That's awesome. Congrats
It's just pure greed. These sort of disinformation campaigns by nonprofits should be illegal.
Donations follow the same axiom as pricing: ask for what the market will bear.
while "dire" might be a bit of an overstatement, I agree with this impression because it is in part why I donated once or twice.
This is a reasonable stance to take, except when your donations are enough to cover the core product for decades.
It's not literally fraud in the legal sense, but it's purposefully taking advantage of the goodwill of unsophisticated donors to fund projects and people the donors predictably wouldn't approve of if they understood what was happening. The donors think they are supporting Wikipedia, and the money is largely going elsewhere. Morally, it's lying.
Not defending. Having done some myself, I'd guess they're mostly following the standard playbook.
And yet every donation dialogue on their page is a desperate plea for money to preserve Wikipedia itself.
This is the misleading theme around Wikimedia's donation strategy.
It looks like quadratic growth until around 2011, after that it becomes linear. This still seems like a lot of growth, considering the number of pageviews per article seems to be roughly constant over the last 5 years [1]
0: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
1: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...
Edit: this is how last year's expenses break down:
Salaries and wages: 46,146,897
Awards and grants: 12,653,284
Internet hosting: 2,335,918
In-kind service expenses: 1,361,958
Donation processing expenses: 4,977,583
Professional service expenses: 8,998,261
Other operating expenses: 9,005,744
Travel and conferences: 2,867,774
Depreciation and amortization: 2,856,901
Special event expense, net: 209,690
------------------------------------------
Total expenses: 91,414,010
Ha.
They may have raised more or less than their annual budget this year plus I imagine probably spend some money on their email campaigns etc.
So it doesn’t seem totally out of line.
If you live in SF, Seattle, Portland, NYC, Boston, Chicago or Philly, 80K is lower-middle class if that. Other cities/countries, it's incredible... just depends.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-budget-of-Wikipedia [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
Exponential growth has ever-increasing slope.
I'm was just referring to the op's observation that the growth is linear.
My point was you can only achieve that linear result if the first few data points are ignored.
(I know you're joking)But even if they're costly, if they keep the service running and bring in funds, why would anyone risk damaging their business and start cutting costs ?
The case problem was that the software was running on MS-DOS, had a janky text-based interface, but managed to work well for Zara's fast-fashion inventory.
The 'right' solution for the case was to not change anything at all.
I find it hard to believe that any business would not benefit from moving from an ancient computer system to one with error validations and better tooling so that their boots on the ground can make less mistakes. Forget the cost of transitioning since at scale that's a whole executive job function, but purely from a day-to-day I don't understand how what you said can be true.
Even passenger jets still use floppy disks. AFAIK Zara did update their POS system later though, to be more compatible with payment device hardware.
Assume each site makes one certificate issue request per month: 146 * 10^6 / (30 * 24* 3600) ~= 56 reqs/sec. Maybe double or triple the number to account for office hour-related peak hours.
I don't even think sharding would be required to handle that, strictly speaking. A single medium-to-high end machine could probably handle billions of sites this way, assuming everything has been done right (I assume it has).
I do however think a lot work has to go into:
a) developing/documenting client tools
b) developing/maintaining the server codebase
c) developing/documenting/maintaining security protocols
d) devops for the server(s) doing the key signing
e) devops for maintaining security, according to the protocols developed
and so on...