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Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.
by Clewza313 5y ago
Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.
- zozbot234 5y ago10 years ago would've been 2011 or so. I'd say it's very much in the ballpark wrt. global impact, considering everything that Wikimedia does and the way the projects have grown. Of course, much of it has to be credited to growth in Internet and Web access since then.
- sharken 5y agoI think it's fair to say that server costs and global reach of Wikipedia is up, and factor in some ambitious goals the current expenditure is not too unreasonable. Money is a funny thing, in Denmark about $320 million is spent on Covid testing a month. So from January to July that would be the equivalent of Wikipedia funding for 20 years.
- Dylan16807 5y ago> I think it's fair to say that server costs and global reach of Wikipedia is up, and factor in some ambitious goals the current expenditure is not too unreasonable. I'd definitely want an analysis on the server costs. Compared to ten years ago you can get vastly better servers per dollar and about ten times the bandwidth per dollar.
- paxys 5y ago> Because 10 years ago WMF's expenses were $10M/year I linked to a source for their financial reports and you still pulled the number straight out of your ass.
- Clewza313 5y ago19/20 expenses were $112M. Per the 09/10 annual report below, 10 years earlier expenses were $10.27M. What exactly am I pulling out of my ass? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/AR_web_all-spreads_24mar11_72_FINAL.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/AR_web_a...
- bawolff 5y agoThey had ~30 million in expenses in the 2011-2012 financial year: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL_11_12From_KPMG.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL... Whether or not its 10x better service, I don't know, but they are definitely doing more now then back then. There's been lots of software development since 2011 (Some good, some not so much). Even just site speed and stability has improved significantly since 2011.
- martin_a 5y ago> but they are definitely doing more now then back then And it's probably questionable if all side ventures are needed or if they could/should have sticked to the core project and developt it with little money. As mentioned further down: Do you really need 40 fundraiser positions?
- bawolff 5y agoThe side ventures aren't the thing they are doing now that they weren't back then (Other then wikidata which started in 2012, all the other side projects are really old). Things they are doing now is stuff like having a website that stays up and is speedy. Software improvements for english wikipedia EN Wikipedia has always been where the lion share of attention was focused on (With wikidata and commons coming in second. The other projects get very little love).
- rPlayer6554 5y agoIn June 2011 they had 11 million articles across all Wikipedias. As of now they have 55 million articles across all Wikipedias. [0]. I'd say this is pretty good even without considering any increases to viewership or size of existing pages. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
- xenator 5y agoThere is no big differences for the database in these numbers. Wikipedia doesn't save lives here. They can have different shards for read only data and doesn't need to process millions of different signals every second. And worth to mention that site growth is predictable.
- onion2k 5y agoThere is no big differences for the database in these numbers. On big thing that changes as a site grows, and as it reaches more places internationally, is that it attracts more attacks. Stopping that costs lot.
- taurath 5y agoI find it sad that this is a debate given how much of a public good it is. $10m is absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.
- Clewza313 5y agoI don't think anybody is begrudging them $10M/year, or even $100M/year for that matter. My concern is that the way their expenses keep spiralling upwards is a) not sustainable and b) introducing serious scope creep into their original mission. Here's the OG version by Jimmy Wales: "The sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world." Here's what it currently looks like: "Empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ Which one is more inspiring on all counts?
- MattGaiser 5y agoThe 2nd one just tells me that they are actively engaging in the collection part now.
- rakoo 5y agoActually phrased like that, the second is more interesting. The first version is about centralizing all informations so it can be consumed. It's the traditional view of knowledge dissemination, scaled to the whole world instantaneously. The second version is about giving people the tool to produce knowledge so it can be shared with the whole world. Just like the printing press spread authoring power from a select few people who bothered to write everything, to anyone with enough money to buy a machine, Wikipedia is giving the power to share knowledge from those who had the right curriculum to anyone with a bit of motivation. This is the revolution that Internet and the Web promised (not just allow everyone to watch and listen, but give everyone a voice), and I'm glad Wikipedia is doing it. If it takes more money to fulfill that mission then it's totally worth it.
- 5y ago
- NeoVeles 5y agoThe thing that gets me is the Archive.org only has approximately $20 million USD of revenue and they run a system that is much more data intensive. The wayback machine alone is a data crunching monster and it is done for a small fraction of WMF.
- dlandau 5y agoI wish archive.org fundraised like WMF. Archive.org is super slow when it doesn't plain timeout with some message about server load.
- derangedHorse 5y agoI really don’t think that would be needed. I’ve never had a timeout on archive.org and the rise in costs probably wouldn’t be worth the value add.
- zozbot234 5y agoArchive.org is a lot less people intensive than what WMF does. Even the book scanning work they support is mostly done by third parties, and they largely focus on hosting the resulting content. Wikipedia can't work like that, no matter how much some people wish it could.
- roelschroeven 5y agoAs opposed to Wikipedia where the content is written by third parties, and Wikimedia largely focuses (or should focus) on hosting the resulting content?
- kaba0 5y agoHow often is archived pages edited? It is a very different problem hosting static and dynamic data.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoIt's also debatable if managing to stay basically at the same point given developments in the rest of the internet for the past ten years isn't far better than people have a right to expect.