3 ms·

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 encycl

by 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.

by ken 7y ago

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.