Comments on: Bloomberg Interviews Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales [VIDEO] http://pulse2.com/2009/12/22/bloomberg-interviews-wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-video/ Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:08:15 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Gregory Kohs http://pulse2.com/2009/12/22/bloomberg-interviews-wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-video/comment-page-1/#comment-31232 Gregory Kohs Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:04:19 +0000 http://pulse2.com/?p=23479#comment-31232 In actuality, because the Mediawiki software renders pages that are easily cached and serve up mostly text (certainly not video or pages and pages of images), it only costs about $1.2 million per year to physically sustain Wikipedia with bandwidth and servers, including the salaries of about 3 developers. This information is all available in the legal Form 990 document that the Wikimedia Foundation is required to file.<br><br>Where is the rest of the $10 million budget going? Mostly to salaries of a bloated staff of 35 who sit back and watch the 99.5% of the work that is being performed by unpaid volunteers. Also, the Foundation tucks away between $1 million and $2 million into a bank savings account for a rainy day in the future.<br><br>The other firms you cite (YouTube and Facebook) cost more because those companies are trying to ramp up to a state of profitability. It costs money to make money. Wikipedia has no such profitability incentive, so that's why costs are kept low. <br><br>I run a site with over 50,000 pages, and over 1,200 unique visitors per day. It costs 61 cents per day to run. Do the math. In actuality, because the Mediawiki software renders pages that are easily cached and serve up mostly text (certainly not video or pages and pages of images), it only costs about $1.2 million per year to physically sustain Wikipedia with bandwidth and servers, including the salaries of about 3 developers. This information is all available in the legal Form 990 document that the Wikimedia Foundation is required to file.

Where is the rest of the $10 million budget going? Mostly to salaries of a bloated staff of 35 who sit back and watch the 99.5% of the work that is being performed by unpaid volunteers. Also, the Foundation tucks away between $1 million and $2 million into a bank savings account for a rainy day in the future.

The other firms you cite (YouTube and Facebook) cost more because those companies are trying to ramp up to a state of profitability. It costs money to make money. Wikipedia has no such profitability incentive, so that's why costs are kept low.

I run a site with over 50,000 pages, and over 1,200 unique visitors per day. It costs 61 cents per day to run. Do the math.

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