[chr15m]

> The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank.

I don't think "rich" is the correct way to describe this. It sounds like a lot of money but there are a lot of expenses and people to pay. Seventeen months sounds fragile - one long-ish recession and they're toast. I hope they survive.

[Aurornis]

They spend a ton of money on things unrelated to the website. The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. They could run Wikipedia basically forever on the interest from their money in the bank.

In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.

[bawolff]

> The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget.

This is a lie. The only way to make this true is if you don't count programmers, and managers of those programmers as part of running the website.

[loeg]

It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.

[bawolff]

Maybe not, but they need more than zero.

Regardless, even if you think its not a neccesary expenditure (obviously there is a big gap between bare minimum and healthy), its still an expenditure on hosting the site. The person i was responding to was claiming it wasnt related to the website.

[ryan_lane]

300 employees is an extremely low number of employees for a project of this scope.

I think some of yall need to think about how this would be run if it was a company. There would be thousands of employees, realistically.

[loeg]

I don't think that's true at all. I have to go pretty far up the Org tree at my corporate job to get to 300 engineers and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.

[ryan_lane]

I don't think you understand the scale of "running Wikipedia". I do. I worked there for years when there were 100 engineers and they were severely understaffed.

Wikipedia is: mediawiki (and its development), wikimedia cloud services (which I built) that runs tools and provides services for developers (including volunteers and tool authors), server/network infrastructure, wikidata, search, etc.

Mediawiki itself is extremely complicated to build and run, and it's running for numerous languages across multiple projects (wikipedia, commons, wikidata, wiktionary, etc etc).

I'm leaving out a lot of the other things handled by the engineering teams, but it's considerably more complex than you think it is.

[mistercheph]

> and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.

I highly doubt that the totality of your corporate employers output is even close to the scope and scale of wikipedia. I’m pretty sure you and I both know that if your employer was gone tomorrow, most would not notice, and only the most severely bookish scholasts (they are likely to be wikipedia editors) will be able to recall what exactly was done there 5 years after the books are closed.

[mrguyorama]

Wikipedia gets far more traffic, use, and dependence than any of the multiple 3000 person companies I've worked for.

Like orders of magnitude. Wikipedia gets more traffic than Amazon.

[Doctor_Fegg]

Your regular reminder that OpenStreetMap has something like two or three FTEs and anchors $1bn of value.

[lostglass]

Ah yes, I too am something of an armchair engineer and I can speak confidently on topics I have no insight into.

[james_marks]

17 months of runway for the something with the scale and ambition of Wikipedia is living hand-to-mouth.

[ryukoposting]

18-24 months is a typical runway for a healthy American startup. As a mature nonprofit with a very predictable revenue source, 17 months is well within reason. Runways get shorter as you scale and stabilize, not longer.