If anything, I got from this article that Wikipedia has kept costs well below revenue growth, which is normally the sign of a healthy organization.
That's worth looking into. Wikipedia hasn't gone down the Web 2.0 Javascript/CSS rathole, where every page loads megabytes of vaguely useful junk. What's the problem?
Images are dramatically larger, both in the raw size out of cameras and the resolutions people are willing to put on pages (including higher-DPI screens).
Video's likely a lot more prevalent now, too.
I dunno what they're paying for bandwidth, but AWS S3 has barely dropped per-GB bandwidth costs since its release in 2006.
That shouldn't be a big problem. Screen resolutions have not increased significantly in years (most desktops and laptops are still stuck with 1920x1080), so there's no reason for larger images at all. It should be trivial to write the software so that it auto-scales the image down to an appropriate size for web display on modern screens (which is small, since most Wikipedia images are pretty small within the text, just like any reference work), while also providing a clickable link to allow seeing the image at full resolution. Very few visitors are going to view any image in an article at full resolution, let alone all the images in the article, so the only thing growing should be the image sizes of those optional full-size images. Even there, the software can compress the raw images down to well-compressed JPEGs; it's not Wikipedia's job to store unedited, low or no-compression raw images; an 80% quality JPEG is sufficient.
Same goes for videos; that stuff can be compressed, scaled, recoded to more efficient codecs, etc.
> So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly US$2 million a year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.
Should you? I mean, my day job is making it so you expressly don't. If your costs are scaling even linearly I would say you're doing something wrong. The point of scaling is to reduce costs--economies of scale are why you scale. And a user-editable encyclopedia and PHP application are not really good arguments for diseconomies.
Without knowing more information about the financials, or how resources are allocated this is all conjecture. But a website that services 17bb page views/month is going to cost a lot of money to run. They could be spending their money very poorly, idk, but I also don't know whether or not what they are spending is an appropriate amount.
Point to the diseconomies of scale and we can talk about them, but everybody else has figured out how to leverage economies of scale when building out a large technical system.
Not only does it seem costs haven't been reduced, their rate of increase has exceeded the growth in pages served, quite substantially. That's not the whole story I'm sure, but as a rough estimate that doesn't seem sustainable or healthy... or necessary simply in terms of general hosting cost declines over that period.
But that won't be a live project. That would be a fossil that would slowly wither and die, as it becomes less and less relevant and more and more inadequate with the needs of the current user. In 2005, iPhone didn't exist, now everybody has a smartphone. Should we somehow account for that or just ignore it? How about knowledge graphs and linked data and all AI developments - should all Wikipedia knowledge still be text-only and ignoring whole Linked Data universe? How about supporting thousands of existing languages - should we just dump them in their own domain, or should we help them with automatic translations, article templating, language-sensitive searches and so on? How about creating richer media like maps, diagrams, graphs, video and audio content - should we help this or should we be content with just inserting links to outside content? And that's only minuscule part of the questions we can ask about things changed and developed in the last decade.
The point here is that Wiki universe is a a big and complex live active project (or set of projects), with very many facets, and reducing it to technical maintenance of one webserver site - even one that gets tons of traffic - is not a good idea. The goal of the movement, as I understand it, is not "make sure site en.wikipedia.org does not crash", it is "make all sum of human knowledge be available to everyone". It's a big mission, and it requires people to achieve it.
Twitter doesn't need 3,500 employees, Facebook doesn't need 17,000 and Google doesn't need 72,000. They could all fire 50%-90% of their workforce and the product wouldn't be materially affected for the vast majority of users. The reason they have this many is because they can have this many. Their success has given food to the cancerous growth.
You get this situation whenever a company isn't operated by a shareholder who get's dividends.
When the person who runs the company knows that every dollar they don't spend is money in their pocket, people start to actually care about expenses and only focusing on what is important.
It's fief-building, to a large extent.
1) one of the biggest moats for tech companies is talent, and it's necessary to have GOOD employees available to test new fields and grow quickly (when Android came along, Google suddenly needed a lot more engineers that it had available and saved the time/challenge/cost of hiring good quality engineers). Also the numbers you posted are overall employment numbers, not engineering ones (you need to have bigger HR, sales, support etc as you grow). I totally agree that there is a point of diminishing marginal return and they could be bloated, I just don't know what that is and I don't think you do either, so don't discount the number just because it's large.
2) Dividends are given if the company doesn't think that it can reinvest those in a more profitable way. Berkshire Hathaway notoriously doesn't give dividends - it doesn't mean Buffett & Munger are personally pocketing all the wealth. Also, dividend returns are taxed so that's why many times shareholders are okay with having the company reinvest it/bring it down as retained earnings because it's smarter that way.
In countries with Dividend Imputation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_imputation) such as the one I live in, companies actually distribute the money they earn.
In the USA, wasting money on bloat is effectively incentivised by the tax structure because you can spend money that is already inside the company with an effective discount vs distributing it so that it can be invested elsewhere.
Owners should be withdrawing the profits of their companies. The current situation leads to bloat and stagnation.
Though I still don't agree with withdrawing profits - I think it's smart to reinvest profits into the business (just look at Amazon).
The key difference is this: they earned the money and they can do with it whatever their shareholders allow them to. Wikimedia, on the other hand, get the money from the annual beg-fest aka "give is money or bad things may happen to humanity's last remaining encyclopedia" racket and they are only bound by whatever liberal interpretation they apply to their statutes. The problem I see with this is that with each increase in avoidable expenses they increase the risk of donations one day not keeping up with rising expenses, threatening the very existence of Wikipedia as we know it. By growing expenses, they are essentially endangering what they are supposed to protect.
The trick with any great start up is how to get out of the "aggressive growth without revenue" stage. Some (very few) keep the growth but aggressively grow revenue and become self-sustaining. Others dial down the growth at a certain stage, and revenue increases to match, and they're self-sustaining.
The point is you have to become sustainable. Most start-ups flare out badly. You cannot change over-night from "growth like cancer" to "stable and flat". You need some way to switch and it takes time.
In the early days, when almost everything was volunteer-run, hosting costs were indeed Wikipedia's main expense (as explained in that old quote from Jimmy Wales). These days, hosting amounts to about 2% of expenses, and most of the rest goes to staff costs (incl. about two dozen people in fundraising alone). Meanwhile, most of the value - the actual content - is contributed by unpaid volunteers. The paid staff have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Nobody minded working for free when there was just enough money to cover hosting costs. Now, however, there is an influx of $100 million in donations a year, and none of that benefits the average contributor, the people actually writing Wikipedia. That grates a little, much like in the monkey fairness experiment (Google it if you're unfamiliar with it).
A charity is based on how much people are willing to donate, which can change VERY quickly. Imagine what would happen if the public perception of the people behind wikipedia was to dramatically change and next fundraising campaign only brought in 20% of last years?
Additionally If people start to believe that the finances are squandered or not spent as expected, there could be a movement to NOT donate. This happened with the Red Cross after 9/11 where people felt they were duped by the fact their donations went to a consolidated funds (often to fund overseas activities) rather exclusively to 9/11 victims.
Charities also tend to need to keep a few years of funding in the bank to deal with a change in markets, as a charity typically can't use debt to get through rough years (economic downturns / recessions). Exponential growth makes this nearly impossible unless your running extremely lean.
I think the article is a little sensationalist (and maybe it needed to be to reach certain people), it seems to have some sound concerns.
Yes there is.
2005: > So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. 2016: > According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287495
This is eye-opening, to say the least.
This has been a trap for charitable organizations ever since they existed. Churches, clubs, museums, Etc. The second trap is embezzlement which happens all the time because, as a donation funded organization for some reason people often neglect strong financial controls.
The article author is correct that unless corrected, this situation will kill the Wikimedia Foundation.
To me, it's a no-brainer that the WMF of today needs more than one employee. Whether it needs 300, I don't know, but that doesn't sound far enough off for me to quibble with them over it.
300 feels like too much but 80 could be a logical number.
Well, that's a little unfair. When you measure from 1, virtually any number will look like an absurd multiple. Calling it 300x makes it sound ridiculous but for a company with $80MM in revenue, 300 employees doesn't seem to be unreasonable.
For most startups, success means getting bought out by a larger company. Wikipedia by contrast has always put the highest priority on maintaining its own independence, which means that for them a buyout would be a profound failure.
You're right that the costs of running wikipedia are still quite low considering the incredible scope, popularity and importance of the site. "Cancer" seems over the top and needlessly combative. But, it definitely doesn't hurt having someone bring up the fact that costs grew by 6x in 6 years. As he says, more years of this could put wikipedia in a precarious position.
It seems the OP cares about wikipedia and is genuinely worried. These conversations need to be had (also at fast growing startups) and having them in the open is part of the wikipedia way. Maybe he's wrong but it doesn't seem nonsensical or disingenuous to me. It seems genuine and rational.