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Comment by swores | Hacker News Reader

> "I have no idea why so many people keep getting this wrong."

To me it seems a perfectly natural effect of nearly everyone using it as a website which holds lots of information, and very few people comparatively have any experience with the community side, so people assume that what they see is what Wikipedia is.

Not many people are spending time reading reports on organisation costs breakdowns for Wikipedia, so the only way they'd know is if someone like you actively tells them. I personally also assumed server costs were the vast majority, with legal costs a probable distant second - but your comment has inspired me to actually go and look for a breakdown of their spending, so thanks.

Edit: FY24-25, "infrastructure" was just 49.2% of their budget - from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

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Wikipedia is also uniquely cacheable.

I suspect that 95+% of visits to Wikipedia don't actually require them to run any PHP code, but are instead just served from some cache, as each Wikipedia user viewing a given article (if they're not logged in) sees basically the same thing.

This is in contrast to E.G. a social network, which needs to calculate timelines per user. Even if there's no machine learning and your algorithm is "most recent posts first", there's still plenty of computation involved. Mastodon is a good example here.

The move away from "most recent posts first" is because that's actually harder at scale than the algorithmic timeline.

As a former Wikipedia admin, I think the best way to think of it as a massive text-focused battle MMORPG that happens to produce an encyclopedia as a side effect.

Yep, the encyclopedia is the not-so-wasteful "proof of work" part of the MMORPG. It's a game, but you grind it by working on generally useful stuff.

Haha and with battles in the form of massive flame wars?

> holds lots of information

But they want that information to be at least kept up to date and hopefully to improve over time, right? That's what the community is for. It's not a free lunch.

I wasn't insinuating any sort of judgement, from myself or from the vague general public that I referred to; just commenting on which parts are particularly visible & thought about.

Edit: I wasn't going to say anything, but then noticed you're the same person I was replying to before, so I will since it's more than once - in both your comments you seem to feel that you need to defend Wikipedia but in both cases there was nobody attacking them :)

I appreciate that internet comments can often contain lots of hostility, but I encourage you to remember that it's not a default state, and that often comments are just good faith opinions without an angry subtext. In both cases you could have just written as if adding some interesting information, rather than as if you're countering an anti-Wikipedia campaign. (And I'm not trying to attack or criticise now either, sorry if it comes off that way - just constructive feedback!)

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