>The modern Wikipedia has 11-12 times as many page views than it had in 2005,[21] but the WMF is spending 33 times as much to serve up these pages to the readers.
This seems reasonable given that they have improved reliability, redundancy and backups.
I dont see how this is reasonable, especially when CPU , RAM and SSD is anywhere between 10 to even 100,000x faster while being cheaper as well. Bandwidth cost has also dropped by 95% or 20x.
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.
OK you have me on compute. Seems like storage however has not budged since the $5tb month pricepoint a few like backblaze have established. More still have cut data plans e.g. enterprise plans clients would be happy to spend a huge amount to not worry about hitting a storage limit, but thats just not offered anymore these days despite prices of drives from the storage cartel dropping at an even pace per year.
This data is everything I remember when I see the whining messages on Wikipedia about how they desperately need my money. No, Wikipedia, you don't need more donations in fact if you get less money you might be better off.
There's no better alternative. I mean who drags out an encyclopedia nowadays? It wouldn't even surprise me if a scandal appeared where a now underfunded encyclopedia had staff copying from Wikipedia for it's books.
Before the true and total death of encyclopedias I probably should go out and buy one...
Here is the example I always remember when people talk about deletion on Wikipedia: "Canadian Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias, study find" [0].
Deletion is not some unbiased cleanup. Pages are chosen are a reason.
> 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.
I read years and years ago the whole thing had sufficient funds from their porno main hustle to keep it afloat forever. I guess they didn’t anticipate expenses getting so out of control. And it was weird porn with naked women posing with a cat. :/
This article is over seven years old and has been on the HN frontpage at least once before. It's nothing new, and I don't see a reason for them to suddenly care.
Wikipedia is consistently fast, reliable, free, invaluable, current and transparent and has been for years and years. It’s a cornerstone of the internet. I’d wager it’s the internet at its best.
The issue is that they provide this wonderful service on donated money, and despite having been donated enough money now to provide it in perpetuity, they continue to beg for more while they are running the balance down by massively increasing their spending on nonsense. WMF are not Wikipedia, they are a parent organisation that spends little on keeping Wikipedia running, and a lot on their own ballooning wages.
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?
You're free not to contribute to Wikipedia. You're free not to use Wikipedia. You're free to download all of the content hosted on Wikipedia and use it for yourself. You're free not to donate money to Wikipedia. You're free to run your own online encyclopedia that's just a dumb web server on Hetzner serving plaintext for pennies each month that's as fiscally conservative as you please.
Wikipedia continues to bring in more money than it spends. It has a quarter billion dollars in the bank. By all accounts, Wikipedia is financially healthier than essentially every startup featured on this site and oversees what's probably the largest, most well-curated collection of knowledge ever compiled.
If fundraising dips in the future, so what? They cut back? It's sad to see folks get laid off, but that's essentially what the author is arguing for, so it's kind of moot.
> Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. ... Whatever the reason is, it will happen.
Incidentally, we did go through a global recession. COVID caused Wikipedia to see almost double it's normal increase in funding while the organization decreased expenses. And the following year, fundraising brought in less cash, but income still far outstripped expenses, and income basically returned to it's trend before the recession.
The argument "it's not their place to spend the money they raise" seems, at this point, like such a ridiculous argument when there's really nothing at this point that shows that the people in charge are being irresponsible.
If you believe Wikipedia's mission is important, but their amount of spending is creating risk, what do you do? Starving them of cash isn't a great answer.
That's why speech is cool: people can say "hey, maybe you should be building more reserves and be used to running as a leaner operation, to be able to tolerate downturns. It's not clear all your spending is really supporting the mission."
> If fundraising dips in the future, so what? They cut back? It's sad to see folks get laid off, but that's essentially what the author is arguing for, so it's kind of moot.
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.
> 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.
> And as the data at the top of the essay shows, they already demonstrated this during the pandemic!
For one year, they contracted spending less than 1%, before more than making up for it and growing faster on average for those 2 years than most.
> Expenses might be high, but how much reserve do you expect them to keep?
When the expenses are growing exponentially, all reserves look small.
> 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.
So better they be wasteful, so they can raise more money to be wasteful with? Do I have that right?
> 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.
I mean, I would. I'd rather they fulfill their core mission on ROI alone than waste it on stuff that evidently adds no value.
I'd donate for that. I won't donate to see it wasted.
This is an interesting comment that seems to miss the point.
> If fundraising dips in the future, so what? They cut back? It's sad to see folks get laid off, but that's essentially what the author is arguing for, so it's kind of moot.
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. Author cites a lack of other best practices across the organization + a continued ramp-up in spend not commensurate with what wikipedia needs as a defense of this argument. The best practices and need for fiscal prudence cited by the author exist in essence to mitigate the risk of waste and insolvency against the fulfillment of the mission.
> Incidentally, we did go through a global recession. COVID caused Wikipedia to see almost double it's normal increase in funding while the organization decreased expenses. And the following year, fundraising brought in less cash, but income still far outstripped expenses, and income basically returned to it's trend before the recession.
I'm not sure what this is intending to suggest, but all I can come up with is "because Wikipedia thrived during the biggest imminent risk to humanity in decades, there's not much to worry about." So did Zoom and Pfizer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a good handle of enterprise risk.
> The argument "it's not their place to spend the money they raise" seems, at this point, like such a ridiculous argument
It's probably the most grounded argument I've read about WMF's incapability to handle risk as it relates to its mission.
WMF is non-profit. They serve a mission foremost. It's on their board to ensure that the mission is served effectively today and can continue to be served effectively for as long as is relevant, or in the case of Wikipedia, as long as possible.
Not contributing is an option, but in the absence of alternatives, it's the option that most greatly jeopardizes the mission in the eyes of donors. This is why people may choose to use their voices rather than their dollars.
> 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.
I think this article is pretty telling, but not in the way you think. He complains that you are no longer allowed to cite Fox news, which has literally declared itself and Entertainment Network masquerading as a news network, that is known for sharing flipped or mislabeled or otherwise deeply misleading graphs and just completely lying on television. I just watched a clip from Fox News yesterday where they were just asking questions about whether Taylor Swift is an n a t o plant LOL. Likewise those Nobel Prize winners speaking out about covid that he mentions, if I'm thinking of the right ones, are people trying to claim it's a hoax and touting horse dewormer and stuff because they have Nobel prizes and doctorates in completely unrelated fields and don't know what they are talking about but have Nobel syndrome.
I think Fox News is just more honest about their bias than most; its certainly not true that CBC, CNN, etc. are unbiased lol. There is a distinct bias in wikipedia that is unavoidable if you happen to disagree with the NYT on a controversial social issue.
I don't think CBC, CNN, the NYT, etc are unbiased at all — I don't think any news source even can be unbiased, and I think the notion of neutrality that many news sources attempt to apply, most especially the NYT, actually acts as its own sort of bias; but I think you are engaging in a bit of a fallacy here: the fact that no source is precisely unbiased does not mean that all sources are equal, nor that all sources' biases manifest in the same way.
(Nor would the absence of bias automatically mean that every point of view would be treated with equal respect and giving equal time in which to air its ideas, because that in itself, if there is an inequality in the quality of the argumentation or facts of the relevant sides, would in fact be a bias in favor of the worst, least correct side.)
The bias of centrist liberal news sources tends to manifest more in the language they use to describe issues (excessive passive voice, waffling on things) or in what they choose to cover (focusing excessively on detransitioners when they make up a tiny minority compared to the vast majority of trans people who are happy with transitioning), not in a gross manipulation of and distortion of actual facts as is the case with Fox News. Speaking of which, I don't know what you could possibly mean about Fox News being more honest about their bias then cnn. They regularly claim that they are the only clear-headed, unbiased news source, that they are the only ones willing to tell you the real unvarnished truth compared to everyone else, but they are the only sane ones in this clown world, etc, and they present things in an exceedingly misleading way to the point of lying far more often than any news source which I don't think you could count as being honest about one's bias in any way unless you intend being honest to just mean being brazen.
There is a concept of growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. It is clear from the numbers that Wikipedia (as a corporation) is still growing. Cutting costs is something fixed mindset people do - it only makes sense to put effort towards that if you don't think you can grow anymore.
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.
I agree that psychology applies to the CEO. I agree that any financial decisions they make must involve psychology.
But you are applying the concept of mindset in a way that goes beyond its definition.
Let's say there are two gardeners. One gardener always prunes his hedge so that it stays the same size. The other gardener lets it grow.
This says nothing about whether the gardeners have fixed mindset or growth mindset, because Carol Dweck's concept of mindset (which is what people are talking about when they talk about "fixed mindset vs growth mindset", the phrase you used in your original comment) has nothing to do with plant growth.
Likewise, "fixed mindset vs growth mindset" also has nothing to do with operational growth. If a CEO decides to cut costs, we cannot deduce that they have a fixed mindset. We also can't deduce that they have a growth mindset. Mindset is not about the action taken, but about psychology/attitude/thinking.
Let's say a startup has negative growth. A fixed mindset CEO might think "I wasn't born to be a CEO" and quit. A growth mindset CEO might think "I can learn from my mistakes. We will try strategy X this year", where X could be cutting costs to extend runway, or it could be to get more funding to spend even more, but the actual strategy is unimportant, since "mindset" has nothing to do with operational growth.
I dont see how this is reasonable, especially when CPU , RAM and SSD is anywhere between 10 to even 100,000x faster while being cheaper as well. Bandwidth cost has also dropped by 95% or 20x.