[elect_engineer]

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

This is the first time I have seen any comment saying that I should have listed page views instead of pages. I hadn't given it much thought until you brought it up, but I don't see any reason which I shouldn't remove the pages statistic and replace it with page views. I do want to make the essay as accurate as I can, and criticisms/suggestions are a big help in doing that. (you never see the flaws in your own writing).

Can anyone think of a downside to me changing it to pageviews?

[Sacho]

Sure - I would argue that bandwith costs are only a tiny fraction, and the real cost is in stewarding all the existing content(page numbers) - e.g. more servers = more admins, older content/tools need maintenance, etc.

I think what is happening here is that the server costs argument is weak as a first argument. Maybe x33 expenditure is high, but I know WP has grown, and it's hard to quantify how that growth translates into expenditure - it's easy to imagine higher reliability, more accessibility, more need for maintenance of established products and so on as WP matures. If I happen to like WP and am willing to give them benefit of the doubt, why wouldn't I trust that their engineering team knows what they're doing? You haven't established your credibility as an SRE(or enough facts) to really shake that initial goodwill.

Once I view your initial argument as shaky, I am naturally more inclined to view the rest of your arguments skeptically(or just outright ignore them).

From an outsider POV, your two strong arguments are: - I want to donate to just WP because I don't care about the rest; As the non-WP fraction of expenses grows, there will be a tipping point where the "waste" will erode my willingness to donate - Even though there are growing development costs, WP tools have stagnated, core problems aren't addressed, new features aren't being used(another signal of "waste")

I think if you lead your essay with those arguments, the server costs argument would be better received. It's much easier to comprehend "Out of $1 I donate, only $0.50 goes to WP", and as an experienced WP user you speak from a position of authority on the second point. From there, it's easier to convince me that WP is also being wasteful in server costs.

In general though, I think you need more evidence put forward to really convince an outsider that WP is wasteful - more comparisons of overall spending vs just-WP spending, more examples of development stalling or going in the wrong direction. The essay may be convincing to an insider who already is aware of the problems, but from an outside perspective it's light on evidence.

[elect_engineer]

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

I don't think I have ever hinted that Wikipedia is spending too much on servers. I consider that part of Wikipedia to pretty much be the best managed part, and everything they do increases reliability, helps with disaster recovery, or makes the site faster. I even said "It costs a certain amount to have reliable servers, run a good legal team, maintain the core software, etc. But none of the things that the WMF needs to do require ever-expanding spending."

In my opinion, spending 1,250 times as much to do basically the same job is all the evidence you need. I wouldn't squawk at 5 or 10 times as much, but 1,250 times as much? At that point the burden of proof is on the person who claims that such a huge increase in spending was necessary.

[Faark]

Yes, calling out concrete examples of waste would make it a lot easier to understand if this is about actual mismanagement or about a different ideology were priorities are / how narrow the mission is supposed to be.

[elect_engineer]

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

Calling out concrete examples of waste also has a downside. It usually results in the discussion going off into the weeds about whether individual expenditures are justified. There are many people who focus on individual examples of waste. I chose to focus on the big picture -- overall spending growth.

[FabHK]

> Can anyone think of a downside to me changing it to pageviews?

No, it makes sense.