The real problem with Magnifica Humanitas is that it will be impossible to produce the first sentence of the canonical Latin version in which the first two words are "Magnifica humanitas" but carries the same meaning as the first sentence in the English version published.
It's amazing how Karen Hao's (Empire of AI) confusion of cubic meters with liters of water for datacenters continues to get amplified, even after this error was publicly revealed.
Something like 20 years on we’re still hearing that “most” bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, even though that study (authored in part by Elizabeth Warren of all things!) was methodological nonsense.
> The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses.
The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
> The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the software?
I think there are things to criticize WMF budget about, but the website wouldn't exist if you only paid for the web server. Legal is important. Trust and safety is important. Having people maintain the software is important. Having people on call in case the site goes down at 1am is important. Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
That's not to say i agree with everything WMF spends money on, but there is a lot more to running a major website then just buying a bunch of servers.
I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?
What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider, I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I agree that you need someone on call and I appreciate that they serve a massive amount of traffic. But then $5 million per year is a similarly massive estimate for a hosting budget.
IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
> Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
> I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?
A non-zero amount.
This isn't like a huge part of their budget, but people sue wikipedia constantly. Someone has to deal with that. We're also seeing a more complicated regulatory environment with new privacy laws, new nsfw laws, new social media laws. Someone has to keep track of those developments, figure which apply, and figure out what needs to be done to comply with them.
> What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider,
And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house? Big public communities have more Trust&safety needs not less. We want people to feel safe editing Wikipedia.
And then you also have people who are arrested for their edits to Wikipedia (e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-launches-new-offli... ). Often there is not a whole lot anyone can do about that, but having someone at WMF advocating for them where they can seems like a worthy thing to do.
Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees). The previous year the same event had a bomb threat. Part of trust and safety's job is to ensure proper security procedures for in person events
> I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
People post PII to wikipedia all the time. You are right that WMF intentionally collects less than most, but people post PII to dox others all the time.
> How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.
> IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
They do offer database downloads, which are mirrored extensively.
The thing with most distributed solutions is the make tradeoffs which make the product worse. Often they are rigid, and have poor latency characteristics. You could spend a lot of money trying to make a better distributed system only to get nowhere. I think most wikipedians would prefer WMF focus on lower risk ventures.
> > Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
> Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
That's a debatable point, but i do think users eventually drift away if nobody fixes the bugs and frustrations they encounter. To be clear though, i dont think every software feature wmf works on is a good idea. Actually i think quite a few are stupid. But i think some are needed.
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Anyways, my point is that all these things add up, and they are important at least to some extent. I'm sure you could dig in to these items and find parts of each that could be cut. All i want to say is they should not be eliminated entirely. I think to make fair criticisms of WMF budget people need to do the actual digging and not just say any money not spent on a server is wasted money.
So you don't know and we can assume its not relevant.
> And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house?
That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
> Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees).
They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
> I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.
Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science. This doesn't need an ongoing tens or hundreds of millions per year.
> That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
Theoretically, yes.
Practically? Law enforcement can be ignorant, incompetent or slow as molasses, or a combination of all three of them. Besides, some places like the EU impose specific requirements on what happens with certain kinds of speech, especially anything glorifying or calling for violence, so as an organization, you have to have people and procedures to deal with it.
> They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
It was a core factor, other than Jimbo Wales wanting to distance himself/his company that hosted Wikipedia (Bomis) from it a bit, why Wikimedia got founded in the first place.
> Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science.
The problem is the bots are not respecting robots.txt and instead do stuff like load the source diff pages. It does not make any sense for AI training and likely pollutes the database, but unfortunately the diff pages are among the most expensive to render, the worse the older the requested diff is.
Internal DEI initiatives are very helpful for an organisation trying to create a comprehensive knowledge base without falling to any group's bias. That requires diverse perspectives.
I don't care about internal DEI if the job is managing sewerage systems, but this is a perfect example of a context where fostering diverse engagement is both rational and improves the end product.
The perfect ought not be the enemy of the good - the question isn't whether Wikipedia has solved all prejudice, the question is whether it is doing better on that question than its peers. And I'd say it is, relatively speaking. I'm always happy for it to do better, though.
Spending money to get people into editing Wikipedia that would never otherwise have done so seems like a very worthy goal to me.
Posting this without actually looking at what these stand for is more than useless.
People need to be paid. People want benefits. People need to be taught how to edit. Children need to be taught how to research. People need to be brought together to figure out where the site and the tech is going. People want to feel safe participating in their community. If Wikipedia had only ever been "server costs" it would be nowhere close to what it is today.
> First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category.
"Seed oils" (commonly used cooking oils extracted from plant seeds excluding coconut) are as valid of a construct as "reptiles" (quadrupeds excluding aves and mammals) or "fish" (vertebrates excluding quadrupeds)
> The US prepared for _this_ war with Iran for a couple of weeks.
That's a little unfair, it would be more accurate to say that the US has war gamed the region for decades and had a good grasp of the pitfalls and requirements, and then to add that the current US administration ignored all that prior work and insight and simply blundered in on a whim.
"DDL-920 is a potent, selective and brain permeable negative allosteric modulator (NAM) of the γ-aminobutyric acid type A receptors (GABARs), inhibits parvalbumin (PV) expressing interneurons (PV+INs) and consequently enhances γ-oscillations both in vitro and in vivo."
I think that is the Feed's tab, though I have not used the blue app in a long time