Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined

pallasblog.substack.com

49 pointsLucasLanglois30 comments

Well yes, hosting is cheap. The majority of expenses for any company comes from employee salaries, payments to vendors and professional services, and you can see exactly that in Wikimedia's balance sheet. So what's the point this piece is trying to make exactly?

Its not the piece, it’s the editorialized headline. (Now fixed)

The point of the piece is to highlight the discrepancy between the tone of Wikipedia's fundraising and mission and the reality of their system and financial situation.

I can't blame Wikipedia for putting all their effort in their sole means of funding, though.

(This comment was written when this HN submission had an editorialised headline about server hosting costs)

Funny how people will (1) ignore the software development side of things, and (2) cheer on the massive new regulation of "Big Tech" but ignore what that imposes on an org like the Wikimedia Foundation, both during the legislative stage (re. advocacy) and the once the regulation is imposing its bureaucracy. The UK Online Safety Bill is a prime example. Also, Wikipedia is a very important project, but just one of many projects operated by the Foundation. Finally, these articles somehow attack "high expenses" at the very same time as "running a surplus being added to an endowment capable of generating income that will help support then projects indefinitely even if some people stop visiting the sites (and thus seeing the December donation banners) because ChatGPT could be their interface to all the great knowledge".

The org is not without reproach, and certainly not the most important part of the overall Wikimedia Movement, but there's a bit of smoke and mirrors going on with articles like these.

As for the tone of banners: I believe there's a consultation about them going on right now; they're being co created with the userbase. Go be part of the solution! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2023_b...

Direct costs maybe but how much of the staff cost is staff required to make the site run?

Even staff is not that high.

They have long ago eclipsed the cost of running it and now donate/fund causes that are in line with their views.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...

Is there a good synopsis on their views and who they donate to? Preferably more than one. I don't typically trust wikipedia for things more controversial than climate data for a particular city, usually more like math or animal facts. But ut would be nice to know the typical biases.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start

Total revenue 154MM. Staff at 88MM. Total expenses seem to be 145MM and I don't see anything to indicate they are re-donating that money. Where's the source for your comment? It seems to be blatantly untrue, and I'm wondering why.

I think the use of the word "eclipsed" is a a bit odd. Eclipsed in this case, and the literal sense, just means it's covered. In this case, revenue exceeds costs by what, 8%?

Wikimedia net assets grew by $50M in 2021. Check the article to get more information.

I read it, and I read their audit report. And in 2022 they grew by only 8MM. So in 2021 they received more donations than needed to just cover expenses. What's the problem?

We should want the assets to grow significantly. Ideally Wikimedia would have an endowment that is sufficient to grow at a rate to allow the site to be run in perpetuity without any further contributions.

The awards and grants line item for ~15MM is the second largest thing listed under staff and ahead of Internet hosting.

I do not mind that they provide those grants, it is just something to keep in mind.

You mean how much they pay to Wikipedia's contributors?

Pretty sure they meant the people who write the software and operate the systems that actually host the site.

~100M seems a bit high for that.

WP seems to me to be the most cacheable site in existence, I wonder what 100M worth of staff are doing there.

Right, I'm sure 100MM is mostly not going to sysadmins, but I wonder what percentage of it _is_

... I mean, _as you'd expect_, surely? I can't imagine why anyone would expect this to be a large part of their costs; it's largely a relatively easy sort of thing to optimise (I assume most page views are just served straight from a cache; most users don't log in), and they've had 20 years to do so. As you'd expect, the bulk of its costs are staff.

Same could be said about the staff, at this point this thing should run itself and require very little maintenance.

Instead the leaders are spending 67 million in salaries in order to justify their own fat paychecks.

Now I know that people are doing the same kind of shenanigans in the private sector, but at least in the private sector they aren't getting money by begging and misleading the commoners about how they are about to run out of money and they need your support to keep existing <insert sad jimbo wales face>

> at this point this thing should run itself and require very little maintenance.

This is a very popular belief about established web services. From time to time someone tries it; it rarely works out well.

Rather glad Wikipedia isn’t doing the “you have to log in to use it, also we’ll rate limit you if you don’t pay for Wikipedia verified, and it will also randomly go down a lot” thing that Twitter is trying in an attempt to make this work.

I always toss $5 to Wikipedia when they do the annual donation campaign and I don't care where it goes. I like what they stand for and they made high school indefinitely easier for me, I owe em'.

If you're interested how they run Wikipedia, their tech docs are public: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://github.com/wikimedia

Compared to many other stuff I read, it's mostly "boring tech".

tl;dr: Wikipedia's expenses grow exponentially year-over-year and it's not clear where the extra money is going, since the basic experience of Wikipedia hasn't changed all that much in the past decade.

    Year       Support and revenue          Expenses  Net assets at year end
    2003–2004              $80,129           $23,463                 $56,666
    2004–2005             $379,088          $177,670                $268,084
    2005–2006           $1,508,039          $791,907              $1,004,216
    2006–2007           $2,734,909        $2,077,843              $1,658,282
    2007–2008           $5,032,981        $3,540,724              $5,178,168
    2008–2009           $8,658,006        $5,617,236              $8,231,767
    2009–2010          $17,979,312       $10,266,793             $14,542,731
    2010–2011          $24,785,092       $17,889,794             $24,192,144
    2011–2012          $38,479,665       $29,260,652             $34,929,058
    2012–2013          $48,635,408       $35,704,796             $45,189,124
    2013–2014          $52,465,287       $45,900,745             $53,475,021
    2014–2015          $75,797,223       $52,596,782             $77,820,298
    2015–2016          $81,862,724       $65,947,465             $91,782,795
    2016–2017          $91,242,418       $69,136,758            $113,330,197
    2017–2018         $104,505,783       $81,442,265            $134,949,570
    2018–2019         $120,067,266       $91,414,010            $165,641,425
    2019–2020         $129,234,327      $112,489,397            $180,315,725
    2020–2021         $162,886,686      $111,839,819            $231,177,536
    2021–2022         $154,686,521      $145,970,915            $239,351,532

Fun fact: All of Wikipedia (text only, compressed) is like 20 GB

Why edit the title? This article is barely about the hosting costs. And also yes, it's well-known wiki has very healthy revenue despite it's desperate sounding pleas for donations.

So, to OP, (who is selling a product that you can “buy” facts), how does adding money into the equation resolve anything?

From reading this article it seems you’re not content with the editorial process?

Or is it just the quickest descent to the most cynical conclusion?

This is why I don't donate.

Hosting costs are small for most sites not doing things like streaming video or data storage. Human costs are high - an average American software engineer is probably at 100k or more, and it takes many of them to operate a site.

This is like saying you wouldn't pay your doctor or barber because the electricity is only 1% of the total revenue.

Except the doctors or barbers that operate inside the facility are volunteers who receive nothing for their service.

The article appears to be a beef about moderator structure and the author's perception of a Biden bias over an article they hand-picked.

The revenue and expense statement, the subject heading an entirely misleading heading given the bulk of the article is not about revenue/expenses strapped on at the end appears to have no, or at best threadbare connection to the main article other than 'politics' - well, what I had for breakfast is 'politics' too, perhaps that influences my reading of this article.

The moderator discussion and revenue/expense discussion offers nothing of substance in information of discussion over multitudes of other articles that have discussed the same thing with far more insight.

HN political flamebait, really. {Edit, thanks for the downvote.. author? That was 3 minutes. I really don't care, the account's literally called 'throwaway'. Censorship, eh?]

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