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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise.

And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!

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For comparison, OpenStreetMap has roughly $800k in reserves and their expenses are a couple hundred thousands dollars per year.

I agree there are probably more justifiable expenses at Wikimedia than that, but that there is a middle ground between the high water mark they're targeting and what other non-profits are operating with. The Internet Archive's annual budget is ~$10 million.

EDIT: @dylan604 (replying here due to HN throttling): Section 230 shields Wikipedia from most liability/exposure: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/successes/wikipedia

What's the legal expenses associated with Wiki? I could see some people wanting to sue for information linked to/about them. OSM probably doesn't have that same type of exposure.

Alexa rank for wikipedia is 13, OSM is 4550. It's not on the same planet. No, not on the same galaxy.

Wikipedia is not only read and written by the entire planet of humans, including the smallest 3rd world countries, it's also a bot feast, and busy powering APIs all over the world.

It got hundreds of links in some articles, which are automatically connected to all other articles in a gigantic graph of data. Oh, each article may also exist in a hundred languages, times each version, thanks to the history of all edits ever performed or suggested.

It's not just links though, now articles have plenty of metadata that generate connections, tables, ranks, toc, indexes, hierarchies, and listings as well.

All that is edited, rollbacked, debated, diffed and rendered almost on the fly for millions of articles, while respecting the permission system, and of course, the fun part, detecting the thousands of attempt at abuses by second.

In the blink of an eye. Because wikipedia is _fast_. It's one of the fastest site around.

Of course now it is also serving billions of images, sounds and videos. And the foundation is also maintaing:

    MediaWiki

    Meta-Wiki
 
    Wikibooks

    Wikidata

    Wikinews

    Wikiquote

    Wikisource
 
    Wikispecies

    Wikiversity

    Wikivoyage

    Wiktionary

Not to mention animating workshops all around the globes, helping NGO to provide offline wikipedias for poor countries and providing and maintaining the wiki as FOSS.

Thanks, it’s always so easy to forget how much work has to be done so that things seem easy and effortless.

you turned me from Wikipedia cynical to wanting a job there

"MediaWiki is free software. No guarantee or warranty of any kind is provided." Sounds about right!

We've run our internal corporate wikis on it for years without any major problems. It's a great example of free self-hosted software that just works.

Section 230 means you eventually win the lawsuits, but you still have to pay lawyers to defend them.

Correct me if I’m wrong, I was under the impression that Section 230 means most lawsuits are summarily dismissed. Without it you have the first amendment which as you say means you probably eventually win but it’s a much bigger hassle.

>>> As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million.

>> It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff.

> It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise.

How much of that money and staff goes to actually running the site and maintaining the software? IIRC (and correct me if I'm wrong), a large fraction actually goes to other efforts.

Between 2005 and 2015-2016, page views grew by ~11x, articles by ~12x, hosting expenses ~33x, and total WMF spending grew by 1250x.

Hosting and actual sysop expense is quite limited. I think 15ish years ago when Brion Vibber started to do it full time, he ran the whole Wikimedia operation pretty much on his own, with an annual spend of low six digits (and that included his salary, hardware, hosting, the whole shebang).

Spending $100m a year on dev work, conferences, grants, D&I staff etc is a luxury, the site could be kept running for less than 1% of the cost (and dozens of big companies would do it for free just for the PR benefits).

Maybe the only other function apart from hosting/sysop that is essential to WMF's operation are the lawyers that prevent it from being shutdown in entire countries by lawsuit-happy individuals.

Well, the lawyer factor is probably most important.

A lot of people are willing to spend big money to shut down truth.

"It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise." {citation needed}, as they say. Some parts of the Wikipedia "global" movement are so small, they didn't even realise for example, most of "Scots" Wikipedia was pure gibberish. The so called movement is a galaxy of tiny rocks revolving around one massive black hole, English Wikipedia, and even that project is so small as to feel quite parochial. As a result, there are backlogs everywhere, especially in important but difficult work, like copyright problems.

Same scale? We're talking about almost static pages, with some videos / audio. At heart wikipedia is very simple and did not changed much from 15 years ago.

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