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Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024
- explain 2y agoShouldn't be paying for bandwidth.
- thunderfork 2y agoNo such thing as a free lunch - whatever balance sheet it lands on, every byte of every request costs someone something.
- Affric 2y agoYep but Wikipedia exists to freely disseminate information to humans. Should they pay for the bandwidth for AI agents?
- stefan_ 2y agoNo, the link exists, every second you saturate it or not, and if not it's just lost bytes.
- urda 2y agoThat's not how bandwidth metering works at all.
- sitkack 2y agoYeah, because they use Google Cloud. /s If you think Wikipedia is delivering over a metered link, turn in your nerd card at the front desk.
- urda 2y agoI just about gave myself whiplash reading that, your critical thinking is all over the place and completely disconnected with reality. You poorly assumed bandwidth is free (like many people do it is a common mistake), which tells me everything I need to know. Take your own advice: hand in your nerd card at the front desk, and don’t even think about passing go or collecting 200.
- sitkack 2y agoHow to tell people you don’t know how carrier grade internet connections work.
- tatersolid 2y agoEvery request contributes to server costs. Every byte contributes to the 95/5 pricing. Wikipedia can’t afford private peering with every ISP in the world.
- explain 2y agoBandwidth is dirt cheap. I do 30 petabytes per month.
- nullpoint420 2y agoI assume it’s for work, but man am I jealous. Cox Internet has me on a 1TB/mo cap.
- bsimpson 2y agoI used to be a Wikipedia donor, until there was an article that made the rounds a few years ago that argued that Wikipedia-the-website is essentially funded in perpetuity, and that the "Jimmy Wales needs your help or kittens will die" scarebanners are actually raising money for the Wikimedia foundation to spend on its own political ends.
- danpalmer 2y ago"its own political ends" being Wikipedia shaped things, that seems like a fairly good thing to donate to.
- jjice 2y agoI’m personally cool with Wikimedia doing whatever they want with their notations since it’s public and everything, but the donation banners definitely lead you to believe that it goes directly towards hosting if you don’t dive in.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoAnd that unless people donate right now, Wikipedia is actually at risk. I've seen far too many comments of people who fell for that lie and donated even though they really didn't have money to spare, because the fear of losing such an important resource drove them to it.
- palata 2y agoI donated to "Wikipedia" for years until I learned that it was actually not really going to Wikipedia. I completely stopped now.
- bsimpson 2y agoI found the Twitter thread that I believe was the source of this; claims that they granted money to culture war institutions: https://x.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633 https://x.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633 I love Wikipedia as a free source of history, but I have no interest in donating money to them as a proxy in the culture war.
- sien 2y agoFrom 'What it Costs to Run Wikipedia' Wikipedia spends $US 3m on hosting in 2024. They spend $US 107m on salaries. So their hosting costs might have gone to, say, $US 5m at the outside. That is they are maybe 1/20th of their salary cost. AI's extra scraping might be a problem for some folks. But for wikipedia to talk about the percentage increase is disingenuous. Source : https://www.saastr.com/what-is-costs-to-run-wikipedia-3m-in-hosting-107m-in-salaries/ https://www.saastr.com/what-is-costs-to-run-wikipedia-3m-in-...
- basisword 2y agoI don't understand the argument here. If your company had hosting costs increase this much and said "hey sien, we're going to cover the costs by cutting your salary" I don't think you'd be thrilled. Non-profits have staff and they have to pay them.
- falcor84 2y ago> Non-profits have staff and they have to pay them. Being the devil's advocate, there are are quite a lot of smaller non-profits that are entirely volunteer-run. While Wikipedia's mission might inherently be big enough to merit a few salaried employees, I can't fathom why they need so many. As per Wilde's famous quip, it seems to me that "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy".
- kshacker 2y ago
- basisword 2y agoThe reason? >> a rise they attribute to AI crawlers. AI companies are killing the open web by stealing visitors from the sources of information and making them pay for the privilege
- jjice 2y agoHow lazy are these people scraping Wikipedia that they can do a bit of research to see there’s an entire dump provided by Wikipedia directly? https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- acdha 2y agoTheir entire industry is built on not paying for data. They aren’t going to spend their own money optimizing this until they have to pay the costs for their design choices.
- damnesian 2y agoSpending money to make money is one of the pillars of capitalism. Getting things for free is anathema. Isn't it strange no one is calling out tech billionaires for "communism" yet the social safety net we need and pay for gets that ding on the daily?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eurleif 2y agoI'm curious what would happen if Wikipedia tried to sign up for a $200/month Cloudflare plan and use it for all their content. In theory, that would be consistent with Cloudflare's ToS; and while there have been examples of Cloudflare sales reps trying to pressure customers with larger bandwidth needs to spend more, executives have said (including in comments here on Hacker News) that those sales reps were acting against policy, and that unlimited bandwidth really does mean unlimited.