Well yes, hosting is cheap. The majority of expenses for any company comes from employee salaries, payments to vendors and professional services, and you can see exactly that in Wikimedia's balance sheet. So what's the point this piece is trying to make exactly?

(This comment was written when this HN submission had an editorialised headline about server hosting costs)

Funny how people will (1) ignore the software development side of things, and (2) cheer on the massive new regulation of "Big Tech" but ignore what that imposes on an org like the Wikimedia Foundation, both during the legislative stage (re. advocacy) and the once the regulation is imposing its bureaucracy. The UK Online Safety Bill is a prime example. Also, Wikipedia is a very important project, but just one of many projects operated by the Foundation. Finally, these articles somehow attack "high expenses" at the very same time as "running a surplus being added to an endowment capable of generating income that will help support then projects indefinitely even if some people stop visiting the sites (and thus seeing the December donation banners) because ChatGPT could be their interface to all the great knowledge".

The org is not without reproach, and certainly not the most important part of the overall Wikimedia Movement, but there's a bit of smoke and mirrors going on with articles like these.

As for the tone of banners: I believe there's a consultation about them going on right now; they're being co created with the userbase. Go be part of the solution! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2023_b...

Direct costs maybe but how much of the staff cost is staff required to make the site run?

... I mean, _as you'd expect_, surely? I can't imagine why anyone would expect this to be a large part of their costs; it's largely a relatively easy sort of thing to optimise (I assume most page views are just served straight from a cache; most users don't log in), and they've had 20 years to do so. As you'd expect, the bulk of its costs are staff.

I always toss $5 to Wikipedia when they do the annual donation campaign and I don't care where it goes. I like what they stand for and they made high school indefinitely easier for me, I owe em'.

If you're interested how they run Wikipedia, their tech docs are public: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://github.com/wikimedia

Compared to many other stuff I read, it's mostly "boring tech".

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

tl;dr: Wikipedia's expenses grow exponentially year-over-year and it's not clear where the extra money is going, since the basic experience of Wikipedia hasn't changed all that much in the past decade.

    Year       Support and revenue          Expenses  Net assets at year end
    2003–2004              $80,129           $23,463                 $56,666
    2004–2005             $379,088          $177,670                $268,084
    2005–2006           $1,508,039          $791,907              $1,004,216
    2006–2007           $2,734,909        $2,077,843              $1,658,282
    2007–2008           $5,032,981        $3,540,724              $5,178,168
    2008–2009           $8,658,006        $5,617,236              $8,231,767
    2009–2010          $17,979,312       $10,266,793             $14,542,731
    2010–2011          $24,785,092       $17,889,794             $24,192,144
    2011–2012          $38,479,665       $29,260,652             $34,929,058
    2012–2013          $48,635,408       $35,704,796             $45,189,124
    2013–2014          $52,465,287       $45,900,745             $53,475,021
    2014–2015          $75,797,223       $52,596,782             $77,820,298
    2015–2016          $81,862,724       $65,947,465             $91,782,795
    2016–2017          $91,242,418       $69,136,758            $113,330,197
    2017–2018         $104,505,783       $81,442,265            $134,949,570
    2018–2019         $120,067,266       $91,414,010            $165,641,425
    2019–2020         $129,234,327      $112,489,397            $180,315,725
    2020–2021         $162,886,686      $111,839,819            $231,177,536
    2021–2022         $154,686,521      $145,970,915            $239,351,532

Fun fact: All of Wikipedia (text only, compressed) is like 20 GB

Why edit the title? This article is barely about the hosting costs. And also yes, it's well-known wiki has very healthy revenue despite it's desperate sounding pleas for donations.

So, to OP, (who is selling a product that you can “buy” facts), how does adding money into the equation resolve anything?

From reading this article it seems you’re not content with the editorial process?

Or is it just the quickest descent to the most cynical conclusion?

This is why I don't donate.

The article appears to be a beef about moderator structure and the author's perception of a Biden bias over an article they hand-picked.

The revenue and expense statement, the subject heading an entirely misleading heading given the bulk of the article is not about revenue/expenses strapped on at the end appears to have no, or at best threadbare connection to the main article other than 'politics' - well, what I had for breakfast is 'politics' too, perhaps that influences my reading of this article.

The moderator discussion and revenue/expense discussion offers nothing of substance in information of discussion over multitudes of other articles that have discussed the same thing with far more insight.

HN political flamebait, really. {Edit, thanks for the downvote.. author? That was 3 minutes. I really don't care, the account's literally called 'throwaway'. Censorship, eh?]