[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[Michael Snow]

On 3/14/2013 10:26 PM, Theo10011 wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> Only data-center usage (facilities, bandwidth, power). It does not
>> include capital expenditures (servers, storage, network gear, etc.;
>> budgeted at $1.9M in 2012-13) nor ops engineering staffing, nor of
>> course any software engineering staffing or the basics of an
>> organizational support structure (management/administration, legal,
>> etc.).
> I'm not technically inclined, but those numbers sound odd. Maybe I'm
> missing something? The traffic ranking didn't go up nearly as substantially
> in the last couple of years as the hosting and cap-ex mentioned above.
I'm not sure why you would use traffic ranking for financial analysis, 
even the envelope-and-napkin kind of analysis we're engaging in here. 
I'm pretty confident that just because Google has been sitting at #1 for 
some time, it doesn't mean that their core operational costs have 
remained flat over that period.

Aside from that, it's only recently that Wikimedia sites have approached 
having the kind of redundancy and failover capabilities we've talked 
about needing for a long time. That's at least one example of something 
that can add pretty significant costs without having a material impact 
on traffic (except in emergencies, of course).

--Michael Snow