors are found. For the record, I prefer that this thread have the same title as my essay. The current title misses several important aspects of my essay, such as transparency and the dependency on revenues always increasing.
esturk 9y ago
I try to alleviate as much bandwidth to Wikipedia as I can by using the Google cache version whenever I can. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
- brador 9y ago
  Don't do that. Your time is more valuable than the artificial micro-cent the wikimedia foundation will save.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Why is using the Google Cache version not as equally productive as using the main Wikipedia content?
    - brador 9y ago
      It might be equivalent, even faster, but that was not the problem he suggested he was solving for.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        To summarise, you suggest it's a waste of time, I ask how is it a waste of time to click on one version of a link over another, you suggest there's no difference in efficiency. The point I'm making is, GP is no worse off for using the Google Cache version. They might miss out on a few edits made after the page was cached, but in the grand scheme of things that's unlikely to matter.
- mulmen 9y ago
  You could probably save time by just estimating your bandwidth costs - which are probably tiny - and donating 10x that to the foundation.
cagenut 9y ago
~$160K/month for hosting for a site that big[1] is pretty damn good. I'm sure they're getting a lot of favors and discounts to get there. [1] - http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings I've worked with a bunch of sites farther down that list that are spending an order of magnitude more than that.
- chriscappuccio 9y ago
  I'd be happy to work with them and help dramatically lower their costs by using my network...
- tryingagainbro 9y ago
  I've worked with a bunch of sites farther down that list that are spending an order of magnitude more than that. If the site was repeatedly down or slow people would complain even more. Wikipedia is truly global and that adds to costs.
TrickyRick 9y ago
> If we do these things now, in a few short years we could be in a position to do everything we are doing now, while living off of the endowment interest, and would have no need for further fundraising. Or we could keep fundraising, using the donations to do many new and useful things, knowing that whatever we do there is a guaranteed income stream from the endowment that will keep the servers running indefinitely. This is probably the best point in the entire essay, if they reduced spending funding would essentially become obsolete. Kind of clashes with the begging banners which have made me donate to WMF the last couple of years.
labster 9y ago
I wish that the WMF spent some of their mountain of cash on programmer time on security reviews of the extensions in the Mediawiki ecosystem. Instead, it feels like it's mainly just me in my free time, as part of my efforts for the nonprofit wiki farm, miraheze.org. The WMF does a great job on any code used on or produced for WMF servers, but for the other extensions listed on mediawiki.org, it's a smorgasbord of XSS and SQLI. A lot of those are git hosted by the WMF too, so don't use the hosting location as any indication of security.
matt4077 9y ago
The financial statements linked in this rant don't support this sort of of panic... The WMF's assets increased by $20,000,000 over the last year, up to reserves of now $90,000,000. I'm not in a position to judge the effectiveness of their spending, but this completely antiquated paragraph about the waterfall model of software engineering makes me doubt the author's judgement.
- elect_engineer 9y ago
  I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". No, you are missing the point. I did not imply that Waterfall if better than Agile (I have managed several Agile projects and really like it when it is done correctly). What my point is is that the WMF is failing to do things that Agile requires -- things that have been around so long that Waterfall required them. Nothing about Agile allows you to build software in secret with no input from the people who will be expected to use it and then throw it over the wall. It would again stress that this is not the fault of the developers. Their management forbids them from talking to the ordinary Wikipedia editors who will use the software.
ShinTakuya 9y ago
I knew a guy who was a software engineer for Wikipedia back in uni. At least back then (around 2011 or so) they were flying him and other software engineers working for them to conferences across the world to Europe. Not only that but the guy booked the tickets on a premium airline business class. He said that everyone did that. You'd think working for a non profit you'd be looking at discount airline economy class tickets.
- nebolo 9y ago
  Why? Why would you expect a software engineer working for a nonprofit to look at discount airline economy class tickers?
  - bo1024 9y ago
    I mean, maybe it's just the culture I am used to, but I would expect everyone/anyone to be looking at discount airline economy class tickets by default.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Why? You're working. You may well be traveling on your own time. I travel within guidelines but that doesn't mean traveling in the cheapest possible way even if it's more painful than it has to be.
      - bo1024 9y ago
        I'm not arguing for cheapest way possible no matter how painful, just that I am used to a cost-conscious approach by default that starts at the cheap options and works upward and that's what I would tend to expect in this scenario.
        ghaff 9y ago
        You specifically referred to discount airlines which in my limited experience with them are mostly pretty awful to start with.
tyingq 9y ago
Wikipedia is also a bit cagey about whether their overall traffic is growing or not. Specifically, Google's changes to how they display Wikipedia derived info have driven traffic down. Links that used to go to Wikipedia often now link to Google's own sites with copies of the data. https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-steadily-losing-google-traffic-228237 https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-ste...
- tonyztan 9y ago
  Since Wikipedia doesn't derive any income from direct traffic, it is actually a good thing for Google and others to host copies of the data, so long as they comply with the Creative Commons licensing requirements. This reduces the cost for Wikipedia to spread knowledge.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    I'm skeptical about that. Wikipedia has used traffic in the past to solicit donations. Over time, it's also increasingly less obvious that Google's content came from Wikipedia. So it reduces overall awareness of Wikipedia as an entity. It also questions what the money is for. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia doesn't pay for good content, those contributors are unpaid. The money is largely for the site and underpinnings. And we just established that views are being drawn away from that...
- atdt 9y ago
  What do you mean by "a bit cagey"? The Foundation is pretty open with its data. https://analytics.wikimedia.org/ https://analytics.wikimedia.org/ and https://stats.wikimedia.org/ https://stats.wikimedia.org/ are good starting points.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    I was referring to this: http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-slams-silly-claim-of-lost-google-traffic-2015-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-slams-... Both of your links seem to confirm declining page views.
acd 9y ago
What would happen if Wikimedia switched to the content to primarly use IPFS to distribute the content to reduce bandwidth costs?
superioritycplx 9y ago
Any org that's run by SJW's eventually gets run into the ground.
tryingagainbro 9y ago
IMO a lot of these expenses are because they have the money. I am sure they could cut xx% of their staff plus travel expenses and the average user wouldn't notice it. Eventually they might have to do it, but Wikipedia is unique and it's a shame if it wasn't funded by (especially by) those making tens of billions online.
atdt 9y ago
I worked for Wikimedia from 2012 to 2016. During that time I successfully agitated for the creation of a dedicated performance team, which I led for its first two years. During that time, we cut median page load time by over 40% ( http://observer.com/2015/08/how-wikipedia-upped-its-page-load-speed-by-roughly-40-percent-and-why/ http://observer.com/2015/08/how-wikipedia-upped-its-page-loa...), and brought median page save time down from over 6 seconds to 800ms. My salary was in the 100k to 150k range. That is not a princely sum for software developers in the Bay Area, but it is a lot of money, especially when you consider that it came primarily from donations of $50 or less that donors could have spent elsewhere, on other causes. I was humbled by that fact and made a point of reflecting on it daily to make sure I was doing my best to maximize value for donors and users.
icantdrive55 9y ago
http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2015/200/049/2015-200049703-0cbd0c91-9.pdf http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2015/200/049/2015-2000... (Not sure if this link will work? It's from Guidestar. It's there 190's from 2015.)
trothamel 9y ago
Isn't it as much a matter of what the community gets out of the spending that the Wikimedia foundation does? It seems like the problem is that the spending seems divorced from the community of content creators, such that it's hard to see how the spending has made Wikipedia better. You have things like the comments system, Flow or Structured Discussions, which is a step back from the current system and yet still has money being spent on it.
transverse 9y ago
Wikipedia should be replaced by an AI generated encyclopedia. This is the one and only answer.
elect_engineer 9y ago
I am the author of the Wikipedia Essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". For the record, I would prefer that this thread have that title (it was recently changed to "Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth". I would also note that focusing on hosting costs pretty much ignores the point of my essay, which is the exponential growth of spending and the dependence on future exponential growth in revenue.

150 points by hk__2 9y ago

Wales wants a private jet.[1] Not going to happen from Wikia.[2] [1] http://gawker.com/5192786/jimmy-wales-definitely-not-getting-his-wikipedia-jet-now http://gawker.com/5192786/jimmy-wales-definitely-not-getting... [2] http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/revenue-financial.wikia_inc.7c0c60deea305554.html http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/revenue-financ...

cagenut 9y ago
I miss gawker.
- theWatcher37 9y ago
  Gawker somehow managed to be worse than the daily mail.
snakeanus 9y ago
I had no idea that he was also the owned of wikia. Quite disappointed.
- dandare 9y ago
  Didn't he establish Wikia after he donated Wikipedia to non-profit? I see nothing bad in Wales making few bucks form Wikia after what he helped to create. The Wikipedia spending problem is a different story.
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    In itself, no. But there was a lot of issues and conflict in relation to how the creation of Wikia affected policy, and suddenly a lot of things that had a "home" on Wikipedia were now being pushed to Wikia for a variety of reasons, some valid, and some a lot less so.
    - dandare 9y ago
      Can you share more details or resources? I would like to learn more about this.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Why?
cooper12 9y ago
Do you not know what flirting is? He was obviously joking.
- trentmb 9y ago
  > He was obviously joking. As was Animats.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

Isn't that what kills most charities that don't starve?

Alex3917 9y ago
Wikipedia isn't a charity, it's a non profit. Their financials look fine, they have over a year's budget in reserves. Not seeing the issue at all here.
- fatbird 9y ago
  The issue is that the organization and spending have grown, but the mission hasn't, and they're not obviously doing better or more than they were a decade ago, except for a list of failed projects like Knowledge Engine that appear to be badly managed internal efforts that had little hope of succeeding. And all this is against a backdrop of continuing to present themselves as a scrappy do-gooder surviving on fundraising and volunteer efforts. The threat Macon identifies is that the bottom will drop out of the exponential growth in revenue and spending, leaving them no option but to sell out to Google, Facebook, or another party that will simply buy and monetize them, destroying the basic value that Wikipedia does still offer. I don't know how worried to be, but I was genuinely shocked to find out how much money they take in and how many staff they have, without fundamentally being much different than I remember from a decade ago.
  - nqzero 9y ago
    the project that i'd like to see is a beta area where the notability requirements are relaxed, with some sort of semi-automated process for promotion, with the ultimate goal of covering a much larger corpus wikipedia is great for mainstream stuff, but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page. and i'm sure the problem extends well past tech
    - hk__2 9y ago
      > but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page Do you mind mentioning some of them?

snakeanus 9y ago

Related http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pay-us-our-salaries/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-fr... and https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia... Also, look at how much they spend for nothing https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

stinkytaco 9y ago
How are salaries nothing? Those don't even seem that extreme compared to what someone with that skill set might make elsewhere in the private sector.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

film42 9y ago

> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting... Wikipedia also keeps "revision history" and a "talk" section for each page. Those original pages created before 2005 can still be modified, potentially adding to the overall cost. Breaking news stories can cause massive amounts of churn which I imagine has increased with the site's popularity [1]. So really 11x pages = 33x higher hosting costs doesn't seem unrealistic considering how much metadata is associated with each page. That's not to say there isn't a problem, but "page count" might not be the best metric. I wonder what average number of revisions per page looks like over the last 12 years. [1] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Talk:2017_Las_Vegas_Strip_shooting https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Talk...

revelation 9y ago
You're right, page count is not the best metric. Instead you can just look up the hosting costs in their yearly report and find out it's a pittance compared to all their other spending and declining in relation.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Could you link me to that?
  - hk__2 9y ago
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim... Page 3. In 2016 they spent $2M in hosting vs. e.g. $2.2M in "travel and conferences" and $3.6M in "donations processing expenses".
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Well, shit. That’s horrendous, half of the money is just going to salaries.

II2II 9y ago

The numbers are alarming, but the argument needs to be more persuasive. For a proposal like this, I would expect to see a breakdown of where the money has gone and realistic projections of futures expenses. Simply providing alarmist statements based upon linear extrapolations (after being adjusted for inflation alone) then proposing an even more alarmist buyout (when the only thing of tangible value is the domain name) is not enough when proposing potentially crippling changes to funding.

hk__2 9y ago
> For a proposal like this, I would expect to see a breakdown of where the money has gone and realistic projections of futures expenses The Foundation’s financial statements are online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer#References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
- elect_engineer 9y ago
  I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". I have included links to all of the financials that I could find in my essay, and I have repeatedly asked for more transparency regarding how the money has been spent. Just to take one example, Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation executive director from 2007 to 2014, received $100,000 pay rise and was secretly kept on as a "special advisor" after we were all told that she stepped down in 2014. This was kept secret for years, until it turned up buried in a required financial disclosure. I also would like a breakdown of where the money has gone and realistic projections of futures expenses. What you see is my best effort to provide that. If anyone has more information, I will be glad to add it to my essay.

njharman 9y ago

"Sounds like cancer doesn't it" Causes me to immediately stop listening and start doubting everything you said and claim, questioning your motive. It is an emotional appeal. Which 1) insults my intelligence, thinking I'm stupid an unaware enough to fall for that. And one or more of the following 2) you're too stupid or poor at arguing that you don't know you're doing it 3) the facts don't support your side so you try to rile up the ignorant and gulliabl to win 4) you don't care about argument / have other motives like fame, clicks, distraction from other issues.

lisper 9y ago
It's also an insult to people with actual cancer.
- libria 9y ago
  Why is that? People with deadly viruses aren't insulted that we call malevolent programs computer viruses. Equating my laptop with a human would be insulting, but I don't think that was done here.
  - lisper 9y ago
    Because real cancer kills people. Wikimedia spending more money is not going to result in anyone actually dying. Calling it a cancer trivializes the pain and suffering of people with actual cancer and their families.
    - elect_engineer 9y ago
      I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". For the record, I am myself a cancer survivor, and I have received multiple emails from other Wikipedians who have cancer saying that they have no problem with my essay title.
      - lisper 9y ago
        I've been very fortunate never to have had cancer, and to only ever know one person who did. But she'd dead now so I can't ask her for her opinion. I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree about this.

jessriedel 9y ago

See extensive discussion on HN (1054 points, 406 comments) of this issue back in May. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235

hk__2 9y ago
Thank you; I looked up that post’s title on HN before posting it but got no result.
- elect_engineer 9y ago
  I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". The previous discussion led to a version of my essay that was published with my permission in the Wikipedia Signpost. That version was dumbed-down a bit by the signpost editors, In particular they removed most of the references that document that my claims are factual. This version is the version I keep updated as errors are found. For the record, I prefer that this thread have the same title as my essay. The current title misses several important aspects of my essay, such as transparency and the dependency on revenues always increasing.

esturk 9y ago

I try to alleviate as much bandwidth to Wikipedia as I can by using the Google cache version whenever I can. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

brador 9y ago
Don't do that. Your time is more valuable than the artificial micro-cent the wikimedia foundation will save.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Why is using the Google Cache version not as equally productive as using the main Wikipedia content?
  - brador 9y ago
    It might be equivalent, even faster, but that was not the problem he suggested he was solving for.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      To summarise, you suggest it's a waste of time, I ask how is it a waste of time to click on one version of a link over another, you suggest there's no difference in efficiency. The point I'm making is, GP is no worse off for using the Google Cache version. They might miss out on a few edits made after the page was cached, but in the grand scheme of things that's unlikely to matter.
mulmen 9y ago
You could probably save time by just estimating your bandwidth costs - which are probably tiny - and donating 10x that to the foundation.

cagenut 9y ago

~$160K/month for hosting for a site that big[1] is pretty damn good. I'm sure they're getting a lot of favors and discounts to get there. [1] - http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings I've worked with a bunch of sites farther down that list that are spending an order of magnitude more than that.

chriscappuccio 9y ago
I'd be happy to work with them and help dramatically lower their costs by using my network...
tryingagainbro 9y ago
I've worked with a bunch of sites farther down that list that are spending an order of magnitude more than that. If the site was repeatedly down or slow people would complain even more. Wikipedia is truly global and that adds to costs.

TrickyRick 9y ago

> If we do these things now, in a few short years we could be in a position to do everything we are doing now, while living off of the endowment interest, and would have no need for further fundraising. Or we could keep fundraising, using the donations to do many new and useful things, knowing that whatever we do there is a guaranteed income stream from the endowment that will keep the servers running indefinitely. This is probably the best point in the entire essay, if they reduced spending funding would essentially become obsolete. Kind of clashes with the begging banners which have made me donate to WMF the last couple of years.

labster 9y ago

I wish that the WMF spent some of their mountain of cash on programmer time on security reviews of the extensions in the Mediawiki ecosystem. Instead, it feels like it's mainly just me in my free time, as part of my efforts for the nonprofit wiki farm, miraheze.org. The WMF does a great job on any code used on or produced for WMF servers, but for the other extensions listed on mediawiki.org, it's a smorgasbord of XSS and SQLI. A lot of those are git hosted by the WMF too, so don't use the hosting location as any indication of security.

matt4077 9y ago

The financial statements linked in this rant don't support this sort of of panic... The WMF's assets increased by $20,000,000 over the last year, up to reserves of now $90,000,000. I'm not in a position to judge the effectiveness of their spending, but this completely antiquated paragraph about the waterfall model of software engineering makes me doubt the author's judgement.

elect_engineer 9y ago
I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". No, you are missing the point. I did not imply that Waterfall if better than Agile (I have managed several Agile projects and really like it when it is done correctly). What my point is is that the WMF is failing to do things that Agile requires -- things that have been around so long that Waterfall required them. Nothing about Agile allows you to build software in secret with no input from the people who will be expected to use it and then throw it over the wall. It would again stress that this is not the fault of the developers. Their management forbids them from talking to the ordinary Wikipedia editors who will use the software.

ShinTakuya 9y ago

I knew a guy who was a software engineer for Wikipedia back in uni. At least back then (around 2011 or so) they were flying him and other software engineers working for them to conferences across the world to Europe. Not only that but the guy booked the tickets on a premium airline business class. He said that everyone did that. You'd think working for a non profit you'd be looking at discount airline economy class tickets.

nebolo 9y ago
Why? Why would you expect a software engineer working for a nonprofit to look at discount airline economy class tickers?
- bo1024 9y ago
  I mean, maybe it's just the culture I am used to, but I would expect everyone/anyone to be looking at discount airline economy class tickets by default.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Why? You're working. You may well be traveling on your own time. I travel within guidelines but that doesn't mean traveling in the cheapest possible way even if it's more painful than it has to be.
    - bo1024 9y ago
      I'm not arguing for cheapest way possible no matter how painful, just that I am used to a cost-conscious approach by default that starts at the cheap options and works upward and that's what I would tend to expect in this scenario.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        You specifically referred to discount airlines which in my limited experience with them are mostly pretty awful to start with.

tyingq 9y ago

Wikipedia is also a bit cagey about whether their overall traffic is growing or not. Specifically, Google's changes to how they display Wikipedia derived info have driven traffic down. Links that used to go to Wikipedia often now link to Google's own sites with copies of the data. https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-steadily-losing-google-traffic-228237 https://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-ste...

tonyztan 9y ago
Since Wikipedia doesn't derive any income from direct traffic, it is actually a good thing for Google and others to host copies of the data, so long as they comply with the Creative Commons licensing requirements. This reduces the cost for Wikipedia to spread knowledge.
- tyingq 9y ago
  I'm skeptical about that. Wikipedia has used traffic in the past to solicit donations. Over time, it's also increasingly less obvious that Google's content came from Wikipedia. So it reduces overall awareness of Wikipedia as an entity. It also questions what the money is for. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia doesn't pay for good content, those contributors are unpaid. The money is largely for the site and underpinnings. And we just established that views are being drawn away from that...
atdt 9y ago
What do you mean by "a bit cagey"? The Foundation is pretty open with its data. https://analytics.wikimedia.org/ https://analytics.wikimedia.org/ and https://stats.wikimedia.org/ https://stats.wikimedia.org/ are good starting points.
- tyingq 9y ago
  I was referring to this: http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-slams-silly-claim-of-lost-google-traffic-2015-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-slams-... Both of your links seem to confirm declining page views.

acd 9y ago

What would happen if Wikimedia switched to the content to primarly use IPFS to distribute the content to reduce bandwidth costs?

superioritycplx 9y ago

Any org that's run by SJW's eventually gets run into the ground.

tryingagainbro 9y ago

IMO a lot of these expenses are because they have the money. I am sure they could cut xx% of their staff plus travel expenses and the average user wouldn't notice it. Eventually they might have to do it, but Wikipedia is unique and it's a shame if it wasn't funded by (especially by) those making tens of billions online.

atdt 9y ago

I worked for Wikimedia from 2012 to 2016. During that time I successfully agitated for the creation of a dedicated performance team, which I led for its first two years. During that time, we cut median page load time by over 40% ( http://observer.com/2015/08/how-wikipedia-upped-its-page-load-speed-by-roughly-40-percent-and-why/ http://observer.com/2015/08/how-wikipedia-upped-its-page-loa...), and brought median page save time down from over 6 seconds to 800ms. My salary was in the 100k to 150k range. That is not a princely sum for software developers in the Bay Area, but it is a lot of money, especially when you consider that it came primarily from donations of $50 or less that donors could have spent elsewhere, on other causes. I was humbled by that fact and made a point of reflecting on it daily to make sure I was doing my best to maximize value for donors and users.

icantdrive55 9y ago

http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2015/200/049/2015-200049703-0cbd0c91-9.pdf http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2015/200/049/2015-2000... (Not sure if this link will work? It's from Guidestar. It's there 190's from 2015.)

trothamel 9y ago

Isn't it as much a matter of what the community gets out of the spending that the Wikimedia foundation does? It seems like the problem is that the spending seems divorced from the community of content creators, such that it's hard to see how the spending has made Wikipedia better. You have things like the comments system, Flow or Structured Discussions, which is a step back from the current system and yet still has money being spent on it.

transverse 9y ago

Wikipedia should be replaced by an AI generated encyclopedia. This is the one and only answer.

elect_engineer 9y ago

I am the author of the Wikipedia Essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". For the record, I would prefer that this thread have that title (it was recently changed to "Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth". I would also note that focusing on hosting costs pretty much ignores the point of my essay, which is the exponential growth of spending and the dependence on future exponential growth in revenue.