[Peter]

Originally Posted by Nick

Did they ever run ads? I could have sworn they did at one point.

No, I believe wikipedia has always been independant from any kind of sponsorship or advertising. Purely donation ran

[freudling]

Synotic:

Thanks maine! I will have a boo.

[freudling]

Well, with the amount of servers this guy has (close to 200), I have no doubt about his hardware costs. That is an empire of servers, and all over the world. My question now is, "is that all necessary?"

[Fyre4ce]

Originally Posted by Railroader

I think your priorities are just fine.

Some people simply put too much weight into pointing out how much they know in comparison to others. It's a severe insecurity issue with them.

However, I will point out that a simple search for "wikipedia" might have been a good idea before posting.

Agreed. My apologies.

[undotwa]

Originally Posted by freudling

Well, with the amount of servers this guy has (close to 200), I have no doubt about his hardware costs. That is an empire of servers, and all over the world. My question now is, "is that all necessary?"

yes

[Peter]

Originally Posted by freudling

Well, with the amount of servers this guy has (close to 200), I have no doubt about his hardware costs. That is an empire of servers, and all over the world. My question now is, "is that all necessary?"

yes.
The Wikipedia library is about 10 Terabytes last time i checked, then add in the INSANE amount of bandwidth they use. Then add in all the other wiki* projects.

[PDX Chris]

Originally Posted by freudling

Well, with the amount of servers this guy has (close to 200), I have no doubt about his hardware costs. That is an empire of servers, and all over the world. My question now is, "is that all necessary?"

Yep, check out their technical FAQ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Technical_FAQ

-----

How about the connection?

Wikimedia currently has a dual 1Gbit/s connections to its colo provider, PowerMedium Data output is roughly 500Mbit/s at peak (Dec 2005).

How big is the database?

About 170GB on 9 October 2004, excluding images and multimedia.
About 57GB on 11 April 2004 and growing at between 1 and 1.4 GB per week. This includes all languages and support tables but not images and multimedia. You can download compressed database dumps at http://download.wikipedia.org/ .

In August 2003 the database was roughly 16 GB and uploaded images and media files took another gigabyte or so. In February 2003 it was about 4GB.

-------

Check out their hourly traffic rate: http://noc.wikimedia.org/stats.php?period=hourly

I might be reading the last graph wrong, but it looks upwards of 5000 hits per second.

[Xeo]

RE: the post about using adverts. They certainly could use adverts instead of donations but cleraly they'd prefer not to and, if advertising could get them $1 million+, they really must not be interested in making money off the site and want to offer it truly for free. I see nothing wrong with that.

They must be getting by on the donations. The one thing I don't get is, how do they have a staff of 2 full-timers and 2 part timers on a budget of $33K. Those 4 people are getting screwed.

[Gamoe]

Regardless of all the arguments over accuracy, pros and cons, I find the Wikipedia to be a most valuable site and resource. As with almost any large operation, I can understand perfectly why they need more funds, and would not hesitate to contribute financially, if my own funds weren't in the red at the moment.

I understand their desire to keep the Wikipedia ad-free. I think this is the way any serious resource or encyclopedia should be. However their resistance to succumb to such an easy revenue stream is most noble, in my view.

[Xeo]

I just wanted to throw in that I find it a very valuable resource too. Sure, I may not quote it when doing research, but it's amazing when you just want to know about some random term you just heard and there's a whole article with history about it on there.