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Comment by balladeer | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I worry about projects about Wikipedia and the Archive. When will they run out of storage space and money? When will it become too big to handle?

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That will never happen for Wikipedia. Their content is tiny in disk space and not growing very fast. They are also drowning in money, despite what their donation begging messages claim.

The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is drowning in data and pinching pennies. Still, they're doing okay, and the constant decrease in per-gigabyte HDD costs are allowing them to continue for the time being. They absolutely need and deserve your donations, however.

If HDD price/gig stopped going down, however, they might be in a lot of trouble.

You're saying they rely on the decreasing prices, rather than low prices? How's that?

The amount of data is growing superlinearly while their resources (probably) aren't, so a dropping price for storage is currently allowing them to keep up (if just barely so).

As a mathematical curiosity: an exponential decreasing price means that the total expense to store a Gigabyte forever is finite.

Eg a 10% decrease a year, means that storing forever costs approximately ten times the first year's storage cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series#Sum has the math.

A stream of perpetual future payments does not need to be decrease exponentially (or decrease at all) to have finite present value. A contract to receive $1/year forever (which you can resell or leave as inheritance etc.) is worth 1/r, where r is the risk-free rate of return at the time the contract is sold. At 1% interest a $1 perpetuity is worth $100 — the amount of money you’d have to put in a bank today to expect to get $1 in interest per year forever.

Yes, the exponential decrease is sufficient, but not necessary.

Of course, you are putting an exponential decrease into the present value calculation.

To give a truly non-exponential example: summing up 1/n^2 also only gives you a finite value.

Wikipedia is drowning in money?

Their audited financials:

- Cash in hand: $100m, Annual expenses: $91m - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

Internet archive:

- Net assets: $2m, Functional expenses: $18m - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

Yes, but look at how those $91M break down. Almost all "actual" expenses (including hosting) went down from last year, but the salaries continued to grow by several million, as they do every single year. I love Wikipedia, but I've stopped donating for that reason.

How much should an organization spend in salaries?

Snapchat spends 1,649m in operating expenses. Wikimedia 46m in salaries.

Now, are these dollars invested paying off for our society? That's for all of us to decide.

- https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/snap/financial..., https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

The problem with Wikimedia salaries is that they often are allocated to some projects / roles that don't have much to do with the principal activity (Wikipedia). Although I recognize that it is important to fund / subsidize stuff that won't otherwise be included, I wish their final goal was more concentrated on the wellbeing of Wikipedia, rather than other minor projects.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22135938

Actually wikipedia has too much money. If anything we should stop giving it money for some time.

Yep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

> In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told a TED audience: So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.

2005: bandwidth cost of $5000 in with 1.4 billion page views

For 2018:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

15 billion page views

$145,850,778 in assets

$10,901,208 in liabilities

$134,949,570 in net assets

$104,505,783 in revenue ($97,748,964 from donations)

$81,442,265 in expenses ($38,597,407 salary, $2,342,130 tech costs, others)

I am not that educated on their operations but it seems a bit crazy to me how only 2.4 million out of all expenses is the server costs. And the 39 million salaries are all to their employees none of which do the actual content contribution

Going from 1.5 billion page views at $5000 to 15 billion page views at 82 million is crazy imo.

The WMF does quite a few things besides paying for the hosting costs of Wikipedia. As one example, their latest project is Wikidata, a general-purpose, language-independent knowledge base which already gets more edits over time than the English Wikipedia does. Given that developing such a generally-useful knowledge base has been a "holy grail" of AI for literally decades and that Wikidata is freely available at zero cost right now, those donations might already be more than paying for themselves.

There was a behind-the-scenes talk at 36c3 in Dec 2019 where a few Wikipedia Admins show what the infrastructure looks like and what they actually do: Infrastructure of Wikipedia https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-73-infrastructure-of-wikipedia

I compare the value I get from them to the $$$ I sometimes send them, and I am content.

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