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Comment by ripdog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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