Posted by greyface- 12 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(techni...
https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1rllcdg/megathre...
(Unless this was satire and I missed it)
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) maintains a significant financial surplus and a growing, healthy balance sheet, with net assets reaching approximately $271.5 million in the 2023–2024 fiscal year. This surplus is largely driven by consistent, high-volume, small-dollar donations, with total annual revenue often exceeding $180 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports...
[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...
[2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
Another key difference over the last 15 years has been the introduction of awards and grants, which didn't exist then but now comprise $26.8M (15%) of their expenditures. This is where most of the ideological/controversial spending actually goes, rather than the salaries per se, but even more to the point, this one line item is more than 3 times their entire inflation-adjusted budget from 15 years ago ($5.6M times 150% CPI = $8.4M) and is still more than if we adjusted their entire budget using the hosting cost as an index ($5.6M times 3.75 = $21M).
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/WMF_Annu...
Using hosting costs as an index is nonsensical. I wasn't able to find numbers for 2009, but since 2015 the monthly page views have remained almost exactly constant. So you might as well claim that they're vastly overpaying for hosting since inflation from 2008 is way less than 3.75x.
Ultimately every person has to decide for themselves whether they think WMF is a worthy recipient for their donations, but it is in no way operating on a shoestring budget nor staffed by volunteers anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Despite the constant screeching for donations, the entire site is owned by a company with shareholders. All the “donations” go to them. They already met their funding needs for the next century a long time ago, this is all profit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
In a discussion forum like HN, pointing to primary sources is the most reliable input to the other readers' research on/synthesis of their own secondary interpretation of what may be going on. Pointing to other secondary interpretations/analyses is also useful, but not without including the primary source so that others can - with apologies to the phrase currently misused by the US right wing - truly do their own research.
My original post was a joke about this.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/18/23206110/james-webb-space...
Actually fuck the whole dynamic web. Just give us hypertext again and build native apps.
Edit: perhaps I shouldn't say this on an VC driven SaaS wankfest forum...
But if there's one thing I've learned over the years as a technologist, it's this: the "best technology" is not often the "technology that wins".
Engineering is not done in a vacuum. Indeed, my personal definition of engineering is that it is "constraint-based applied science". Yes, some of those constraints are "VC buxx" wanting to see a return on investment, but even the OSS world has its own set of constraints - often overlapping. Time, labor, existing infrastructure, domain knowledge.
The entire web is built on geopolitical stability and cooperation. That is no longer certain. We already have supply chains failing (RAM/storage) meaning that we will be hardware constrained for the foreseeable future. That puts the onus on efficiency and web apps are NOT efficient however we deliver them.
People are also now very concerned about data sovereignty whereas they previously were not. If it's not in your hands or on your computer than it is at risk.
The VC / SaaS / cloud industry is about to get hit very very hard via this and regulation. At that point, it's back to native as delivery is not about being tied to a network control point.
I've been around long enough to see the centralisation and decentralisation cycles. We're heading the other way now
> "VC / SaaS / cloud industry is about to get hit very very hard via ... regulation"
can you explain?
How? Well the numerous non-US sovereign technology initiatives are going to be incentivised through regulation with local compliance being the only option going forwards.
As a non-US person I am already speaking to people at other orgs in similar space as ours who are looking at options there.
Tons of native apps also have plugins or addons, which (surprise surprise) is just code downloaded from some central repo, and run with way less sandboxing than JS.
[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/notepad-plus-...