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Comment by DenseComet | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia's edits rates have been increasing very rapidly. Tools like those must exist in order to vet them and ensure that Wikipedia remains a trustworthy source. Its hard to see the benefits (nor am I sure how to ensure it shows) as the expectation is Wikipedia is always correct, but without them, the misinformation in Wikipedia would be much greater.

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Between 2004 and 2018, monthly edits grew from 500k to 40M, an 80x growth. [1]

In the same period, expenses have grown from 25k to 80M, a 3200x growth. [TFA]

[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e...

Not claiming to know more than you about this but your point assumes that the changing cost of maintaining the project at scale has some proportional relationship to the number of edits.

As it has attracted global attention and ever more significant influence on people worldwide, Wikipedia's threats are likely more varied and insidious than they were in 2004. The cost of offsetting these threats may not relate to the volume of edits.

I certainly don't claim any domain knowledge, but the growth in expenses is so vast that I'm disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not, by the way, suggesting that a 3200x growth in expenses is inherently unjustifiable, just that it should in fact be justified.

Yes, agreed that it should be justified in the open.

Hmm, the long timeframe makes me wary of the comparison. The problem is, the comparison holds weaker and weaker over shorter timeframes:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... Planned spending 2019 ~92mil

https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e... - ~130% page edits growth 2012-2019 (~35mil expenses, a 260% increase)

https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/e... - ~80% page edits growth 2015-2019 (~65mil expenses, a 140% increase)

The rate of increased page edits is closer and closer to the rate of increased expenses. I personally don't think that's a convincing argument, because I haven't seen this massive improvement in tools to justify the extra costs(most of the extra expenditure doesn't seem to be on development, anyway), but I don't think the argument can be dismissed out of hand.

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