[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[MZMcBride]

Erik Moeller wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:47 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>> It costs about $2.5 million to keep the sites operational for a year.
>
>How did you come up with that number?

I used to say $2 million, but Roan recently told me that it had probably
gone up since that estimate (from 2009). So now I say $2.5 million. It's
advertised on Meta-Wiki here:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/?banner=money_or_die>. ;-)

As I recall, the $2 million (now $2.5 million) figure came from
discussions with technical staff about what it would cost to keep the site
running for a year and an examination of relevant Wikimedia-related budget
breakdowns that were split out between non-technical staff costs, overhead
costs, etc. However, following Cunningham's Law, if you have a better
figure, please share. :-)  We can certainly say it's far less than $35
million to only keep the sites up and running (barebones hosting support
and related tech staff costs), the question is how much less.

MZMcBride