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Comment by Aurornis

9 days ago

They spend a ton of money on things unrelated to the website. The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. They could run Wikipedia basically forever on the interest from their money in the bank.

In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.

> The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget.

This is a lie. The only way to make this true is if you don't count programmers, and managers of those programmers as part of running the website.

  • It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.

    • Maybe not, but they need more than zero.

      Regardless, even if you think its not a neccesary expenditure (obviously there is a big gap between bare minimum and healthy), its still an expenditure on hosting the site. The person i was responding to was claiming it wasnt related to the website.

    • 300 employees is an extremely low number of employees for a project of this scope.

      I think some of yall need to think about how this would be run if it was a company. There would be thousands of employees, realistically.

      6 replies →

    • Ah yes, I too am something of an armchair engineer and I can speak confidently on topics I have no insight into.