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Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The 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.

Archive.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.

As opposed to Wikipedia where the content is written by third parties, and Wikimedia largely focuses (or should focus) on hosting the resulting content?

How often is archived pages edited? It is a very different problem hosting static and dynamic data.

An "archive" is a repository of material that can't be edited. Editing archives is a kind of fraud.

That’s my point. You can easily cache static data, it’s easier to scale, etc. Wikipedia is semi-static at most.

You don't say it explicitly, but this comment is toeing close to the sentiments of people who believe that WMF is responsible for the generating the content that appears on Wikipedia (instead of the legions of unpaid volunteer editors—the wiki part of the thing).

Even for a well-informed person who understands that's not how Wikipedia works, your comment does no favors for the people who are already walking around with the idea in their head that it does, nor does it help the people who have to correct this (too frequently) mistaken belief. And after ruling out that that's what you meant, it's not clear what your comments did mean.

I wish archive.org fundraised like WMF. Archive.org is super slow when it doesn't plain timeout with some message about server load.

I 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.

Archive.org has a tons more work to do (they have many side projects beyond Wayback...) and definitely could scale to a Wikipedia size organization, if they had the fundraisers.

Otoh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Ceramic%20a...

Every time I see the Wikipedia/WMF donation banner again, I donate to the Internet Archive. Maybe I should give the WMF some change because they remind me to do that periodically.

They had ~30 million in expenses in the 2011-2012 financial year: 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.

> 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?

The 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).

One should expect that with improvements in software and hosting, the cost-value-ratio improves. Does not seem to be the case here, which is strange.

More users, links, more languages more articles etc.

Yes, something like factor 5 more. Doesn't explain why, with evolving technology, costs have risen by factor 10.

Well, side ventures which burn money would explain factor 10, but yeah...

Like many other such projects the project has been hijacked and used as a cash cow for things those people really want to do. See Firefox (though it is getting better there with them realizing that no investing in your cash cow is a bad idea).

If the fundraising positions are unambiguously bringing enough money to justify their stay, definitely. I have no idea, though.

It seems they currently (2019-2020) are responsible for 12% of the expenses [1], but I can't find any information as to which percentage of the donations they're responsible for. I wonder if there's a more transparent report for that.

Looking at their donor numbers [2], it suggests that most of the fundraising is still coming from the long tail, from regular people donating online. They only seem to have 17 "major benefactors" and even if we multiply the smallest amount for that tier (50k) by 10x, that still only accounts for 7% of the donations.

According to their 2019 data, the average donation seems to be $15, which suggests Jimbo banner is way more important than the fundraisers.

Of course my assumption might be completely incorrect.

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...

In 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

There 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.

There 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.

10 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I 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.

I 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/

Which one is more inspiring on all counts?

Actually 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.

I see it the other way around, "available to every person in the world." is the epitome of something distributed, more so than distributing something "effectively", which implies making compromises. So albeit unrealistic the first one would be more inspiring to me.

The 2nd one just tells me that they are actively engaging in the collection part now.

I think an organization can change its goal (in the same direction as the original one).

There's always the danger of "doing a Mozilla" - focusing on useless senior management pet projects until the point that they're unable to actually fund the thing that they're getting paid for.

The management probably don't see themselves as caretakers of incredibly valuable resource that needs to be preserved. Which is probably what 90% of the rest of humanity want them to be.

The first is empty, pseudo-aspirational, typical early 2000s SV, bordering on caricature hogwash.

The 2nd is mature, focused, grounded in reality and is actually what wikimedia does. So yeah #2 100%. But then again I'm not 12.

It'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.

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