[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[James Alexander]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:57 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com>wrote:

> 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


Aye, I know for example that our page views have more then doubled in the
last 5 years (since 2008) and I believe grew even more dramatically in the
years before that.

James