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The servers are relatively low when compared to the rest There is an essay called "wikipedia has cancer" about its balooning costs that grow like a tumor http

by rvba 6y ago

The servers are relatively low when compared to the rest There is an essay called "wikipedia has cancer" about its balooning costs that grow like a tumor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Qub3d 6y ago
FYI, the user who wrote that keeps an annually-updated version on his own userpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... It includes updates as of March 2020.
fomine3 6y ago
This post should be pinned for this topic.
bawolff 6y ago
I've read it. I think its misleading. Hosting costs were less when wikimedia had no money, but speed was much lower, downtime was constant, there were no backup data centers (and the data center was literally in a high risk hurricane zone), and the sites had exponential growth since then. I'm not sure if that chart includes salary cost, but there's also the difference between paying all the sysadmins vs largely volunteer sysadmins. Maybe there's an argument that its better to stick to volunteers if at all possible, but at the end of the day there are quality improvements when you have 24/7 on call coverage vs hoping some random volunteer with a day-job is available to bring the site back up when it explodes (not to mention burn out is not sustainable in the long term). At the end of the day, wikipedia's hosting is much higher quality now than it was in the beginning. Wikipedia used to go down so much there was literally an external website dedicated as a scratch pad for users to write articles on until the real website came back up. Back in the day, when WMF had no money, they cut every corner they could to make it work. The result was something that was always on fire but got the job done. Now we have much better quality. But quality costs money. Whether or not the trade-off is worth it is debatable, but lets not pretend that wikimedia hosting costs are buying the same thing as they were in 2005. Last of all, i would encourage a comparison to any other site of similar size/popularity. Wikimedia hosting is orders of magnitude cheaper than industry norms. [Disclaimer: used to work there but not on the infra team. I dont work there anymore. My opinions are my own]

by rvba 6y ago

Qub3d 6y ago

FYI, the user who wrote that keeps an annually-updated version on his own userpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... It includes updates as of March 2020.

fomine3 6y ago

This post should be pinned for this topic.

bawolff 6y ago

I've read it. I think its misleading. Hosting costs were less when wikimedia had no money, but speed was much lower, downtime was constant, there were no backup data centers (and the data center was literally in a high risk hurricane zone), and the sites had exponential growth since then. I'm not sure if that chart includes salary cost, but there's also the difference between paying all the sysadmins vs largely volunteer sysadmins. Maybe there's an argument that its better to stick to volunteers if at all possible, but at the end of the day there are quality improvements when you have 24/7 on call coverage vs hoping some random volunteer with a day-job is available to bring the site back up when it explodes (not to mention burn out is not sustainable in the long term). At the end of the day, wikipedia's hosting is much higher quality now than it was in the beginning. Wikipedia used to go down so much there was literally an external website dedicated as a scratch pad for users to write articles on until the real website came back up. Back in the day, when WMF had no money, they cut every corner they could to make it work. The result was something that was always on fire but got the job done. Now we have much better quality. But quality costs money. Whether or not the trade-off is worth it is debatable, but lets not pretend that wikimedia hosting costs are buying the same thing as they were in 2005. Last of all, i would encourage a comparison to any other site of similar size/popularity. Wikimedia hosting is orders of magnitude cheaper than industry norms. [Disclaimer: used to work there but not on the infra team. I dont work there anymore. My opinions are my own]