[Foundation-l] Re: Funding for the newly elected Board Members

Mon Jun 21 08:18:00 UTC 2004

"Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com> schrieb:

> I think we should relieve you of your fears with regards to this issue 
> Mark :-)
> 
> Last evening, we were discussing of how much money was currently in bank.
> I made a quick estimate, because Mav in on holidays, so I could not ask 
> him last numbers, but basically I know that mid may we had roughly 5.400 
> dollars. Add to this the 9000 dollars refund for a server. Plus 10.000 
> euros received a few days ago by Jimbo for the trophy.
> 
> That makes about 24 000 dollars (it is a *very* rough estimate).
> 
> JeLuF made a provisional hardware budget for the rest of the year.
> You may find it here : 
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_provisional_budget
> Current amount indicated is 12000 dollars

I read this, and it looks very much underestimated to me.
The total database size of all Wikipedias is growing even slightly more
than exponentially, doubling time at the moment being six months.
Wikipedia's own usage statistics are not very clear, but in as far as
they are, they have increased more than tenfold in the past year. Alexa
tells us that our reach has grown 37% in three months time.

All this draws me to the conclusion: The amount of hardware we need
at the end of the year might easily be double what we need now. And
since we grow faster than Moore's law, we will NOT get by with keeping
the same amount of hardware or growing linearly. Add to that that at
the moment we do not have everything we want (there's well-known
regulars now who have no f***ing idea what the Maintenance Page is
for or what the Wikipedia search results look like).

I'm afraid that this kind of estimates, and Wikipedia hardware buys
in general, are often based on what would be comfortable now rather
than on what will be needed by the time the hardware actually arrives,
or even better, when the hardware _after that_ arrives.

Andre Engels