Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)

Mon Oct 24 00:24:15 UTC 2005

On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > Robin Shannon wrote:
> > > Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs
> > > assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing
> > > hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?
> >
> > I'll let mav answer this in detail, but suffice to say, the primary
> > growing cost is hardware/hosting, but some administrative costs are
> > growing as well, although at a slower pace.
>
> Robin, see for yourself: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
>
> Increases in hardware/hosting costs drive overall increases in budgeted
> costs.
> Overhead costs have been pretty much increased as a percentage on top of
> that
> by approximately 20-30%.

You know, those figures would make a lot more sense if they were done on an
accrual basis rather than a cash basis. As is the figures completely ignore
the fact that the expected life of the servers is more than a single
quarter. Yes, the cash basis figures are needed to know how much money is
required in fundraising, but they don't give a good picture of the actual
costs involved in running the foundation.

PS -
>
> Note that the large degree of uncertainty in my hardware cost projection
> is due
> to the fact that I need to update my model with new data (the last real
> traffic
> data I put into it is a year old; the same time WikiStats stopped
> reporting
> page views; yet the model has been pretty good at predicting what we
> needed to
> spend for 2005 so far).

The other big problem with my model is that is only tracks spending vs page
> views from wikipedia.org <http://wikipedia.org>. In the past the amount of
> traffic from the other
> Wikimedia domains was so small that it could safefly be ignored. This is
> no
> longer the case for wikimedia.org <http://wikimedia.org> thanks to Commons
> and will soon not be the
> case for wiktionary.org <http://wiktionary.org> and wikinews.org<http://wikinews.org>
> :

If you're using those cash-basis figures that's another problem with the
model as well :).

Anthony