3 ms·

Given the scale of Wikipedia, the fact that they can run it on only $10M/year is rather impressive. Glancing at the docs you reference, roughly $6M of their sp

by smanek 16y ago

Given the scale of Wikipedia, the fact that they can run it on only $10M/year is rather impressive. Glancing at the docs you reference, roughly $6M of their spending goes to straight operating expenses (servers, bandwidth, travel, etc). I don't think anyone would disagree that is completely reasonable for an organization Wikimedia's size with the amount of traffic they have (it seems quite lean, even compared to most startups). The other big chunk ($3.5M) is salary for people. There you have to take into account that they have ~70M unique users a month. Assuming $150K/engineer/year all told (office space, computers, salary, benefits, etc) and that all the salary were just going to engineering, that's only enough cash to hire about 23 engineers (or about 1 engineer for every 3M users). In practice, not all their employees are engineers, so it's probably closer to 5M users per engineer. As a point of comparison, Facebook brags about having only 1 engineer per million users. Wikipedia is being laudably frugal and efficient. I can't imagine running a site their size with much fewer resources.

citricsquid 16y ago
I understand that things cost a lot, I just don't see the justification in going from ~$10m costs to ~$25m costs. Unless I'm missing something, what does it offer me (as a person who is supposed to donate)? I don't see anything, although based on the other people like you saying they're expanding maybe I've missed something.
danio 16y ago
They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers. 10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism. 5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable. There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for? $380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel. Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.
- bjelkeman-again 16y ago
  Running a site with 70M users/month and relying on the "majority" of new development work to be done by volunteers. I think that is highly optimistic.
  - angrycoder 16y ago
    The irony here is stunning, because that is what they rely on for their content, volunteers.
- gritzko 16y ago
  Regarding contractors I might say that their multimedia-related code (ie the in-browser audio/video player) is done by Kaltura, an external contractor. http://kaltura.com http://kaltura.com Penny counting is a bit too much, folks should be paid properly. But their drift away from "organic" growth is a bit disturbing indeed.
axod 16y ago
With due respect, BS. Utter BS. plentyoffish.com has around 6m monthly and is run by a tiny team. (1 person for a long time afaik, maybe 2 now?) It's pie in the sky to think that you need to spend so much to run what is essentially, a very simple website. Wikipedia isn't some massively social website. Majority of people accessing it are READ_ONLY. It's not streaming video. The majority is static text. So it doesn't make sense to care how many people are on it... 10m users will not require twice the engineers or servers as 5m. Wikipedia: 70m users/month - hosting costs $6m or so? ($.086/user) Reddit: 10m users/month maybe? - hosting costs $33k or so? ($0.0033/user) [July] Mibbit: 1.5m users/month - hosting costs $500 or so ($0.0003/user) (numbers from quantcast, yes I know they're not exact but they're usually not orders of magnitude out). eg Wikipedia spends 250 times as much on hosting per user as I do. I'm not even saying I'm efficient with hosting costs. I'm sure I could host mibbit on $100/mo at a push. And I thought Reddits hosting costs were obscene. Do you really think that 8 cents per month, to host each User of a website is not ridiculously expensive?
- gritzko 16y ago
  Technically, Wikipedia is a PHP+MySQL wiki with an echeloned cache system (squid). http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers They currently try to expand into video, but IMO there are some bottlenecks of social nature. The current average video on Wikipedia is 5-10MB, retrieved by the user in 15% of cases, so nothing special at all, technically. The mass of content is no longer growing exponentially, more like steady-state. The user base is slowly expanding, AFAIK.
  - axod 16y ago
    Using PHP+MySQL for something where the vast majority of pages are static seems a bad design choice. I guess the caching can aid with that, but it seems a better idea to optimize for reads in the first place.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  What are you using as users, uniques?

by smanek 16y ago

citricsquid 16y ago

I understand that things cost a lot, I just don't see the justification in going from ~$10m costs to ~$25m costs. Unless I'm missing something, what does it offer me (as a person who is supposed to donate)? I don't see anything, although based on the other people like you saying they're expanding maybe I've missed something.

danio 16y ago

They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers. 10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism. 5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable. There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for? $380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel. Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.

bjelkeman-again 16y ago
Running a site with 70M users/month and relying on the "majority" of new development work to be done by volunteers. I think that is highly optimistic.
- angrycoder 16y ago
  The irony here is stunning, because that is what they rely on for their content, volunteers.
gritzko 16y ago
Regarding contractors I might say that their multimedia-related code (ie the in-browser audio/video player) is done by Kaltura, an external contractor. http://kaltura.com http://kaltura.com Penny counting is a bit too much, folks should be paid properly. But their drift away from "organic" growth is a bit disturbing indeed.

axod 16y ago

With due respect, BS. Utter BS. plentyoffish.com has around 6m monthly and is run by a tiny team. (1 person for a long time afaik, maybe 2 now?) It's pie in the sky to think that you need to spend so much to run what is essentially, a very simple website. Wikipedia isn't some massively social website. Majority of people accessing it are READ_ONLY. It's not streaming video. The majority is static text. So it doesn't make sense to care how many people are on it... 10m users will not require twice the engineers or servers as 5m. Wikipedia: 70m users/month - hosting costs $6m or so? ($.086/user) Reddit: 10m users/month maybe? - hosting costs $33k or so? ($0.0033/user) [July] Mibbit: 1.5m users/month - hosting costs $500 or so ($0.0003/user) (numbers from quantcast, yes I know they're not exact but they're usually not orders of magnitude out). eg Wikipedia spends 250 times as much on hosting per user as I do. I'm not even saying I'm efficient with hosting costs. I'm sure I could host mibbit on $100/mo at a push. And I thought Reddits hosting costs were obscene. Do you really think that 8 cents per month, to host each User of a website is not ridiculously expensive?

gritzko 16y ago
Technically, Wikipedia is a PHP+MySQL wiki with an echeloned cache system (squid). http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers They currently try to expand into video, but IMO there are some bottlenecks of social nature. The current average video on Wikipedia is 5-10MB, retrieved by the user in 15% of cases, so nothing special at all, technically. The mass of content is no longer growing exponentially, more like steady-state. The user base is slowly expanding, AFAIK.
- axod 16y ago
  Using PHP+MySQL for something where the vast majority of pages are static seems a bad design choice. I guess the caching can aid with that, but it seems a better idea to optimize for reads in the first place.
citricsquid 16y ago
What are you using as users, uniques?