Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017)

I think he raises a very important point regarding the enormous risk of WMF being purchased by the current generation of tech-giants. I don't think there is any reason to believe that new management of Wikipedia by a company such as Google, Facebook or Amazon would be the least bit benevolent. The implications that Wikipedia being co-opted would have on freedom of information on the internet would be immense. I don't think that this is idle scare-mongering. Of course, there…

See extensive discussion on HN (1054 points, 406 comments) of this issue back in May. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235

>The modern Wikipedia has 11-12 times as many page views than it had in 2005,[21] but the WMF is spending 33 times as much to serve up these pages to the readers. This seems reasonable given that they have improved reliability, redundancy and backups. I dont see how this is reasonable, especially when CPU , RAM and SSD is anywhere between 10 to even 100,000x faster while being cheaper as well. Bandwidth cost has also dropped by 95% or 20x.

My quick math leaving out a lot of details and what-ifs: Wikipedia spent $110M to run the site last year. That's $9.16M a month. If hosting is $2M per month that leaves $86M annually. With no other expense that leaves an annual salary of $287,000 per employee. If you run a business you're most likely going to spend 1x an employees salary on all types of costs. So average salary is closer to $143,000 if they have only employees and…