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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

I considered donating to Wikipedia until I read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

The TL;DR is that Wikipedia has a massive spending problem, and if they brought it back to something reasonable, their existing war chest would last them for at least a decade, even with no additional funding.

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Remember that time in feb 2005 when Wikipedia went down for several days and lost about a week of data because there was a power failure and they were too shoe strings to have proper back ups, and also had disabled a bunch of ACID features in mysql to get the last bit of performance out of mysql causing the power failure to corrupt the db, because they didn't have enough money for more servers and were desperate to try anything to get the last bit of performance out of their servers?

No? That's because it doesn't happen anymore now that WMF has a reasonable budget.

That doesn't mean their spending money on what the people donating want. Most people seem to want to donate to keep Wikipedia running, but that is not necessarily where the money actually goes.

How many comments did you write on this thread to justify Wikipedia's expenses? I counted at least 6.

Its actually kind of ironic given i don't think WMF is particulary well managed or effective in its spending. I just think most of the criticisms of WMF spending are kind of terrible.

There are like 3 orders of magnitude of budget difference; I'm sure a happy middle ground could be found. Even going back to 2010's budget would save $160M/year and still be 17x 2005's budget.

This is by far the worst defense I have ever read for why wikipedia needs a $200m budget.

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