10 ms·

Did you read their article? They mention how money they funnel into the fund is counted as "expenses", as is stuff like hiring 40 people just for fundraising. I

Did you read their article? They mention how money they funnel into the fund is counted as "expenses", as is stuff like hiring 40 people just for fundraising. I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year.

cycrutchfield 5y ago
Ok but if they fired all their fundraisers how are they going to get $10m a year?
- brigandish 5y ago
  How much comes in via the banner on the site?
- yreg 5y ago
  Banner with Jimbo's face like in the old days.
- mike_d 5y ago
  Stop spending the other $90 million a year.
paxys 5y ago
> I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year. What exactly are you basing this on?
- colonwqbang 5y ago
  Here's their budget for 2020 https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2019-2020 https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Mediu... They budgeted $5M for "data centre expenses". We cannot know for sure how much it would really cost if WMF only focused on running their website. But $10M doesn't sound implausible to me.
  - croes 5y ago
    If WMF would only run the website, the content would only be advertisment and propaganda.
    - hugi 5y ago
      That's what some people want. They're horrified there's a free platform providing useful content, where they can't profit off people's work.
      - AmericanChopper 5y ago
        Your comment would make sense if moderating wikipedia cost that extra $102,000,000 we’re talking about. But it doesn’t. Wikimedia has one project I’m slightly interested in, and spends most of their money on other projects that I’m completely uninterested in, and would personally consider to be largely a useless waste of time. They aggressively fundraise with a message that implies their single product that everybody cares about is financially imperilled. In reality, if they’d been run responsibly, the one valuable thing they produce could have already been financially secured for decades into the future. I really just don’t care about what they spend most of their money on, I think they’re deceitful in the way that they fundraise, and all I hope is when all of their side projects eventually fail, that their core product survives in some form.
        SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
        What are the “other projects” you are referring to?
        AmericanChopper 5y ago
        Everything on this list that isn’t Wikipedia, along with essentially all of the research they fund. https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_projects https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia... You don’t have to put it in air quotes like you’re making some sort of point. Calling everything they fund a “project” is the language Wikimedia use in their budgets and governance documentation. If you were actually having trouble thinking of a single project they operate other than Wikipedia, then perhaps you might also have some questions about what they do with 90% of their revenue.
soco 5y ago
Because all Wikipedia needs to do is to keep the website up, yes... This sounds pretty much similar with the argument on which the education system gets constantly defunded.
- saurik 5y ago
  Funding Wikipedia's side projects--like wiktionary--doesn't seem particularly valuable; Wikipedia doesn't spend much money actually improving Wikipedia, and what effort they have put in was spent on things like the "visual editor" project that both their own surveys and studies showed wouldn't actually improve editing.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia, and provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself.
    - saurik 5y ago
      > provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself I don't think I agree with you at all here, given that I grew up wanting the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Wikipedia refuses to offer it... seemingly in no small part because the founder of it makes money off of Wikia. But, I believe regardless: if someone goes to an encyclopedia and is told "this encyclopedia needs your help: it is going to run out of money unless you donate to it", and you take that money to do something that isn't to improve that encyclopedia, that is absolutely unethical, no matter how useful it might be on its own. > Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia This alone might be somewhat fair (though I find it hard to believe, honestly); but, I still challenge whether someone who comes to the website and is shown the current banner would believe their money isn't being flitted away on things that don't benefit the resource they were using, even if it might be "more ethical" to provide better translations.
      - 5y ago
thoughty 5y ago
I would be very surprised if their spend was just $10M/year on their tech infra. That's very low. I expect it would be much higher. PS: I work for cloud computing company and have insight on how much costs increase with scale. edit: fixed typos.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Wikipedia is hosted on ordinary rackmount servers at a handful of colocation facilities: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers It does not significantly use cloud services, and as you can see by the picture of their racks, they use standard 1 RU pizzaboxes. Their workload is highly scalable horizontally, and doesn't even need much in the way of expensive "enterprise" hardware such a SAN arrays: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Wikimedia_Foundation_Servers_2015-90.jpg/1920px-Wikimedia_Foundation_Servers_2015-90.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Wi... If you buy beige box rackmount hardware with basic compute and CPU, it's pretty easy to spend less than $250K per rack, and the hardware can be kept for 5+ years. That's about 50K per rack per year. Double that for opex, and assume twenty racks distributed across a a handful of sites for capacity and availability. That's just $2M per annum. Keep in mind they're a high-profile charity, so they get discounts and tax breaks. (I'm not saying that's all there is to Wikipedia! There's software development, management, finance, etc... I'm just saying that the infrastructure alone is probably less than you think.) PS: English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! There have been comments along these lines made in other forums, and the response was that it would cost more to rewrite the software than the maintain the hardware required for PHP. I don't remember the numbers, but I vaguely remember tens of millions for a rewrite, a high risk of breaking issues, and a significantly lower hardware cost.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > It does not significantly use cloud services They do host their own private "cloud", mostly used for research and project development. > English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! Nitpicking, page views from outside users are not supposed to hit PHP at all - those requests should be served by their caching layer. But yes, you're correct that they're relying on quite a bit of legacy tech from their early days, not just PHP but MariaDB as well even though many enterprises would now rely on Postgres wrt. these use cases. I suppose that they could rewrite the stuff piecemeal, and recent developments in PHP itself would make it easier. (Some things have been rewritten already, notably the wikitext parser. That's clearly one thing where you would want to avoid breakage at all costs, but they did get it done.)
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I agree with you, however: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cycrutchfield 5y ago

Ok but if they fired all their fundraisers how are they going to get $10m a year?

brigandish 5y ago
How much comes in via the banner on the site?
yreg 5y ago
Banner with Jimbo's face like in the old days.
mike_d 5y ago
Stop spending the other $90 million a year.

paxys 5y ago

> I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year. What exactly are you basing this on?

colonwqbang 5y ago
Here's their budget for 2020 https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2019-2020 https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Mediu... They budgeted $5M for "data centre expenses". We cannot know for sure how much it would really cost if WMF only focused on running their website. But $10M doesn't sound implausible to me.
- croes 5y ago
  If WMF would only run the website, the content would only be advertisment and propaganda.
  - hugi 5y ago
    That's what some people want. They're horrified there's a free platform providing useful content, where they can't profit off people's work.
    - AmericanChopper 5y ago
      Your comment would make sense if moderating wikipedia cost that extra $102,000,000 we’re talking about. But it doesn’t. Wikimedia has one project I’m slightly interested in, and spends most of their money on other projects that I’m completely uninterested in, and would personally consider to be largely a useless waste of time. They aggressively fundraise with a message that implies their single product that everybody cares about is financially imperilled. In reality, if they’d been run responsibly, the one valuable thing they produce could have already been financially secured for decades into the future. I really just don’t care about what they spend most of their money on, I think they’re deceitful in the way that they fundraise, and all I hope is when all of their side projects eventually fail, that their core product survives in some form.
      - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
        What are the “other projects” you are referring to?
        AmericanChopper 5y ago
        Everything on this list that isn’t Wikipedia, along with essentially all of the research they fund. https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_projects https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia... You don’t have to put it in air quotes like you’re making some sort of point. Calling everything they fund a “project” is the language Wikimedia use in their budgets and governance documentation. If you were actually having trouble thinking of a single project they operate other than Wikipedia, then perhaps you might also have some questions about what they do with 90% of their revenue.

soco 5y ago

Because all Wikipedia needs to do is to keep the website up, yes... This sounds pretty much similar with the argument on which the education system gets constantly defunded.

saurik 5y ago
Funding Wikipedia's side projects--like wiktionary--doesn't seem particularly valuable; Wikipedia doesn't spend much money actually improving Wikipedia, and what effort they have put in was spent on things like the "visual editor" project that both their own surveys and studies showed wouldn't actually improve editing.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia, and provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself.
  - saurik 5y ago
    > provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself I don't think I agree with you at all here, given that I grew up wanting the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Wikipedia refuses to offer it... seemingly in no small part because the founder of it makes money off of Wikia. But, I believe regardless: if someone goes to an encyclopedia and is told "this encyclopedia needs your help: it is going to run out of money unless you donate to it", and you take that money to do something that isn't to improve that encyclopedia, that is absolutely unethical, no matter how useful it might be on its own. > Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia This alone might be somewhat fair (though I find it hard to believe, honestly); but, I still challenge whether someone who comes to the website and is shown the current banner would believe their money isn't being flitted away on things that don't benefit the resource they were using, even if it might be "more ethical" to provide better translations.
    - 5y ago

thoughty 5y ago

I would be very surprised if their spend was just $10M/year on their tech infra. That's very low. I expect it would be much higher. PS: I work for cloud computing company and have insight on how much costs increase with scale. edit: fixed typos.

jiggawatts 5y ago
Wikipedia is hosted on ordinary rackmount servers at a handful of colocation facilities: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers It does not significantly use cloud services, and as you can see by the picture of their racks, they use standard 1 RU pizzaboxes. Their workload is highly scalable horizontally, and doesn't even need much in the way of expensive "enterprise" hardware such a SAN arrays: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Wikimedia_Foundation_Servers_2015-90.jpg/1920px-Wikimedia_Foundation_Servers_2015-90.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Wi... If you buy beige box rackmount hardware with basic compute and CPU, it's pretty easy to spend less than $250K per rack, and the hardware can be kept for 5+ years. That's about 50K per rack per year. Double that for opex, and assume twenty racks distributed across a a handful of sites for capacity and availability. That's just $2M per annum. Keep in mind they're a high-profile charity, so they get discounts and tax breaks. (I'm not saying that's all there is to Wikipedia! There's software development, management, finance, etc... I'm just saying that the infrastructure alone is probably less than you think.) PS: English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! There have been comments along these lines made in other forums, and the response was that it would cost more to rewrite the software than the maintain the hardware required for PHP. I don't remember the numbers, but I vaguely remember tens of millions for a rewrite, a high risk of breaking issues, and a significantly lower hardware cost.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > It does not significantly use cloud services They do host their own private "cloud", mostly used for research and project development. > English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! Nitpicking, page views from outside users are not supposed to hit PHP at all - those requests should be served by their caching layer. But yes, you're correct that they're relying on quite a bit of legacy tech from their early days, not just PHP but MariaDB as well even though many enterprises would now rely on Postgres wrt. these use cases. I suppose that they could rewrite the stuff piecemeal, and recent developments in PHP itself would make it easier. (Some things have been rewritten already, notably the wikitext parser. That's clearly one thing where you would want to avoid breakage at all costs, but they did get it done.)

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I agree with you, however: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html