User talk:Guy Macon/Wikipedia has Cancer

Relevant New Developments

• https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tech-to-pay-up/
• https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/

Potentially relevant to @Guy Macon's thesis.

SpurriousCorrelation 10:16, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! The camel's nose comes to mind...

• Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up --Wired
• Report: Wikimedia Foundation is Announcing the Launch of a Commerical Product, Wikimedia Enterprise --Library Journal
• Wikimedia will launch a paid service for big tech companies --The Verge
• Big tech companies may soon have to pay for Wikipedia content --TechRadar
• Apple might soon pay for Wikipedia content --Apple Insider
• Wikipedia wants to charge Google, Amazon, and Apple for using its content --Mashable
• Wikimedia Enterprise Seeks to Turn Big Tech Into Paying Customers --WebProNews
• Wikipedia will not be free for tech-giants anymore, launches Wikimedia Enterprise --TechStory
• Wikimedia Enterprise Seeks to Turn Big Tech Into Paying Customers --Tech Investor News
• Wikimedia Enterprise on Meta Wiki
• Wikimedia Enterprise on Meta Wiki^{...redirects are so old school. Here at W?F we prefer to have two identical pages that update at different times -- until someone forgets to do the manual update. And BTW, the duplicate page doesn't have a talk page. :(}
• Wikimedia Enterprise on Wikimedia Dfff^{...because the software the W?F makes Wikipedia use isn't good enough for the W?F.}
• Wikimedia Enterprise/FAQ
• Wikimedia Enterprise/Essay
• Wikimedia Enterprise sign up page
• Wikimedia Enterprise API
• Discussion on Wikimedia Forum
• Hacker News thread
• Reddit thread

So, my loyal minions   sycophants   fanbois   henchmen   talk page stalkers  talk page watchers, how should I cover this? --Guy Macon (talk) 13:02, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

One point that is implied but not easily said out loud is that the general internet-connected public doesn't really know about or care about Wikimedia. They see this amazing Wikipedia project, and that's the end of their journey. WMF is using dark patterns in fundraising, and now APIs, to exploit this, by implying that its about the survival of the project, dammit. Two immediate concerns about the API: 1, it converts companies relying on WP for its source of knowledge into customers, who will therefore have leverage over WMF. WMF may not promise anything, they may explicitly say that using the service does not mean any guarantees of <thing>, but the economic principle is unavoidable. 2, by having a commercial offering, WMF is now always incentivized to keep the "free" product worse. Yes, there may be an official policy to not do this, but it doesn't sit well to rely on what is basically a poster on a wall that says, "remember: it is against policy to do what you feel pressured to do".SpurriousCorrelation 01:06, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Oh, and along with the Camel's nose metaphor, this fits under the concept of Creeping normality, which is how I see this being made palatable to project contributors. SpurriousCorrelation 01:10, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Cassidy J. Moon's Rebuttal

PART 1: I don't really know how to edit wikipedia properly, so my apologies for the mess that this will look like. Your calculations contain an error. You assumed a constant number of internet users. Assuming that wikipedia use has grown at the same rate as general internet use, it makes perfect sense that hosting costs have been multiplied by 33; actually, it seems like they should have grown higher.

You say: "According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month.[18] The WMF spends roughly $2 million USD per year on Internet hosting[11] and employs some 300 staff.[19] The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005,[20] but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting,[21] has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall.[22] WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.[23]"

Using this as a source: https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm

I don't know if these calculations are from 2015 or 2022. Depending on when you measure, there were 3 to 4 times more users of the internet in 2015 than 2005. There are now 6 to 7 times more users of the internet than there were in 2005.

Assuming that hosting costs = users × pages (it... doesn't work that way... but, whatever, lets go with it) then you'd expect 11 to 12 times as many web pages, with 3 to 4 times more users, to result in 33 to 48 times as much in hosting costs. Using 2022 numbers, you'd expect 66 to 84 times as much in hosting costs.

Given that, there's no reason to assume that they're being profligate in their spending, at least as far as hosting is concerned.

PART 2: Your essay contains an implicit assumption that going from a great many volunteers + 1 employee to a great many volunteers + 300 employees is a terrible waste of money that could have easily been avoided by simply not hiring 299 people. There is no reason to believe that that is correct.

People need to eventually make money. Many volunteer projects fall apart because of this. If your revenue greatly exceeds your expenses, and you might lose an important volunteer becasue they need to go and make money instead of helping maintain a globally important piece of infrastructure, then you should probably pay that volunteer to keep them doing whatever important thing they have already been doing for years.

Given that, there's no reason to assume that they're being profligate in their spending, at least as far as employees are concerned.

ANTI-PART 3: I still find the lack of transparency or financial limits concerning. All I have done is prove that most of your evidence for wikipedia's financial imprudence doesn't work. I haven't actually proven that wikipedia is on sound financial footing, and am not making that claim. I am literally only saying that it's less clear than you think it is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.43.215.66 (talk) 22:37, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Regarding your part 1, hosting costs are a very minor share of Wikimedia's spending, so the increase in spending cannot be explained only by an increase in pages/visits. --Ita140188 (talk) 07:47, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

---

Nothing wrong with your editing or writing, but if you ever get into a situation where you can't get something to look right on Wikipedia, the magic words are "feel free to edit/format this. I will tell you if I don't like your changes". This removes the "don't edit other people's comments even to fix spelling or grammar error" handcuffs, and you almost always end up liking the result.

I do want to avoid errors in math or fact, so please explain exactly how you think I should edit the page to enhance the clarity. In particular, I am having trouble understanding why how many users of the internet there are is relevant. I think number of page views is the right thing to measure.

Maybe a "what the page says now" and "what the page should say instead" format would get your point across. Could you try that?

I suspect (but cannot verify because of the lack of transarency; examples include listing "computers and furniture" as a line item and later reluctanly revealing that many of the computers are in a datacenter but rental of computers in the same dtacenter are not included) that hosting costs are reasonable. They are such a tiny percentage of total spending that it doesn't "smell" like someone going wild on hosting spending. Second, we now have multiple datacenters with a lot of redundancy. That was money well spent.

As for employees and volunteers, in general the employees didn't replace volunteers. The vast majority of the actual work of creating an encyclopedia is and always has been done by volunteers.

In the last five years salaries and wages have gone from $31,713,961 USD to $88,111,412 USD. (Again there is a lack of transparacy; it is unclear if this includes outside contractors.) The foundation does not have 2.75 times as much work to do. We weren't hurting from a lack of W?F workers in 2018. We cleartly had no good reason to hire more than double the number of people to do an amount of work that really hasn't changed. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:16, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

(...Sound of crickets...)

Does anyone reading this have any guess as to why the cost to keep Wikipedia running would be related to the total number of people on the Internet as opposed to the number who read Wikipedia pages? --Guy Macon (talk) 15:09, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

As I read it, there seems to be unclarity in this paragraph:

> According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly $2 million USD per year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.

If the "The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005" refers to 1.4 billion vs 16 billions of page views per month (and [20] reference math seem to confirm that), then Wikipedia serves 11-12 times as many pages (per month), because the word "host" in this context would usually be understood as "how many unique pages website has". And I think they did understand it like that and that's how "total users" x "total pages" could be seen as a flawed but better approximation of hosting cost growth. Trafium (talk) 19:05, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Ah. I see the problem. Thanks for the clear explanation.

A bit of background for those reading this page:

Hosting a web page means "making the page available on the internet." Most of the companies that sell this kind of service sell make websites available on the internet. In other words, Lyle Zapato pays one price to make both https://zapatopi.net/belgium/ and https://zapatopi.net/blackhelicopters/ available.

Of course hosting pages imples serving pages, unless nobody looks at a page. For small sites it cost the same whether 5 or 5,000 people look at a page in a month, but for large sites like Wikipedia that serve many millions of pages serving more pages costs more money. Yet the service is still called "hosting".

How about this:

"The modern Wikipedia serves 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much for this service, which seems reasonable given that they have increased the reliability and improved the redundancy and backups. More concering is the fact that since 2005 the WMF has hired roughly 300 times as many employees and is now spending 1,250 times as much overall, which seems rather excessive considering that the actual amount of work they have to do is pretty much the same."

Would that clear up the confusion? --Guy Macon (talk) 20:04, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

This is definitely more clear, although, rereading it again, I imagine "serves 11–12 times as many pages" could be still misunderstood as "has 11-12 times as many (total unique) pages to serve". Incorporating "page views" would eliminate the ambiguity for me entirely. But I'm not a native english speaker, so it might be just me.

Anyway, glad I could help and thank you for the page, it was quite insightful for me to read it after the new Wikipedia UI which forced me to create an account here to change it back :) Trafium (talk) 19:29, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

We wouldn't want to give you a button that lets you choose without creating an account! The W?F knows better than you do what is best for you. (Creating the account would still be better; as an IP your choice would disappear if you cleared your cookies - Not the W?DF's fault, just the way the web works.) --Guy Macon (talk) 00:06, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Unless someone objects or has a better version, I will change it to

"The modern Wikipedia has 11-12 times as many page views than it had in 2005, 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. More concerning is the fact that since 2005 the WMF has hired hundreds of extra employees and is now spending 1,250 times as much overall, which seems rather excessive considering that the actual amount of work they have to do is pretty much the same." --Guy Macon (talk)

That's a good wee improvement (I fixed the typo "concering"). ··gracefool 💬 08:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Anonymous

From Taiwan News:[1]

"The collective also railed against Wikipedia for allegedly underrepresenting women in its articles, having a 'spending cancer,' engaging in deletionism, and committing POV skewing".

I would ask my loyal   minions   henchmen   loyal opposition   sycophants   unindicted coconspirators   arch-nemeses   coadjutors   bête noires   abettors   adversaries   talk page stalkers   talk page watchers...yeah, let's go with talk page watchers...reading this to please try to find any source where Anonymous talks about Wikipedia having a "spending cancer". I searched and could only find sources talking about it, not the actual words used by Anonymous. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:18, 16 March 2023 (UTC)