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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Actually, they're spending less than 3MM per year for hosting. "Other operating expenses" are ~10MM, and everything else on the list has essentially nothing to do with Wikipedia.

However, at the current rate it won't take long until they actually do spend 100MM+ on their own salaries.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

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A friend of mine who worked there claimed the bulk of the funding is spent on paying attorneys to defend Wikipedia editors against hostile governments and companies that sue and imprison them for writing unflattering material.

Take it with a grain of salt, I guess, given the level of cynicism Hacker News seems to have about Wikimedia Foundation, and you could easily dismiss insiders defending their own organization as shills. I don't really see a way to tell from those financial statements. I'm guessing that would count as program expense and break down between salaries and professional services depending on the relative proportions to which they keep attorneys on staff versus contracting legal defense out to other firms.

While there are circumstances where WMF does spend money on that, i am pretty sure its not the majority of their expenditures.

I had trouble finding info on how much they spend on that, but https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Legal_Fees_Assistance_... suggests the budget is carefully considered.

>everything else on the list has essentially nothing to do with Wikipedia

I would say that engineer/product/analytics salaries are part of the cost of running and updating a webpage. Then you have HR which is needed to support those employees and Legal which is especially needed given the high risk nature of Wikipedia.

Good luck keeping Wikipedia up in a useful manner without those people.

edit: Then you need Finance to help handle the costs responsibly. Then you need Fundraising to help raise the money needed to pay for all that. Then you generally want some Marketing/Branding/Communications to help with the whole talking to external humans part.

Wikipedia could run with the company the size of craigslist but with all of the additional cash they choose to add layers of bloat without providing similiar value.

You're applying corporate thinking to this. Wikimedia Foundation doesn't need marketing or branding people, it really doesn't. Communications people I can understand because there will be journalists and others that need to be communicated to. But they don't need a marketing strategy nor do they need marketing collateral.

I'm curious if sites like the pirate bay are "high risk". If so, did it take $100M / year to keep them up with legal and HR teams etc?

These claims are often made, but I'm not sure they check out. Plenty of much much more controversial stuff stays online / is available. But supposedly wikipedia will be destroyed without these experts.

Pirate Bay is banned in many countries, was raided by the police multiple times, had its founders literally put into jail, had its domains seized, is blocked by Facebook, can't get donations outside of crypto, etc.

It's a pretty good example of why you need legal teams for any sort of sustainable effort.

But, despite all of that, they were online for years with a budget that was a fraction of $100 million.

And they were hosting content that was blatantly illegal in many countries, while Wikipedia really isn't.

I mean Piratebay is up right now. At least, if not literally, in spirit. I can get torrent magnet links off a site that looks exactly like the same Piratebay and probably not get a virus.

>And they were hosting content that was blatantly illegal in many countries,

PirateBay never hosted content, and that's the problem. It's like sue yellow-pages, because they listed a drug-dealer.

And what do you mean with illegal?

Pirate bay is a much smaller scale than wikipedia.

Their approach to legal is to basically just get arrested, which is an interesting approach.

The Pirate Bay spent years hopping from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction because of all the suits and enforcement against them. Wikipedia doesn't, and also probably doesn't have any interest in pursuing any sort of expensive jurisdiction-hopping strategy that would also throw all of its employees and work into jeopardy.

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