
Wikimedia Foundation spending - apsec112
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed
======
cs702
Also known as "the institutional imperative." Quoting Warren Buffett's 1989
letter to shareholders:[1]

"My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an
unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business
school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not
intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then
that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make
rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead,
rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into
play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an
institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work
expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will
materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the
leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return
and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer
companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive
compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these
courses, which are too often misguided. After making some expensive mistakes
because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and
manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and
I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert
to the problem."

[1]
[http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html)

~~~
derefr
I wonder how much of this could be counteracted simply by _capping profits_ ,
such that all net revenue in excess of some fixed amount is forced by the
corporate charter to be turned into either employee compensation or
stockholder dividends.

Sure, such a company would have no chance of succeeding in the stock market,
but what if it never plans on IPOing in the first place?

~~~
Lazare
> I wonder how much of this could be counteracted simply by capping profits

Buffet's core complaint is about companies not making _enough_ profits due to
their profligate spending on other things. A profit cap would not have the
impact you're hoping for here. :)

> such that all net revenue in excess of some fixed amount is forced by the
> corporate charter to be turned into either employee compensation or
> stockholder dividends.

By definition, only profits can be paid out as dividends, so again, a profit
cap would prevent the thing you're you're trying to boost.

~~~
derefr
> By definition, only profits can be paid out as dividends, so again, a profit
> cap would prevent the thing you're you're trying to boost.

Er, sorry, I rather meant that _profits after dividends_ would be capped. You
can do anything you like with the money—other than keep it in the corporate
coffers (or in commercial paper or anything else that's still liquid assets on
the balance sheet.)

But yes, you're still right, it wouldn't have the correct effect.

How about a sliding window cap on non-compensation spending, together with a
sliding window cap on headcount? So, in a year with record 10x net revenue,
you _would_ be allowed to 10x your salaries/bonuses/dividends, but you _wouldn
't_ be allowed to multiply your capital costs, or "new" labor costs, by more
than, say, 1.3x. (And keep the fixed profit-after-dividend cap, because
otherwise the corporation would just hold all its money in the bank until the
sliding window grew enough to let it spend it.)

~~~
mnx
I mean, you took a simple rule, got on objection, and made it a lot more
complex. That's usually a sign that the underlying issue is not all that
simple, and a simple rule will not remedy it.

~~~
jessaustin
With all the thousands of corporations that get created and destroyed all the
time, it seems like parent's proposed rule could probably work for one or two
of them? If not, maybe we could come up with something more substantial than,
"this could be hard!"

~~~
arjie
That guy gave solid advice. OP is welcome to implement OP's rule but adding
epicycles isn't going to get meaningful responses. When you start adding
epicycles it's worth reinvestigating if your original theory has a meaningful
basis.

------
ordinaryperson
Pretty sure this article could have been called "Wikipedia's Costs Growing
Unsustainably" instead of the clickbait headline.

But overall this oped is misplaced. Running the leanest possible operation
shouldn't be Wikipedia's focus at this stage in its lifecycle, it's improving
the quality of its content.

Back in 2005 Wikipedia had 438k articles and the focus was expanding the reach
of its content to cover all topics; today the article count is 5.4 million
it's quality that matters more. You can't improve quality just based on crowd-
sourcing alone (see: Yelp, Reddit, etc), and the bigger it's gotten the more
of a target it's become by disinformation activists.

This attitude on budgets over value strikes me as a classic engineer's POV.
The OP is nostalgic about a time when the site was run by a single guy in his
basement, but could 1 guy handle the assault of an army of political zealots
or Russian hackers? DDoS attacks? Fundraising? Wikipedia is arguably one of
the most coveted truth sources the world over, protecting and improving its
content is more important than an optimal cost-to-profit ratio.

If the OP has specifics, by all means, share them, but this kind of
generalized fearmongering about budgets isn't spectacularly useful, IMHO.

~~~
JackFr
> Pretty sure this article could have been called "Wikipedia's Costs Growing
> Unsustainably" instead of the clickbait headline.

That's not what I got at all. And that's why the article is interesting.

Wikipedia's _funding_ is what's growing unsustainably. It's higher funding
that's pushing the costs higher. And that's what makes it interesting (and
only a little click-baity.)

It seems, having taken people's money for a charity, you have a moral
obligation to spend the money on the charity, whether it needs it or not. And
as a manager of said charity, it's very easy to believe (or to convince
yourself) it needs the money. Or otherwise why were we making plaintive pleas
for money?

(And that happens in a world of good intentions. When fundraisers become
cynical, you end up with the US political outrage machine, which operates
simply to raise money rather than to effect political change....)

~~~
ordinaryperson
Huh?

From the OP: "After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the
next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway
spending, followed by bankruptcy."

If it was just about wasting donations, they'd never go into debt. It's costs,
and specifically costs-to-income ratio he seems perturbed about.

~~~
caseysoftware
In most non-profit organizations, costs never go down. Once a budget is set
for programs, staffing, etc, they don't just go away and in fact, they often
continue to grow without bound. See any government budget ever for evidence.

So if donations don't continue to grow to match or at least keep pace, they
could start running a deficit to eat away those reserves in no time. And once
a non-profit organization starts running at a deficit, some contributors will
question their contributions and they may shrink accordingly.

Those reserves could disappear in just a few years.. unless there's a change,
two years should show the direction and another couple years, the course will
be set one way or another.

~~~
JackFr
> And once a non-profit organization starts running at a deficit, some
> contributors will question their contributions and they may shrink
> accordingly.

That's backwards though. It's not unusual for a non-profit to run a deficit. A
donor will question a non-profit that's running a surplus - why am I giving
you money you don't need.

~~~
narrowrail
How many people that give to charities look at their balance sheets before
hand?

~~~
caseysoftware
Most don't as long as everyone is getting paid, the galas and events continue,
and outward appearances are fine.

Once invoices or paychecks are delayed, people stop and question why the
leadership is "making so much money" and the ROI on galas and events. And once
a few donors see the deficits, the questions get harder and money slows down..
making the next round of invoices a little harder.

------
avar
I was very actively involved in MediaWiki development & Wikimedia ops (less so
though) in 2004-2006 back when IIRC there were just 1-4 paid Wikimedia
employees.

It was a very different time, and the whole thing was run much more like a
typical open source project.

I think the whole project has gone in completely the wrong direction since
then. Wikipedia itself is still awesome, but what's not awesome is that the
typical reader / contributor experience is pretty much the same as it was in
2005.

Moreover, because of the growing number of employees & need for revenue the
foundation's main goal is still to host a centrally maintained site that must
get your pageviews & donations directly.

The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as
possible, the way OpenStreetMap operates is a much better model. Success
should be measured as a function of how likely any given person is to see
factually accurate content sourced from Wikipedia, and it shouldn't matter if
they're viewing it on some third party site.

Instead it's still run as one massive monolithic website, and it's still hard
to get any sort of machine readable data out of it. This IMO should have been
the main focus of Wikimedia's development efforts.

~~~
jacquesm
> and it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it.

Huh? [https://dumps.wikimedia.org/](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/)

Doesn't that qualify?

~~~
rspeer
That gives you Wikitext encapsulated in XML. How do you get at the _content_
of the Wikitext?

I work on a Wikitext parser [1]. So do many other people, in different ways.
Wikitext syntax is horrible and it mixes content and presentation
indiscriminately (for example, it contains most of HTML as a sub-syntax).

The problem is basically unsolvable, as the result of parsing a Wiki page is
defined only by a complete implementation of MediaWiki (with all its
recursively-evaluated template pages, PHP code, and Lua code), but if you run
that whole stack what you get in the end is HTML -- just the presentation, not
the content you presumably wanted.

So people solve various pieces of the problem instead, creating approximate
parsers that oversimplify various situations to meet their needs.

One of these solutions is DBPedia [2], but if you use DBPedia you have to
watch out for the parts that are false or misleading due to parse errors.

[1]
[https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wikiparsec](https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wikiparsec)

[2] [http://wiki.dbpedia.org/](http://wiki.dbpedia.org/)

~~~
10165
"That gives you Wikitext encapsulated in XML."

avar: "The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as
possible, the way OpenStreetMap operates is a better model."

I am confused.

Doesn't OSM data come encapsulated in XML or some binary format?

As for dispersion of content, I could have sworn I have seen Wikipedia content
on non-Wikipedia websites. Is there some restriction that prohibits this?

I have seen Wikipedia data offered in DNS TXT records as well.

~~~
3131s
For each article there is some metadata, but the entire text of an article is
just a blob inside one XML element.

For anyone who has not worked with the Wikipedia data dumps extensively
before, trust us that it is _not_ easily machine-readable and that even
solutions like DBPedia / Wikidata are not yet suitable for many purposes.

~~~
WikipediasBad
As someone who contributes to many knowledge projects, including Wikipedia and
Wikidata frequently, I'm curious about what you mean that Wikidata is not yet
suitable for any purposes. Am I wasting my time contributing to it? I thought
that it was helping a lot of machines understand data. Can you please explain
further?

~~~
3131s
Please reread, for _many_ purposes! I love Wikipedia.

The Wiki markup is extremely complicated and being user created, it is also
inconsistent and error prone. I believe the MediaWiki parser itself is
something like a single 5000 line PHP function! All of the alternate parsers
I've tried are not perfect. There is a ton of information encoded in the semi-
structured markup, but it's still not easy to turn that into actual structured
data. That's where the problem lies.

~~~
lacksconfidence
> believe the MediaWiki parser itself is something like a single 5000 line PHP
> function!

It's not. I'm on mobile so not easiest to link, but the PHP versio of the
parser is nothing like a single function. There is also a nodejs version of
the parser under active development with the goal of replacing the php parser.

~~~
3131s
Thanks, I had heard that somewhere but stand corrected.

------
idorosen
Reproducing the table from the article with one extra column, the ratio of
expenses to revenue for clarity, it looks like they're still operating with a
very comfortable margin. Yes, the 19% margin is tighter than a 50% margin 12
years ago, and their existence depends on donations now more than ever
($23,463/yr is sustainable by a single engineer's salary, $65,947,465/yr
is...not), but Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects also serve a much wider
audience and broader purpose. This isn't scary in and of itself, especially if
they've got cash reserves to give them time to tighten the belt later on if it
becomes a problem and someone in a leadership position is monitoring their
finances to act if their burn rate gets too high... I've seen plenty of
nonprofits with tighter margins survive and succeed.

    
    
      Year      Revenue      Expenses      Net Assets    Expense Ratio (1-margin)
      2003/2004     $80,129       $23,463       $56,666   29%
      2004/2005    $379,088      $177,670      $268,084   47%
      2005/2006  $1,508,039      $791,907    $1,004,216   53%
      2006/2007  $2,734,909    $2,077,843    $1,658,282   76%
      2007/2008  $5,032,981    $3,540,724    $5,178,168   70%
      2008/2009  $8,658,006    $5,617,236    $8,231,767   65%
      2009/2010 $17,979,312   $10,266,793   $14,542,731   57%
      2010/2011 $24,785,092   $17,889,794   $24,192,144   72%
      2011/2012 $38,479,665   $29,260,652   $34,929,058   76%
      2012/2013 $48,635,408   $35,704,796   $45,189,124   73%
      2013/2014 $52,465,287   $45,900,745   $53,475,021   87%
      2014/2015 $75,797,223   $52,596,782   $77,820,298   69%
      2015/2016 $81,862,724   $65,947,465   $91,782,795   81%
    

How sure are we that these numbers are accurate, anyhow?

~~~
masklinn
> it looks like they're still operating with a very comfortable margin.

That's not the essay's concern, the essay's concern is that expenses grow much
faster than the site's load.

~~~
Whitestrake
I thought the essay's concern was that funding is growing too fast, allowing
expenses to expand to fill the gap in a way that is unsustainable (because
eventually the funding growth must come to an end).

------
contingencies
Administrator since 2003 here. I have contributed to Wikipedia in various
languages, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. Three
core points, particularly on Wikipedia:

(1) _Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated
contributors._ This is due to factors such as too much bureaucracy, too many
subjective guidelines, too much content being deleted (exclusionism), and an
overwhelming mess of projects and policies.

(2) _Not enough focus._ By starting many projects the foundation has muddied
its mission and public identity. In addition, it has broad and potentially
mutually conflicting goals such as educating the public about various issues,
educating the public about how to work with others to contribute to projects,
asking the public for money, agitating governments and corporations for policy
change and support, monitoring public behavior looking for evidence of
wrongdoing, and engaging with education. Why not leave education to the
educationalists, politics to the politicians, spying to the government and
motivated contributors and fundraising to donors?

(3) _Non-free academic media is hurting the project._ Given that only a small
number of editors have true access to major academic databases, it is often
hard for contributors to equally and fairly balance an article.

Having said that, I still have tremendous respect for the project and
comparing its costs to those of the prior systems necessarily incorporating
manual preparation, editing, production and distribution of printed matter by
'experts', the opportunity costs for access alone justify the full
expenditure. It's not a lot of money in global terms.

~~~
cooper12
> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated
> contributors.

This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely
a community issue.

> Not enough focus.

This is a valid point but I think you're being too scorched earth with it like
saying that Wikipedia shouldn't do _any_ political outreach at all. If its
millions of viewers hadn't seen the SOPA blackout, would it have been as
successful? If it didn't fight for freedom of panorama and other copyright
issues, would it be able to exist in the same form as now? Your suggestion is
like telling Japan to go back to isolationism. Sure it might work if you're
self-sustaining, but it's no way to run a global project.

> Non-free academic media is hurting the project.

If you are part of a university, you likely have access to such media. Many
public libraries also have such access. Lastly, there's the Wikipedia Library.
[0] I'm not sure what you want Wikipedia to do here past what it's already
doing.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library)

~~~
rsync
>> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated
contributors.

> This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is
> completely a community issue.

I do not contribute financially to wikipedia, despite being very interested in
doing so, because of this issue.

I am sick and tired of seeing large amounts of properly formatted, well formed
articles, written in good faith, deleted by _the little hitlers_ protecting
their precious wikipedia turf.

This "community issue" costs wikipedia several thousand of my dollars per
year. I wonder how many other people decline to support them financially due
to these "community issues" ?

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I don't normally post "me too" on HN, but I feel I should here.

I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, because the editorial policies don't
agree with my views on how an internet encyclopedia should be run.

------
elect_engineer
I am the author of this op-ed, which I will prove by posting a comment on my
Wikipedia talk page [
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon#Hacker_New...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon#Hacker_News)
] before saving this. I am open to any questions, criticism, or discussion.
BTW, as I noted in the op-ed. At the request of the editors of The Signpost,
the version linked to at the top of this thread has fewer citations and less
information in the graphic. The original version is at [
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)
]

~~~
forrestthewoods
What was 81 million dollars spent on in 2016?

Employee cost has grown 300. How many employees are there? What do they work
on?

~~~
Faark
His argument seems to boil down to "growth must be cancer" and "wikipedia/wmf
shouldn't have expanded it's scope", with the conclusion "this must fail". But
don't most organizations do? Are non-profits not allowed? Otherwise I also
would like some more specific criticism about how money is wasted.

------
heydenberk
Wikimedia publishes independently-audited financial statements. Here's the
latest one.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-
_FY15-16.pdf)

It's clear that salaries and awards and grants are driving the increase in
cost. Maybe this is damning evidence of a decadent culture, which the author
of this op-ed clearly presume, but I doubt it. I would expect that Wikipedia's
employees have been working very hard for a long time to keep the site running
and they've cultivated expertise in governing the site in a way that avoids
controversy and maintains credibility. I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain
long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-
graduate-mill like so many non-profits are. It seems that they've done that,
and they've waited until the organization was financially stable to do so.

~~~
saurik
When I say "I want to know where Wikimedia is spending its money", I don't
mean "is it on people or on bandwidth or on equipment?"; I mean "is it on
Wikipedia or Wiktionary? how much money did they burn into the finally-
launched WYSIWYG editor that their own research shows is barely used and
solves the wrong problem? how little time is being spent figuring out how to
handle a world with decreasingly reliable second-party sources, given their
adamant refusal to allow reliance on first-party material? do they have any
resources at all dedicated to dealing with deletionism?". I do not care if the
people there are being paid a million dollars a year: I want to know their
time is being used in ways that makes sense, and as far as I can tell almost
none of their resources are being spent on anything which seems to actually
matter. If they explained "actually, we added an automated model for verifying
the value of an edit that our metrics have shown decreased the amount of time
moderators have to spend watching the site while having minimal effects on new
user retention, a project which used twenty engineers for five years to build"
I'd at least shrug and go "huh, OK"; but as of right now I am not seeing it...
it isn't that they overpay their staff, it is that they fundamentally don't
have anything useful to do with staff but seem to keep growing their staff and
then allocating them towards dumb things _while telling everyone if they stop
donating to this cancerous staff growth the site will go offline_ , which is a
situation for which I simply can't attach enough modifiers to the word "lie"
to to express the level of active deception at play.

~~~
jessriedel
Exactly. There's this folk belief that the main risk with non-profits is that
that they will pay themselves above-market salaries or otherwise embezzle
money in outright fraud. And when people criticize the non-profit for
inefficiency, they often defend themselves by saying "Look! The salaries for
our legions of workers are market rate and we have all these noble sounding
projects."

But this is a red herring, because outright fraud is relatively rare. Rather,
the much biggest issue is a terribly managed organization spending resources
ineffectively. Non-profits shouldn't be judged on overhead or executive salary
(who cares?), they should be judged on what they accomplish for the amount
they spend. And WMF does terribly on this metric.

~~~
emmelaich
Great comments.

"spending resources ineffectively"

Often staff is taken on in order to fill vacancies without as much regard for
skill levels. The marginal value of extra employees lowers and can dip into
the negative. This is the sort of ineffective spending which is invisible to
all but their closest colleagues -- who have too little political capital to
do anything about it.

------
aaronharnly
> ...I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard
> software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month
> was was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like
> requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones.

This part of the critique seems a little off, doesn't it? I don't know the
state of WMF engineering, it very well may have problems, and a complete lack
of documentation or planning is not a good sign, but the particular artifacts
(requirements documents, schedules with milestones) mentioned here are more
from the pre-Agile waterfall school of thought. Can anyone familiar with WMF
engineering comment?

~~~
smacktoward
That's the point; he's arguing that WMF engineering practices are so
disorganized that not only don't they qualify as agile, they _don 't even
qualify as waterfall_ (which predates agile by several decades).

Waterfall methodologies are deeply un-hip today, of course, but when they
first coalesced they were a big improvement over what came before them, which
was essentially nothing: an absence of _any_ formal project management
methodologies, with people cobbling together projects from bits and pieces of
expertise learned in other disciplines.

(Note that I have no idea how WMF's software engineering practices work, so I
have no idea if this assertion is accurate or not. I'm just trying to clarify
what I think Macon is arguing here.)

~~~
dom0
"Waterfall methodology" is the ultimate straw man.

~~~
amscanne
It's hilarious. It has only existed as a thing to critcize, and the term
itself actually originates in a paper describing why it's broken. No one has
ever advocated for the "waterfall" approach.

The ultimate straw man indeed :)

~~~
dragonwriter
> It has only existed as a thing to critcize

No, this is false.

> and the term itself actually originates in a paper describing why it's
> broken.

So does the term "capitalism". Like capitalism, though, the waterfall method
was a thing actually in wide use both before (the first paper describing it's
use was about 20 years earlier than the critical one in which the term seems
to have been first used) and after (it's been mandated by many institutions,
particularly in government, even after that critical paper) being names in
criticism.

> No one has ever advocated for the "waterfall" approach.

Actually, a number of large organizations, particularly governments, _to this
day_ mandate processes for software development projects, _particularly_ large
projects, that embody essentially the key features of the waterfall method,
most critically that of doing full analysis across the whole scope before
beginning development (often, in government, before getting approval for
funding to open up contracting for the actual development work.) A lot of the
contractors involved advertise that they use agile methods, but it ends often
up being a kind of Scrum-within-waterfall monstrosity that managed to preserve
the worst features of both.

~~~
amscanne
> No, this is false.

Point me to someone espousing the benefits of the waterfall approach, please.

> So does the term "capitalism". Like capitalism, though, the waterfall method
> was a thing actually in wide use both before (the first paper describing
> it's use was about 20 years earlier than the critical one in which the term
> seems to have been first used) and after (it's been mandated by many
> institutions, particularly in government, even after that critical paper)
> being names in criticism.

I'm not saying that no one has ever tried building software this way. But the
term and "methodology" are literally the collection of broken processes
associated with early development.

> Actually, a number of large organizations, particularly governments, to this
> day mandate processes for software development projects, particularly large
> projects, that embody essentially the key features of the waterfall method,
> most critically that of doing full analysis across the whole scope before
> beginning development (often, in government, before getting approval for
> funding to open up contracting for the actual development work.)

How do you go to tender without reasonable complete requirements?

The problem here isn't the development methodology, it's the fact that going
to tender for development basically forces you into this position. Governments
seem to be moving to in house development to solve this problem, but I'd
hardly say that the original requirements gathering was the result of anyone
advocating for the waterfall approach.

------
cwyers
It just... really bothers me that Wikipedia has grown into this massive thing,
with $60 million in cash reserves and $31 million in salaries a year... and
the people who aren't getting paid are the ones actually writing an
encyclopedia. For that kind of money, you'd think they could actually pay
people to write an encyclopedia, like Britannica used to. Now Britannica is
circling the drain, Wikipedia is raking in money, and instead of paying the
writers, there's this whole bureaucracy slurping up the cash and not giving it
to the people doing the actual work. I hate all this digital sharecropping. I
hate all these businesses based on paying millions of amateurs nothing or next
to nothing for large volumes of low quality labor, making it up on volume, and
paying a handful of people large sums of money to "administer" it. You'd think
for that kind of money you could pay some writers.

~~~
aquadrop
60 millions in spending, but that's for top5 site in the world, serving
knowledge to billions of people, and is a phenomenon of modern society, is it
that much? Of course they probably could spend less, like 20 millions if they
were perfectly effective. But who is perfectly effective all the time? Sure,
it's needed to keep an eye on effectiveness and try to improve it, and
increase transparency, evaluate what all those people are doing etc But I
wouldn't say that situation is awful or anything. Original article is using
imagination and projection a lot.

And I think there's big problem with idea paying writers. The moment you start
paying your writers become not just people who want to help and share their
knowledge because of goodness, but they (or some part, which you can't
distinguish) also become people who want money. And it's hard to manage it,
people can start bickering who's got how much, etc. You might end up with
thousands of people willing to write anything just to get some money and some
good writers leaving because they don't want to compete with money grabbers.

~~~
cwyers
> You might end up with thousands of people willing to write anything just to
> get some money and some good writers leaving because they don't want to
> compete with money grabbers.

Okay, but why isn't programming held to the same standard? Why do they have,
what, four scrum coaches on payroll? Can't they rely on scrum coaches who want
to help and share their knowledge because of goodness, too?

~~~
aquadrop
I think they are held to a degree - mediawiki is open-source and devs can
contribute. I guess scrum coaches or other kind of management is harder to use
this way, you still need core team working full-time, but I don't know what
they are doing.

------
hn_throwaway_99
This op ed is non-sensical. According to the author, every successful startup
in history is "cancer". Wikipedia's costs have grown because their usage has
grown exponentially (comparing costs to economy-wide inflation is particularly
baffling).

If anything, I got from this article that Wikipedia has kept costs well below
revenue growth, which is normally the sign of a healthy organization.

~~~
Animats
If hosting cost per hit has increased, something is wrong. Computer costs have
gone down since 2005.

That's worth looking into. Wikipedia hasn't gone down the Web 2.0
Javascript/CSS rathole, where every page loads megabytes of vaguely useful
junk. What's the problem?

~~~
ceejayoz
> If hosting cost per hit has increased, something is wrong. Computer costs
> have gone down since 2005.

Images are dramatically larger, both in the raw size out of cameras and the
resolutions people are willing to put on pages (including higher-DPI screens).

Video's likely a lot more prevalent now, too.

I dunno what they're paying for bandwidth, but AWS S3 has barely dropped per-
GB bandwidth costs since its release in 2006.

~~~
Arizhel
>Images are dramatically larger, both in the raw size out of cameras and the
resolutions people are willing to put on pages (including higher-DPI screens).

That shouldn't be a big problem. Screen resolutions have not increased
significantly in years (most desktops and laptops are still stuck with
1920x1080), so there's no reason for larger images at all. It should be
trivial to write the software so that it auto-scales the image down to an
appropriate size for web display on modern screens (which is small, since most
Wikipedia images are pretty small within the text, just like any reference
work), while also providing a clickable link to allow seeing the image at full
resolution. Very few visitors are going to view any image in an article at
full resolution, let alone all the images in the article, so the only thing
growing should be the image sizes of those optional full-size images. Even
there, the software can compress the raw images down to well-compressed JPEGs;
it's not Wikipedia's job to store unedited, low or no-compression raw images;
an 80% quality JPEG is sufficient.

Same goes for videos; that stuff can be compressed, scaled, recoded to more
efficient codecs, etc.

------
rawland
According to the Wikimedia strategic plan summary [1], it seems the spending
is indeed in line, with what was (mis?)planned:

[https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strat...](https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/The_Resources_We'll_Need)

And some salaries (from 990s):

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries)

\--

Sources:

[1]:
[https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strat...](https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary)

------
brudgers
I am not sure I understand what problem am I supposed to see when I look at
the table. It looks to me like Wikipedia has income in excess of expenses and
a reserve to cover unforeseen events. Remembering what Wikipedia was like in
2005 when Wales thought it didn't need employees, made me think that Wales
could not imagine the scale at which Wikipedia is an important asset of
humanity today.

It's similarly myopic to the criticism of Wikipedia's software engineering
methodology further down the essay. There's a scale of project at which
waterfall greatly increases the odds of success: without a plan, a pyramid
doesn't get nice sharp corners or come to a point, the dam does not turn the
turbine, and Armstrong does not boot print moon dust (never mind landing back
in the vicinity of ships and helicopters and medical staff).

A big Wikipedia changes slowly. That's good. One person's rant doesn't cause
it to pivot on a dime. One person's rant doesn't suddenly turn it to ad
funded. One person's rant doesn't suddenly remove a category of articles.

~~~
maehwasu
The problem isn't that there isn't enough income to cover expenses.

The problem is that expenses have grown along with rapidly increasing income.

The two best explanations for this are:

a) Wikipedia has spent that money in ways that add commensurate value

b) Wikipedia is adding projects that sound reasonable, but don't add tons of
value, in order to soak up the increased revenue (possibly unintentionally;
intentions are irrelevant in bureaucracies).

It's not binary, of course. People who have a problem with that chart aren't
saying Wikipedia has added NO value from the spend.

They're just noting that (b) is a very very common failure mode of large
organizations that have easy access to money. In fact, I'd argue that it's
common enough as the failure mode that the burden of proof should always be on
the party who asserts that it's NOT happening, rather than the other way
around.

------
easilyBored
Nah, just companies that profit from Wikipedia (hello Google!) and non-profits
should pony up. Why shouldn't a person doing great work to make sure Wikipedia
runs smoothly get paid when there's so much money going around?

Google should "adopt" 150 of their employees, MSFT 50, Facebook 50 and so on.
It's tax deductible too...

~~~
dahdum
Wikipedia isn't spending more because of high costs of hosting, bandwidth and
development. They are spending on executives, administration, grants,
travel/conferences, and other mostly unrelated expenditures.

I don't donate to them from an effective altruism standpoint, every year I've
read their spending plan and decided there are far better places to give. If
they only spent on the core Wikipedia platform and support - I'd donate every
year.

~~~
hackuser
> Wikipedia isn't spending more because of high costs of hosting, bandwidth
> and development. They are spending on executives, administration, grants,
> travel/conferences, and other mostly unrelated expenditures

What is that based on?

~~~
dahdum
It's all public, so in their financial reports:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-
_FY15-16.pdf)

For 2016:

2.3M on travel/conferences

11.3M on grants (2x 2015 levels)

31.7M on salaries/wages

Their plan is here:
[https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan](https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan)

If you check the staffing plan:

Engineering +9%

Community Engagement +15%

Advancement (fundraising) +35%

Legal +35%

HR/Finance +23%

Communications +175%

It's not a struggling organization. People are giving them barrels of cash so
they expand their scope to spend it, then ask for even more the next year.

------
sparkzilla
Good on Guy for bringing this up at last, but others have been questioning
Wikipedia's fundraising for some time now [1][2][3] Note: I wrote the last
one. In the same way that many charities exist to line the pockets of their
staff, while not giving to their cause, Wikipedia has become a bloated
fundraising bureaucracy that happens to have an online encyclopedia. The
emphasis on fundraising leads to corrupt actions, for example the fundraising
banners that say the site is in imminent danger of collapse despite it having
over $100 million in the bank.

[1] [https://www.dailydot.com/business/wikipedia-fundraiser-
banne...](https://www.dailydot.com/business/wikipedia-fundraiser-banner/) [2]
[https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/12/16/1631223/wikipedia-e...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/12/16/1631223/wikipedia-
exceeds-fundraising-target-but-continues-asking-for-more-money) [3]
[http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-
money/](http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/)

------
skdotdan
Maybe a bit off-topic, but I don't think we should use the word "cancer" that
way.

~~~
jmcdiesel
Why? its a valid analogy.

~~~
skdotdan
Okay, maybe it's just me.

~~~
allengeorge
Nope - not just you. I opened it thinking it'd be about how the WMF was
preying on other organizations, but what I got was...very different.

~~~
jmcdiesel
Cancer isnt a predator... why would you expect that?

------
nullc
IMO-- as someone who was directly involved at the time the big mistake was
relocating to SF. That one decision was the beginning of a cascade of ever
increasing spending which marked the end of an era of fiscally conservative
operations.

There were many positive outcome too: this increase in spending has resulted
in many benefits but not at all proportional to the increase in costs.

------
ppod
I don't know much about wikipedia or WMF but the spending growth in that table
is not exponential. And surely the correct way to measure the scale of the
service provided is page views rather than number of pages.

------
mycall
Expenses (2016/2015) [1]

Salaries and wages 31,713,961 26,049,224

Awards and grants 11,354,612 4,522,689

Internet hosting 2,069,572 1,997,521

In-kind service expenses 1,065,523 235,570

Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765

Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105

Other operating expenses 4,777,203 4,449,764

Travel and conferences 2,296,592 2,289,489

Depreciation and amortization 2,720,835 2,656,103

Special event expense, net 311,313 266,552

Total expenses 65,947,465 52,596,782

[1]([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-
_FY15-16.pdf))

~~~
rawland

      > Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765
      > Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105

WTF?

~~~
_nedR
> Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765

Might be payment-processing fees like credit cards and paypal?

> Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105

Lawyers, Auditors, Consulting?

------
wauzars
This is one of the reasons I hated working there. They waste money and every
year beg for more. Why do they even need an office in a prime San Francisco
location? On top of that, they work on stupid projects, and internally the
organization is run by imbeciles.

------
a_imho
I'm very conflicted about the donate me guilt tripping. On one hand these
companies need cash to operate and they do a world of good, but on the other
reading their financial reports I'm just not convinced they are efficient with
the money.

------
tuna-piano
As I understand it, Wikipedia's software and content is completely open
source. You could make a foundation called BetterWiki, and run it on $1M (if
you get the SEO and volunteers to your side). Is that right?

Now if the people donating (cards against humanity, mom+pops, etc) feel good
supporting Wikipedia, and there are more people that want to feel good
supporting Wikipedia than Wikipedia needs, maybe Wikipedia should invest money
in more missions that go along with its general values?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content)

------
freshflowers
> _I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard
> software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month
> was was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like
> requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones._

This person appears to be completely ignorant of the changes in software
engineering since, let's say, the mid 90s. (Which kind of discredits
everything else he writes.)

However, he's introduced as _" He runs a consulting business, rescuing
engineering projects that have gone seriously wrong."_

So basically this is just a consultant's sales pitch.

~~~
smsm42
> So basically this is just a consultant's sales pitch.

I think it may be more a particular mindset, where being in possession of a
hammer (probably a very good hammer, nothing wrong with it) makes everything
look like a nail. Even if in fact it is a complicated assembly line producing
microprocessor chips, and bashing it with a hammer probably won't do any good.

------
zby
The cancer metaphor seems very artificial - it is only about the exponential
growth with no underlying model. Without the model exponential growth means
nothing - because you don't know how to extrapolate the current trend.

------
antr
Can someone explain to me what assets worth $91m does WMF have? It seems like
an awful amount of capex

~~~
rcar
Cash. It's the (mostly) the cumulative sum of revenue - expenses.

~~~
lr4444lr
That's pretty indefensible. Safe assets like US Treasuries could give them
about 1% in one year maturity yield. And since they're non-profit, would
probably have no tax to pay on it.

~~~
jacques_chester
It probably isn't cash in a bank account. Balance sheets typically list "cash
and cash equivalents", which can include short-term investments of various
sorts.

The WMF balance sheet for 2015-16[1] shows that they held $46.7 million in
cash and cash equivalents. Long term investments are listed as $11 million.

Fun trivia from their Statement of Activities[2]: they spent more on
processing donations ($3.6m) and conferences/travel ($2.3m) than on hosting
costs ($2m).

[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-
_FY15-16.pdf)

[2] What a for-profit company might call Income Statement or Profit & Loss.

~~~
appleiigs
They also have a short term investments line in balance sheet too, separate
from cash. Leads me to believe it's cash. Although you are correct many
companies lump them together.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _They also have a short term investments line in balance sheet too, separate
> from cash. Leads me to believe it 's cash._

I can see how you'd come to that view.

But there's no need to guess, here. These terms have legal meanings derived,
in the USA, from the GAAP standards. "Cash and cash equivalents" doesn't mean
"actually it's all cash because we also listed 'short term investments'".

------
soheil
Why were there so many sites that failed before Wikipedia took off? Looks like
part of any search engine should be the service Wikipedia prodives, henece,
the Google love affair. Can the same model be applied to other things, i.e.
User created content + user curated content + indefinite feedback loop: the
more users use it the more content is created/curated (a percentage of new
users go on to creating/curating content)?

------
Fiahil
> If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now,
> before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a
> detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any
> reasonable questions asking for more details.

I never search for it, but I'm really surprised the foundation has not yet
made their spending transparent. Aren't they supposed to be non-profit ?

~~~
davidgerard
It's thoroughly transparent, see links in comments on the original article.

------
lottin
In short: despite the alarming headline, financially Wikipedia is doing very
well.

------
xchip
"I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard
software engineering principles [...]. If they had, we would be seeing things
like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones. This
failure is almost certainly a systemic problem directly caused by top
management, not by the developers doing the actual work."

------
rayiner
Almost all growth you see in the real world is exponential in its early
stages. The numbers the article points to show revenues exceeding costs and a
growing surplus. There is no story here other than Wikipedia is a rapidly
growing organization and is doing it while running in the black.

------
Svekax
> It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors.

We have a winner. It's the same thing killing ESPN. It's not wise for
companies to take political positions on the left or on the right that will
alienate half your users. Just don't do it.

~~~
cooper12
Sorry, but sometimes companies do indeed need to take political positions if
their existence is threatened. SOPA was a huge example of this and net
neutrality is an upcoming partisan issue. If you'd rather they sit back and
get shackled in the name of neutrality, you're not really for the project,
you'd rather see it be at the mercy of other politicians without having any
say or doing anything to counteract it at all. (it's also completely naive of
the massive lobbying already going on. sounds like you just want your side to
have a say and any opposition offends you)

------
bootload
_" 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, has about 300 times as many
employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall."_

Are there any comparable data on the costs for 11x( 16 billion PV/M) this?
(I'm thinking google/amazon here)

 _" their poor handling of software development has been well known for many
years."_

So is the problem inefficiency in the code/HW setup? That is solvable. Any
pointers to the hosting solution used?

------
glasz
thought i will be reading about the beginning of the end of political
censorship and revisionism on wikipedia.

anyway, wp is a business and money is to be made with all kinds of shit.

------
eriknstr
>Nothing can grow forever. 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.

Does the Archive Team backup Wikipedia? Probably they do but if not I guess
they should.

------
mastazi
> 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

I stopped reading right there.

~~~
rfrey
Why?

~~~
mastazi
Sorry for replying late. Because assuming that spending is directly
proportional to the number of pages hosted, signals that the author is either
not competent or biased.

------
devwastaken
Oh I see it all the time. Random extraneous projects and really niche projects
that don't fit well in the wikimedia ecosystem, built ontop of the tech debt
ridden remains of Mediawiki while the core devs are tasked with making helper
tools when they should be paid to work on continually improving core
functionality of Mediawiki so anyone other than Wikipedia can use it.

------
roadbeats
There are articles claiming Wikipedia is actually backed by some investors and
corporate who want to control it. Wikiscanner results gives a hint about how.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/)

------
dandare
Do you know if Wikimedia Foundation releases detailed spending data? The
financial reports are too top level.

I would like to visualize Wikipedia's budget using wikiBudgets.org - something
like this: [https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-
budget-2016](https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016)

------
rubatuga
How true are his statements? I seriously don't know enough about the WMF or
the fiscal policies in place to make even a guess.

~~~
dante821
There's a list of references at the bottom of this article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

~~~
rubatuga
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/12...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-
to-donate-yours/)

A serious eye opener. I was under the impression WMF was struggling to survive

~~~
cooper12
You might have skipped over this part of the article:

> “Based on guidance from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, our
> reserve amounts to one year of operating budget,” said Samantha Lien, a
> spokeswoman for the Wikimedia Foundation. “If there were circumstances that
> affected our ability to raise those funds during that period, we could end
> up in an urgent situation — the reserve is a safety net to protect Wikipedia
> against such a possibility.”

It's prudent for any non-profit to have a suitable reserve in case of
emergencies. The WMF was not financially stable and only recently has started
moving towards that direction with its endowment. I agree that the banners
were a bit too alarmist in tone, but they weren't that far from the truth and
I'd rather Wikipedia overcommits rather than under to save face but instead be
financially unstable.

~~~
akolbe
That "prudent reserve" argument is really a red herring the WMF loves to
employ, because as long as you find ways to inflate your annual spending you
can justify _any_ reserve amount as "necessary".

And that's exactly what's happened. Today WMF spend twenty times what they
used to spend ten years ago, when Wikipedia was already a top-10 website.

So naturally, the reserve they say is necessary today ($100 million) is twenty
times the reserve they said was necessary ten years ago ($5 million). If that
pattern continues, then in another ten years they will say that they need a
reserve of $2 billion. Twenty years from now it will be $40 billion. You get
my drift.

I wouldn't mind if readers and contributors saw palpable value from that
spending, but is Wikipedia's software really 20 times more useful for the
reader and contributor than it was ten years ago? I don't think so.

------
vinceguidry
I have zero problems with Wikipedia's resorting to nagging the everloving fuck
out of people who don't donate.

I just wish I could get them to not nag the everloving fuck out of _me_. Every
year when I see the donation banner, I donate perhaps $20. I would maybe
double that donation if it could stop fucking nagging me.

~~~
akolbe
A lot of people seem to have that reaction. And that's why WMF is swimming in
cash.

~~~
vinceguidry
Awesome, more power to them.

If they can't work out how to stop nagging me, I'll find a technological
solution to the problem. Ideally, I'd turn it on after I donate and it will
turn off after the donation drive is done, so I can get reminded to again next
year.

But of course that's never going to happen. So I'll never get reminded and my
donations are going to stop. Oh well.

~~~
akolbe
Why more power to them? The WMF often treats the volunteer community - the
people actually writing Wikipedia - like shit. Many of their flagship
engineering projects were disasters that required unpaid volunteers to clean
up after them.

The WMF operates in its own bubble, happy to ride its cash cow – a top-5
website to display its fundraising ads on, built by unpaid labour.

This open letter for example, endorsed by more volunteers than any other
Wikipedia initiative ever, never even got a response from WMF:

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_Wikimedia_Foundati...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_Wikimedia_Foundation:_Superprotect_and_Media_Viewer)

More background:

[http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1275679-donate-to-
wikipedia-...](http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1275679-donate-to-wikipedia-
and-pay-for-what-exactly/)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundatio...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundation_money_in_wrong_place/)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/12...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-
to-donate-yours/)

[https://www.dailydot.com/business/sue-gardner-log-rolling-
co...](https://www.dailydot.com/business/sue-gardner-log-rolling-corruption-
wikimedia-chapters/)

Be sure you know what you support and empower, and what role it does and
doesn't play in creating and maintaining Wikipedia.

~~~
vinceguidry
Color me absolutely unsurprised to learn that there are political issues at
Wikipedia. All these people that hate it so much should go on over to that
other, freer encyclopedia where they won't get treated like shit and they'll
make a greater contribution to the world.

I can't remember what the name of it is, but when you find it you let me know
so I can go there too.

~~~
akolbe
You just don't get that WMF, who you give your money to, and Wikipedia are not
the same.

WMF don't write Wikipedia, don't curate Wikipedia, don't check its content.

They pay the hosting (2% of their expenses), tweak the software (sometimes for
better, sometimes for worse), give out grants (often of doubtful benefit to
the reader) and use it as a fundraising platform.

Their expenditure has increased 20-fold over the past ten years.

I've been contributing to Wikipedia since 2006. It was a top-10 website even
then. It's not twenty times better today than it was ten years ago (and what
expansion and improvement of content there has been since then is not down to
the WMF).

Its software is not half a billion dollars better than it was ten years ago.

But that's the amount of money the WMF has soaked up.

~~~
vinceguidry
You finally got me interested, so I started to read your links. I got halfway
through one of them before I decided to go see what Jimmy Wales has to say
about the WMF. Perusing his most recent Quora answers he chose not to answer
any on this issue, so I looked up the WMF itself's Quora topic and found this:

[https://www.quora.com/Wikipedia-in-2015-Why-does-
Wikipedia-a...](https://www.quora.com/Wikipedia-in-2015-Why-does-Wikipedia-
ask-for-donations-even-though-it-has-a-huge-reserve-60M-of-value-cash-
investments-etc/answer/Andreas-Kolbe)

It explains what they're using the money for and addresses the messaging
problem created by the donation banners and what their solution was.

~~~
akolbe
Thanks for looking into it. (Btw, I wrote that Quora answer you linked to.)

Yes, the donation banners sound slightly less alarmist these days (partly due
to year-long efforts by myself and others), but most people who donate still
think there is an acute hosting costs crisis and ask no questions about what
the money is spent on, and what benefit that spending brings to readers and
contributors.

For example, I would like to see WMF spend money on displays giving readers a
rough idea of an article's health and reliability (based e.g. on the quality
of the cited sources, and the contributor mix - it's quite easy to distinguish
an astroturfed article from a healthy one, if you know what to look for). No
interest.

I would like them to spend some of their millions to give contributors free
access to sources (paywalled services, digitised books, online libraries etc.)
But that's not where their spending priorities are. What they do do in this
area seems more like a fig leaf.

I'd like them to do research on known problem areas in their content (such as
PR editing and political and other kinds of manipulation, especially in some
of the other language versions) and to issue consumer warnings for these known
flaws, but they prefer to sweep them under the carpet.

To my mind, the WMF are very provincial and inward-looking: tinkering with the
software, PR and fundraising come first, readers and contributors last. Until
that changes, I don't recommend donating to them.

~~~
vinceguidry
Huh. I see your point now. I wonder if there's a better way to accomplish your
goals than to encourage people to not donate to WMF. After all, you can't
exactly donate to Wikipedia, so there's no way for people who want to support
WP to choose what they want to do.

Yes, I did read about the Reward Board. No, that's not a real alternative,
it's a half-baked idea that doesn't take into account why people donate to
non-profits.

Donation is simultaneously an act of trust and an act of delegation. I am
saying that I trust that whoever I'm donating to can spend this $20 better
than I can spend it. I donate money precisely because I don't care enough to
donate _time_ , which is far more valuable to me than my money is.

Literally the only reason I've bothered to read your rationale, and trust me
it was a struggle, is because I find the _idea_ of Wikipedia fascinating
enough to briefly care about the political intricacies.

If you guys were the Red Cross and you told me to not donate, I'd just roll my
eyes, the $10 that comes out of my account every month towards it isn't worth
the effort it takes to verify whether it's money well spent or not. I'm well
aware of the fact that it's not an efficient donation. But they actually help
people that need help and if I spent it on beer instead that would help
nobody.

I want money to come out of my account and someone who cares about it more
than me to spend it more wisely than I ever could. That's why I donate. I
donate some $60 a month to various Patreons. I am mildly interested in what
they do with it but honestly they could be spending it on beer, weed or meth
themselves and I wouldn't give a toss.

If Wikipedia wants to distance itself politically from the Wikimedia
Foundation then what it needs is enough organization to collect it's own
donations and the gumption to run its own outreach campaigns. I'd even do my
part by telling everyone I know. Someone has to lead the charge, and being
that you seem to be the one who cares the most, you should at least seriously
consider stepping up.

But you're fighting an uphill battle by asking people to not donate to
Wikipedia / WMF. Education is expensive, and you are using the scarcest
resource you have, time, to convince me, one person, to _not_ spend my money,
which is super cheap for me.

------
theprop
Woah, nearly $100 mn per year. Did they start paying all the "volunteers" who
create all their content?

------
fareesh
From an engineering point of view, would changing any part of their stack
reduce the hosting burden? I did some tinkering with MediaWiki in late 2006,
it was a bit convoluted at the time. I imagine it is a gigantic project now.

~~~
_joe
Techops at WMF here: the TL;DR is "no", but I can get into details.

MediaWiki accounts for the lion's share of the servers we run (between MW
itself and the databases and the object storage for files/images, I think
around 60%), but it's not really that inefficient, also because we
aggressively cache content on our own CDN.

Given the amount of traffic we handle, I don't think any sgnificant change
could reduce the hosting burden much - and it's already a very small footprint
at 2M/year. To give you some context, we have currently less than 2000
physical nodes across all of our datacenters; it's pretty hard to reduce that
number further while guaranteeing stability and performance of the sites.

I'm not saying we couldn't improve things - there is always room for it - but
I doubt we could do something that reduces our hardware footprint by a
significant amount. As a benchmark, moving from PHP 5.x to HHVM gave us more
capacity and over two years we reduced by 15% the number of MediaWiki
application servers, but that does not result in a huge change in the hosting
bill.

------
lossolo
They are handling around 2.9k req/s. In april they had 7.6 billion page views.
English articles: 5,400,448. English wikipedia download has size of 13 GB
compressed (expands to over 58 GB when uncompressed).

~~~
staz
I remember ten years ago WP doing multiple giga seemed huge. Now I could
download that in one day and keep the uncompressed version on my phone or like
in a ten bucks sd card

------
fasteo
>>> We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what
the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for
more details

Isn't this an obligation for foundations ?

------
yellow103
Perhaps they view themselves as a charity, and that spending is the goal.

~~~
VLM
That's a good point, its like my local public library.

The problem summarizes down to my local public library spends most of its
money on the physical building and physical books. You could inaccurately
think that is the only expense of running a library, but there are numerous
"in the noise" expenses people don't talk about as much.

You could replace my local public library with a completely non-physical
website of ebooks. No physical building or books means that primary expense
disappears. That means a ebook library, is completely free, right?

Well it turns out that the "lost in the noise" expenses of running a public
library still exist and would then be the primary expenses. At perhaps 5% of
previous "brick and mortar" cost. And the city and county were happy to fund a
brick and mortar public library at 100% of budget, but you're not getting a
penny or at most 1% if you're a "free virtual library" and you need 5% to keep
open... Maybe a corporate benefactor could be found? I mean that's how we got
our brick and mortar library, thanks, steel monopoly...

Note that my public library costs $3.5M/yr, and is one of the best in the
state, if not the best, and serves 71K people in my city, that's about $50/yr
per resident and I'm quite happy with it. It sounds like a public ebook
library should round down to free. Amazon Kindle Unlimited is currently
$120/year plus tax. Isn't that fascinating? The actual cost per user after all
the financial hand waving is done implies the nicest newest largest most
luxurious library in the state is less than half the cost of an inferior
virtual replacement. It does make one wonder if "free" wikipedia is actually
costing our civilization in total more than paper encyclopedias did in the
80s. Merely changing the billing model to trick people into thinking something
is zero cost, when its actually more expensive to the overall civilization,
isn't very innovative.

------
systematical
I honestly wouldn't have a problem with them running ads as long as it was a
single ad per-age and non-obtrusive.

~~~
lolc
I'm happy they don't go down that route. And I wish they don't waste energy on
discussing ads.

If we keep going with the cancer analogy: When I read about metastasis on
Wikipedia, what kind of ads do you think I would be shown if they'd show ads?
Benign ones?

------
postit
I keep wondering how much money would Wikimedia save if they implemented web
torrent and progressive loading.

------
peterwwillis
ISPs use Wikipedia as a killer app (free access from mobile providers), so
make them pay for it. Charge them for access, or demand they host an official
mirror. In exchange you don't show begware to the ISP's customers. ISPs will
end up competing to provide access, eliminating the bulk of hosting
requirements.

~~~
jmcdiesel
So, basically, completely disregard the idea of net neutrality and the
sentiment behind it?

~~~
peterwwillis
Yes. Or keep doing the same thing they're doing now and hope it gets better.

~~~
jnicholasp
False dichotomy. Either/Or does not exhaust the set of plausible options.

------
y1426i
Not surprising. It's quality has deteriorated and not dependable. It's high
SEO ranking has led to it being exclusively used for pushing an opinion or
agenda. Articles on popular topics eventually end up being biased towards a
viewpoint rather than being factual and chronological.

~~~
cooper12
It's funny how you're using this post for soapboxing as the op-ed has nothing
at all to do with what you said. This is why vitriolic titles like that
shouldn't be allowed.

------
Markoff
TLDR: Wikipedia doesn't need your money, don't donate anytime soon

------
profalseidol
Wikipedia should transform into a blockchain dApp.

~~~
davidgerard
Someone is of course trying this
[https://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2017/04/25/wikipedia-
right-b...](https://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2017/04/25/wikipedia-right-but-on-
the-blockchain/)

Wikipedia with micropaid contributors living on the Ethereum blockchain.

------
aerovistae
For anyone who hesitates like I did, WMF is Wikimedia Foundation, not World
Monetary Fund-- there is no World Monetary Fund; it's the IMF --
_International_ Monetary Fund.

------
erikb
Hm? Have you seen the annoying "please sponsor us" ads over the last 5 or so
years? And you didn't recognize the cancer back then when that started?

~~~
cooper12
Your logic is that they're a cancer because they ask for donations? Would you
rather they run ads?

~~~
erikb
The way they ask for donations was super annoying, nobody else does that. And
they always asked as if they would die otherwise despite actually making more
money each year!

If you lie this way it is actually illegal in most countries, I think.

~~~
cooper12
Nobody else does that because they're not ad-free. Regarding the more money
thing, they have to still ask for more because it's financially prudent for
every non-profit to have a reserve in case of emergency or bad years. They
make more because their costs increase as well, and you're also mixing cause-
and-effect since it's quite likely they're only making more due to such tweaks
to the fundraising message. Ads in Wikipedia would be much more annoying for
me personally.

~~~
erikb
No ads afaik:

[https://git-scm.com/](https://git-scm.com/) (sponsored like wikipedia)

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/](https://wiki.archlinux.org/) (domain specific
wikipedia)

[https://github.com/](https://github.com/) (free for everybody to use)

And that's just from the top of my head. Let's also not forget that most ad
based projects are not _that_ annoying and don't lie as much. Finally, I
believe ads are also cancer.

So no point taken, sorry.

~~~
cooper12
So how would you prefer Wikipedia be funded? git-scm is mainly just a book put
online and man pages, not a wiki. The archlinux wiki is obviously funded from
donations to the project itself. Wikipedia can't have a enterprise model like
GitHub.

~~~
erikb
I argue against lying and shoving ads into people's faces. Obviously I would
prefer if they would get funding without these tricks. Showing you three
projects that do should be proof enough that it is possible.

~~~
cooper12
Except those three projects don't have the same model at all... Wikipedia
isn't a small print book that can fund a website. It's not part of a larger
software project that receives donations ample enough to defray and costs of
maintenance. (mediawiki is the underlying software, but it's not the project
itself) Lastly, it can't have "private" articles like GitHub does. You can't
just say "I'd prefer they not did this" while completely ignoring why they do
it and without presenting any valid alternatives or models.

~~~
erikb
You still try to win the argument by presenting logical paradoxons instead of
arguing. Having a different model is a possible, acceptable solution. Just not
being annoying liers may result in success as well. Without the lies they
would have made not as much profit, but they would have probably survived at
the necessary level to continue providing the service.

------
praneshp
> 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, has about 300 times as many
> employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has
> gone up by 85% over the past three years.

Can someone analyze this? It sounds a lot like he has a negative feeling about
WMF, and threw in numbers to validate his opinion. I'd expect non-linear
spending (in terms of pages hosted) at some point (because other things
related to pages like links probably grow non-linearly).

~~~
weeks
As a Wikipedia administrator (mostly inactive), this sentiment makes complete
sense to me. The WMF seemingly spends the majority of its money on non-
critical functions such as community outreach, local chapters, yearly
conferences and other non-critical costs. Including a parade of highly paid,
not very effective executives. One thing to keep in mind is the WMF != the
Wikipedia community, it is very possible to truly support the Wikipedia
mission without also supporting how the WMF is ran.

~~~
smsm42
> on non-critical functions such as community outreach, local chapters, yearly
> conferences

These _are_ critical functions if you want to have live developing community.
If you just want to have a site that answers http requests, sure, not
critical. There are billions of those. Making sure Wiki projects work as
communities and not just as IP address answering http requests is what makes
it critical.

> One thing to keep in mind is the WMF != the Wikipedia community, it is very
> possible to truly support the Wikipedia mission without also supporting how
> the WMF is ran.

Absolutely. But in doing that one must not forget what the point is. If you
declare chapters and and community development unnecessary, what is necessary?
Just server maintenance? Nope. Google has tons of expertise in maintaining
servers, still can't make communities. Their Freebase project is no more,
Wikidata is alive and well. Something to learn from this?

~~~
fiter
How does WMF measure their community building success/failure?

~~~
smsm42
There are regular surveys, and then by talking to people on events,
conferences or just by people providing feedback on one of many channels. And
of course by statistical measures such as traffic, editor activities, etc.
(for which WMF has team that does relevant data collection and research - yet
another non-obvious place where people work that is not directly "site
maintenance"). You can also check out
[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration)
and
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources)
for teams that do it and know better than I do :)

------
darod
As someone who's recovering from cancer, this is a horrible title.

~~~
jmcdiesel
You realize that cancer has meanings outside of biological cancer, right?

------
grandalf
Is this a case where the HN story originally appeared with a title matching
the essay and was subsequently changed to a more descriptive title? Quite the
opposite of the typical pattern :)

~~~
anc84
I really wish the rules were better. Titles should not be edited after a
submission was on the frontpage for X hours. And this title was quite
descriptive in my opinion...

~~~
grandalf
It's just odd because so often a tantalizing but highly descriptive title is
reverted to whatever the author opaquely titled the article and I feel a tinge
of annoyance...

Then this time I see the clickbaity title and double-check to see what the
actual essay is titled and they match... then a few hours later the HN title
is changed.

------
Hambonetasty
It's a website not a person. Keep it clean, fool.

~~~
jmcdiesel
Cancer has definitions outside of biology that fit still...

"Racism is a cancer" is a valid use of the term, as well...

------
fictioncircle
Frankly, the problem with this Op Ed is there is a very simple solution
available to anyone who is concerned about a "doomsday" scenario for
Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Wh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Where_do_I_get_it.3F)

Mirror it and make it available read-only until that day comes as a separate
"disaster recovery" organization and raise the minimal funding required for
that function (1 employee + 1 dedicated server) would be sufficient to the
task. More if you wanted to make it usable but at that point, you aren't
really a dumb mirror.

> pages-articles.xml.bz2 – Current revisions only, no talk or user pages; this
> is probably what you want, and is approximately 13 GB compressed (expands to
> over 58 GB when uncompressed).

You just need to mirror this regularly and maintain a reasonable depth of the
backup. (Say, once a month for the past 12 months)

Then, whenever this terrible event destroys Wikipedia you are on the clear due
to you operating under the past licenses for the data and people will need a
new place to go if Wikipedia is genuinely destroyed.

~~~
maxvu
I understand how this is valuable in offsetting load immediately but I think
the graver threat here is the disbanding of the contributor community and
resultant loss of network-effect value.

I imagine the cost of the disorganization or loss of volunteer contribution
effort in the splintering of WP spinoffs/mirrors is orders of magnitude larger
than load offset from mirroring.

~~~
fictioncircle
> I imagine the cost of the disorganization or loss of volunteer contribution
> effort in the splintering of WP spinoffs/mirrors is orders of magnitude
> larger than load offset from mirroring.

I'm sure it would be but at the end of the day I'm not sure that would be,
ultimately, bad if a monolithic entity failed because of mismanagement.

Nothing stops them from sharing information/pages or linking to each other.

~~~
maxvu
I understand what you mean. I also understand that we're reasoning in the
abstract here but I don't think it's fair to apply traditional economic theory
to a social mission (accessible information?) and I'm not convinced that
failure here is a favorable outcome for it.

You are right, though, that I might be overestimating the cost of coordination
post-dissolution. It's interesting to think about how that might be done
effectively.

~~~
fictioncircle
I've seen that kind of diaspora before in internet forums and ran some for
awhile based on that principle.

It does work more or less in that case. I'm not 1000% sure it'll work with
Wikipedia but in the case I was personally involved in it did.

------
nathan_f77
> After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for
> the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending,
> followed by bankruptcy. At that point there are several large corporations
> (Google and Facebook come to mind) that will be more than happy to pay off
> the debts, take over the encyclopedia, fire the WMF staff, and start running
> Wikipedia as a profit-making platform. There are a lot of ways to monetize
> Wikipedia, all undesirable. The new owners could sell banner advertising,
> allow uneditable "sponsored articles" for those willing to pay for the
> privilege, or even sell information about editors and users.

I honestly wouldn't complain if Wikipedia was owned and monetized by Google. I
think they would recognize the importance of Wikipedia and handle it very
carefully. I also think there is a small and very vocal minority on Hacker
News who would be outraged, but most of the world wouldn't think twice.

~~~
angry-hacker
I think majority here would disagree, including me :)

And for Google it's fine as it is, they make billions using the free data
people provide through Wikipedia. They just spill out the facts (often wrong)
and people never leave Google.

~~~
sparkzilla
Then you will probably be interested in my article: Google and Wikipedia: Best
Friends Forever.

[http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best-
friends-...](http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best-friends-
forever/)

