Comment by bawolff
9 days ago
> 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.
I don't think that's true at all. I have to go pretty far up the Org tree at my corporate job to get to 300 engineers and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.
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Your regular reminder that OpenStreetMap has something like two or three FTEs and anchors $1bn of value.
Ah yes, I too am something of an armchair engineer and I can speak confidently on topics I have no insight into.