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Comment by elect_engineer | Hacker News Reader

I am the author of this op-ed, which I will prove by posting a comment on my Wikipedia talk page [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon#Hacker_New... ] before saving this. I am open to any questions, criticism, or discussion. BTW, as I noted in the op-ed. At the request of the editors of The Signpost, the version linked to at the top of this thread has fewer citations and less information in the graphic. The original version is at [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... ]

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The key financial metric I'd look at is "months to cash out". Basically someone reasonable needs to decide "if no other money comes in to this organization, how long should it need to operate?"

From there you can get more specific on what "operate" means (i.e. will layoffs occur before scaling back hosting costs).

Has there been any such analysis?

(I am the author of the op-ed. A better version is at [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... ].)

The question as I understand it is is "if no other money comes in how long could Wikipedia operate?

If you assume (and I do) that the Wikimedia foundation (WMF) would keep on the spending path they are on, it would take a year plus or minus a few months to go completely broke. If they were to immediately respond with massive spending cuts they could last a lot longer.

The reason I don't believe that the WMF will react to a revenue decrease with spending cuts is because they really, really, believe that everything they are doing and everything they have planned is absolutely essential. Plus, it is human nature to say "this is temporary. The revenue will go back to increasing next year", all the while greatly expanding the fundraising appeals.

Have you compared the growth of costs with similar sized organizations?

What was 81 million dollars spent on in 2016?

Employee cost has grown 300. How many employees are there? What do they work on?

He was comparing that back then, they have 1 employee and now the foundation have 300-ish employees.

His argument seems to boil down to "growth must be cancer" and "wikipedia/wmf shouldn't have expanded it's scope", with the conclusion "this must fail". But don't most organizations do? Are non-profits not allowed? Otherwise I also would like some more specific criticism about how money is wasted.

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