Comment by ryan_lane
3 years ago
That particular VP wasn't very good at his job, and at the time he wrote that, the foundation was still considerably understaffed, and simply wasn't keeping up with the needs of any part of the community (readers, editors, volunteer developers).
I'm really tired of your argument that hosting costs $2.4m a year. It's disinformation at best, because you're leaving out salaries of the folks who keep it running.
And I am really tired of seeing people online saying, "Well, but they must have huge hosting costs. Think of all the traffic!"
And they are saying this because hosting costs are subtly ...
https://www.wionews.com/science-technology/exclusive-wikiped...
("Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites, yet many people don’t know that it is hosted and operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Unlike other top websites, we rely on donations to support Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects ...")
... and not so subtly ...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/wiki...
("But why does the “Wiki” continually appeal for funding? ... the wheels keep turning, and it has massive bandwidth and hosting service costs.")
... alluded to in press reports designed to stimulate giving. So I think it is fair enough to point out that the scale of WMF expenses is not actually due to hosting costs.
Lastly, Erik's $10M+ estimate very clearly included the requisite salaries.
Erik's estimates were not good, which is one of the many reasons he wasn't good at his job. The current staffing at Wikimedia is considerably more in-line with their needs, and their salaries are much closer to what the industry pays (but is still considerably lower). Wikimedia's salaries are much higher than $10 a year currently, which kind of shows how off he was on his estimates.
Note that any site near Wikipedia's scale has at least 2-3x more software engineers (many of them have thousands of engineers), and much larger legal teams. Support roles grow in parallel with employee size. Wikimedia's overall salary cost is quite amazing for what they maintain.