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by daedrdev 156 days ago
The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
1 comments
bawolff 156 days ago
There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".
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daedrdev 155 days ago
No, you simply assume that.

In 2025 they spend 184 million, and 2% was on hosting. Even several times that for salaries means that an absurd fraction is on non wikipedia items.

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bawolff 155 days ago
Hosting does not include software development. It does not include sysadmins. I'm not sure if it even includes data center personel (Wikipedia owns its own servers. That means you have to hire people to plug them in. Amazon isnt doing it for you).

Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going.

That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia.

Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.

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