On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Robin Shannon wrote:
Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?
I'll let mav answer this in detail, but suffice to say, the primary growing cost is hardware/hosting, but some administrative costs are growing as well, although at a slower pace.
Robin, see for yourself: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
Increases in hardware/hosting costs drive overall increases in budgeted costs. Overhead costs have been pretty much increased as a percentage on top of that by approximately 20-30%.
You know, those figures would make a lot more sense if they were done on an accrual basis rather than a cash basis. As is the figures completely ignore the fact that the expected life of the servers is more than a single quarter. Yes, the cash basis figures are needed to know how much money is required in fundraising, but they don't give a good picture of the actual costs involved in running the foundation.
PS -
Note that the large degree of uncertainty in my hardware cost projection is due to the fact that I need to update my model with new data (the last real traffic data I put into it is a year old; the same time WikiStats stopped reporting page views; yet the model has been pretty good at predicting what we needed to spend for 2005 so far).
The other big problem with my model is that is only tracks spending vs page
views from wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org. In the past the amount of traffic from the other Wikimedia domains was so small that it could safefly be ignored. This is no longer the case for wikimedia.org http://wikimedia.org thanks to Commons and will soon not be the case for wiktionary.org http://wiktionary.org and wikinews.orghttp://wikinews.org :
If you're using those cash-basis figures that's another problem with the model as well :).
Anthony