Also known as "the institutional imperative." Quoting Warren Buffett's 1989 letter to shareholders:[1]
"My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.
For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.
Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem."
Jeff Bezos talked about something very similar in his most recent letter to shareholders[0]:
"As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second."
I wonder how much of this could be counteracted simply by capping profits, such that all net revenue in excess of some fixed amount is forced by the corporate charter to be turned into either employee compensation or stockholder dividends.
Sure, such a company would have no chance of succeeding in the stock market, but what if it never plans on IPOing in the first place?
Wow, this really hits the nail on the head in regards to the small company I work for. Expanded rapidly from 30-40 to 120 in two years. The higher-ups have failed to address some core issues (with some refused on principle, such as an aversion to stronger organizational structure due to not wanting to seem "corporate") while still pursuing pet projects and spending freely (of money and others' time). Communication is also a massive issue - half the company (within the current structure) knows what's going on, the other half have to either do their own investigative work or wait. Would fine with me if you're a much larger company but at 120 or so it seems pretty silly and hypocritical to their "anti-corporate" ethos. Will be interesting when/if we hit Dunbar's number.
Agreed. It's for this reason that we have to be as free as possible to create new institutions. All institutions, no matter how well-intentioned and self-aware their founders, succumb to these forces. The only way to prevent perverse misallocation of effort and resources is to allow for a steady turnover of institutions.
I think this problem derives from the nature of and incentives of people. What happens is that certain managers (and founders) have derived their success from pushing certain directions that have added a lot of value.
Usually long term initiative take a lot of domain knowledge and a specific set of connections. When something new becomes more important, they risk losing their personal position since they may not be the best person in terms of knowledge and connection to carry out the new direction. Instead they try to use their accumulated power to keep their direction supported even when it's not in the interest of the business for as long as they can.
To address this, perhaps there's merit in rewarding timely exits and somehow punishing people that have dragged things out. However the most that companies can do is usually just fire someone. And at that point they have probably sucked the company dry of the value they can personally extract.
This will be very familiar to readers of The Systems Bible [1], which expounds in great depth about the above problems and potential mitigation strategies.
The basic takeaway is that these behaviours and forces are natural, intrinsic and inevitable; that a wise systems-manager will seek to carefully manage them rather than oppose or decry them.
Thanks for the link. He says something else very relevant to OP's point, too:
"We face another obstacle: In a finite world, high growth
rates must self-destruct. If the base from which the growth is
taking place is tiny, this law may not operate for a time. But
when the base balloons, the party ends: A high growth rate
eventually forges its own anchor."
A better more original source of pithy organizational rules would be Robert Conquests three laws of politics
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
If you transform Conquest's rules from politics to running (ruining?) the wikipedia, the transformed rules are
"We can change nothing not even our exponential growth spiral, not our policies, nothing"
"LOL We're not doing the fiscal conservatism thing. I like how the current top discussion is about popularity and the need for a circular firing squad, not something financial. A direct quote of an attempt to avoid working on the issues "I'm reminded of the inflammatory, low-rent campaign of Donald Trump." Yeah buddy that'll fix it, that'll fix it real good."
"We're headed off the financial cliff now get out of the way I'm going gas pedal to the floor as you can see in the exponential graphs. The problem is we're a CRUD app and that's cutting edge CS just like quantum computing so naturally there's no possibility of criticism there. After all, the Egyptians didn't have flush toilets and they built a pyramid, so any criticism of the toilet in my bathroom is either making fun of the entire Egyptian culture or pretending the pyramids were not a logistical challenge."
There is some humor in that the world of paper encyclopedia publishing ran on mostly capitalist operational principles for decades, centuries. It turns out that running an online encyclopedia off donations and extreme hand waving is powerful enough to destroy an industry on its way to its inevitable collapse. Maybe someday in the future we'll have encyclopedias again, but the era after wikipedia and before the next encyclopedia will be a bit of a dark age. That's too bad.
Pretty sure this article could have been called "Wikipedia's Costs Growing Unsustainably" instead of the clickbait headline.
But overall this oped is misplaced. Running the leanest possible operation shouldn't be Wikipedia's focus at this stage in its lifecycle, it's improving the quality of its content.
Back in 2005 Wikipedia had 438k articles and the focus was expanding the reach of its content to cover all topics; today the article count is 5.4 million it's quality that matters more. You can't improve quality just based on crowd-sourcing alone (see: Yelp, Reddit, etc), and the bigger it's gotten the more of a target it's become by disinformation activists.
This attitude on budgets over value strikes me as a classic engineer's POV. The OP is nostalgic about a time when the site was run by a single guy in his basement, but could 1 guy handle the assault of an army of political zealots or Russian hackers? DDoS attacks? Fundraising? Wikipedia is arguably one of the most coveted truth sources the world over, protecting and improving its content is more important than an optimal cost-to-profit ratio.
If the OP has specifics, by all means, share them, but this kind of generalized fearmongering about budgets isn't spectacularly useful, IMHO.
I was very actively involved in MediaWiki development & Wikimedia ops (less so though) in 2004-2006 back when IIRC there were just 1-4 paid Wikimedia employees.
It was a very different time, and the whole thing was run much more like a typical open source project.
I think the whole project has gone in completely the wrong direction since then. Wikipedia itself is still awesome, but what's not awesome is that the typical reader / contributor experience is pretty much the same as it was in 2005.
Moreover, because of the growing number of employees & need for revenue the foundation's main goal is still to host a centrally maintained site that must get your pageviews & donations directly.
The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as possible, the way OpenStreetMap operates is a much better model. Success should be measured as a function of how likely any given person is to see factually accurate content sourced from Wikipedia, and it shouldn't matter if they're viewing it on some third party site.
Instead it's still run as one massive monolithic website, and it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it. This IMO should have been the main focus of Wikimedia's development efforts.
> the foundation's main goal is still to host a centrally maintained site
Wikimedia universe is way bigger than one site. There's Wikidata, Commons, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks and so on. And there's a lot of language versions too - English is not the only way to store knowledge, you know.
> The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as possible
The requires a) creating the content and b) presenting the content in the form consumable by the users. Creating tools for this is far from trivial, especially if you want it to be consumable and not just unpalatable infodump accessible only to the most determined.
> Instead it's still run as one massive monolithic website
This is not accurate. A lot has changed since 2004. It's not one monolithic website, it's a constellation of dozens, if not hundreds, of communities. They are using common technical infrastructure (datacenters, operations, etc.) and common software (Mediawiki, plus myriad of extensions for specific projects), but they are separate sites and separate communities, united by common goal of making knowledge available to everyone.
> it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it
Please check out Wikidata. This is literally the goal of the project. You can also be interested in "structured Commons" and "structured Wiktionary" projects, both in active development as we speak.
> This IMO should have been the main focus of Wikimedia's development efforts.
It is. One of focuses - for a project of this size, there's always several directions. BTW, right now Wikimedia is in the process of formulating movement strategy, with active community participation. You are welcome to contribute: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...
Disclosure: working for WMF, not speaking for anybody but myself.
Random thought. Why can't something like Wikipedia be run distributed through a blockchain? Edits are just transactions that are broadcast over the network. I imagine the total cost of that to individual contributors of nodes would be less than the millions they're paying right now.
Completely with you. The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content and allow more new content.
Sadly it seems the opposite is true, whole parts of Wikipedia are infested by cancer (aka corrupt/out-od-mind admins who are acting in their own world/turf and interest), have a closer look at certain languages like de.Wikipedia.org where more new and old articles get deleted than content can grow (source: various German news media incl. Heise.de reported about it). And why is Wikia a thing? And why is it from the Wikipedia founder, has he a double interest!? And now he is starting a news offspring as well! Something like the Wikipedia frontpage and WikiNews, just under his own company. And on the otherside Wikipedia banned trivia sections to make the Wikia offspring even possible (happened 10 years ago, but you probably remember it; yet Wikipedia deleted/buried the trivia section history). Why even delete non-corporate-spam artices? Why are fictional manga creatures all o er on Wikipedia but info about movie characters all deleted? Many Wikipedia admin seem to be deletionists that care only about their turf, the care about "their own" articles, they revert changes to them just for their own sake. Look at the WikiData project. Why is it implemented by a German Wikipedia org that has little to do with intl Wikimedia foundation, it's not a sister project, they do their own fundraiser and media news reported not so nice things over the years.
Look at OpenStreetMap project, it works a lot better. Maybe the Wikipedia project should be transfered over or forked by OpenStreetMaps project. And delete all admin rights, and start over with the in some way toxic community that scares away most normal people who don't want to engage in childish turf wars and see their contributions deleted and cut down for no reason but admin power play.
Reproducing the table from the article with one extra column, the ratio of expenses to revenue for clarity, it looks like they're still operating with a very comfortable margin. Yes, the 19% margin is tighter than a 50% margin 12 years ago, and their existence depends on donations now more than ever ($23,463/yr is sustainable by a single engineer's salary, $65,947,465/yr is...not), but Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects also serve a much wider audience and broader purpose. This isn't scary in and of itself, especially if they've got cash reserves to give them time to tighten the belt later on if it becomes a problem and someone in a leadership position is monitoring their finances to act if their burn rate gets too high... I've seen plenty of nonprofits with tighter margins survive and succeed.
Administrator since 2003 here. I have contributed to Wikipedia in various languages, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. Three core points, particularly on Wikipedia:
(1) Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. This is due to factors such as too much bureaucracy, too many subjective guidelines, too much content being deleted (exclusionism), and an overwhelming mess of projects and policies.
(2) Not enough focus. By starting many projects the foundation has muddied its mission and public identity. In addition, it has broad and potentially mutually conflicting goals such as educating the public about various issues, educating the public about how to work with others to contribute to projects, asking the public for money, agitating governments and corporations for policy change and support, monitoring public behavior looking for evidence of wrongdoing, and engaging with education. Why not leave education to the educationalists, politics to the politicians, spying to the government and motivated contributors and fundraising to donors?
(3) Non-free academic media is hurting the project. Given that only a small number of editors have true access to major academic databases, it is often hard for contributors to equally and fairly balance an article.
Having said that, I still have tremendous respect for the project and comparing its costs to those of the prior systems necessarily incorporating manual preparation, editing, production and distribution of printed matter by 'experts', the opportunity costs for access alone justify the full expenditure. It's not a lot of money in global terms.
I am the author of this op-ed, which I will prove by posting a comment on my Wikipedia talk page [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon#Hacker_New... ] before saving this. I am open to any questions, criticism, or discussion. BTW, as I noted in the op-ed. At the request of the editors of The Signpost, the version linked to at the top of this thread has fewer citations and less information in the graphic. The original version is at [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... ]
It's clear that salaries and awards and grants are driving the increase in cost. Maybe this is damning evidence of a decadent culture, which the author of this op-ed clearly presume, but I doubt it. I would expect that Wikipedia's employees have been working very hard for a long time to keep the site running and they've cultivated expertise in governing the site in a way that avoids controversy and maintains credibility. I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are. It seems that they've done that, and they've waited until the organization was financially stable to do so.
> ...I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month was was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones.
This part of the critique seems a little off, doesn't it? I don't know the state of WMF engineering, it very well may have problems, and a complete lack of documentation or planning is not a good sign, but the particular artifacts (requirements documents, schedules with milestones) mentioned here are more from the pre-Agile waterfall school of thought. Can anyone familiar with WMF engineering comment?
It just... really bothers me that Wikipedia has grown into this massive thing, with $60 million in cash reserves and $31 million in salaries a year... and the people who aren't getting paid are the ones actually writing an encyclopedia. For that kind of money, you'd think they could actually pay people to write an encyclopedia, like Britannica used to. Now Britannica is circling the drain, Wikipedia is raking in money, and instead of paying the writers, there's this whole bureaucracy slurping up the cash and not giving it to the people doing the actual work. I hate all this digital sharecropping. I hate all these businesses based on paying millions of amateurs nothing or next to nothing for large volumes of low quality labor, making it up on volume, and paying a handful of people large sums of money to "administer" it. You'd think for that kind of money you could pay some writers.
This op ed is non-sensical. According to the author, every successful startup in history is "cancer". Wikipedia's costs have grown because their usage has grown exponentially (comparing costs to economy-wide inflation is particularly baffling).
If anything, I got from this article that Wikipedia has kept costs well below revenue growth, which is normally the sign of a healthy organization.
If hosting cost per hit has increased, something is wrong. Computer costs have gone down since 2005.
That's worth looking into. Wikipedia hasn't gone down the Web 2.0 Javascript/CSS rathole, where every page loads megabytes of vaguely useful junk. What's the problem?
In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told a TED audience:
> So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly US$2 million a year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.
To be honest, most successful startups are indeed quite cancerous.
Twitter doesn't need 3,500 employees, Facebook doesn't need 17,000 and Google doesn't need 72,000. They could all fire 50%-90% of their workforce and the product wouldn't be materially affected for the vast majority of users. The reason they have this many is because they can have this many. Their success has given food to the cancerous growth.
You get this situation whenever a company isn't operated by a shareholder who get's dividends.
When the person who runs the company knows that every dollar they don't spend is money in their pocket, people start to actually care about expenses and only focusing on what is important.
But he's right: every successful startup in history is cancer. Deliberately so: they grow huge very, very quickly. It's steroids.
The trick with any great start up is how to get out of the "aggressive growth without revenue" stage. Some (very few) keep the growth but aggressively grow revenue and become self-sustaining. Others dial down the growth at a certain stage, and revenue increases to match, and they're self-sustaining.
The point is you have to become sustainable. Most start-ups flare out badly. You cannot change over-night from "growth like cancer" to "stable and flat". You need some way to switch and it takes time.
I think the article was questioning if this is suitable for a Charity. A business should be able to estimate its growth and sales, and can re-invent itself if a path isn't going to be profitable. The growth in a business should also be growing revenue (or it should be creating the foundation for later revenue).
A charity is based on how much people are willing to donate, which can change VERY quickly. Imagine what would happen if the public perception of the people behind wikipedia was to dramatically change and next fundraising campaign only brought in 20% of last years?
Additionally If people start to believe that the finances are squandered or not spent as expected, there could be a movement to NOT donate. This happened with the Red Cross after 9/11 where people felt they were duped by the fact their donations went to a consolidated funds (often to fund overseas activities) rather exclusively to 9/11 victims.
Charities also tend to need to keep a few years of funding in the bank to deal with a change in markets, as a charity typically can't use debt to get through rough years (economic downturns / recessions). Exponential growth makes this nearly impossible unless your running extremely lean.
I think the article is a little sensationalist (and maybe it needed to be to reach certain people), it seems to have some sound concerns.
If you read the article, you'll notice it says that the expenses are growing faster than the traffic, and faster than revenue. This is the exact opposite of what you would normally expect (due to economies of scale).
Wikipedia is an explicitly not-for-profit enterprise, and thus something completely different from the standard startup.
For most startups, success means getting bought out by a larger company. Wikipedia by contrast has always put the highest priority on maintaining its own independence, which means that for them a buyout would be a profound failure.
You're right that the costs of running wikipedia are still quite low considering the incredible scope, popularity and importance of the site. "Cancer" seems over the top and needlessly combative. But, it definitely doesn't hurt having someone bring up the fact that costs grew by 6x in 6 years. As he says, more years of this could put wikipedia in a precarious position.
It seems the OP cares about wikipedia and is genuinely worried. These conversations need to be had (also at fast growing startups) and having them in the open is part of the wikipedia way. Maybe he's wrong but it doesn't seem nonsensical or disingenuous to me. It seems genuine and rational.
What you say is correct. He just says something different and not the opposite. He talks about that a money hungry, fast growing business is not the model an open content wiki should have as a foundation. The value to the user would probably be the same if it would be a 3 person inc with $150k/year revenue.
I am not sure I understand what problem am I supposed to see when I look at the table. It looks to me like Wikipedia has income in excess of expenses and a reserve to cover unforeseen events. Remembering what Wikipedia was like in 2005 when Wales thought it didn't need employees, made me think that Wales could not imagine the scale at which Wikipedia is an important asset of humanity today.
It's similarly myopic to the criticism of Wikipedia's software engineering methodology further down the essay. There's a scale of project at which waterfall greatly increases the odds of success: without a plan, a pyramid doesn't get nice sharp corners or come to a point, the dam does not turn the turbine, and Armstrong does not boot print moon dust (never mind landing back in the vicinity of ships and helicopters and medical staff).
A big Wikipedia changes slowly. That's good. One person's rant doesn't cause it to pivot on a dime. One person's rant doesn't suddenly turn it to ad funded. One person's rant doesn't suddenly remove a category of articles.
Nah, just companies that profit from Wikipedia (hello Google!) and non-profits should pony up. Why shouldn't a person doing great work to make sure Wikipedia runs smoothly get paid when there's so much money going around?
Google should "adopt" 150 of their employees, MSFT 50, Facebook 50 and so on. It's tax deductible too...
Good on Guy for bringing this up at last, but others have been questioning Wikipedia's fundraising for some time now [1][2][3] Note: I wrote the last one. In the same way that many charities exist to line the pockets of their staff, while not giving to their cause, Wikipedia has become a bloated fundraising bureaucracy that happens to have an online encyclopedia. The emphasis on fundraising leads to corrupt actions, for example the fundraising banners that say the site is in imminent danger of collapse despite it having over $100 million in the bank.
IMO-- as someone who was directly involved at the time the big mistake was relocating to SF. That one decision was the beginning of a cascade of ever increasing spending which marked the end of an era of fiscally conservative operations.
There were many positive outcome too: this increase in spending has resulted in many benefits but not at all proportional to the increase in costs.
I don't know much about wikipedia or WMF but the spending growth in that table is not exponential. And surely the correct way to measure the scale of the service provided is page views rather than number of pages.
This is one of the reasons I hated working there. They waste money and every year beg for more. Why do they even need an office in a prime San Francisco location? On top of that, they work on stupid projects, and internally the organization is run by imbeciles.
I'm very conflicted about the donate me guilt tripping. On one hand these companies need cash to operate and they do a world of good, but on the other reading their financial reports I'm just not convinced they are efficient with the money.
[+] [-] cs702|9 years ago|reply
"My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.
For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.
Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem."
[1] http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html
[+] [-] valar_m|9 years ago|reply
"As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second."
[0] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t
[+] [-] Darthy|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...
[+] [-] derefr|9 years ago|reply
Sure, such a company would have no chance of succeeding in the stock market, but what if it never plans on IPOing in the first place?
[+] [-] JBlue42|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quotemstr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Axiverse|9 years ago|reply
Usually long term initiative take a lot of domain knowledge and a specific set of connections. When something new becomes more important, they risk losing their personal position since they may not be the best person in terms of knowledge and connection to carry out the new direction. Instead they try to use their accumulated power to keep their direction supported even when it's not in the interest of the business for as long as they can.
To address this, perhaps there's merit in rewarding timely exits and somehow punishing people that have dragged things out. However the most that companies can do is usually just fire someone. And at that point they have probably sucked the company dry of the value they can personally extract.
[+] [-] mboto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichardHeart|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dood|9 years ago|reply
The basic takeaway is that these behaviours and forces are natural, intrinsic and inevitable; that a wise systems-manager will seek to carefully manage them rather than oppose or decry them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
[+] [-] golergka|9 years ago|reply
"We face another obstacle: In a finite world, high growth rates must self-destruct. If the base from which the growth is taking place is tiny, this law may not operate for a time. But when the base balloons, the party ends: A high growth rate eventually forges its own anchor."
[+] [-] Paul-ish|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mycall|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrdwavexe|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] VLM|9 years ago|reply
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
If you transform Conquest's rules from politics to running (ruining?) the wikipedia, the transformed rules are
"We can change nothing not even our exponential growth spiral, not our policies, nothing"
"LOL We're not doing the fiscal conservatism thing. I like how the current top discussion is about popularity and the need for a circular firing squad, not something financial. A direct quote of an attempt to avoid working on the issues "I'm reminded of the inflammatory, low-rent campaign of Donald Trump." Yeah buddy that'll fix it, that'll fix it real good."
"We're headed off the financial cliff now get out of the way I'm going gas pedal to the floor as you can see in the exponential graphs. The problem is we're a CRUD app and that's cutting edge CS just like quantum computing so naturally there's no possibility of criticism there. After all, the Egyptians didn't have flush toilets and they built a pyramid, so any criticism of the toilet in my bathroom is either making fun of the entire Egyptian culture or pretending the pyramids were not a logistical challenge."
There is some humor in that the world of paper encyclopedia publishing ran on mostly capitalist operational principles for decades, centuries. It turns out that running an online encyclopedia off donations and extreme hand waving is powerful enough to destroy an industry on its way to its inevitable collapse. Maybe someday in the future we'll have encyclopedias again, but the era after wikipedia and before the next encyclopedia will be a bit of a dark age. That's too bad.
[+] [-] ordinaryperson|9 years ago|reply
But overall this oped is misplaced. Running the leanest possible operation shouldn't be Wikipedia's focus at this stage in its lifecycle, it's improving the quality of its content.
Back in 2005 Wikipedia had 438k articles and the focus was expanding the reach of its content to cover all topics; today the article count is 5.4 million it's quality that matters more. You can't improve quality just based on crowd-sourcing alone (see: Yelp, Reddit, etc), and the bigger it's gotten the more of a target it's become by disinformation activists.
This attitude on budgets over value strikes me as a classic engineer's POV. The OP is nostalgic about a time when the site was run by a single guy in his basement, but could 1 guy handle the assault of an army of political zealots or Russian hackers? DDoS attacks? Fundraising? Wikipedia is arguably one of the most coveted truth sources the world over, protecting and improving its content is more important than an optimal cost-to-profit ratio.
If the OP has specifics, by all means, share them, but this kind of generalized fearmongering about budgets isn't spectacularly useful, IMHO.
[+] [-] avar|9 years ago|reply
It was a very different time, and the whole thing was run much more like a typical open source project.
I think the whole project has gone in completely the wrong direction since then. Wikipedia itself is still awesome, but what's not awesome is that the typical reader / contributor experience is pretty much the same as it was in 2005.
Moreover, because of the growing number of employees & need for revenue the foundation's main goal is still to host a centrally maintained site that must get your pageviews & donations directly.
The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as possible, the way OpenStreetMap operates is a much better model. Success should be measured as a function of how likely any given person is to see factually accurate content sourced from Wikipedia, and it shouldn't matter if they're viewing it on some third party site.
Instead it's still run as one massive monolithic website, and it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it. This IMO should have been the main focus of Wikimedia's development efforts.
[+] [-] smsm42|9 years ago|reply
Wikimedia universe is way bigger than one site. There's Wikidata, Commons, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks and so on. And there's a lot of language versions too - English is not the only way to store knowledge, you know.
> The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as possible
The requires a) creating the content and b) presenting the content in the form consumable by the users. Creating tools for this is far from trivial, especially if you want it to be consumable and not just unpalatable infodump accessible only to the most determined.
> Instead it's still run as one massive monolithic website
This is not accurate. A lot has changed since 2004. It's not one monolithic website, it's a constellation of dozens, if not hundreds, of communities. They are using common technical infrastructure (datacenters, operations, etc.) and common software (Mediawiki, plus myriad of extensions for specific projects), but they are separate sites and separate communities, united by common goal of making knowledge available to everyone.
> it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it
Please check out Wikidata. This is literally the goal of the project. You can also be interested in "structured Commons" and "structured Wiktionary" projects, both in active development as we speak.
> This IMO should have been the main focus of Wikimedia's development efforts.
It is. One of focuses - for a project of this size, there's always several directions. BTW, right now Wikimedia is in the process of formulating movement strategy, with active community participation. You are welcome to contribute: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...
Disclosure: working for WMF, not speaking for anybody but myself.
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
Huh? https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
Doesn't that qualify?
[+] [-] sudoscript|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: Turns out someone is already working on it: https://lunyr.com/
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
Thoughts?
Also what's the difference between WikiData and DBPedia?
[+] [-] mboto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frik|9 years ago|reply
Sadly it seems the opposite is true, whole parts of Wikipedia are infested by cancer (aka corrupt/out-od-mind admins who are acting in their own world/turf and interest), have a closer look at certain languages like de.Wikipedia.org where more new and old articles get deleted than content can grow (source: various German news media incl. Heise.de reported about it). And why is Wikia a thing? And why is it from the Wikipedia founder, has he a double interest!? And now he is starting a news offspring as well! Something like the Wikipedia frontpage and WikiNews, just under his own company. And on the otherside Wikipedia banned trivia sections to make the Wikia offspring even possible (happened 10 years ago, but you probably remember it; yet Wikipedia deleted/buried the trivia section history). Why even delete non-corporate-spam artices? Why are fictional manga creatures all o er on Wikipedia but info about movie characters all deleted? Many Wikipedia admin seem to be deletionists that care only about their turf, the care about "their own" articles, they revert changes to them just for their own sake. Look at the WikiData project. Why is it implemented by a German Wikipedia org that has little to do with intl Wikimedia foundation, it's not a sister project, they do their own fundraiser and media news reported not so nice things over the years.
Look at OpenStreetMap project, it works a lot better. Maybe the Wikipedia project should be transfered over or forked by OpenStreetMaps project. And delete all admin rights, and start over with the in some way toxic community that scares away most normal people who don't want to engage in childish turf wars and see their contributions deleted and cut down for no reason but admin power play.
[+] [-] idorosen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|9 years ago|reply
(1) Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. This is due to factors such as too much bureaucracy, too many subjective guidelines, too much content being deleted (exclusionism), and an overwhelming mess of projects and policies.
(2) Not enough focus. By starting many projects the foundation has muddied its mission and public identity. In addition, it has broad and potentially mutually conflicting goals such as educating the public about various issues, educating the public about how to work with others to contribute to projects, asking the public for money, agitating governments and corporations for policy change and support, monitoring public behavior looking for evidence of wrongdoing, and engaging with education. Why not leave education to the educationalists, politics to the politicians, spying to the government and motivated contributors and fundraising to donors?
(3) Non-free academic media is hurting the project. Given that only a small number of editors have true access to major academic databases, it is often hard for contributors to equally and fairly balance an article.
Having said that, I still have tremendous respect for the project and comparing its costs to those of the prior systems necessarily incorporating manual preparation, editing, production and distribution of printed matter by 'experts', the opportunity costs for access alone justify the full expenditure. It's not a lot of money in global terms.
[+] [-] elect_engineer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heydenberk|9 years ago|reply
It's clear that salaries and awards and grants are driving the increase in cost. Maybe this is damning evidence of a decadent culture, which the author of this op-ed clearly presume, but I doubt it. I would expect that Wikipedia's employees have been working very hard for a long time to keep the site running and they've cultivated expertise in governing the site in a way that avoids controversy and maintains credibility. I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are. It seems that they've done that, and they've waited until the organization was financially stable to do so.
[+] [-] aaronharnly|9 years ago|reply
This part of the critique seems a little off, doesn't it? I don't know the state of WMF engineering, it very well may have problems, and a complete lack of documentation or planning is not a good sign, but the particular artifacts (requirements documents, schedules with milestones) mentioned here are more from the pre-Agile waterfall school of thought. Can anyone familiar with WMF engineering comment?
[+] [-] cwyers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|9 years ago|reply
If anything, I got from this article that Wikipedia has kept costs well below revenue growth, which is normally the sign of a healthy organization.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
That's worth looking into. Wikipedia hasn't gone down the Web 2.0 Javascript/CSS rathole, where every page loads megabytes of vaguely useful junk. What's the problem?
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|9 years ago|reply
> So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly US$2 million a year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.
[+] [-] Negitivefrags|9 years ago|reply
Twitter doesn't need 3,500 employees, Facebook doesn't need 17,000 and Google doesn't need 72,000. They could all fire 50%-90% of their workforce and the product wouldn't be materially affected for the vast majority of users. The reason they have this many is because they can have this many. Their success has given food to the cancerous growth.
You get this situation whenever a company isn't operated by a shareholder who get's dividends.
When the person who runs the company knows that every dollar they don't spend is money in their pocket, people start to actually care about expenses and only focusing on what is important.
[+] [-] ealexhudson|9 years ago|reply
The trick with any great start up is how to get out of the "aggressive growth without revenue" stage. Some (very few) keep the growth but aggressively grow revenue and become self-sustaining. Others dial down the growth at a certain stage, and revenue increases to match, and they're self-sustaining.
The point is you have to become sustainable. Most start-ups flare out badly. You cannot change over-night from "growth like cancer" to "stable and flat". You need some way to switch and it takes time.
[+] [-] jlawer|9 years ago|reply
A charity is based on how much people are willing to donate, which can change VERY quickly. Imagine what would happen if the public perception of the people behind wikipedia was to dramatically change and next fundraising campaign only brought in 20% of last years?
Additionally If people start to believe that the finances are squandered or not spent as expected, there could be a movement to NOT donate. This happened with the Red Cross after 9/11 where people felt they were duped by the fact their donations went to a consolidated funds (often to fund overseas activities) rather exclusively to 9/11 victims.
Charities also tend to need to keep a few years of funding in the bank to deal with a change in markets, as a charity typically can't use debt to get through rough years (economic downturns / recessions). Exponential growth makes this nearly impossible unless your running extremely lean.
I think the article is a little sensationalist (and maybe it needed to be to reach certain people), it seems to have some sound concerns.
[+] [-] microcolonel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|9 years ago|reply
For most startups, success means getting bought out by a larger company. Wikipedia by contrast has always put the highest priority on maintaining its own independence, which means that for them a buyout would be a profound failure.
[+] [-] dalbasal|9 years ago|reply
You're right that the costs of running wikipedia are still quite low considering the incredible scope, popularity and importance of the site. "Cancer" seems over the top and needlessly combative. But, it definitely doesn't hurt having someone bring up the fact that costs grew by 6x in 6 years. As he says, more years of this could put wikipedia in a precarious position.
It seems the OP cares about wikipedia and is genuinely worried. These conversations need to be had (also at fast growing startups) and having them in the open is part of the wikipedia way. Maybe he's wrong but it doesn't seem nonsensical or disingenuous to me. It seems genuine and rational.
[+] [-] erikb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rawland|9 years ago|reply
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strat...
And some salaries (from 990s):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
--
Sources:
[1]: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strat...
[+] [-] brudgers|9 years ago|reply
It's similarly myopic to the criticism of Wikipedia's software engineering methodology further down the essay. There's a scale of project at which waterfall greatly increases the odds of success: without a plan, a pyramid doesn't get nice sharp corners or come to a point, the dam does not turn the turbine, and Armstrong does not boot print moon dust (never mind landing back in the vicinity of ships and helicopters and medical staff).
A big Wikipedia changes slowly. That's good. One person's rant doesn't cause it to pivot on a dime. One person's rant doesn't suddenly turn it to ad funded. One person's rant doesn't suddenly remove a category of articles.
[+] [-] easilyBored|9 years ago|reply
Google should "adopt" 150 of their employees, MSFT 50, Facebook 50 and so on. It's tax deductible too...
[+] [-] sparkzilla|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.dailydot.com/business/wikipedia-fundraiser-banne... [2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/12/16/1631223/wikipedia-e... [3] http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/
[+] [-] skdotdan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|9 years ago|reply
There were many positive outcome too: this increase in spending has resulted in many benefits but not at all proportional to the increase in costs.
[+] [-] ppod|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mycall|9 years ago|reply
Salaries and wages 31,713,961 26,049,224
Awards and grants 11,354,612 4,522,689
Internet hosting 2,069,572 1,997,521
In-kind service expenses 1,065,523 235,570
Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765
Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105
Other operating expenses 4,777,203 4,449,764
Travel and conferences 2,296,592 2,289,489
Depreciation and amortization 2,720,835 2,656,103
Special event expense, net 311,313 266,552
Total expenses 65,947,465 52,596,782
[1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...)
[+] [-] rawland|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wauzars|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_imho|9 years ago|reply