Wikipedia Has Cancer

Wikipedia spent $110M to run the site last year. That's $9.16M a month. If hosting is $2M per month that leaves $86M annually.

With no other expense that leaves an annual salary of $287,000 per employee. If you run a business you're most likely going to spend 1x an employees salary on all types of costs. So average salary is closer to $143,000 if they have only employees and hosting as a cost which is next to impossible.

Wikipedia can double their employees for all I care. Triple them even. Please just stick around and keep doing whatever it takes to keep the lights on and running.

For a site that is a part of the internet and seems to be very much a net positive to the world it's crazy to think a staff of 300 is a lot. 300 employees keep doing your work!

> For those readers who were around three years ago, did you notice at the time any unmet needs that would have caused you to conclude that the WMF needed to increase spending by $30 million dollars?

I dunno, when I revisit pages, I am often surprised by how much more content there is now! So just comparing pages now vs then doesn't probably capture where bandwidth demands have actually grown. I imagine most of the increased demand is on Wikimedia, which is its own resource.

On the other hand, as useful as Wikipedia is, if it were to disappear couldn’t we all just use and donate to Marginalia.nu for our obscure factoids, references and summaries?

In terms of Wikimedia, or non-profits in general, I'm not sure how ownership stakes aligning interests is translated when ownership stakes don't exist.

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...