18 ms·

Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017)

528 points by wlkr 7y ago

jcrben 7y ago
As someone who has edited since 2007 (pseudoanonymously, about 13k edits), I appreciate the continued investments that Wikipedia has made into various initiatives, most importantly technology. It's not cheap or easy to stay on top of technical trends (e.g., upgrading to PHP 7) while shipping feature improvements. For example, I use Visual Editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor) all the time.
save_ferris 7y ago
> There has been zero actual effort by the WMF to increase transparency on spending. Oof. Aside from compute costs, what could justify a more than 100% increase in expenses from 2012 to the present? The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective).
- landryraccoon 7y ago
  > The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective) I’m curious, it sounds like you’re a casual Wikipedia user so - how do you have any idea if this is true? What about editor features, community, moderation, administrative improvements? This kind of attitude frustrates me - it’s the sort of attitude that kills nonprofit fundraising efforts unless they are for show in a way that laypeople can understand. Surely you can see how inefficient it would be to run a non profit if everything they spent money on had to be highly visible?
  - wyattpeak 7y ago
    Frankly, if a nonprofit can't justify to laypeople why they should have money, they shouldn't have money. My money is limited, the causes which can benefit from it are not. It seems to me the height of self-absorption that an organisation should expect donations over the many other worthwhile causes without justifying the benefit that money would bring. Changes to editor tools and processes don't cut it. All of those exist in service of improving Wikipedia as a resource. If I can't see those changes as an end-user, I question whether any of them really mattered. Is a fantastic new user-friendly diagnostic machine justified in a hospital if treatment rates don't go up?
    - DenseComet 7y ago
      Wikipedia's edits rates have been increasing very rapidly. Tools like those must exist in order to vet them and ensure that Wikipedia remains a trustworthy source. Its hard to see the benefits (nor am I sure how to ensure it shows) as the expectation is Wikipedia is always correct, but without them, the misinformation in Wikipedia would be much greater.
      - wyattpeak 7y ago
        Between 2004 and 2018, monthly edits grew from 500k to 40M, an 80x growth. [1] In the same period, expenses have grown from 25k to 80M, a 3200x growth. [TFA] [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|all|~total|monthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e...
        mpalmer 7y ago
        Not claiming to know more than you about this but your point assumes that the changing cost of maintaining the project at scale has some proportional relationship to the number of edits. As it has attracted global attention and ever more significant influence on people worldwide, Wikipedia's threats are likely more varied and insidious than they were in 2004. The cost of offsetting these threats may not relate to the volume of edits.
        wyattpeak 7y ago
        I certainly don't claim any domain knowledge, but the growth in expenses is so vast that I'm disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm not, by the way, suggesting that a 3200x growth in expenses is inherently unjustifiable, just that it should in fact be justified.
        mpalmer 7y ago
        Yes, agreed that it should be justified in the open.
  - theamk 7y ago
    I think good communications are especially important for nonprofits! If one is donating, they will want to know how their money will be spent. The things do not need to be highly visible of course -- but they should be at least explained. I don't understand why they are not saying things like "we hired 50 more programmers to keep our servers running, and 25 more to develop new AI to fight spam". Instead, I looked at "2018 Annual Report" [0], and found those specific points: - Support researchers who make offline wikipedia - Advertise itself in Nigeria - Support participation of women in Wikipedia - AI to detect vandalism - Page previews - Content translation tools That's 1 user feature and 2 editor features. Did I miss something? [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/
    - LegitShady 7y ago
      A balance sheet and details on why wikipedia say advertising itself in Nigeria Isa good use of charity funds. Komen style charities aren't charities.
  - baddox 7y ago
    I don’t understand. It’s pretty reasonable to say that editor features, etc. are not worth the money if they are not noticeable to the basic user, which presumably accounts for the overwhelmingly vast majority of Wikipedia page views.
    - loeg 7y ago
      And perhaps more importantly, the majority of donations.
    - jcrben 7y ago
      If editors don't get better tools, they'll stop editing. Then the content for basic users will not be worth reading. Source: continuously edited since 2007, and continue in large part due to improved tools.
      - s1artibartfast 7y ago
        Just Curious: In what way is the continual improvement of tools a motivation to keep editing? Do you think that $40 million is a reasonable cost for those improvements?
        jcrben 7y ago
        If you edit using Visual Editor and compare that to the old wiki markup, you will understand. Visual Editor much faster esp. with automatic citation templates. My time is valuable (more than when I started as a poor college student) and my tolerance for bad UX has declined as technology in general has improved. And that's just one tool which has improved. There's an annual community wishlist survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_20... And yes, it's reasonable. I work in tech as a software engineer and it's not as cheap as people think.
        s1artibartfast 7y ago
        Thanks for responding!
  - jrumbut 7y ago
    I'm a very light editor, small dollar donor, and moderate user and I can say I'm pretty impressed with the platform improvements. The pace of change appears to be very carefully managed to almost always be positive and minimize pointless disruption. The complaints in this thread are part of why you get those big, flashy redesigns that look great but hurt utility. Of course as a donor I'd never turn down more good for less money, but I don't think maximizing thriftiness always yields the best value. I'd rather things be just a little plush (if that's how you'd describe the current state) and see Wikipedia continue to succeed as it (largely) has.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    Community and moderation are mostly handled by volunteers. Wikimedia's efforts to moderate the platform have been widely condemned by the community, because they're seen as an infringement on the community's self-rule by an unaccountable bureaucracy.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Are you saying the only thing worth spending money on are arbitrary redesigns of the user-facing UI?
- taneq 7y ago
  Bandwidth costs? I'd imagine they've seen a huge increase in both compute and bandwidth requirements over that time.
  - theamk 7y ago
    Finance report [0] says "Internet hosting" was $2,342,130, or 2.8% of their expenses. This is approximately the same as last year ($2,169,861, [1]) [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin... [1] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html
    - ketzu 7y ago
      That's an 8% increase over 1 year. Those over 7 years would already result in an increase of 72%.
  - loeg 7y ago
    The rate of spending growth exceeds actual resource use growth by "lots." Also, the cost of those resources — bandwidth, storage, etc — have been decreasing on a per-capacity basis over this time period. Bandwidth, compute, and storage are all vastly cheaper than they were 10 years ago or even 5.
- paulie_a 7y ago
  < The platform has barely changed That's a feature not everything needs to be tricked out with the JavaScript equivalent of spinners.
Medicalidiot 7y ago
If I remember correctly, the person that wrote this had quite the axe to grind about Wikipedia and her/his major criticisms of it were actually what nonprofits look to shoot for. Wikipedia has genuine issues, but not anything this person says has much merit.
- apsec112 7y ago
  This feels like a very empty response; it doesn't point out any specific problem with the author's facts or reasoning. The basic argument is that, ten years ago, Wikipedia ran a very similar service at a much lower cost, so the current organization is therefore spending money ineffectively. You can say you disagree with that, but why? It makes sense to me.
  - itsgrimetime 7y ago
    But Wikipedia is no where near the same service it was in 2012. Dozens (if not hundreds) of features, increased traffic demands and higher availability, it seems obvious that the platform would have to grow.
    - AbrahamParangi 7y ago
      The point is that while views have increased by 10x over the past 15 years, expenses have increased by 1250x. That leaves a 125x increase in per-user spending that does not appear to be reflected in commensurate increases in user value.
      - slowenough 7y ago
        > while views increased 10x over the past 15 years, expenses have increased by 1250x. That leaves a 125x Wikipedia is probably a money laundering operation. How else to explain the cooked books feel of those numbers? Edit: wow way to anger The herd! seems I've hit a nerve so I know I must be onto something. The fact that people don't want to consider this point of view makes it more likely to be the case because it's shielded from inspection, by The mirage of goodness conveyed by Wikipedia's reputation perhaps its charity status. I suppose such shielding must be how many money laundering operations work to disguise themselves. so people being outraged at the suggestion is exactly as intended and doing the work of hiding the money laundering business. This is fascinating. Well done!
ken 7y ago
It's a symptom of the centralized nature of the web. To serve everybody, you need a boatload of servers. I recall hearing about this cool free editable encyclopedia in the early 2000's, but I could never get a single page to completely load. It was unusably slow. It's nice to think Wikipedia only needs $50K a year in operating expenses, but you can't reasonably develop and host a top-10 website on that.
- cldellow 7y ago
  Wikipedia does about 200 billion pageviews a year. At $80,000,000/year, one penny buys them 25 pageviews. Yeah, there's room for some efficiencies here. I say this as someone who donated $1,000 a long time ago and then realized that the WMF, despite what it's begging appeals would have you believe, is doing just fine. It's just a matter of what they choose to spend donor money on. I have no problem with them raising money and spending it, but I find their fundraising campaigns very misleading.
- jfim 7y ago
  The hosting expenses associated with the Wikimedia foundation are, according to their financial report [0], 2.3 million USD. Hosting their servers is actually their smallest expense item, other than "Special event expense, net". As a comparison, they spend 52.1 million on salaries, wages, awards, and grants. I'd disagree with your statement that they could not reasonably develop and host a top-10 website with the amount of money that they're raising, and if they needed to, they could significantly cut down on expenses and still keep everything running. [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Wikipedia, to a first approximation, is basically a collection of static webpages, especially in comparison to other top websites. Relatively few pageviews need to actually hit the central database (compare this to Google, where essentially every pageview needs to be customized specifically for the request), which means that the actual cost to service the traffic is going to be much less than other websites of comparative pageviews.
apsec112 7y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235
Randor 7y ago
Well, I'm not seeing any problems. The Annual Report is available here: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
- surround 7y ago
  From the “update” sections: > [The 2016-2017 report] has numbers for "Grants and awards" and "Professional service expenses" but there is no obvious way of finding out the details of those expenditures
- anonu 7y ago
  Me neither. Sounds like a guy with a grudge. Organizations grow and morph over time. Assuming Wikipedia should be a barebones hosting platform like it was at it's start is probably dreaming.
  - Randor 7y ago
    Yep, It appears that their biggest expense is the $38,597,407 in salaries distributed to ~350 employees. This makes the average salary $110,278 at the Wikimedia Foundation. I don't really have anything negative to say about that. However I guess you could question why they need 350 employees. So I looked at the projects they are currently working on: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_projects https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_p...
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      I can see the argument for say 175 employees and a reduced scope, while building up an endowment to better weather down-years is better for WMF's long-term goals, but there's also the risk that reduced spending would cause reduced donations.
      - loeg 7y ago
        > but there's also the risk that reduced spending would cause reduced donations. Reduced spending and reduced donations would be a good outcome for Wikipedia readers (especially in the long term). Lower running costs allows putting more current revenue towards that endowment, and means the future is a bit more sustainable in less favorable economic cycles. Donations also don't exist in a vacuum; the best use of donors' limited money is probably not WMF burning a pile of it. I'd encourage, for example, https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities in place of WMF giving.
thomascgalvin 7y ago
Year-over-year, "revenue" and "profitability", or at least the not-for-profit version thereof, have been increasing for Wikipedia. Every company in the world is trying to be in that exact situation. Economics is not biology. Stasis is very hard to maintain. Typically, a business is either growing, or it is declining. Our current problems tend to revolve around companies that are too big to fail, not companies that are too big to succeed. I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade.
- apsec112 7y ago
  Wikipedia is a non-profit, not a company. Wikipedia's "revenues" are donations from readers, who are told that they have to donate for Wikipedia to stay online. Since almost everyone already uses Wikipedia, "growing revenue" must mean getting more donations from each user, who then might donate less to other charities.
- CriticalCathed 7y ago
  >I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade. Why? The thing of value in wikipedia is the encyclopedia that was Built off of FREE LABOR by VOLUNTEERS. The increases in spending seem to be going to white collar office jobs that aren't actually necessary for The Wiki to exist and thrive. All wiki needs is servers. It shouldn't need to grow. Wiki isn't a capitalist entity. It doesn't need to play by the rules of capital. And that it is mirroring the pattern of capitalist companies is tremendously worrying for the future of the project.
  - elect_engineer 7y ago
    Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... I think you hit the nail on the head. For a charity that is trying to feed starving children, they can always use more money as long as there are any starving children left. Same with most charities. But if a charity exists to but an encyclopedia on the web, they don't need to keep increasing their spending other than what is needed to cover any increases in the cost of running the servers plus a reasonable amount for support staff. Related: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Frequently_asked_questions#Why_will_it_require_up_to_US$2.5_million_to_develop_a_movement_strategy https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...?
klyrs 7y ago
> In 2008 Wikipedia had over 5 million registered editors, 250 language editions, and 7.5 million articles. Wikipedia.org was the 10th-busiest website in the world. We had already started Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity and Wikispecies, we had already opened chapters in multiple countries, and we had already moved from Florida to San Fransisco. No neat charts showing trends on these numbers? I'd want to see that comparison, at a bare minimum, before sounding alarms.
jakobmi 7y ago
Guy Macros: Okay, good. What do you suggest doing now?
- loeg 7y ago
  The article says that. > If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now, before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details. We should limit spending increases to no more than inflation plus some percentage (adjusted for any increases in page views), build up our endowment, and structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad.
ufo 7y ago
> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it? Honestly, I always felt that these kind of conparisons are insensitive, and doubling down on it like the linked article does doesn't help.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  If you tell your mother you'll have found at least one person who cares whether you're offended or not. In fact I find posts aboit wikipedia in general insensitive please stop.
- misterdoubt 7y ago
  It doesn't even make sense with the data being presented. > After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year. As a grad student I made a total $1,300 per month, but ten years later I'm spending that on just housing costs. So what?
  - elect_engineer 7y ago
    Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Re: "Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year." You missed the first part of what I wrote in my essay: "Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it WILL happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment." I made it clear that Wikipedia is not in trouble at the present time. But there is a real possibility that there are bad times ahead, and we should prepare for them now.
umvi 7y ago
I do like his idea of building up investments and running wikipedia off of ROI instead of begging for donations every year. Why is it that WMF hasn't done that yet?
- jcrben 7y ago
  It has been raising an endowment for several years: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment You can donate at https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...
  - peteretep 7y ago
    I would like to see the Gates Foundation and co start investing in more media endowments like this.
    - s1artibartfast 7y ago
      Seems like a terrible investment for the Gates foundation. It is highly visible and has ample public funding. Additionally, it appears that it has no budget control.
  - elect_engineer 7y ago
    It has indeed been raising an endowment for several years, but every time I ask them to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad the answer is "maybe next year". If the endowment is just one more account that can be drained at will we have no protection from a sudden drop in revenue while the WMF maintains the current spending levels in the hope that revenue will recover. I also looked into whether the endowment is legally protected against a large payout as a result of a lawsuit. I am not a lawyer, but it looks like the WMF needs to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal to get that sort of protection. Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
- persona_reuse 7y ago
shubb 7y ago
Looking at what they claim to be working on, maybe the money is just being spent on stuff that americans don't see. The last few years, the annual plans seem focussed on making Wikipedia relevant in India, South America, and the Middle East. When I was at EE school, the chip manufacturers gave the school devboards students go to know their stuff. Matlab was cheap too. I suspect Wikimedia is funding a bunch of journalism and research training in these countries, so that every highschool kid gets pointed to wikipedia at school.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  If they are as a charity collecting money ostensibly needing it for their online encyclopedia they should disclose all this explicitly with dollar amounts.
  - shubb 7y ago
    Yes, unless there is a vital reason why not, I think charities should have to disclose spending to quite a high resolution. It seems the most recent business plan and accounts are less detailed than in previous years. This is a backwards step.
Causality1 7y ago
Putting all the arguments aside, I had no idea Wikipedia was so far in the black. The donation begging had me thinking they were desperately clinging to life. I don't like that. From now on my annual Wikipedia donation will be going to the Internet Archive.
- jackfrodo 7y ago
  I agree. The cup-of-coffee keeps wikipedia running strategy feels kinda scummy, but hey, it's probably how they got so far in the black in the first place. No incentive for them to stop the campaign.
- eropple 7y ago
  The Internet Archive is also a profoundly worthwhile charity. But those of us with a little understanding of the space would be remiss to not point out that this article is dishonest and you're falling for it. It isn't uncommon for nonprofits (and Wikipedia is not only a nonprofit but is functionally infrastructure at this point; its survival is important beyond its own self-perpetuation) to try to build up an endowment in order to survive lean times. This is normal. You're falling for an okeydoke. Please don't.
  - maehwasu 7y ago
    If their actual goal was to build up an endowment to survive lean times, their spending profile would be quite different. That may be an ancillary goal of theirs, but it’s demonstrably not close to the primary one (in a revealed preference sense).
  - Causality1 7y ago
    Building up an endowment is fine. Misleading me to think that Wikipedia is close to shutting down due to lack of funds is uncool. I don't care that they spend too much money; I care that they convinced me they're broke.
  - joshuaissac 7y ago
    What exactly is dishonest about the article? The author's criticism is that the Wikimedia Foundation isn't building up its endowment fast enough, and that it instead uses the donations on frivolous spending.
ajxs 7y ago
I think he raises a very important point regarding the enormous risk of WMF being purchased by the current generation of tech-giants. I don't think there is any reason to believe that new management of Wikipedia by a company such as Google, Facebook or Amazon would be the least bit benevolent. The implications that Wikipedia being co-opted would have on freedom of information on the internet would be immense. I don't think that this is idle scare-mongering. Of course, there is already a risk of misinformation being propagated on Wikipedia by bad actors, I don't think that there is a very big gap to jump before we lose control over the online record completely.
- jcrben 7y ago
  Over half of the board is elected by the community of editors, so it doesn't seem very likely https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/board/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/board/. I vote in these elections and count Dr. James Heilman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman) as a friend.
  - geowwy 7y ago
    In the case of insolvency I don't think the board will have much choice.
    - elect_engineer 7y ago
      Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Re: "In the case of insolvency I don't think the board will have much choice"; this is a key point to understanding my essay. Imagine someone winning a huge lawsuit and the WMF not being able to pay. Or imagine a really bad scandal (something like The New York Times publishing conclusive proof that the WMF is a front for ISIS) and donations drop through the floor, followed by the WMF continuing to increase spending until they run out of funds. None of these doomsday scenarios are likely, but they are not impossible either.
commandersaki 7y ago
I honestly don’t mind a world without Wikipedia.
loeg 7y ago
(2017)? It seems the original article dates to 2016, but was updated for 2017 and 2018. (The trend holds, which is why it's on HN frontpage today.)
jeanvalmarc 7y ago
So in summary Wikipedia is a responsibly run nonprofit that spends slightly less than it takes in while providing a valuable service to millions (or billions) of users?
- joshuaissac 7y ago
  The summary is that the Wikimedia Foundation asks for and spends increasingly large amounts of money in donations mostly on things that are unrelated to Wikipedia. The writer seems to want the Foundation to use the money instead to build up an endowment (like universities do) so that Wikipedia is not eternally reliant on donations to survive. He also suggests that Wikipedia itself is fairly well-run, but the Foundation is not.
deevolution 7y ago
The fact that wikipedia, the world encyclopedia, is centrally hosted is itself a problem. Wikipedia should be censorship resistant, borderless, distributed and resilient to disasters, similar to Bitcoin. So far it's none of those things, so it doesn't deserve my money. If I could contribute by hosting articles on my computer I would be more than happy to offer up a few gigs of harddrive space in exchange for access to the world knowledge bank
- viraptor 7y ago
  You can https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/
  - deevolution 7y ago
    Oh wow, this is awesome! Also looks like there is an active proposal for decentralizing wikipedia[1]. But IPFS seems to more or less offer a decent solution. 1. https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wikipedia https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wik...
- m463 7y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but I am curious what the real-life tradeoffs would be? For example, what would happen to a distributed wikipedia in relation to say maps and borders or other controversial subjects like trump, scientology or vaccinations? Maybe these are the same questions people had when wikipedia first started in relation to traditional encyclopedias, and we already have the answers?
  - ossworkerrights 7y ago
    I suppose all nodes would have to be in sync with a parent node, but indeed that is a good question. What happens when one goes rogue and starts bending the truth. There is nothing stopping criminal governments around the world from doing it, in such a set-up.
- clarry 7y ago
raz32dust 7y ago
I am all for transparency in spending, but I don't support the author's suggested guidelines for spending. Sticking to inflation-and page-view adjusted growth in spending is a terrible requirement. It ties the hands of the company to do any sort of innovation. I donate pretty regularly, and I am happy that wikipedia is doing more with my money than to just keep the site running.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Can you name one thing that the foundation did with your money? This might be a trick question, so be careful to not confuse things that Wikipedia does without your money with things Wikimedia does with your money.
  - Camillo 7y ago
    IIRC they started a web search engine project that went nowhere.
    - _joe 7y ago
      You remember incorrectly. It was a plan from a past Executive Director that never even started.
      - elect_engineer 7y ago
        Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... I do not believe that the above "It was a plan from a past Executive Director that never even started" claim is accurate. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-17/Special_report#knowledgeengine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/Special_report#knowledgeengine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/In_focus#knowledgeengine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... Key quotes: "In May 2015, Risker observed that a team called 'Search and Discovery' was 'extraordinarily well-staffed with a disproportionate number of engineers at the same time as other areas seem to be wanting for them'." "We also know at some point it was an ambitious project to create a brand new search engine as an alternative to Google."
zelly 7y ago
There's no need for Wikipedia to be a centralized entity. I do not want to send checks to some foundation. I want to run a node.
opportune 7y ago
Here's another view of the WMF's runaway spending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_multilanguage.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... I don't donate to the WMF because they don't need my money, but I wish they just kept Wikipedia running and made small incremental changes over time for scaling/keeping up to date/adding helpful features. I would of course donate if Wikipedia were at risk of failing (not that it would be that hard to rehost and rebuild it), and they know that and exploit everyone who doesn't realize how rich they are with the annoying begging. As they say: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". If you keep giving a nonprofit money, it will keep growing, even if it has more than enough it needs for its earlier charter.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  But for how many years can Wikipedia run on that much money? IMO not having a large endowment which comfortably lasts a decade is irresponsible for the kind of resource Wikipedia presents to the world.
  - circlefavshape 7y ago
    They're working on an endowment afaik
    - elect_engineer 7y ago
      Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Re: "They're working on an endowment afaik", Yes. They are. which is why I have called on the WMF to "build up our endowment, and structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad." The danger I warn about in my essay is the WMF continuing to increase spending even if donations stop increasing. If they do that there is currently nothing stopping them from draining the endowment and spending it.
mastazi 7y 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 This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated? I can't think of any other scenario besides Wikipedia where this would be expected to be true.
- busymom0 7y ago
  Also hasn't the cost of hosting gone down significantly since 2005?
- logifail 7y ago
  > Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated? How would one expect them to be correlated? As an aside, a friend of mine relaunched an ecommerce site in March. Wordpress + WooCommerce, stripped of fluff. His hosting plan costs him $3/month, including tax. He told me his site took just over $60k in revenue in the first 6 weeks.
  - darawk 7y ago
    I assume the operative word for him was 'linearly' not 'correlated'. But cost/pageview is sublinearly correlated, so spending growth should be even slower than a linear projection.
    - logifail 7y ago
      > spending growth should be even slower than a linear projection Indeed. In my experience in several organisations, as soon as there is even an inkling of "spare money" in (part of) an organisation, humans will invariably starting coming up with creative ways to spend it. This may end badly. If you start with the premise: "there is [almost] no budget, what can we do anyway?", then you often get the most creative and useful solutions.
      - Reimersholme 7y ago
        "Parkinson's law is the adage that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion'. It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization." Fittingly enough, there's a Wikipedia article on the subject. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
HenriNext 7y ago
Click-bait redirects here. The figures don't look anything like growth rate of cancer, they look like growth rate of a toenail.. 10-15% a year. Then the author claims that "spending is growing at an ever-increasing rate" like cancer. But it is not. Draw a trend-line over the spending graph, and you'll see that the growth rate is actually damn linear (and well aligned with revenue growth). Rest of the article is reasons why spending should be reduced. Well maybe it shouldn't. As long as there is revenue growth, maybe it is better to invest the revenue on better tools. When revenue growth stops, you've got the better tools you invested in, and can then reduce spending by not building further new tools.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- alexsideris 7y ago
  If that was the case then every company/startup that fails to raise another round would survive on the "better tools" they developed with their previous funding rounds. But as we know, they die or sell instead.
  - HenriNext 7y ago
    Sorry, but that is a broken analogy. Wikipedia's revenue model and cost structure is nothing like startup's.
    - alexsideris 7y ago
      I agree it's not a perfect analogy, Wikipedia's model is even worse. Startups generate revenue as well. Wikipedia is nearly fully dependant on funding.
      - zanny 7y ago
        Wikipedia cannot "sell" their product, that's antithetical to it's purpose and mission. Doctors without Borders is not a failure because they rely on donations for disaster relief rather then profiting from it.
wortelefant 7y ago
Wikimedia is contributing a lot of time and resources to other Open/Commons projects as well, at least in Germany: Open Education, Open Science, Open Glam, Open Access, Open Government etc. They also invest in advocacy (lobbying for more Open Culture, Open Access etc), which is an important voice in the political process, since most grassroots initiatives can not sustain this kind of work for a long time. I don't see the expenses as necessary for the upkeep of Wikipedia alone, but as an investment to keep the ecosystem of Open Source/Open Access alive and growing, which benefits Wikipedia as well. While I think it is important to question the distribution of Wikimedia support for projects in the Commons (they probably could do more funding, e.g. a prototype fund) , having a strong institution to foster digital participation and Open Society is vital.
- jiofih 7y ago
  Never heard of these Open * efforts, besides open science maybe - are they supporting one of the free-access research publishing platforms?
Iv 7y ago
In 2019, with a budget of 100+M, if the WMF was really devoted to keeping wikipedia sustainably online, it would have found a way to store it in a P2P fashion.
praveenster 7y ago
I usually check ratings for a charity by reviewing it on Charity Navigator (which is itself a 501 (c) (3) and in need of donations as well). The rating for the Wikimedia Foundation happens to be really good: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=11212 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... I use Wikipedia for reference on various topics on a daily basis and I know my kids do it at school as well. Hence, I donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, the approximate cost of my yearly Netflix subscription as they provide huge amounts of valuable information without any ads and to everyone without paywalls. There aren’t very many free services on the web that run without ads.
- elect_engineer 7y ago
  Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Charity Navigator is a fine organization, but they do have the flaw of having to take the charities word on what the core mission is. If the WMF says they need 350 employees -- or 350,000 employees -- to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that flying people to exotic locations for Wikimania meetings is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that building a search engine to compete with Google is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. My position is that Wikipedia was accomplishing that core mission just fine in 2008. I was an active editor in 2008 and I did not notice any pressing needs that were not funded because we were spending 4.3% of what we are spending now. What, exactly, are we doing now that we were not doing ten years ago that justifies us spending 23 three times as much money to do essentially the same job? I could see spending 5 times more, but 23?
elect_engineer 7y ago
Hello. I am the author of the "Wikipedia has cancer" essay on Wikipedia. After I finish writing this I I will confirm this with a post to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Macon#[[WP:CANCER] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...] on Hacker news I read HN pretty much every day, even though I don't post very often. I will be happy to discuss any aspect of my essay on Wikipedia, and I would especially be interested in correcting any errors that may have crept in.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  The confirmation link that you posted isn't formatted quite correctly but here is a link that is. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Macon#WP:CANCER_on_Hacker_news https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...
- floren 7y ago
  Please stop with the giant disclaimer in front of every single reply and just post something like "(I am the author of the original essay)" and your response.
- dahart 7y ago
  What is the cancer exactly? I have a hard time buying that spending by itself is a cancer. Ignoring all the opinion commentary and looking at only the numbers in your essay, they seem to demonstrate exactly the opposite of your conclusion. The numbers are showing support and net assets are larger and growing faster than spending. Isn't that the definition of a healthy business? Spending increases are roughly linear for a decade, perhaps even slowing slightly based on your plot, but Wikipedia usage and value has grown as it becomes a global resource. This just my take on it from a distance, I don't know the ins and outs of the foundation or the web site, but all the commentary in your essay seems to obsess hyperbolically on separating the absolute spending numbers from any context. I'm failing to see evidence of an actual problem based on what you wrote. In a general sense, I can completely agree with the abstract idea that spending should have transparency and a budget, that's always a good idea. Wikipedia seems to me like it's still dramatically overperforming given its expenditures, that its value currently outweighs its costs, when you compare it to healthy for-profit websites of the same size & usage. Could all the increased spending be a symptom of the fact that Wikipedia 10 years ago was undervalued and managing by miracles to survive on a shoestring, and now that it's enormous the costs are correcting to where they should be?
joshfraser 7y ago
This actually looks like a healthy, growing organization. You want your revenue to exceed expenses and have a bit of a nest egg to give you buffer for an uncertain future.
TrickyRick 7y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FUser%3AGuy_Macon%2FWikipedia_has_Cancer https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw...
ossworkerrights 7y ago
Isn't this always the case with open source / "free" platforms? Loads of volunteers put the effort in, while someone somewhere has enormous financial benefits off of it?
mikl 7y ago
Ugh, so is this was they’ve been doing with our donations, building some massive behemoth that burns $100M a year on who-knows-what? Their financial statements say very little about what they’re doing with it, but it is an exorbitant amount of money to keep a website running, even one the size of Wikipedia. Other threads state that they’re funding all sorts of side-hustles with the money. If so, that is fraudulent, since when they do fundraising campaigns, they claim to be raising funds for Wikipedia. Really slimy of them to then go and spend it on something else.
agustif 7y ago
Whit what's just happening with the .org sale, anything can happen, even a sell-off of wikipedia is on the table I guess...
blackbrokkoli 7y ago
I'm a bit astonished how here on HackerNews there are articles all day about how sophisticated and surprisingly complicated and convoluted stuff like hosting, IT security, people management, scaling, updating etc is and yet it is somehow ultra suspicious that a page with massive growth had to change in a non-lineary way over the course of two decades with rapidly changing culture... Wow employing 300 people to keep up with a massively more popular internet on much more differentiated devices in times of information platforms manipulating national elections is not exactly 300 times as expensive as employing one dude to do odd jobs around the house?! Must be mismanagement!! Wow administrating a site which went from changing slowly to changing at inhumane pace and serving those pages with media formats which did not even existed at the beginning to a growing global population does not just include changing a checkbox on hostgator?! Must be scammers in their IT!! I realize this comes off as very salty - I actually don't have much stake in this personally but I despise the pseudo intellectual criticism here in this otherwise very down-to-earth community. PS: Comparing things to cancer is the Hitler-comparison of biology.
- Veedrac 7y ago
  Page views have doubled since 2008, and decreased since 2015. This can't be about hosting. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombine...
Ajedi32 7y ago
Thought exercise: if the Wikimedia Foundation collapsed today and we had to build a new version of Wikipedia without their assistance, how much would it cost? Data dumps of Wikipedia's databases, and the MediaWiki software itself are all Freely and publicly available[1], so none of that would have to be rebuilt; we'd only have to create a new organizational and operational infrastructure. [1]: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
posterboy 7y ago
they are a tech giantt already. There's no difference
el_cujo 7y ago
I'm sure WMF does some good stuff, but I'm sure the average donator just thinks they're donating to keep Wikipedia alive and online and has no idea about all of the extra stuff WMF does (and therefore needs money to fund). I'm not necessarily saying WMF's stuff isn't worth funding, but it really seems like they're tricking people into paying for it under the guise of keeping Wikipedia running.
hollerith 7y ago
How to avoid the fundraising banners on Wikipedia: Dismissing them by clicking the X works only momentarily. Here is how to keep them gone. You have to have an account and be logged in. Go to Special:Preferences, click on the "Gadgets" tab, then tick the box next to the statement "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner."
davidwitt415 7y ago
As someone who has contributed regularly to Wikipedia over the years, I stopped recently due to another cancer that Wikipedia has, called 'Philip Cross.' Supposedly an individual, he has made roughly 150,000 edits since 2013 without taking a single day off. Anybody who is not aware of 'Philip Cross' can read about 'him' here: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c... https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-msm-promotion-operation-part-3/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c... "According to Craig Murray, whose Wikipedia page has been repeated edited by Cross remarked that "the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel." Wikipedia management, all the way up to Jimmy Wales are well aware of 'Philip Cross' and yet 'he' continues to operate freely as an editor. Despite the basic usefulness of Wikipedia for non-controversial topics, I decided that I cannot and will not support an organization that allows this kind of astroturfing.
- elect_engineer 7y ago
  Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... First off, the above comment is an example of hijacking; using a discussion about one thing to try to get attention for something else. You see this a lot with Abortion, Gun control, and US presidential politics. I am not saying that those aren't important topics, but do they really need to be inserted into a discussion about how much money Wikipedia is spending? I would strongly encourage the person trying to hijack this discussion to start a new discussion I would strongly encourage all HN readers to not give the poster the attention he wants and to downvote any comments that are not about WMF finances I also would strongly encourage all HN readers to not respond to this sort of thing and to stay on topic. For those who are interested, here is what Wikipedia has done about this situation: Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive240#Philip_Cross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from post-1978 British politics, broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter. This sanction supersedes the community sanction applied in May 2018. Passed 11 to 0 at 18:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC) Amended by motion at 20:08, 9 August 2018 (UTC) Wikipedia's relevant policy states: "The purpose of a topic ban is to forbid editors from making edits related to a certain topic area where their contributions have been disruptive, but to allow them to edit the rest of Wikipedia. Unless clearly and unambiguously specified otherwise, a topic ban covers all pages (not only articles) broadly related to the topic, as well as the parts of other pages that are related to the topic, as encapsulated in the phrase 'broadly construed.'" If anyone thinks Wikipedia should do more, they should bring it up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests -- not on hacker news. Again, I encourage all HN readers to not respond to hijacking attempts.
g8oz 7y ago
Like many successful foundations the Wikimedia Foundation has been taken over by empire builders. These types expand non-core mandates to justify increased headcount and gain clout & self-importance. The tech requirements of Wikipedia are straightforward. The content comes from volunteers. The software development could be handled via a community development process like Debian's.
nazgulnarsil 7y ago
When you subsidize something you get more of it. Don't donate to WMF. If it crashes and burns it is trivial for anyone else to host the existing material with <10 employees and <100k year hosting costs.
- elect_engineer 7y ago
  But who would pay the 137,201 active editors? Oh, wait, they are all unpaid volunteers. OK, who would pay the 1,149 administrators? Oh wait, they are all unpaid volunteers too. OK, who would pay the developers? Oh, wait, the software was originally created by unpaid volunteers and it works well enough that having three developers evaluating bug fixes submitted by volunteers would be enough. There are plenty of Linux distributions and open-source projects that get by on one or two developers. What about the 924,632,645 edits, 49,122,961 pages of all kinds and 5,978,255 articles? Oh wait, those are free to copy over along with the software that runs the encyclopedia. Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"
celerrimus 7y ago
@elect_engineer: Well, as many here already pointed out, I do not see here cancer grows. The 16,000,000,000 page views per month is something really huge. For some perspective, I run servers for a commercial company, and with such traffic, we would pay about $7,000,000 per year. But of course, we run on the latest and overprovisioned hardware for best performance and safety, and in reputable, but a very expensive company. In this scenario, $2M for hosting such a big infrastructure globally is not looking too bad. I assume that they need a lot of sysadmins to manage such big infrastructure (maybe 500-600 servers?), and those needs to be paid well. I won't be surprised that this would be much over $10M per year. Maybe this data is available somewhere, those are only my pure estimates. Anyway, with revenue of $100M and $20M of excess every year, dramatic mails and notices I get from MediaWiki and Wales itself, how bad Wikipedia needs my donation, looks now a little disgusting for me...

528 points by wlkr 7y ago

As someone who has edited since 2007 (pseudoanonymously, about 13k edits), I appreciate the continued investments that Wikipedia has made into various initiatives, most importantly technology. It's not cheap or easy to stay on top of technical trends (e.g., upgrading to PHP 7) while shipping feature improvements. For example, I use Visual Editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor) all the time.

save_ferris 7y ago

> There has been zero actual effort by the WMF to increase transparency on spending. Oof. Aside from compute costs, what could justify a more than 100% increase in expenses from 2012 to the present? The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective).

landryraccoon 7y ago
> The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective) I’m curious, it sounds like you’re a casual Wikipedia user so - how do you have any idea if this is true? What about editor features, community, moderation, administrative improvements? This kind of attitude frustrates me - it’s the sort of attitude that kills nonprofit fundraising efforts unless they are for show in a way that laypeople can understand. Surely you can see how inefficient it would be to run a non profit if everything they spent money on had to be highly visible?
- wyattpeak 7y ago
  Frankly, if a nonprofit can't justify to laypeople why they should have money, they shouldn't have money. My money is limited, the causes which can benefit from it are not. It seems to me the height of self-absorption that an organisation should expect donations over the many other worthwhile causes without justifying the benefit that money would bring. Changes to editor tools and processes don't cut it. All of those exist in service of improving Wikipedia as a resource. If I can't see those changes as an end-user, I question whether any of them really mattered. Is a fantastic new user-friendly diagnostic machine justified in a hospital if treatment rates don't go up?
  - DenseComet 7y ago
    Wikipedia's edits rates have been increasing very rapidly. Tools like those must exist in order to vet them and ensure that Wikipedia remains a trustworthy source. Its hard to see the benefits (nor am I sure how to ensure it shows) as the expectation is Wikipedia is always correct, but without them, the misinformation in Wikipedia would be much greater.
    - wyattpeak 7y ago
      Between 2004 and 2018, monthly edits grew from 500k to 40M, an 80x growth. [1] In the same period, expenses have grown from 25k to 80M, a 3200x growth. [TFA] [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|all|~total|monthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e...
      - mpalmer 7y ago
        Not claiming to know more than you about this but your point assumes that the changing cost of maintaining the project at scale has some proportional relationship to the number of edits. As it has attracted global attention and ever more significant influence on people worldwide, Wikipedia's threats are likely more varied and insidious than they were in 2004. The cost of offsetting these threats may not relate to the volume of edits.
        wyattpeak 7y ago
        I certainly don't claim any domain knowledge, but the growth in expenses is so vast that I'm disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm not, by the way, suggesting that a 3200x growth in expenses is inherently unjustifiable, just that it should in fact be justified.
        mpalmer 7y ago
        Yes, agreed that it should be justified in the open.
- theamk 7y ago
  I think good communications are especially important for nonprofits! If one is donating, they will want to know how their money will be spent. The things do not need to be highly visible of course -- but they should be at least explained. I don't understand why they are not saying things like "we hired 50 more programmers to keep our servers running, and 25 more to develop new AI to fight spam". Instead, I looked at "2018 Annual Report" [0], and found those specific points: - Support researchers who make offline wikipedia - Advertise itself in Nigeria - Support participation of women in Wikipedia - AI to detect vandalism - Page previews - Content translation tools That's 1 user feature and 2 editor features. Did I miss something? [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/
  - LegitShady 7y ago
    A balance sheet and details on why wikipedia say advertising itself in Nigeria Isa good use of charity funds. Komen style charities aren't charities.
- baddox 7y ago
  I don’t understand. It’s pretty reasonable to say that editor features, etc. are not worth the money if they are not noticeable to the basic user, which presumably accounts for the overwhelmingly vast majority of Wikipedia page views.
  - loeg 7y ago
    And perhaps more importantly, the majority of donations.
  - jcrben 7y ago
    If editors don't get better tools, they'll stop editing. Then the content for basic users will not be worth reading. Source: continuously edited since 2007, and continue in large part due to improved tools.
    - s1artibartfast 7y ago
      Just Curious: In what way is the continual improvement of tools a motivation to keep editing? Do you think that $40 million is a reasonable cost for those improvements?
      - jcrben 7y ago
        If you edit using Visual Editor and compare that to the old wiki markup, you will understand. Visual Editor much faster esp. with automatic citation templates. My time is valuable (more than when I started as a poor college student) and my tolerance for bad UX has declined as technology in general has improved. And that's just one tool which has improved. There's an annual community wishlist survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_20... And yes, it's reasonable. I work in tech as a software engineer and it's not as cheap as people think.
        s1artibartfast 7y ago
        Thanks for responding!
- jrumbut 7y ago
  I'm a very light editor, small dollar donor, and moderate user and I can say I'm pretty impressed with the platform improvements. The pace of change appears to be very carefully managed to almost always be positive and minimize pointless disruption. The complaints in this thread are part of why you get those big, flashy redesigns that look great but hurt utility. Of course as a donor I'd never turn down more good for less money, but I don't think maximizing thriftiness always yields the best value. I'd rather things be just a little plush (if that's how you'd describe the current state) and see Wikipedia continue to succeed as it (largely) has.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  Community and moderation are mostly handled by volunteers. Wikimedia's efforts to moderate the platform have been widely condemned by the community, because they're seen as an infringement on the community's self-rule by an unaccountable bureaucracy.
Avamander 7y ago
Are you saying the only thing worth spending money on are arbitrary redesigns of the user-facing UI?
taneq 7y ago
Bandwidth costs? I'd imagine they've seen a huge increase in both compute and bandwidth requirements over that time.
- theamk 7y ago
  Finance report [0] says "Internet hosting" was $2,342,130, or 2.8% of their expenses. This is approximately the same as last year ($2,169,861, [1]) [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin... [1] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html
  - ketzu 7y ago
    That's an 8% increase over 1 year. Those over 7 years would already result in an increase of 72%.
- loeg 7y ago
  The rate of spending growth exceeds actual resource use growth by "lots." Also, the cost of those resources — bandwidth, storage, etc — have been decreasing on a per-capacity basis over this time period. Bandwidth, compute, and storage are all vastly cheaper than they were 10 years ago or even 5.
paulie_a 7y ago
< The platform has barely changed That's a feature not everything needs to be tricked out with the JavaScript equivalent of spinners.

Medicalidiot 7y ago

If I remember correctly, the person that wrote this had quite the axe to grind about Wikipedia and her/his major criticisms of it were actually what nonprofits look to shoot for. Wikipedia has genuine issues, but not anything this person says has much merit.

apsec112 7y ago
This feels like a very empty response; it doesn't point out any specific problem with the author's facts or reasoning. The basic argument is that, ten years ago, Wikipedia ran a very similar service at a much lower cost, so the current organization is therefore spending money ineffectively. You can say you disagree with that, but why? It makes sense to me.
- itsgrimetime 7y ago
  But Wikipedia is no where near the same service it was in 2012. Dozens (if not hundreds) of features, increased traffic demands and higher availability, it seems obvious that the platform would have to grow.
  - AbrahamParangi 7y ago
    The point is that while views have increased by 10x over the past 15 years, expenses have increased by 1250x. That leaves a 125x increase in per-user spending that does not appear to be reflected in commensurate increases in user value.
    - slowenough 7y ago
      > while views increased 10x over the past 15 years, expenses have increased by 1250x. That leaves a 125x Wikipedia is probably a money laundering operation. How else to explain the cooked books feel of those numbers? Edit: wow way to anger The herd! seems I've hit a nerve so I know I must be onto something. The fact that people don't want to consider this point of view makes it more likely to be the case because it's shielded from inspection, by The mirage of goodness conveyed by Wikipedia's reputation perhaps its charity status. I suppose such shielding must be how many money laundering operations work to disguise themselves. so people being outraged at the suggestion is exactly as intended and doing the work of hiding the money laundering business. This is fascinating. Well done!

ken 7y ago

It's a symptom of the centralized nature of the web. To serve everybody, you need a boatload of servers. I recall hearing about this cool free editable encyclopedia in the early 2000's, but I could never get a single page to completely load. It was unusably slow. It's nice to think Wikipedia only needs $50K a year in operating expenses, but you can't reasonably develop and host a top-10 website on that.

cldellow 7y ago
Wikipedia does about 200 billion pageviews a year. At $80,000,000/year, one penny buys them 25 pageviews. Yeah, there's room for some efficiencies here. I say this as someone who donated $1,000 a long time ago and then realized that the WMF, despite what it's begging appeals would have you believe, is doing just fine. It's just a matter of what they choose to spend donor money on. I have no problem with them raising money and spending it, but I find their fundraising campaigns very misleading.
jfim 7y ago
The hosting expenses associated with the Wikimedia foundation are, according to their financial report [0], 2.3 million USD. Hosting their servers is actually their smallest expense item, other than "Special event expense, net". As a comparison, they spend 52.1 million on salaries, wages, awards, and grants. I'd disagree with your statement that they could not reasonably develop and host a top-10 website with the amount of money that they're raising, and if they needed to, they could significantly cut down on expenses and still keep everything running. [0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
jcranmer 7y ago
Wikipedia, to a first approximation, is basically a collection of static webpages, especially in comparison to other top websites. Relatively few pageviews need to actually hit the central database (compare this to Google, where essentially every pageview needs to be customized specifically for the request), which means that the actual cost to service the traffic is going to be much less than other websites of comparative pageviews.

apsec112 7y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235

Randor 7y ago

Well, I'm not seeing any problems. The Annual Report is available here: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...

surround 7y ago
From the “update” sections: > [The 2016-2017 report] has numbers for "Grants and awards" and "Professional service expenses" but there is no obvious way of finding out the details of those expenditures
anonu 7y ago
Me neither. Sounds like a guy with a grudge. Organizations grow and morph over time. Assuming Wikipedia should be a barebones hosting platform like it was at it's start is probably dreaming.
- Randor 7y ago
  Yep, It appears that their biggest expense is the $38,597,407 in salaries distributed to ~350 employees. This makes the average salary $110,278 at the Wikimedia Foundation. I don't really have anything negative to say about that. However I guess you could question why they need 350 employees. So I looked at the projects they are currently working on: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_projects https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_p...
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    I can see the argument for say 175 employees and a reduced scope, while building up an endowment to better weather down-years is better for WMF's long-term goals, but there's also the risk that reduced spending would cause reduced donations.
    - loeg 7y ago
      > but there's also the risk that reduced spending would cause reduced donations. Reduced spending and reduced donations would be a good outcome for Wikipedia readers (especially in the long term). Lower running costs allows putting more current revenue towards that endowment, and means the future is a bit more sustainable in less favorable economic cycles. Donations also don't exist in a vacuum; the best use of donors' limited money is probably not WMF burning a pile of it. I'd encourage, for example, https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities in place of WMF giving.

thomascgalvin 7y ago

Year-over-year, "revenue" and "profitability", or at least the not-for-profit version thereof, have been increasing for Wikipedia. Every company in the world is trying to be in that exact situation. Economics is not biology. Stasis is very hard to maintain. Typically, a business is either growing, or it is declining. Our current problems tend to revolve around companies that are too big to fail, not companies that are too big to succeed. I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade.

apsec112 7y ago
Wikipedia is a non-profit, not a company. Wikipedia's "revenues" are donations from readers, who are told that they have to donate for Wikipedia to stay online. Since almost everyone already uses Wikipedia, "growing revenue" must mean getting more donations from each user, who then might donate less to other charities.
CriticalCathed 7y ago
>I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade. Why? The thing of value in wikipedia is the encyclopedia that was Built off of FREE LABOR by VOLUNTEERS. The increases in spending seem to be going to white collar office jobs that aren't actually necessary for The Wiki to exist and thrive. All wiki needs is servers. It shouldn't need to grow. Wiki isn't a capitalist entity. It doesn't need to play by the rules of capital. And that it is mirroring the pattern of capitalist companies is tremendously worrying for the future of the project.
- elect_engineer 7y ago
  Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... I think you hit the nail on the head. For a charity that is trying to feed starving children, they can always use more money as long as there are any starving children left. Same with most charities. But if a charity exists to but an encyclopedia on the web, they don't need to keep increasing their spending other than what is needed to cover any increases in the cost of running the servers plus a reasonable amount for support staff. Related: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Frequently_asked_questions#Why_will_it_require_up_to_US$2.5_million_to_develop_a_movement_strategy https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...?

klyrs 7y ago

> In 2008 Wikipedia had over 5 million registered editors, 250 language editions, and 7.5 million articles. Wikipedia.org was the 10th-busiest website in the world. We had already started Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity and Wikispecies, we had already opened chapters in multiple countries, and we had already moved from Florida to San Fransisco. No neat charts showing trends on these numbers? I'd want to see that comparison, at a bare minimum, before sounding alarms.

jakobmi 7y ago

Guy Macros: Okay, good. What do you suggest doing now?

loeg 7y ago
The article says that. > If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now, before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details. We should limit spending increases to no more than inflation plus some percentage (adjusted for any increases in page views), build up our endowment, and structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad.

ufo 7y ago

> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it? Honestly, I always felt that these kind of conparisons are insensitive, and doubling down on it like the linked article does doesn't help.

LegitShady 7y ago
If you tell your mother you'll have found at least one person who cares whether you're offended or not. In fact I find posts aboit wikipedia in general insensitive please stop.
misterdoubt 7y ago
It doesn't even make sense with the data being presented. > After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year. As a grad student I made a total $1,300 per month, but ten years later I'm spending that on just housing costs. So what?
- elect_engineer 7y ago
  Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Re: "Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year." You missed the first part of what I wrote in my essay: "Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it WILL happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment." I made it clear that Wikipedia is not in trouble at the present time. But there is a real possibility that there are bad times ahead, and we should prepare for them now.

umvi 7y ago

I do like his idea of building up investments and running wikipedia off of ROI instead of begging for donations every year. Why is it that WMF hasn't done that yet?

jcrben 7y ago
It has been raising an endowment for several years: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment You can donate at https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...
- peteretep 7y ago
  I would like to see the Gates Foundation and co start investing in more media endowments like this.
  - s1artibartfast 7y ago
    Seems like a terrible investment for the Gates foundation. It is highly visible and has ample public funding. Additionally, it appears that it has no budget control.
- elect_engineer 7y ago
  It has indeed been raising an endowment for several years, but every time I ask them to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad the answer is "maybe next year". If the endowment is just one more account that can be drained at will we have no protection from a sudden drop in revenue while the WMF maintains the current spending levels in the hope that revenue will recover. I also looked into whether the endowment is legally protected against a large payout as a result of a lawsuit. I am not a lawyer, but it looks like the WMF needs to structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal to get that sort of protection. Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".
persona_reuse 7y ago

shubb 7y ago

Looking at what they claim to be working on, maybe the money is just being spent on stuff that americans don't see. The last few years, the annual plans seem focussed on making Wikipedia relevant in India, South America, and the Middle East. When I was at EE school, the chip manufacturers gave the school devboards students go to know their stuff. Matlab was cheap too. I suspect Wikimedia is funding a bunch of journalism and research training in these countries, so that every highschool kid gets pointed to wikipedia at school.

LegitShady 7y ago
If they are as a charity collecting money ostensibly needing it for their online encyclopedia they should disclose all this explicitly with dollar amounts.
- shubb 7y ago
  Yes, unless there is a vital reason why not, I think charities should have to disclose spending to quite a high resolution. It seems the most recent business plan and accounts are less detailed than in previous years. This is a backwards step.

Causality1 7y ago

Putting all the arguments aside, I had no idea Wikipedia was so far in the black. The donation begging had me thinking they were desperately clinging to life. I don't like that. From now on my annual Wikipedia donation will be going to the Internet Archive.

jackfrodo 7y ago
I agree. The cup-of-coffee keeps wikipedia running strategy feels kinda scummy, but hey, it's probably how they got so far in the black in the first place. No incentive for them to stop the campaign.
eropple 7y ago
The Internet Archive is also a profoundly worthwhile charity. But those of us with a little understanding of the space would be remiss to not point out that this article is dishonest and you're falling for it. It isn't uncommon for nonprofits (and Wikipedia is not only a nonprofit but is functionally infrastructure at this point; its survival is important beyond its own self-perpetuation) to try to build up an endowment in order to survive lean times. This is normal. You're falling for an okeydoke. Please don't.
- maehwasu 7y ago
  If their actual goal was to build up an endowment to survive lean times, their spending profile would be quite different. That may be an ancillary goal of theirs, but it’s demonstrably not close to the primary one (in a revealed preference sense).
- Causality1 7y ago
  Building up an endowment is fine. Misleading me to think that Wikipedia is close to shutting down due to lack of funds is uncool. I don't care that they spend too much money; I care that they convinced me they're broke.
- joshuaissac 7y ago
  What exactly is dishonest about the article? The author's criticism is that the Wikimedia Foundation isn't building up its endowment fast enough, and that it instead uses the donations on frivolous spending.

ajxs 7y ago

I think he raises a very important point regarding the enormous risk of WMF being purchased by the current generation of tech-giants. I don't think there is any reason to believe that new management of Wikipedia by a company such as Google, Facebook or Amazon would be the least bit benevolent. The implications that Wikipedia being co-opted would have on freedom of information on the internet would be immense. I don't think that this is idle scare-mongering. Of course, there is already a risk of misinformation being propagated on Wikipedia by bad actors, I don't think that there is a very big gap to jump before we lose control over the online record completely.

jcrben 7y ago
Over half of the board is elected by the community of editors, so it doesn't seem very likely https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/board/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/board/. I vote in these elections and count Dr. James Heilman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman) as a friend.
- geowwy 7y ago
  In the case of insolvency I don't think the board will have much choice.
  - elect_engineer 7y ago
    Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Re: "In the case of insolvency I don't think the board will have much choice"; this is a key point to understanding my essay. Imagine someone winning a huge lawsuit and the WMF not being able to pay. Or imagine a really bad scandal (something like The New York Times publishing conclusive proof that the WMF is a front for ISIS) and donations drop through the floor, followed by the WMF continuing to increase spending until they run out of funds. None of these doomsday scenarios are likely, but they are not impossible either.

commandersaki 7y ago

I honestly don’t mind a world without Wikipedia.

loeg 7y ago

(2017)? It seems the original article dates to 2016, but was updated for 2017 and 2018. (The trend holds, which is why it's on HN frontpage today.)

jeanvalmarc 7y ago

So in summary Wikipedia is a responsibly run nonprofit that spends slightly less than it takes in while providing a valuable service to millions (or billions) of users?

joshuaissac 7y ago
The summary is that the Wikimedia Foundation asks for and spends increasingly large amounts of money in donations mostly on things that are unrelated to Wikipedia. The writer seems to want the Foundation to use the money instead to build up an endowment (like universities do) so that Wikipedia is not eternally reliant on donations to survive. He also suggests that Wikipedia itself is fairly well-run, but the Foundation is not.

deevolution 7y ago

The fact that wikipedia, the world encyclopedia, is centrally hosted is itself a problem. Wikipedia should be censorship resistant, borderless, distributed and resilient to disasters, similar to Bitcoin. So far it's none of those things, so it doesn't deserve my money. If I could contribute by hosting articles on my computer I would be more than happy to offer up a few gigs of harddrive space in exchange for access to the world knowledge bank

viraptor 7y ago
You can https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/
- deevolution 7y ago
  Oh wow, this is awesome! Also looks like there is an active proposal for decentralizing wikipedia[1]. But IPFS seems to more or less offer a decent solution. 1. https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wikipedia https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wik...
m463 7y ago
I agree with your sentiment, but I am curious what the real-life tradeoffs would be? For example, what would happen to a distributed wikipedia in relation to say maps and borders or other controversial subjects like trump, scientology or vaccinations? Maybe these are the same questions people had when wikipedia first started in relation to traditional encyclopedias, and we already have the answers?
- ossworkerrights 7y ago
  I suppose all nodes would have to be in sync with a parent node, but indeed that is a good question. What happens when one goes rogue and starts bending the truth. There is nothing stopping criminal governments around the world from doing it, in such a set-up.
clarry 7y ago

raz32dust 7y ago

I am all for transparency in spending, but I don't support the author's suggested guidelines for spending. Sticking to inflation-and page-view adjusted growth in spending is a terrible requirement. It ties the hands of the company to do any sort of innovation. I donate pretty regularly, and I am happy that wikipedia is doing more with my money than to just keep the site running.

xyzzyz 7y ago
Can you name one thing that the foundation did with your money? This might be a trick question, so be careful to not confuse things that Wikipedia does without your money with things Wikimedia does with your money.
- Camillo 7y ago
  IIRC they started a web search engine project that went nowhere.
  - _joe 7y ago
    You remember incorrectly. It was a plan from a past Executive Director that never even started.
    - elect_engineer 7y ago
      Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... I do not believe that the above "It was a plan from a past Executive Director that never even started" claim is accurate. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-17/Special_report#knowledgeengine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/Special_report#knowledgeengine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/In_focus#knowledgeengine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... Key quotes: "In May 2015, Risker observed that a team called 'Search and Discovery' was 'extraordinarily well-staffed with a disproportionate number of engineers at the same time as other areas seem to be wanting for them'." "We also know at some point it was an ambitious project to create a brand new search engine as an alternative to Google."

zelly 7y ago

There's no need for Wikipedia to be a centralized entity. I do not want to send checks to some foundation. I want to run a node.

opportune 7y ago

Here's another view of the WMF's runaway spending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_multilanguage.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi... I don't donate to the WMF because they don't need my money, but I wish they just kept Wikipedia running and made small incremental changes over time for scaling/keeping up to date/adding helpful features. I would of course donate if Wikipedia were at risk of failing (not that it would be that hard to rehost and rebuild it), and they know that and exploit everyone who doesn't realize how rich they are with the annoying begging. As they say: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". If you keep giving a nonprofit money, it will keep growing, even if it has more than enough it needs for its earlier charter.

threatofrain 7y ago
But for how many years can Wikipedia run on that much money? IMO not having a large endowment which comfortably lasts a decade is irresponsible for the kind of resource Wikipedia presents to the world.
- circlefavshape 7y ago
  They're working on an endowment afaik
  - elect_engineer 7y ago
    Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Re: "They're working on an endowment afaik", Yes. They are. which is why I have called on the WMF to "build up our endowment, and structure the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad." The danger I warn about in my essay is the WMF continuing to increase spending even if donations stop increasing. If they do that there is currently nothing stopping them from draining the endowment and spending it.

mastazi 7y 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 This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated? I can't think of any other scenario besides Wikipedia where this would be expected to be true.

busymom0 7y ago
Also hasn't the cost of hosting gone down significantly since 2005?
logifail 7y ago
> Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated? How would one expect them to be correlated? As an aside, a friend of mine relaunched an ecommerce site in March. Wordpress + WooCommerce, stripped of fluff. His hosting plan costs him $3/month, including tax. He told me his site took just over $60k in revenue in the first 6 weeks.
- darawk 7y ago
  I assume the operative word for him was 'linearly' not 'correlated'. But cost/pageview is sublinearly correlated, so spending growth should be even slower than a linear projection.
  - logifail 7y ago
    > spending growth should be even slower than a linear projection Indeed. In my experience in several organisations, as soon as there is even an inkling of "spare money" in (part of) an organisation, humans will invariably starting coming up with creative ways to spend it. This may end badly. If you start with the premise: "there is [almost] no budget, what can we do anyway?", then you often get the most creative and useful solutions.
    - Reimersholme 7y ago
      "Parkinson's law is the adage that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion'. It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization." Fittingly enough, there's a Wikipedia article on the subject. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

HenriNext 7y ago

Click-bait redirects here. The figures don't look anything like growth rate of cancer, they look like growth rate of a toenail.. 10-15% a year. Then the author claims that "spending is growing at an ever-increasing rate" like cancer. But it is not. Draw a trend-line over the spending graph, and you'll see that the growth rate is actually damn linear (and well aligned with revenue growth). Rest of the article is reasons why spending should be reduced. Well maybe it shouldn't. As long as there is revenue growth, maybe it is better to invest the revenue on better tools. When revenue growth stops, you've got the better tools you invested in, and can then reduce spending by not building further new tools.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
alexsideris 7y ago
If that was the case then every company/startup that fails to raise another round would survive on the "better tools" they developed with their previous funding rounds. But as we know, they die or sell instead.
- HenriNext 7y ago
  Sorry, but that is a broken analogy. Wikipedia's revenue model and cost structure is nothing like startup's.
  - alexsideris 7y ago
    I agree it's not a perfect analogy, Wikipedia's model is even worse. Startups generate revenue as well. Wikipedia is nearly fully dependant on funding.
    - zanny 7y ago
      Wikipedia cannot "sell" their product, that's antithetical to it's purpose and mission. Doctors without Borders is not a failure because they rely on donations for disaster relief rather then profiting from it.

wortelefant 7y ago

Wikimedia is contributing a lot of time and resources to other Open/Commons projects as well, at least in Germany: Open Education, Open Science, Open Glam, Open Access, Open Government etc. They also invest in advocacy (lobbying for more Open Culture, Open Access etc), which is an important voice in the political process, since most grassroots initiatives can not sustain this kind of work for a long time. I don't see the expenses as necessary for the upkeep of Wikipedia alone, but as an investment to keep the ecosystem of Open Source/Open Access alive and growing, which benefits Wikipedia as well. While I think it is important to question the distribution of Wikimedia support for projects in the Commons (they probably could do more funding, e.g. a prototype fund) , having a strong institution to foster digital participation and Open Society is vital.

jiofih 7y ago
Never heard of these Open * efforts, besides open science maybe - are they supporting one of the free-access research publishing platforms?

Iv 7y ago

In 2019, with a budget of 100+M, if the WMF was really devoted to keeping wikipedia sustainably online, it would have found a way to store it in a P2P fashion.

praveenster 7y ago

I usually check ratings for a charity by reviewing it on Charity Navigator (which is itself a 501 (c) (3) and in need of donations as well). The rating for the Wikimedia Foundation happens to be really good: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=11212 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... I use Wikipedia for reference on various topics on a daily basis and I know my kids do it at school as well. Hence, I donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, the approximate cost of my yearly Netflix subscription as they provide huge amounts of valuable information without any ads and to everyone without paywalls. There aren’t very many free services on the web that run without ads.

elect_engineer 7y ago
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... Charity Navigator is a fine organization, but they do have the flaw of having to take the charities word on what the core mission is. If the WMF says they need 350 employees -- or 350,000 employees -- to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that flying people to exotic locations for Wikimania meetings is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that building a search engine to compete with Google is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. My position is that Wikipedia was accomplishing that core mission just fine in 2008. I was an active editor in 2008 and I did not notice any pressing needs that were not funded because we were spending 4.3% of what we are spending now. What, exactly, are we doing now that we were not doing ten years ago that justifies us spending 23 three times as much money to do essentially the same job? I could see spending 5 times more, but 23?

elect_engineer 7y ago

Hello. I am the author of the "Wikipedia has cancer" essay on Wikipedia. After I finish writing this I I will confirm this with a post to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Macon#[[WP:CANCER] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...] on Hacker news I read HN pretty much every day, even though I don't post very often. I will be happy to discuss any aspect of my essay on Wikipedia, and I would especially be interested in correcting any errors that may have crept in.

codetrotter 7y ago
The confirmation link that you posted isn't formatted quite correctly but here is a link that is. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Macon#WP:CANCER_on_Hacker_news https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...
floren 7y ago
Please stop with the giant disclaimer in front of every single reply and just post something like "(I am the author of the original essay)" and your response.
dahart 7y ago
What is the cancer exactly? I have a hard time buying that spending by itself is a cancer. Ignoring all the opinion commentary and looking at only the numbers in your essay, they seem to demonstrate exactly the opposite of your conclusion. The numbers are showing support and net assets are larger and growing faster than spending. Isn't that the definition of a healthy business? Spending increases are roughly linear for a decade, perhaps even slowing slightly based on your plot, but Wikipedia usage and value has grown as it becomes a global resource. This just my take on it from a distance, I don't know the ins and outs of the foundation or the web site, but all the commentary in your essay seems to obsess hyperbolically on separating the absolute spending numbers from any context. I'm failing to see evidence of an actual problem based on what you wrote. In a general sense, I can completely agree with the abstract idea that spending should have transparency and a budget, that's always a good idea. Wikipedia seems to me like it's still dramatically overperforming given its expenditures, that its value currently outweighs its costs, when you compare it to healthy for-profit websites of the same size & usage. Could all the increased spending be a symptom of the fact that Wikipedia 10 years ago was undervalued and managing by miracles to survive on a shoestring, and now that it's enormous the costs are correcting to where they should be?

joshfraser 7y ago

This actually looks like a healthy, growing organization. You want your revenue to exceed expenses and have a bit of a nest egg to give you buffer for an uncertain future.

TrickyRick 7y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FUser%3AGuy_Macon%2FWikipedia_has_Cancer https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw...

ossworkerrights 7y ago

Isn't this always the case with open source / "free" platforms? Loads of volunteers put the effort in, while someone somewhere has enormous financial benefits off of it?

mikl 7y ago

Ugh, so is this was they’ve been doing with our donations, building some massive behemoth that burns $100M a year on who-knows-what? Their financial statements say very little about what they’re doing with it, but it is an exorbitant amount of money to keep a website running, even one the size of Wikipedia. Other threads state that they’re funding all sorts of side-hustles with the money. If so, that is fraudulent, since when they do fundraising campaigns, they claim to be raising funds for Wikipedia. Really slimy of them to then go and spend it on something else.

agustif 7y ago

Whit what's just happening with the .org sale, anything can happen, even a sell-off of wikipedia is on the table I guess...

blackbrokkoli 7y ago

I'm a bit astonished how here on HackerNews there are articles all day about how sophisticated and surprisingly complicated and convoluted stuff like hosting, IT security, people management, scaling, updating etc is and yet it is somehow ultra suspicious that a page with massive growth had to change in a non-lineary way over the course of two decades with rapidly changing culture... Wow employing 300 people to keep up with a massively more popular internet on much more differentiated devices in times of information platforms manipulating national elections is not exactly 300 times as expensive as employing one dude to do odd jobs around the house?! Must be mismanagement!! Wow administrating a site which went from changing slowly to changing at inhumane pace and serving those pages with media formats which did not even existed at the beginning to a growing global population does not just include changing a checkbox on hostgator?! Must be scammers in their IT!! I realize this comes off as very salty - I actually don't have much stake in this personally but I despise the pseudo intellectual criticism here in this otherwise very down-to-earth community. PS: Comparing things to cancer is the Hitler-comparison of biology.

Veedrac 7y ago
Page views have doubled since 2008, and decreased since 2015. This can't be about hosting. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombine...

Ajedi32 7y ago

Thought exercise: if the Wikimedia Foundation collapsed today and we had to build a new version of Wikipedia without their assistance, how much would it cost? Data dumps of Wikipedia's databases, and the MediaWiki software itself are all Freely and publicly available[1], so none of that would have to be rebuilt; we'd only have to create a new organizational and operational infrastructure. [1]: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/

posterboy 7y ago

they are a tech giantt already. There's no difference

el_cujo 7y ago

I'm sure WMF does some good stuff, but I'm sure the average donator just thinks they're donating to keep Wikipedia alive and online and has no idea about all of the extra stuff WMF does (and therefore needs money to fund). I'm not necessarily saying WMF's stuff isn't worth funding, but it really seems like they're tricking people into paying for it under the guise of keeping Wikipedia running.

hollerith 7y ago

How to avoid the fundraising banners on Wikipedia: Dismissing them by clicking the X works only momentarily. Here is how to keep them gone. You have to have an account and be logged in. Go to Special:Preferences, click on the "Gadgets" tab, then tick the box next to the statement "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner."

davidwitt415 7y ago

As someone who has contributed regularly to Wikipedia over the years, I stopped recently due to another cancer that Wikipedia has, called 'Philip Cross.' Supposedly an individual, he has made roughly 150,000 edits since 2013 without taking a single day off. Anybody who is not aware of 'Philip Cross' can read about 'him' here: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c... https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-msm-promotion-operation-part-3/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c... "According to Craig Murray, whose Wikipedia page has been repeated edited by Cross remarked that "the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel." Wikipedia management, all the way up to Jimmy Wales are well aware of 'Philip Cross' and yet 'he' continues to operate freely as an editor. Despite the basic usefulness of Wikipedia for non-controversial topics, I decided that I cannot and will not support an organization that allows this kind of astroturfing.

elect_engineer 7y ago
Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... First off, the above comment is an example of hijacking; using a discussion about one thing to try to get attention for something else. You see this a lot with Abortion, Gun control, and US presidential politics. I am not saying that those aren't important topics, but do they really need to be inserted into a discussion about how much money Wikipedia is spending? I would strongly encourage the person trying to hijack this discussion to start a new discussion I would strongly encourage all HN readers to not give the poster the attention he wants and to downvote any comments that are not about WMF finances I also would strongly encourage all HN readers to not respond to this sort of thing and to stay on topic. For those who are interested, here is what Wikipedia has done about this situation: Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive240#Philip_Cross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from post-1978 British politics, broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter. This sanction supersedes the community sanction applied in May 2018. Passed 11 to 0 at 18:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC) Amended by motion at 20:08, 9 August 2018 (UTC) Wikipedia's relevant policy states: "The purpose of a topic ban is to forbid editors from making edits related to a certain topic area where their contributions have been disruptive, but to allow them to edit the rest of Wikipedia. Unless clearly and unambiguously specified otherwise, a topic ban covers all pages (not only articles) broadly related to the topic, as well as the parts of other pages that are related to the topic, as encapsulated in the phrase 'broadly construed.'" If anyone thinks Wikipedia should do more, they should bring it up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests -- not on hacker news. Again, I encourage all HN readers to not respond to hijacking attempts.

g8oz 7y ago

Like many successful foundations the Wikimedia Foundation has been taken over by empire builders. These types expand non-core mandates to justify increased headcount and gain clout & self-importance. The tech requirements of Wikipedia are straightforward. The content comes from volunteers. The software development could be handled via a community development process like Debian's.

nazgulnarsil 7y ago

When you subsidize something you get more of it. Don't donate to WMF. If it crashes and burns it is trivial for anyone else to host the existing material with <10 employees and <100k year hosting costs.

elect_engineer 7y ago
But who would pay the 137,201 active editors? Oh, wait, they are all unpaid volunteers. OK, who would pay the 1,149 administrators? Oh wait, they are all unpaid volunteers too. OK, who would pay the developers? Oh, wait, the software was originally created by unpaid volunteers and it works well enough that having three developers evaluating bug fixes submitted by volunteers would be enough. There are plenty of Linux distributions and open-source projects that get by on one or two developers. What about the 924,632,645 edits, 49,122,961 pages of all kinds and 5,978,255 articles? Oh wait, those are free to copy over along with the software that runs the encyclopedia. Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"

celerrimus 7y ago

@elect_engineer: Well, as many here already pointed out, I do not see here cancer grows. The 16,000,000,000 page views per month is something really huge. For some perspective, I run servers for a commercial company, and with such traffic, we would pay about $7,000,000 per year. But of course, we run on the latest and overprovisioned hardware for best performance and safety, and in reputable, but a very expensive company. In this scenario, $2M for hosting such a big infrastructure globally is not looking too bad. I assume that they need a lot of sysadmins to manage such big infrastructure (maybe 500-600 servers?), and those needs to be paid well. I won't be surprised that this would be much over $10M per year. Maybe this data is available somewhere, those are only my pure estimates. Anyway, with revenue of $100M and $20M of excess every year, dramatic mails and notices I get from MediaWiki and Wales itself, how bad Wikipedia needs my donation, looks now a little disgusting for me...