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Comment by Medicalidiot | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly, the person that wrote this had quite the axe to grind about Wikipedia and her/his major criticisms of it were actually what nonprofits look to shoot for. Wikipedia has genuine issues, but not anything this person says has much merit.

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This feels like a very empty response; it doesn't point out any specific problem with the author's facts or reasoning. The basic argument is that, ten years ago, Wikipedia ran a very similar service at a much lower cost, so the current organization is therefore spending money ineffectively. You can say you disagree with that, but why? It makes sense to me.

But Wikipedia is no where near the same service it was in 2012. Dozens (if not hundreds) of features, increased traffic demands and higher availability, it seems obvious that the platform would have to grow.

The point is that while views have increased by 10x over the past 15 years, expenses have increased by 1250x. That leaves a 125x increase in per-user spending that does not appear to be reflected in commensurate increases in user value.

This argument seems shallow because the author already clearly and specifically argued that the growth in cost is not proportional to the growth in services authored. For example, one of the first arguments put forth by the author is that bandwidth costs have increased by about 11x, expenses increased by over 1,000. Even straightforward commodity expenses such as hosting costs have increased more than expected, 33x.

So while yes your argument is true that in fact the platform is growing, that however as an argument hete isn't really demonstrontative of a correct understanding of the problem the author argues.

TBH, that 3x increase in expected hosting cost (33/11) doesn't seem bad to me. Maybe Wikipedia has a lot more redundancy now, maybe their pages load faster in more countries, maybe they're using external cloud providers instead of running bare metal, maybe they host more stuff that doesn't get as many page views, etc. (For example, I'm pretty sure I could host HN off my desktop computer, but I'm sure it's hosted in a safer way than that.)

How many employees is the right number? Is "1" the right number, is "300" the right number? How does Wikipedia's growth compare to other well-known companies?

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