I think he raises a very important point regarding the enormous risk of WMF being purchased by the current generation of tech-giants. I don't think there is any reason to believe that new management of Wikipedia by a company such as Google, Facebook or Amazon would be the least bit benevolent. The implications that Wikipedia being co-opted would have on freedom of information on the internet would be immense. I don't think that this is idle scare-mongering. Of course, there is already a risk of misinformation being propagated on Wikipedia by bad actors, I don't think that there is a very big gap to jump before we lose control over the online record completely.
Here's another view of the WMF's runaway spending: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_multilanguage.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...</a><p>I don't donate to the WMF because they don't need my money, but I wish they just kept Wikipedia running and made small incremental changes over time for scaling/keeping up to date/adding helpful features. I would of course donate if Wikipedia were at risk of failing (not that it would be that hard to rehost and rebuild it), and they know that and exploit everyone who doesn't realize how rich they are with the annoying begging.<p>As they say: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". If you keep giving a nonprofit money, it will keep growing, even if it has more than enough it needs for its earlier charter.
Wikimedia is contributing a lot of time and resources to other Open/Commons projects as well, at least in Germany: Open Education, Open Science, Open Glam, Open Access, Open Government etc. They also invest in advocacy (lobbying for more Open Culture, Open Access etc), which is an important voice in the political process, since most grassroots initiatives can not sustain this kind of work for a long time. I don't see the expenses as necessary for the upkeep of Wikipedia alone, but as an investment to keep the ecosystem of Open Source/Open Access alive and growing, which benefits Wikipedia as well. While I think it is important to question the distribution of Wikimedia support for projects in the Commons (they probably could do more funding, e.g. a prototype fund) , having a strong institution to foster digital participation and Open Society is vital.
As someone who has edited since 2007 (pseudoanonymously, about 13k edits), I appreciate the continued investments that Wikipedia has made into various initiatives, most importantly technology. It's not cheap or easy to stay on top of technical trends (e.g., upgrading to PHP 7) while shipping feature improvements. For example, I use Visual Editor (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor</a>) all the time.
I am all for transparency in spending, but I don't support the author's suggested guidelines for spending. Sticking to inflation-and page-view adjusted growth in spending is a terrible requirement. It ties the hands of the company to do any sort of innovation. I donate pretty regularly, and I am happy that wikipedia is doing more with my money than to just keep the site running.
Click-bait redirects here.<p>The figures don't look anything like growth rate of cancer, they look like growth rate of a toenail.. 10-15% a year.<p>Then the author claims that "spending is growing at an ever-increasing rate" like cancer. But it is not. Draw a trend-line over the spending graph, and you'll see that the growth rate is actually damn linear (and well aligned with revenue growth).<p>Rest of the article is reasons why spending should be reduced. Well maybe it shouldn't. As long as there is revenue growth, maybe it is better to invest the revenue on better tools. When revenue growth stops, you've got the better tools you invested in, and can then reduce spending by not building further new tools.
As someone who has contributed regularly to Wikipedia over the years, I stopped recently due to another cancer that Wikipedia has, called 'Philip Cross.' Supposedly an individual, he has made roughly 150,000 edits since 2013 without taking a single day off.<p>Anybody who is not aware of 'Philip Cross' can read about 'him' here:<p><a href="https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross" rel="nofollow">https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross</a><p><a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/" rel="nofollow">https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c...</a><p><a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-msm-promotion-operation-part-3/" rel="nofollow">https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c...</a><p>"According to Craig Murray, whose Wikipedia page has been repeated edited by Cross remarked that "the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel."<p>Wikipedia management, all the way up to Jimmy Wales are well aware of 'Philip Cross' and yet 'he' continues to operate freely as an editor. Despite the basic usefulness of Wikipedia for non-controversial topics, I decided that I cannot and will not support an organization that allows this kind of astroturfing.
> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005,but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting<p>This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated? I can't think of any other scenario besides Wikipedia where this would be expected to be true.
Well,<p>I'm not seeing any problems. The Annual Report is available here: <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/" rel="nofollow">https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...</a>
> There has been zero actual effort by the WMF to increase transparency on spending.<p>Oof. Aside from compute costs, what could justify a more than 100% increase in expenses from 2012 to the present? The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective).
Ugh, so is this was they’ve been doing with our donations, building some massive behemoth that burns $100M a year on who-knows-what?<p>Their financial statements say very little about what they’re doing with it, but it is an exorbitant amount of money to keep a website running, even one the size of Wikipedia.<p>Other threads state that they’re funding all sorts of side-hustles with the money. If so, that is fraudulent, since when they do fundraising campaigns, they claim to be raising funds for <i>Wikipedia</i>. Really slimy of them to then go and spend it on something else.
So in summary Wikipedia is a responsibly run nonprofit that spends slightly less than it takes in while providing a valuable service to millions (or billions) of users?
> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it?<p>Honestly, I always felt that these kind of conparisons are insensitive, and doubling down on it like the linked article does doesn't help.
Putting all the arguments aside, I had no idea Wikipedia was so far in the black. The donation begging had me thinking they were desperately clinging to life. I don't like that. From now on my annual Wikipedia donation will be going to the Internet Archive.
Like many successful foundations the Wikimedia Foundation has been taken over by empire builders. These types expand non-core mandates to justify increased headcount and gain clout & self-importance.<p>The tech requirements of Wikipedia are straightforward. The content comes from volunteers. The software development could be handled via a community development process like Debian's.
I do like his idea of building up investments and running wikipedia off of ROI instead of begging for donations every year. Why is it that WMF hasn't done that yet?
Looking at what they claim to be working on, maybe the money is just being spent on stuff that americans don't see.<p>The last few years, the annual plans seem focussed on making Wikipedia relevant in India, South America, and the Middle East.<p>When I was at EE school, the chip manufacturers gave the school devboards students go to know their stuff. Matlab was cheap too.<p>I suspect Wikimedia is funding a bunch of journalism and research training in these countries, so that every highschool kid gets pointed to wikipedia at school.
If I remember correctly, the person that wrote this had quite the axe to grind about Wikipedia and her/his major criticisms of it were actually what nonprofits look to shoot for. Wikipedia has genuine issues, but not anything this person says has much merit.
When you subsidize something you get more of it. Don't donate to WMF. If it crashes and burns it is trivial for anyone else to host the existing material with <10 employees and <100k year hosting costs.
(2017)? It seems the original article dates to 2016, but was updated for 2017 and 2018. (The trend holds, which is why it's on HN frontpage today.)
I'm a bit astonished how here on HackerNews there are articles all day about how sophisticated and surprisingly complicated and convoluted stuff like hosting, IT security, people management, scaling, updating etc is and yet it is somehow ultra suspicious that a page with massive growth had to <i>change in a non-lineary way</i> over the course of two decades with rapidly changing culture...<p>Wow employing 300 people to keep up with a massively more popular internet on much more differentiated devices in times of information platforms manipulating national elections is not <i>exactly</i> 300 times as expensive as employing one dude to do odd jobs around the house?! Must be mismanagement!!<p>Wow administrating a site which went from changing slowly to changing at inhumane pace and serving those pages with media formats which did not even existed at the beginning to a growing global population does not just include changing a checkbox on hostgator?! Must be scammers in their IT!!<p>I realize this comes off as very salty - I actually don't have much stake in this personally but I despise the pseudo intellectual criticism here in this otherwise very down-to-earth community.<p>PS: Comparing things to cancer is the Hitler-comparison of biology.
Thought exercise: if the Wikimedia Foundation collapsed today and we had to build a new version of Wikipedia without their assistance, how much would it cost?<p>Data dumps of Wikipedia's databases, and the MediaWiki software itself are all Freely and publicly available[1], so none of that would have to be rebuilt; we'd only have to create a new organizational and operational infrastructure.<p>[1]: <a href="https://dumps.wikimedia.org/" rel="nofollow">https://dumps.wikimedia.org/</a>
I'm sure WMF does some good stuff, but I'm sure the average donator just thinks they're donating to keep Wikipedia alive and online and has no idea about all of the extra stuff WMF does (and therefore needs money to fund). I'm not necessarily saying WMF's stuff isn't worth funding, but it really seems like they're tricking people into paying for it under the guise of keeping Wikipedia running.
@elect_engineer:
Well, as many here already pointed out, I do not see here cancer grows. The 16,000,000,000 page views per month is something really huge.<p>For some perspective, I run servers for a commercial company, and with such traffic, we would pay about $7,000,000 per year. But of course, we run on the latest and overprovisioned hardware for best performance and safety, and in reputable, but a very expensive company. In this scenario, $2M for hosting such a big infrastructure globally is not looking too bad. I assume that they need a lot of sysadmins to manage such big infrastructure (maybe 500-600 servers?), and those needs to be paid well. I won't be surprised that this would be much over $10M per year. Maybe this data is available somewhere, those are only my pure estimates.<p>Anyway, with revenue of $100M and $20M of excess every year, dramatic mails and notices I get from MediaWiki and Wales itself, how bad Wikipedia needs my donation, looks now a little disgusting for me...
How to avoid the fundraising banners on Wikipedia:<p>Dismissing them by clicking the X works only momentarily. Here is how to keep them gone.<p>You have to have an account and be logged in. Go to Special:Preferences, click on the "Gadgets" tab, then tick the box next to the statement "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner."
Hello. I am the author of the "Wikipedia has cancer" essay on Wikipedia. After I finish writing this I I will confirm this with a post to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Macon#[[WP:CANCER]" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...</a>] on Hacker news I read HN pretty much every day, even though I don't post very often.<p>I will be happy to discuss any aspect of my essay on Wikipedia, and I would especially be interested in correcting any errors that may have crept in.
This actually looks like a healthy, growing organization. You want your revenue to exceed expenses and have a bit of a nest egg to give you buffer for an uncertain future.
I usually check ratings for a charity by reviewing it on Charity Navigator (which is itself a 501 (c) (3) and in need of donations as well). The rating for the Wikimedia Foundation happens to be really good: <a href="https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=11212" rel="nofollow">https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...</a><p>I use Wikipedia for reference on various topics on a daily basis and I know my kids do it at school as well. Hence, I donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, the approximate cost of my yearly Netflix subscription as they provide huge amounts of valuable information without any ads and to everyone without paywalls. There aren’t very many free services on the web that run without ads.
In 2019, with a budget of 100+M, if the WMF was really devoted to keeping wikipedia sustainably online, it would have found a way to store it in a P2P fashion.
> In 2008 Wikipedia had over 5 million registered editors, 250 language editions, and 7.5 million articles. Wikipedia.org was the 10th-busiest website in the world. We had already started Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity and Wikispecies, we had already opened chapters in multiple countries, and we had already moved from Florida to San Fransisco.<p>No neat charts showing trends on these numbers? I'd want to see that comparison, at a bare minimum, before sounding alarms.
The fact that wikipedia, the world encyclopedia, is centrally hosted is itself a problem. Wikipedia should be censorship resistant, borderless, distributed and resilient to disasters, similar to Bitcoin. So far it's none of those things, so it doesn't deserve my money. If I could contribute by hosting articles on my computer I would be more than happy to offer up a few gigs of harddrive space in exchange for access to the world knowledge bank
It's a symptom of the centralized nature of the web. To serve everybody, you need a boatload of servers.<p>I recall hearing about this cool free editable encyclopedia in the early 2000's, but I could never get a single page to completely load. It was unusably slow. It's nice to think Wikipedia only needs $50K a year in operating expenses, but you can't reasonably develop and host a top-10 website on that.
Isn't this always the case with open source / "free" platforms? Loads of volunteers put the effort in, while someone somewhere has enormous financial benefits off of it?
Year-over-year, "revenue" and "profitability", or at least the not-for-profit version thereof, have been increasing for Wikipedia.<p>Every company in the world is trying to be in that exact situation.<p>Economics is not biology. Stasis is very hard to maintain. Typically, a business is either growing, or it is declining. Our current problems tend to revolve around companies that are too big to fail, not companies that are too big to succeed.<p>I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade.