Talk:Wikimedia budget/Archive

Accuracy and Precision

I'm confused by recent mailing-list postings and estimates of growth.

1. Projected growth is given to 4 significant figures of precision, when it is noted elsewhere that from past experience it may only be accurate to within an order of magnitude... I left it at 1 sig. figure to indicate this.
2. Why are hardware costs in the near future proportional to server hits? This seems most uncertain; recent hardware discussions have touched on
   • distribution of load across {more RAM, more CPUs, better division of labor across machines}, to better use the equipment we have, and
   • filesystem changes (away from NFS) to remove related bottlenecks
3. There are many economies of scale unrelated to Moore's law which will kick in long before we are spending $5 million a year on machines... I know those extreme figures aren't on the budget page, but please qualify any medium-term predictions of the effects of exponential growth. +sj+

1. I'm still working on the formatting. As soon as I figure out how to get OpenOffice to display items based on sig figs then I'll upload a new pdf.
2. Because they were proportional in the past.
3. Then please list them so that they can be added to the analysis.
   • as for this last, please see Wikimedia budget/Hardware efficiencies. +sj+

Frankly I doubt we can keep up the same rate of exponential growth but past growth is all we have to measure against. Thus projecting the past growth rate into the future gets us to Google-level traffic in a few years. Add in the rough ratio between traffic and dollars spent while subtracting expected increases in efficiency (Moore's Law), gets us the dollar figures. --Daniel Mayer 19:57, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Budgets and grants

Is this proposed budget "official" enough to start using for grant applications? There is a National Endowment for the Humanities (US Federal government) grant [1] specifically for development of new, innovative refrence materials like encyclopedias, but the application must be to the NEH office by July 15, 2004, and must include a budget. Gentgeen 10:53, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

That grant doesn't look like it was designed for WP in its current stage of development. We would have to identify a significant humanities-specific project we could carry out, with support from some project advisors who are experienced in the associated humanities field, and would need to demonstrate strong organizational support for said project. Perhaps this time next year... We could ask the NEH for a grant to help us identify advisors and consultants, so that we can design a good project for next year. They have such a grant (of more appropriate size), with a September deadline: http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/public-consult.html. +sj+ 20:08, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

If that is the deadline, it will have to be enough. I propose that we go ahead with applying for that grant immediately. Danny 11:22, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

No - this is not official. I'm working on an official budget offline right now and I do plan on incorporating some material from this page (which is just a collection of notes so far). --mav 22:24, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Mav, any estimate on when it will be done? The grant that we most qualify for on Grants has the earliest deadline, we've only got a little over two weeks to apply or well have to wait another year to do so. Gentgeen 22:58, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I need to have something for the board for their Sunday meeting. Provisional budget ETA - Friday. But there is still a great deal of work that needs to be done on the grant proposal other than budget-related items. --mav 23:34, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Update? +sj+ 20:50, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

See Talk:Hardware provisional budget. I'll work on expanding that over 2 years and adding other items in the next few days. --mav 21:08, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Was the suggestion to use those three lines of estimated hardware budgets for the grant proposal? +sj+

I developed a different budget for the grant proposal. That budget presents a very optimistic estimate of the number of servers we will need to buy since I did not think they would believe my real estimate. --Daniel Mayer

Typo

I believe that, in item 2 in the first numbered list in the introduction, "Broken own" should be "Broken down". -- Creidieki 07:27, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Bandwidth and carryover are typoed on this protected page. I still think your servers are ripoffs.
http://grotto11.com/blog/archive/1021507687.shtml
http://forums.dealmac.com/read.php?1,1627099
lysdexia 03:29, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Financial statement 2004

Is there a financial statment 2004 for Wikimedia? I have tried to look for one but haven't found it, just budgets. I have previously donated but this time I intend to decline if I don't know where my money has gone to. -Samulili 12:14, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

The FY 04/05 report is done and waiting for final approval by our auditor. --Daniel Mayer

Is it available somewhere online? -Samulili 08:39, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Newer budgets?

Are there more recent budgets available for viewing? Thanks! --Philip Neustrom

2009

Where is the budget for year 2009? BaenreEntreri 01:23, 9 January 2009 (UTC)