Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017)

Wikimedia manage their own servers. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

Let's ignore Wiki host their own Server for a moment. Cloud provider DO cut their prices ( not Data transfer ), especially over the span of 10 years. They just do it at a slower pace.

But even accounting for the cloud, AWS in 2017 is still easily 10x better in performance per dollar over 2006.

I haven't even factor in the software improvement. JVM / PHP / C# / Python or Ruby compiler has gotten at least 3x faster over that period.

At one point I even wished Wiki to have saved those money so they could acquire Mozilla and be in the browser space and saving ( or at least participating ) in the Open Web.

I fact checked using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia and got amused.

Or CDs/online, like Encarta

Well it can't be powertripping editors because everyone is equal.

> Deletion is not some unbiased cleanup. Pages are chosen are a reason.

While I don't see a need to delete articles when storage is not the limiting factor, the bias here is likely benevolent sexism. Some writers, projects and organized edit-a-thons very eagerly add articles about women [1,2,3,4]. As a result, necessarily also many articles that do not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements [5] are added, and suggested for deletion again.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jul/24/academic-w... [2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/03/08/project-rewr... [3]:https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/05/uk-academics... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)

Perhaps shut it down?

Competence also goes hand in hand with confidence.

Everyone is ignorant the key thing is to know you are.

Even then. No one is not sending their kid to college or missing out on a meal because they had to donate to Wikipedia/WMF. The site is free on principle and it’s fantastic. All donations are voluntary. Is it really that big of an issue that some executive bought a sailing boat or some expensive whiskeys from some of this money?

> The point author is making is that there's no track record to suggest that cost cutting is on the cards, or more broadly, that the organization has any concept of how to manage organizational risk.

I didn’t get the impression the author knew what he was talking about in this regard. He doesn’t understand what they’re up to but has a list of “best practices” they should apply to solve a problem that he came up with?

“I don’t know what their 300 employees do, and that upsets me, but not enough to actually ask anyone about it.”

Let's say, hypothetically, that Wikipedia cuts spending by 50% without impacting fundraising. How much money do they need to save up to satisfy the idea that they have a "good handle of enterprise risk"? Half a billion dollars? A billion? More? But at the same time, what is the cost of doing 50% less? All that money isn't being lit on fire.

If they cut costs, they're doing less. If they're doing less, it means they simply can't raise as much money; you're not going to convince people to give the same amount of money to do less work. At one end of the spectrum, Wikipedia is growing and doing more to justify the money it's bringing in. At the other end of the spectrum, it's PHP and nginx serving bits from a hard disk and it's just plain unethical to ask people to build up the reserves to supply an organization that's already extremely well-funded.

It's also worth noting that Wikipedia's hosting expenses can almost certainly be paid for almost entirely with just the interest from their reserves account. That's likely an eight figure amount of money each year. If fundraising were to suddenly sour, there's lots that could be cut from expenses before you ever had to start laying off staff.

> That's often easier said than done. Figuring out how to constrain growth now (and build reserves) is better than facing hard choices in a panic later.

And as the data at the top of the essay shows, they already demonstrated this during the pandemic! And they have an extremely healthy reserve. Even if their fundraising got halved, they'd still be able to continue for quite a few years before having to reduce expenses by any significant amount. You can say "hey, maybe you should be building more reserves" but this is an organization with _a quarter billion dollars_ on hand and growing. Expenses might be high, but how much reserve do you expect them to keep?

At some point you're just hoarding cash. An organization simply can't make the argument "hey, please donate to us to keep us running" when they spend very little and have hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve. Nobody would donate to Wikipedia if they knew it could survive on a few million dollars each year and it had hundreds of millions of dollars handy, and no new work was being done to add services and improve existing services. There has to be a balance, and where they are now is extremely balanced.

The CEO is human, so psychology applies to them. I don't think one can necessarily separate cost management and planning from the mind of the CEO. If the CEO decides to cut costs, then that CEO has a mindset that supports cutting costs. And such a mindset is not a growth mindset, as otherwise the CEO would instead be considering how to reallocate those dollars to expand the organization. And per your link, a fixed mindset is the opposite of a growth mindset. It is true that it mixes concepts from different fields, but to me each step seems clear - I think you would need more evidence to show that this chain of reasoning does not apply.