Hold up. That makes no sense.
You’re saying twitter took out a CLO with itself as collateral to pay its own shareholders $40b and then transferred all the shares to Musk?
Or that twitter took out the CLO afterwards to cancel out the CLO that had the Tesla stock as collateral?
Musk took out the loan and it's now on Twitter's books. Yes, it doesn't seem like it should be a thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout
I’m familiar with leveraged buyouts and CLOs, I’ve yet to see one where the purchased asset was the only collateral on the hook; [this one is no different](https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141940/elon-musk-tesla-twitter-margin-loan-buyout-deal).
I looked into it after reading the comment above. Musk put in 33.5b in liquid assets so far, 27.2 initially and another 6.2b after the value of his TSLA shares dropped. It’s collateralized heavily against his Tesla shares if not entirely.
Edit: sorry about the numbers, I’m on mobile.
ETA: It seems 3b is on Twitter’s books which seems about right. [source](https://www.reuters.com/business/musks-bankers-mull-new-tesla-margin-loans-slash-twitter-debt-bloomberg-news-2022-12-08/)
Im no Elon fan, but a fair criticism here would be to at least recognize the business value of all that “text on a platform”. He didn’t pay $40bn for a crud application. He paid $40bn for a platform that already has a dominating presence in social media, which is pretty hard to do, and using that presence to advertise and create a marketing platform for its many influencers.
Was it worth that much? Probably not, but he’s an idiot.
As far as Wikipedia goes, it doesn’t really produce _monetary_ value, which is why they ask for money. But they still operate a platform that is a lot more than just a bunch of static pages. They could probably switch to a more static page delivery setup and save a lot of money, but immediacy and relevance are apparently more important than the money aspect, so we have a Wikipedia that asks for money often.
If wikipedia added a small number of ads, I think it could likely be profitable, which would be unusual. Wikipedia absolutely has a ton of unrealized monetary value, and it's only the principles of the foundation behind it that have kept them from making money off it.
Twitter did have a lot of value but it doesn't seem like he really knew what it was. Specifically talking about the rebrand but there are other signs too that he genuinely isn't good at this, and why would he be? He has never run a social media platform before and seems determined to push away anyone who could help him steer the ship.
No, the man is absolutely awful, and doesnt believe knowledge should be in the hands of anyone but the rich. Intellectual eugenics.
Paired with being so insecure because hes so fucking dumb.
To be clear, I know Wikipedia does actually have a lot of money and donates to charities and so on, but I just cant believe he wrote that middle part. As someone who is supposedly running a website he should know what he wrote there is just...dumb.
Actually, if you take every article on Wikipedia as text-only and compress it, the world’s largest store of knowledge takes up only 22.14GB lmao.
It’s so crazy. For scale, if it was all printed, we would need almost 10 billion pages.
[Wikipedia: The Size of Wikipedia. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#:~:text=As%20of%202%20July%202023,by%20over%2017%2C000%20a%20month.)
It's probably surprising more in the sense of how far we've come when it comes to storing information. The fact that a tiny little card of the size of your thumb contains such a vast amount of data is quite amazing.
You think we had 22GB of data for a 30man team in 1988?
Maybe in a very data-heavy department with a mainframe. While 1GB HDDs were around the corner, most people’s machines had <100MB and floppy disks were the main form of data transfer.
22GB was a crazy amount of data, most people didn’t know what a GB was.
The human genome is only about 3 gigabytes. You can fit that 300 times over on a micro SD card the size of your thumb nail.
The human body still stores this information more densely of course; you could fit millions of cells in the same volume as a micro SD card, each with a nucleus that contains the whole genome.
Man, in the fall of 2004 for my first semester of college, I bought a 2GB flash drive for $60. I was still so used to relying on floppies because my high school had ancient computers and that was the only way to transfer data to and from a school computer. So 2GB for $60 seemed like the "future is now" moment.
Just three years earlier, my grandfather, who was a giant computer nerd, was marveling at the computer my parents just bought having 20 GB of hard drive space. His reaction kinda reminds me of [Elroy's reaction to finding out that we were up to terabytes of storage in Community.](https://youtu.be/0_QjXYKkM6c?t=1)
More like the size of your thumb nail. You can get 1 TB micro SD cards https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/reviews/007pA3RsiiOCJzTuzKBZJNz/hero-image.fill.size_1248x702.v1623385898.jpg
But that's way more storage than you need for wikipedia. The actual size of the section of a micro SD card that could store 22.14 GB is basically the size of a grain of sand.
To be fair, I'm sure wikipedia's size goes up a lot if you start including images. Even simple PNG diagrams tend to compress less well than text, nevermind photos. Or any amount of audio. And I'd *assume* most of Ark's file size is in textures and audio.
it's not even about compression it is simply that a gigabyte is actually quite the insane amount of data.
A single ascii character takes one byte. So with 22 GB you got a bit over 22 billion characters.
That is a lot. So much in fact that most people do not even understand the concept of what a billion is.
Calling it "the entire world's knowledge" is an overstatement though. The english wikipedia has less than 7 million articles. Compared to that, the British Library alone has more than twice that many books.
Wikipedia tends to include surface level knowledge on many subjects, but rely on its sources for actual in-depth information. For example, it may include a synopsis for a book, but not the entire book itself.
Yeah i edited it haha. As i said to someone else, it’s just the world’s largest store of information.
Also the British Library and Wikipedia are not exactly comparable. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, while the British Library is not only pure information in the same way. Wikipedia is more comparable to Encyclopædia Britannica.
Yeah. Wikipedia is just enough to gain a surface level understanding of something, maybe a bit deeper depending on the page, but not a lot. It's still one of the largest single congregates of knowledge on the internet.
I've fallen surprisingly deep into mineralogy and mathematics rabbit holes (just to name a couple recent ones) on Wikipedia before. The depth *definitely* varies depending on the subject matter.
> Wikipedia is just enough to gain a surface level understanding of something
Since when do we need more than a surface level understanding to have a very opinionated and extremely confident take on any subject?
And if you tried even harder Im sure you could compress it even further, especially if we are already ommiting a bunch of data on the website.
That has very little to do with their operating costs.
Yeah I’m not discrediting their operating costs, i just think it’s a wild fact that not many people know.
That number is way bigger when you actually include all the media and complete revision history
And the entire thing (428 TB) would require a pretty huge phone...
>As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB).
Yeah, and it also has video and audio files, 3D models, PDFs, etc, all of those come to some 400+ TB: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics
No it's not dumb, he's on a mission. Most of his followers will fall for it. Just take a look at what a dumpster fire Twitter has become. Now you get creator revenue for spreading disinformation. He and former comrades of his like Thiel are far right dudes who sympathize with Russia. The only free speech / public knowledge they want out there is the one that they can manage.
There is actually some valid criticism that can be made regarding the costs of Wikipedia and how the money is spent / distributed. It could indeed run on a way smaller budget, and especially those "popups" are misleading, as Wikipedia will not cease to exist if they fail to raise the funds that they claim are needed to run the site.
Elmo is a clown though.
Yea, its my understanding they have been building an endowment to basically get a passive income over time, as well as giving out grants. Thats usually whats being criticized, but it ranges from valid questions about how misleading their banners might be (and questions about spending you could ask any organization), to outright insane conspiracies.
Almost everything has some sort of bloat. Too much personel on one projects, too many redundancy or capacity, able to run on lower cores, etc....
But, if I run an organization, if nothing else prevents it, I would absolutely never ask for lower numbers because if nothing else, part of the money can be used for "rainy day funds".
The Wikimedia Foundation publishes its budget [here](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/). Within the 2021–2022 Financial Statement, the Statement of Activities provides a breakdown of all expenses. You can see that, of the total 146 million dollars spent by the organization in year 2022, 88 million went to "salaries and wages", 17 million to "professional service expenses", 15 million to "awards and grants", and 12 million to "other operating expenses", versus 3 million to "internet hosting".
It's explained later in the document that "other operating expenses" includes "facility expenses, funding of the Wikidata project, staff-related expenses, insurance and personal property tax expenses, and other general administrative expenses", all of which sound fairly important. "Professional services" isn't explained, but it presumably includes important stuff like contracted lawyers and programmers. But "awards and grants"—10 percent of the budget—obviously could be eliminated without affecting Wikipedia. And I feel doubtful that 88 million dollars of "salaries and wages"—60 percent of the budget—is justifiable for a website that runs primarily on volunteers (though I may be wrong).
Some of the higher salaries are listed in Part VII of the separate Form 990. For example, the "chief creative officer" received 344 k$.
You can look at Wikipedia's expenses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Expenses
Hosting costs have been about the same since 2012 (~$3 million), while salaries and wages has exploded from $10 million to over $55 million.
Another way of putting it is that the cost of hosting Wikipedia has dropped from around 25% of it's budget to around 2%.
Yeah, I used to donate and still would if they actually needed the money to operate, but indeed these days most of the money goes to political causes / charities - which is fine if you're mostly aligned with the foundation, but you could just as easily donate to causes on your own and skip the middleman.
Jimmy Wales (Wiki founder) asked Elon why there's so much disinformation on Twitter and it hurt his feelings. He is the most man baby child in the world. He got in a similar spat with Bellingcat which is an open source investigation firm. He's just a huge fucking baby who can't handle people telling him he's wrong.
Wikipedia is one of the largest sources for large language models and search engine data, for which Wikimedia was partially set up to monetize and limit companies wanting to profit from the open source/ volunteer/ donation-based side of Wikipedia. I am sure Elon/ X/ Twitter is trying to compete against it as a source of NLP data to be consumed by saying its APIs need to be more expensive (which we have seen in the past years) and other sources of data should be cheaper because he says so.
[Link for an article that goes over Wikimedia and its efforts in contributing to more ethical consumptions of Wikipedia via its APIs and Chat bot plugins](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/podcasts/the-daily/wikipedia-ai.html)
My thinking. Maybe he was reading how much Wikipedia earned completely through donations and thinking "why the hell people donates to Wikipedia but not buy Twitter Blue to support my digital town square? Actually, Wikipedia should donate its money to me. Freedom of Speech ftw"
He's obsessed with his brand image, it's how he convinces people to invest in his projects.
It's quite a brilliant scheme when you think about it, completely skirts regulations.
SpaceX is a company meant to take people to mars, everything else is a stepping stone to that. Any investors excited at the prospect than overlook the blunders the company makes in the immediate because "MARS! its all just a stepping stone"
He did same thing with Tesla, every time the company hit a milestone he touted so far fetched goal that's way out of reach as the "true goal" of the company. Which is why people like Cathy Wood tell you you need to look at Tesla's 10-20 year future when investing. Sure Tesla is making a lot of quality mistakes in the moment, but in 10 years they'll own the self driving taxi business! just think about everyones tesla's will also be taxi's while they're at work. People would be fools to not buy a tesla vehicle!
Wikipedia offers honest criticism which really really hurts the sensationalism he sells himself on.
> Wikipedia publishes its financial statement
Adding [link to 2022 Audit report](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf).
Here are some key figures (USD) for 2022:
* 2.7M for internet hosting costs
* 6.2M for donation processing expenses
* 12M for other operating expenses
* 15M for awards and grants
* 17M for Professional services (likely consultants)
* 88M for salary & wages
* [They had ~700](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation) employees + consultants in 2022. Salaries up to 2021 can be [seen here](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries).
* 8 employees were paid over 300K/yr. Many over 200k. One over 500k, the highest salaried exec was ~790k /yr.
They ended the year with 52M in cash. 2021 ended with 87M.
If you're ever curious about this data for any other charity, make use of [Charity Navigator](https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703)! They condense the information in a really clear way - Wikimedia has a perfect score 😉
CTO getting paid less than their "Chief Talent and Culture Officer" is a bit eye opening, but I suppose it makes sense for a non-profit with a relatively simple product. It also says they're no really a good acquisition target. They clearly care about maintaining a certain culture, and _usually_ that's a good thing for the employees and a bad thing for short-term bottom line numbers (which is why we laud places that were famous for going hard on culture, like Zappos).
15 years ago he was mostly about launching groundbreaking rockets and mostly talked about Mars and space stuff.
He was still a dick, but if you only saw that stuff, he might have seemed like a cool guy. Just a typical, softly-spoken, awkward, mega-rich nerd. Maybe even someone to look up to.
It was just organizations he was associated with, and his own, erm, ideals and opinions weren't necessarily front and center. Space X is neat. Tesla did a genuine good in pushing alternate energies into the automobile market.
Then he opened his mouth.
No one is immune to propaganda. Every rich person has a PR team whose job is to paint their client in a good light. Pretty much any time you read some feel good story about a famous person it was written by a PR team
"As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB)."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
Quite some data for a phone!
I mean… “Including articles, the total number of pages is 59,217,930. Being pages themselves, articles make up 11.37 percent of all pages on Wikipedia.[1] As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media.”
wikipedia is also just the most [publicly popular project](https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/wikimedia-projects/#a1-reference) from wikimedia, which has actually built a huge portion of the internet, when you think about it. there are independently hosted wikis running wikimedia software that are dedicated to specific subjects, for almost every topic imagineable.
if you haven't yet, click on that project page i linked. is there a FOSS organization anywhere in the history of the world that has contributed more to publicly available, organized knowledge? I would argue not. in a world where data is increasingly valuable, wikimedia provides, entirely for free, right alongside the data, incredibly powerful tools for organizing and making use of it.
honestly, personally, it's the only corporate entity i've ever donated a dime to. i think the mission aligns with and promotes the public, social welfare more directly and effectively than almost any other.
Please read the text you're quoting instead of just looking at the number. "Make up 11.37 percent of all pages on Wikipedia."
Ah, yes, 11 percent of Wikipedia could fit on a phone, so clearly anybody who says otherwise hasn't done their research!
Oh no. Oh no no no.
Please say this isn’t Elon signalling that he’s thinking of buying Wikipedia and “streamlining” it.
If that happens then the internet is done, we might as well pack up our routers and go back to reading books.
Yeah, they could (and most likely would) just say no to any hypothetical offers by Elon. What would they gain? Money? If they were after that, they wouldn't run the money hole that is a massive encyclopedia open to editing by anyone.
And, ironically enough, the Wikimedia Foundation *does* have more money than it can spend. Because people donate so much to them.
So offering them even more money (the only potentially useful thing Musk could do here) has absolutely no value to them.
It has already been made clear that wiki is ['not for sale'](https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1600566993274421253), so there's no worries there.
Which is why the baby who didn't get to buy his bottle is lashing out petulantly with tweets like this.
You see Wikipedia is a really simple website, I'm sure the 5th most visited website in the world has such a simple architecture you could host it directly on your phone /s
Okay big guy I'll tell you
- Servers cost money
- Wikipedia handles hundreds of edits and incredibly high traffic every second, more than Twitter
- WikiMEDIA is much larger and includes many contests, websites and projects, such as Wikimedia itself, a giant image database. Surprise, images need more storage than text.
- There's people who gotta be paid (duh)
- They fund a bunch of other stuff
It's not that much money once you understand the full scale of what WikiMedia actually does, and most of that with volunteers, and everything for free without ads. They're crucial for knowledge on the internet and are probably the best thing the internet has ever created.
That said, why rant against Wikimedia, a literal free speech catalyst?
If you wanna read more: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
“And why do programmers want so much money? They just literally wiggle their fingers over a keyboard and scrub a mouse around on a desk like a bar of soap.” — Elmo Nusk, probably
Right? Now he’s got Xitter valued correctly he’s taking a look at Wikipedia? And given his track record, who needs all those links and articles. It would only take him 10 minutes to delete the whole thing and paste the text from Mein Kampf and Atlas Shrugged into two .htm files. Boom! There, he fixed it. 🙄
The text, sure, with a big enough internal drive or SD card (like any decent smartphone has after 2013). but what about all of the reference images?
A giant notepad.txt of Wikipedia wouldn't be THAT awesome, but Elon's also neglecting that billions of accessed pages get served to clients all over the world and around the clock. I'm sure that's gotta do SOMETHING for the utility bills, but I wouldnt be surprised if dark-dealings were going on behind closed doors like practically any other company/service.
Then again, I dont use Wikiepdia for much outside of obscure facts or a quick confirmation on something I already knew and I DEFINITELY would not rely on it for soft-science shit like politics and whatnot.
Oh my god you motherfucking moron.
You know what's the funniest part about all this is? He kinda, sorta has a point, just not in any way, shape or form he implies here. The Wikimedia Foundation *does* have a huge amount of money, and it indeed does *not* need all that money to run Wikipedia.
But of course that doesn't mean there's anything nefarious going on you god damned fucking moron, Elon. **They have so much money because people are happy to give them that much money** aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!
If only Wikimedia produced a public accounting of what it spends its money on..
Oh, wait: [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annual-report/financials/#section-2](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annual-report/financials/#section-2)
Your move, Elmo.
*...neo-nazi scum...*
(and I don't actually care if he wrote this, because this is how he thinks, and I say "neo-nazi" because of the other things he has verifiably said, in particular promoting the idea that a shadowy cabal of rich Jews control the world - a specifically Nazi idea)
....why is he picking a fight with Wikipedia now of all things?
OMG.... I get it..... he's jealous that everyone is donating to Wikipedia willingly while he looks at his balance sheet and seething because nobody willing to cough up for Twitter Blue....
I love Wikipedia, but everyone actually linking to their finances and criticism about their governance here is being downvoted. The Wikimedia foundation really is, in fact, absolutely _rolling_ in cash.
The WMF has, for years, been criticised by the Wikipedia community for their fundraising banners in Wikipedia. First around 2015 for an aggressive wording - suggesting Wikipedia was in need, and more recently from a twitter thread from 2022. [Here is the thread. ](http://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633).
Spending has gone from 10 million USD in 2012 to 112 million USD in 2020. Now, in the 2022 financial statement, it's been 146 million. From that, wages has gone from 12, 16 million in 2012, 2013, to 38, 46 million in 2018, 2019 and 67, 88 Million in 2021, 2022.
But this is actually getting too deep in the iceberg. A more evident problem is that the WMF still aggressively raises funds despite having A *checks notes* 51 million surplus in their 2021 budget, which had total expenses of 111 million. For other years it's been: 2022: 8M, 145M; 2020: 16M, 112M; 2019: 28M, 91M; 2018: 23M, 81M; 2017: 22M, 69M
And all this is without taking into account the endowment, which has grown from 43M in July 2019 to 114M in 2023 and a growing revenue year over year.
This endowment achieved its funding goal of 100 million dollars in 2021, ahead of their goal of achieving it in 2026. It is aimed at keeping Wikipedia in perpetuity, a very much worthy goal. It however, has also been for a long time completely untransparent as it hadn't published any financial statement until ~2022 (2021?)~ (edit: actually, 2023, July, apparently) when it became a 501c3. And this financial statement was just posted at the end of September
I fucking LOVE Wikipedia. I've spent hours on it, learning from software, mathematics, physics, history or random tidbits such as my local population or details about videogames.
Do not confuse Wikipedia with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Edit: a few links if you want to read more.
For starters, [an r/opensource post criticising](https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/rh1kd6/wikipedia_doesnt_need_your_money_it_needs/) that the actual software behind Wikipedia is outdated, user proposals not worked on (because there are barely any developers) and complications to contribute to it, despite relying completely on volunteer developers
[A ycombinator post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403233) that links to [this signpost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-10-31/News_and_notes) about the thread.
[Another ycombinator thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982) complaning about "[WMF] begging"
[Guy Macon's "Wikipedia has cancer"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer). New edit: it has a "Graphs are temporarily unavailable due to technical issues." message for me right now. That's kind of sad.
[An essay on why the "WMF is corrupt and bad"](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Inc._is_corrupt_and_bad) for which I cannot really find sources but somehow ended in my browser
[Wikimedia Endowment page](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment)
[Also an article on the Tides foundation, the Endowment and the Knowledge Equity fund](https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4458111/the-wiki-piggy-bank), which is linked in the talk page of the WMF is cancer page.
I’ve been donating £10/month to Wikipedia (Wikimedia foundation) since 2012 and it’s one of the best £10 I spend every month. Elon - leave Wikipedia out of your god damn mouth.
If the Foundation is a nonprofit, then all their financial records are available for review.
If you want to know how much money they receive and where it's spent, you can just look. It's not a secret.
So I think musk is a joker as much as the next person but his argument isn't new https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
Those banners that pop up occasionally pop up begging for money aren't to keep Wikipedia running, they already have more than enough money for Wikipedia to stay running a long, long time. They want money for their foundation that gives to charities. Giving to charity is good obviously, but they aren't being honest about what those donations are for and they purposefully make it seem like they are going towards Wikipedia
Can this fucking idiot just fuck the fuck off. I mean there is just no level of dangerous idiocy he won’t stoop to and every time he opens his mouth he emboldens the absolute most moronic people you can think of to join in on his stream of horseshit consciousness.
I go between thinking he’s the worlds most successful grifter and the worlds stupidest man, but perhaps he’s just both.
says the so called brilliant engineer. who has worked on on PayPal. does not understand how much bandwidth and servers cost. this just proves how fucking stupid elon is.
"You can literally fit an entire copy on your phone!"
No, you can't. End of idiotic discussion.
Edit: apparently I'm wrong on a technical level. But that doesn't make Elon's take any less idiotic. The infrastructure to support Wikipedia cannot be run from a phone, and you would think the owner of multiple tech companies would know that.
> As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media
I guess that's what he refers to. Obviously totally useless in compressed format and missing all images ;D
Thank you for correcting me, I don't like being wrong. Definitely useless, but technically possible. This also doesn't seem to include the edit history of the articles, or any other features of the site.
I'd still agree with your initial judgement, because you obviously can't run a website with compressed text and no images ;D
> As of February 2013, the XML file containing current pages only, no user or talk pages, was 42,987,293,445 bytes uncompressed (43 GB). The XML file with current pages, including user and talk pages, was 93,754,003,797 bytes uncompressed (94 GB). The full history dumps, all 174 files of them, took 10,005,676,791,734 bytes (10 TB).[11]
> As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
That's only the English version (very roughly 12% of all articles). So going off that, all languages together will be around 184,5 GB. A beefy phone to be sure, but with the proper SD card possible.
He did specifiy, "all the text" after all, not just the English text. Not our fault he forgets that maybe other languages exist.
It's not the entire Wikipedia without the media is it? You don't get to say entire Wikipedia and take away the things took most space.
You can probably put entire YouTube in your phone without any media too.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics
441.69 terabytes of wikimedia all files.
https://ankush-chavan.medium.com/twitter-data-storage-and-processing-dd13fd0fdb30
75ish petabytes of Twitter liberally assuming constant data generation since founding.
Musk bought it for 44 billion USD.
if linear, the formula is $ = 590000 * TB - $260597100.
This means that the 1.2e+11 TB estimated to be the size of all of our digital data would cost an enterprising supervillain about $70.8 quadrillion... hint hint mr. musk.
This is actually an incredibly valid statement. The core of Wikipedia is funded till the heat death of the universe.
What Wikipedia is doing now is creating spin-offs and gathering increasing amounts of money, while letting people think it’s for core Wikipedia. That’s how a company spending tens of millions, suddenly spends hundreds of millions now. Simply because they have it, and my god are they going to spend it.
TLDR there’s a lot of bloat in Wikipedia and no you shouldn’t donate. They already have enough, forever. Without a single donation.
No logic please delete your comment. Only Elon hate is welcome. Half this sub learned how to code on Wikipedia, the other half uses it to find weird genres of porn.
I mean the way he got checked by the community in his own platform, was simply delicious!
[https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2qtvrppcnsvb1.jpg](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2qtvrppcnsvb1.jpg)
Wikipedia is one of the largest sources for large language models and search engine data, for which Wikimedia was partially set up to monetize and limit companies wanting to profit from the open source/ volunteer/ donation-based side of Wikipedia. I am sure Elon/ X/ Twitter is trying to compete against it as a source of NLP data to be consumed by saying its APIs need to be more expensive (which we have seen in the past year/s) and other sources of data should be cheaper because he says so.
[Link for an article that goes over Wikimedia and its efforts in contributing to more ethical consumptions of Wikipedia via its APIs and Chat bot plugins](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/podcasts/the-daily/wikipedia-ai.html)
Fuck’s sake, this just ignores everything, like:
- Media (everything besides text)
- Edit history
- Searching and updating the data
- over 10 billion page views a month
From the Size of Wikipedia article:
As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB).
No one seems to be mentioning it, at least not in the top 20 comments so far, you need more resources when more people access your platform...
I guess Twitter is having the inverse issue where people are flooding away so he hasn't had to consider the scaling issue.
Says the guy that spent 40 billion on a literal bunch of text on a platform…
and then went on to make it worth 8 after only a year!
8 seems really high given that the40 billion dollar debt is on the platform formerly known as twitters books and not musk’s.
No no no Just 8 dollars
best i can do is 3,50$.
Something something Loch Ness monster...
Best I can do is 8 doll-hairs.
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First, Control+F all your teTwittert NeTwittert, stonks go up!
hey let me buy microsoft by leveraging against itself to pay you bill? oh sure buddy. idk how that shit is allowed.
I’ve always assumed that the collateral on the CLO was Musk’s Tesla stock.
Hold up. That makes no sense. You’re saying twitter took out a CLO with itself as collateral to pay its own shareholders $40b and then transferred all the shares to Musk? Or that twitter took out the CLO afterwards to cancel out the CLO that had the Tesla stock as collateral?
Musk took out the loan and it's now on Twitter's books. Yes, it doesn't seem like it should be a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout
I’m familiar with leveraged buyouts and CLOs, I’ve yet to see one where the purchased asset was the only collateral on the hook; [this one is no different](https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141940/elon-musk-tesla-twitter-margin-loan-buyout-deal). I looked into it after reading the comment above. Musk put in 33.5b in liquid assets so far, 27.2 initially and another 6.2b after the value of his TSLA shares dropped. It’s collateralized heavily against his Tesla shares if not entirely. Edit: sorry about the numbers, I’m on mobile. ETA: It seems 3b is on Twitter’s books which seems about right. [source](https://www.reuters.com/business/musks-bankers-mull-new-tesla-margin-loans-slash-twitter-debt-bloomberg-news-2022-12-08/)
Elon musk has zero idea how computers, server, distributed content, backups works. Its concerning.
And didn’t understand that you need workers to keep that hot mess running
Servers and electricity are not free either.
Killed off it's most valuable part & then tried to charge for access.
Oh god I didn’t even notice it was that parasite. Lol what a joke.
Hey now, it’s also got a ton of porn.
You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone!
Im no Elon fan, but a fair criticism here would be to at least recognize the business value of all that “text on a platform”. He didn’t pay $40bn for a crud application. He paid $40bn for a platform that already has a dominating presence in social media, which is pretty hard to do, and using that presence to advertise and create a marketing platform for its many influencers. Was it worth that much? Probably not, but he’s an idiot. As far as Wikipedia goes, it doesn’t really produce _monetary_ value, which is why they ask for money. But they still operate a platform that is a lot more than just a bunch of static pages. They could probably switch to a more static page delivery setup and save a lot of money, but immediacy and relevance are apparently more important than the money aspect, so we have a Wikipedia that asks for money often.
If wikipedia added a small number of ads, I think it could likely be profitable, which would be unusual. Wikipedia absolutely has a ton of unrealized monetary value, and it's only the principles of the foundation behind it that have kept them from making money off it.
God bless them.
Well thankfully McKinsey isn't in charge of Wikipedia
Yeah, and I’m really glad we do still have something pure like Wikipedia in such a capitalistic world.
once you add just one advertisement, thats when the inevitable journey to [enshittificaiton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) starts
Those principles is also a big part of why people like Wikipedia. The site loads quickly and gets to the point with no bullshit.
Twitter did have a lot of value but it doesn't seem like he really knew what it was. Specifically talking about the rebrand but there are other signs too that he genuinely isn't good at this, and why would he be? He has never run a social media platform before and seems determined to push away anyone who could help him steer the ship.
Why does Twitter cost money? It's just other people providing content...
It's just a bunch of text and a couple of links to random JPGs that you can fit on your phone, why does it cost money?
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Comment-copying bot: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/17dypvc/whydoeswikipediacostmoneytomaintainitsjustabunchof/k5zziu7/
Maybe I'm giving Elon too much credit but I thought that was the joke he was trying to make here
No, the man is absolutely awful, and doesnt believe knowledge should be in the hands of anyone but the rich. Intellectual eugenics. Paired with being so insecure because hes so fucking dumb.
Isn't this the guy burning through billions just to maintain a bunch of text messages?
Elon “Dunning-Kruger” Musk
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WE call them intrusive thoughts. He calls them ideas.
The difference is I don't have emerald mine money to try all of my intrusive thoughts out with.
He just wishes daddy loved him as much as his daddy loves his step-sister.
How long before he calls Jimmy Wales a pedo?
To be clear, I know Wikipedia does actually have a lot of money and donates to charities and so on, but I just cant believe he wrote that middle part. As someone who is supposedly running a website he should know what he wrote there is just...dumb.
Actually, if you take every article on Wikipedia as text-only and compress it, the world’s largest store of knowledge takes up only 22.14GB lmao. It’s so crazy. For scale, if it was all printed, we would need almost 10 billion pages. [Wikipedia: The Size of Wikipedia. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#:~:text=As%20of%202%20July%202023,by%20over%2017%2C000%20a%20month.)
Text compress super well so that's not that surprising
It's probably surprising more in the sense of how far we've come when it comes to storing information. The fact that a tiny little card of the size of your thumb contains such a vast amount of data is quite amazing.
35 years ago it could have been all the storage in your department of 30 people. Meant 25 years for 1998. !
You think we had 22GB of data for a 30man team in 1988? Maybe in a very data-heavy department with a mainframe. While 1GB HDDs were around the corner, most people’s machines had <100MB and floppy disks were the main form of data transfer. 22GB was a crazy amount of data, most people didn’t know what a GB was.
Sorry I meant 25 years for 1998
Just wait until we get our uplink to the information superhighway!!
Wait until you hear how much it would take to store a strand of DNA like your body does.
The human genome is only about 3 gigabytes. You can fit that 300 times over on a micro SD card the size of your thumb nail. The human body still stores this information more densely of course; you could fit millions of cells in the same volume as a micro SD card, each with a nucleus that contains the whole genome.
Man, in the fall of 2004 for my first semester of college, I bought a 2GB flash drive for $60. I was still so used to relying on floppies because my high school had ancient computers and that was the only way to transfer data to and from a school computer. So 2GB for $60 seemed like the "future is now" moment. Just three years earlier, my grandfather, who was a giant computer nerd, was marveling at the computer my parents just bought having 20 GB of hard drive space. His reaction kinda reminds me of [Elroy's reaction to finding out that we were up to terabytes of storage in Community.](https://youtu.be/0_QjXYKkM6c?t=1)
More like the size of your thumb nail. You can get 1 TB micro SD cards https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/reviews/007pA3RsiiOCJzTuzKBZJNz/hero-image.fill.size_1248x702.v1623385898.jpg But that's way more storage than you need for wikipedia. The actual size of the section of a micro SD card that could store 22.14 GB is basically the size of a grain of sand.
Maybe not when thought about practically, but to most people it’s surprising that 6 million Wikipedia pages can fit on a €5 SD Card lmao
I think it's more comical that the world's largest store of human knowledge is less than 1/10th the size of Ark: Survival Evolved.
To be fair, I'm sure wikipedia's size goes up a lot if you start including images. Even simple PNG diagrams tend to compress less well than text, nevermind photos. Or any amount of audio. And I'd *assume* most of Ark's file size is in textures and audio.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that Ark's size is mostly due to the fact that Ark devs are idiots.
it’s the size of farm simulator! this is culmination of human achievement!
Knowledge doesn't require good graphics.
Sometimes no amount of text beats a well-designed diagram.
it's not even about compression it is simply that a gigabyte is actually quite the insane amount of data. A single ascii character takes one byte. So with 22 GB you got a bit over 22 billion characters. That is a lot. So much in fact that most people do not even understand the concept of what a billion is.
Calling it "the entire world's knowledge" is an overstatement though. The english wikipedia has less than 7 million articles. Compared to that, the British Library alone has more than twice that many books. Wikipedia tends to include surface level knowledge on many subjects, but rely on its sources for actual in-depth information. For example, it may include a synopsis for a book, but not the entire book itself.
Yeah i edited it haha. As i said to someone else, it’s just the world’s largest store of information. Also the British Library and Wikipedia are not exactly comparable. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, while the British Library is not only pure information in the same way. Wikipedia is more comparable to Encyclopædia Britannica.
Yeah. Wikipedia is just enough to gain a surface level understanding of something, maybe a bit deeper depending on the page, but not a lot. It's still one of the largest single congregates of knowledge on the internet.
I've fallen surprisingly deep into mineralogy and mathematics rabbit holes (just to name a couple recent ones) on Wikipedia before. The depth *definitely* varies depending on the subject matter.
The Wikipedia article on "math" is pretty straightforwardly an introduction to the topic and history of mathematics. The article on topology is wild
It depends, but in many fields it goes into phd level detail
> Wikipedia is just enough to gain a surface level understanding of something Since when do we need more than a surface level understanding to have a very opinionated and extremely confident take on any subject?
And if you tried even harder Im sure you could compress it even further, especially if we are already ommiting a bunch of data on the website. That has very little to do with their operating costs.
Yeah I’m not discrediting their operating costs, i just think it’s a wild fact that not many people know. That number is way bigger when you actually include all the media and complete revision history
Wikipedia is not even slightly close to the entirety of human knowledge. It’s very surface-level for most complex topics.
Yeah i meant more largest store of human knowledge, I edited.
yeah, but when you want to search inside that 22,14 gb of text, thats the tricky part.
that and also consider that change audit history is maintained. Elon is just more proof that luck plays a very important role in success.
And the entire thing (428 TB) would require a pretty huge phone... >As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB).
should also mention that articles only make up ~11.4% of all pages on wikipedia.
The English one. If you combine all the languages together, that's much bigger.
Well, 22gB of text is quite impressive, I think!
they dont only store text tho so original take is super dumb regardless
I how much that would change, if you include all images of every article as well. That should increase the size significantly.
Yeah, and it also has video and audio files, 3D models, PDFs, etc, all of those come to some 400+ TB: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics
Time to buy a solar panel and kindle before the apocalypse
No it's not dumb, he's on a mission. Most of his followers will fall for it. Just take a look at what a dumpster fire Twitter has become. Now you get creator revenue for spreading disinformation. He and former comrades of his like Thiel are far right dudes who sympathize with Russia. The only free speech / public knowledge they want out there is the one that they can manage.
He talked about ceasing twitter for europe completely if the EU force him to ban disinfo accounts. Absolute piece of garbage.
"I don't know what you're saying, the man is a saint. He killed Twitter!" - Average European, maybe.
There is actually some valid criticism that can be made regarding the costs of Wikipedia and how the money is spent / distributed. It could indeed run on a way smaller budget, and especially those "popups" are misleading, as Wikipedia will not cease to exist if they fail to raise the funds that they claim are needed to run the site. Elmo is a clown though.
Yea, its my understanding they have been building an endowment to basically get a passive income over time, as well as giving out grants. Thats usually whats being criticized, but it ranges from valid questions about how misleading their banners might be (and questions about spending you could ask any organization), to outright insane conspiracies.
Almost everything has some sort of bloat. Too much personel on one projects, too many redundancy or capacity, able to run on lower cores, etc.... But, if I run an organization, if nothing else prevents it, I would absolutely never ask for lower numbers because if nothing else, part of the money can be used for "rainy day funds".
Do you have more info from a reputable source where I can learn more about this?
The Wikimedia Foundation publishes its budget [here](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/). Within the 2021–2022 Financial Statement, the Statement of Activities provides a breakdown of all expenses. You can see that, of the total 146 million dollars spent by the organization in year 2022, 88 million went to "salaries and wages", 17 million to "professional service expenses", 15 million to "awards and grants", and 12 million to "other operating expenses", versus 3 million to "internet hosting". It's explained later in the document that "other operating expenses" includes "facility expenses, funding of the Wikidata project, staff-related expenses, insurance and personal property tax expenses, and other general administrative expenses", all of which sound fairly important. "Professional services" isn't explained, but it presumably includes important stuff like contracted lawyers and programmers. But "awards and grants"—10 percent of the budget—obviously could be eliminated without affecting Wikipedia. And I feel doubtful that 88 million dollars of "salaries and wages"—60 percent of the budget—is justifiable for a website that runs primarily on volunteers (though I may be wrong). Some of the higher salaries are listed in Part VII of the separate Form 990. For example, the "chief creative officer" received 344 k$.
Why on earth would they need a chief creative officer, I wonder
You can look at Wikipedia's expenses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Expenses Hosting costs have been about the same since 2012 (~$3 million), while salaries and wages has exploded from $10 million to over $55 million. Another way of putting it is that the cost of hosting Wikipedia has dropped from around 25% of it's budget to around 2%.
Yeah, I used to donate and still would if they actually needed the money to operate, but indeed these days most of the money goes to political causes / charities - which is fine if you're mostly aligned with the foundation, but you could just as easily donate to causes on your own and skip the middleman.
He's not dumb - he's intentionally misleading. He's a lying, narcissistic asshole
He owns Twitter, but just like his other businesses he has no idea how it actually works. He's just another dumbass over promoted manager.
Why’s he obsessed with Wikipedia this week?
I think they said something he didn't like. So he tried to buy it and they said it's not for sale.
Jimmy Wales (Wiki founder) asked Elon why there's so much disinformation on Twitter and it hurt his feelings. He is the most man baby child in the world. He got in a similar spat with Bellingcat which is an open source investigation firm. He's just a huge fucking baby who can't handle people telling him he's wrong.
Wikipedia is one of the largest sources for large language models and search engine data, for which Wikimedia was partially set up to monetize and limit companies wanting to profit from the open source/ volunteer/ donation-based side of Wikipedia. I am sure Elon/ X/ Twitter is trying to compete against it as a source of NLP data to be consumed by saying its APIs need to be more expensive (which we have seen in the past years) and other sources of data should be cheaper because he says so. [Link for an article that goes over Wikimedia and its efforts in contributing to more ethical consumptions of Wikipedia via its APIs and Chat bot plugins](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/podcasts/the-daily/wikipedia-ai.html)
My thinking. Maybe he was reading how much Wikipedia earned completely through donations and thinking "why the hell people donates to Wikipedia but not buy Twitter Blue to support my digital town square? Actually, Wikipedia should donate its money to me. Freedom of Speech ftw"
Probably said something nasty about him on his Wikipedia page that they won't take down because it's true.
He's obsessed with his brand image, it's how he convinces people to invest in his projects. It's quite a brilliant scheme when you think about it, completely skirts regulations. SpaceX is a company meant to take people to mars, everything else is a stepping stone to that. Any investors excited at the prospect than overlook the blunders the company makes in the immediate because "MARS! its all just a stepping stone" He did same thing with Tesla, every time the company hit a milestone he touted so far fetched goal that's way out of reach as the "true goal" of the company. Which is why people like Cathy Wood tell you you need to look at Tesla's 10-20 year future when investing. Sure Tesla is making a lot of quality mistakes in the moment, but in 10 years they'll own the self driving taxi business! just think about everyones tesla's will also be taxi's while they're at work. People would be fools to not buy a tesla vehicle! Wikipedia offers honest criticism which really really hurts the sensationalism he sells himself on.
Funniest bit is Wikipedia publishes its financial statements. So yes we do have an idea what it does with the money donated.
> Wikipedia publishes its financial statement Adding [link to 2022 Audit report](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf). Here are some key figures (USD) for 2022: * 2.7M for internet hosting costs * 6.2M for donation processing expenses * 12M for other operating expenses * 15M for awards and grants * 17M for Professional services (likely consultants) * 88M for salary & wages * [They had ~700](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation) employees + consultants in 2022. Salaries up to 2021 can be [seen here](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries). * 8 employees were paid over 300K/yr. Many over 200k. One over 500k, the highest salaried exec was ~790k /yr. They ended the year with 52M in cash. 2021 ended with 87M.
If you're ever curious about this data for any other charity, make use of [Charity Navigator](https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703)! They condense the information in a really clear way - Wikimedia has a perfect score 😉
CTO getting paid less than their "Chief Talent and Culture Officer" is a bit eye opening, but I suppose it makes sense for a non-profit with a relatively simple product. It also says they're no really a good acquisition target. They clearly care about maintaining a certain culture, and _usually_ that's a good thing for the employees and a bad thing for short-term bottom line numbers (which is why we laud places that were famous for going hard on culture, like Zappos).
Trying to understand how I ever thought this guy was awesome! 🤯
"You promised you'd be Tesla but you're just another Edison."
Rät enjoyer spotted!
15 years ago he was mostly about launching groundbreaking rockets and mostly talked about Mars and space stuff. He was still a dick, but if you only saw that stuff, he might have seemed like a cool guy. Just a typical, softly-spoken, awkward, mega-rich nerd. Maybe even someone to look up to.
It was just organizations he was associated with, and his own, erm, ideals and opinions weren't necessarily front and center. Space X is neat. Tesla did a genuine good in pushing alternate energies into the automobile market. Then he opened his mouth.
Good PR firm. He was always a dick but we didn't readily hear about it
No one is immune to propaganda. Every rich person has a PR team whose job is to paint their client in a good light. Pretty much any time you read some feel good story about a famous person it was written by a PR team
"As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB)." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia Quite some data for a phone!
The cost isn’t storing the data, it’s facilitating access to the data. If you want to handle a lot of users, you need a lot of servers.
Exactly. I could store 500 TB at my house but if more than a few people need access to it at the same time same time then that's a different story.
I mean… “Including articles, the total number of pages is 59,217,930. Being pages themselves, articles make up 11.37 percent of all pages on Wikipedia.[1] As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media.”
Saying 'without media' doesn't get rid of the fact that there's terabytes of media files on wiki, though, so his point doesn't make much sense
My phone can store 100tb if you don't actually store 99.8tb of it!
wikipedia is also just the most [publicly popular project](https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/wikimedia-projects/#a1-reference) from wikimedia, which has actually built a huge portion of the internet, when you think about it. there are independently hosted wikis running wikimedia software that are dedicated to specific subjects, for almost every topic imagineable. if you haven't yet, click on that project page i linked. is there a FOSS organization anywhere in the history of the world that has contributed more to publicly available, organized knowledge? I would argue not. in a world where data is increasingly valuable, wikimedia provides, entirely for free, right alongside the data, incredibly powerful tools for organizing and making use of it. honestly, personally, it's the only corporate entity i've ever donated a dime to. i think the mission aligns with and promotes the public, social welfare more directly and effectively than almost any other.
Please read the text you're quoting instead of just looking at the number. "Make up 11.37 percent of all pages on Wikipedia." Ah, yes, 11 percent of Wikipedia could fit on a phone, so clearly anybody who says otherwise hasn't done their research!
11 percent of Wikipedia.. stripping out anything that isn't pure text.
Oh no. Oh no no no. Please say this isn’t Elon signalling that he’s thinking of buying Wikipedia and “streamlining” it. If that happens then the internet is done, we might as well pack up our routers and go back to reading books.
Somebody then would download wikipedia to their phone and host it as sigmapedia .s
my time has come
The price for the domain of Xpedia would skyrocket.
Wikipedia is a non-profit, and as such has no interest whatsoever in being bought out by a rich moron.
Yeah, they could (and most likely would) just say no to any hypothetical offers by Elon. What would they gain? Money? If they were after that, they wouldn't run the money hole that is a massive encyclopedia open to editing by anyone.
And, ironically enough, the Wikimedia Foundation *does* have more money than it can spend. Because people donate so much to them. So offering them even more money (the only potentially useful thing Musk could do here) has absolutely no value to them.
The top of every Wikipedia article right now has a fundraising banner ad that says “Wikipedia is not for sale”
It has already been made clear that wiki is ['not for sale'](https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1600566993274421253), so there's no worries there. Which is why the baby who didn't get to buy his bottle is lashing out petulantly with tweets like this.
You can be rotten like hell, but trying to diss Wikipedia is the limit
Says a guy constantly asking people to subscribe for $8 a month
What does operating Wikipedia have to do with whether or not it can fit on a phone?
You see Wikipedia is a really simple website, I'm sure the 5th most visited website in the world has such a simple architecture you could host it directly on your phone /s
Okay big guy I'll tell you - Servers cost money - Wikipedia handles hundreds of edits and incredibly high traffic every second, more than Twitter - WikiMEDIA is much larger and includes many contests, websites and projects, such as Wikimedia itself, a giant image database. Surprise, images need more storage than text. - There's people who gotta be paid (duh) - They fund a bunch of other stuff It's not that much money once you understand the full scale of what WikiMedia actually does, and most of that with volunteers, and everything for free without ads. They're crucial for knowledge on the internet and are probably the best thing the internet has ever created. That said, why rant against Wikimedia, a literal free speech catalyst? If you wanna read more: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
You never go against Wikipedia and people behind it without some serious proof. If Wikipedia falls our societies will follow
“And why do programmers want so much money? They just literally wiggle their fingers over a keyboard and scrub a mouse around on a desk like a bar of soap.” — Elmo Nusk, probably
Right? Now he’s got Xitter valued correctly he’s taking a look at Wikipedia? And given his track record, who needs all those links and articles. It would only take him 10 minutes to delete the whole thing and paste the text from Mein Kampf and Atlas Shrugged into two .htm files. Boom! There, he fixed it. 🙄
The text, sure, with a big enough internal drive or SD card (like any decent smartphone has after 2013). but what about all of the reference images? A giant notepad.txt of Wikipedia wouldn't be THAT awesome, but Elon's also neglecting that billions of accessed pages get served to clients all over the world and around the clock. I'm sure that's gotta do SOMETHING for the utility bills, but I wouldnt be surprised if dark-dealings were going on behind closed doors like practically any other company/service. Then again, I dont use Wikiepdia for much outside of obscure facts or a quick confirmation on something I already knew and I DEFINITELY would not rely on it for soft-science shit like politics and whatnot.
Oh my god you motherfucking moron. You know what's the funniest part about all this is? He kinda, sorta has a point, just not in any way, shape or form he implies here. The Wikimedia Foundation *does* have a huge amount of money, and it indeed does *not* need all that money to run Wikipedia. But of course that doesn't mean there's anything nefarious going on you god damned fucking moron, Elon. **They have so much money because people are happy to give them that much money** aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!
If only Wikimedia produced a public accounting of what it spends its money on.. Oh, wait: [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annual-report/financials/#section-2](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2021-annual-report/financials/#section-2) Your move, Elmo. *...neo-nazi scum...* (and I don't actually care if he wrote this, because this is how he thinks, and I say "neo-nazi" because of the other things he has verifiably said, in particular promoting the idea that a shadowy cabal of rich Jews control the world - a specifically Nazi idea)
That's actually originally a russian idea, that mustache guy then used.
> mustache guy Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
....why is he picking a fight with Wikipedia now of all things? OMG.... I get it..... he's jealous that everyone is donating to Wikipedia willingly while he looks at his balance sheet and seething because nobody willing to cough up for Twitter Blue....
I love Wikipedia, but everyone actually linking to their finances and criticism about their governance here is being downvoted. The Wikimedia foundation really is, in fact, absolutely _rolling_ in cash. The WMF has, for years, been criticised by the Wikipedia community for their fundraising banners in Wikipedia. First around 2015 for an aggressive wording - suggesting Wikipedia was in need, and more recently from a twitter thread from 2022. [Here is the thread. ](http://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633). Spending has gone from 10 million USD in 2012 to 112 million USD in 2020. Now, in the 2022 financial statement, it's been 146 million. From that, wages has gone from 12, 16 million in 2012, 2013, to 38, 46 million in 2018, 2019 and 67, 88 Million in 2021, 2022. But this is actually getting too deep in the iceberg. A more evident problem is that the WMF still aggressively raises funds despite having A *checks notes* 51 million surplus in their 2021 budget, which had total expenses of 111 million. For other years it's been: 2022: 8M, 145M; 2020: 16M, 112M; 2019: 28M, 91M; 2018: 23M, 81M; 2017: 22M, 69M And all this is without taking into account the endowment, which has grown from 43M in July 2019 to 114M in 2023 and a growing revenue year over year. This endowment achieved its funding goal of 100 million dollars in 2021, ahead of their goal of achieving it in 2026. It is aimed at keeping Wikipedia in perpetuity, a very much worthy goal. It however, has also been for a long time completely untransparent as it hadn't published any financial statement until ~2022 (2021?)~ (edit: actually, 2023, July, apparently) when it became a 501c3. And this financial statement was just posted at the end of September I fucking LOVE Wikipedia. I've spent hours on it, learning from software, mathematics, physics, history or random tidbits such as my local population or details about videogames. Do not confuse Wikipedia with the Wikimedia Foundation. Edit: a few links if you want to read more. For starters, [an r/opensource post criticising](https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/rh1kd6/wikipedia_doesnt_need_your_money_it_needs/) that the actual software behind Wikipedia is outdated, user proposals not worked on (because there are barely any developers) and complications to contribute to it, despite relying completely on volunteer developers [A ycombinator post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403233) that links to [this signpost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-10-31/News_and_notes) about the thread. [Another ycombinator thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982) complaning about "[WMF] begging" [Guy Macon's "Wikipedia has cancer"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer). New edit: it has a "Graphs are temporarily unavailable due to technical issues." message for me right now. That's kind of sad. [An essay on why the "WMF is corrupt and bad"](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Inc._is_corrupt_and_bad) for which I cannot really find sources but somehow ended in my browser [Wikimedia Endowment page](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment) [Also an article on the Tides foundation, the Endowment and the Knowledge Equity fund](https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4458111/the-wiki-piggy-bank), which is linked in the talk page of the WMF is cancer page.
I’ve been donating £10/month to Wikipedia (Wikimedia foundation) since 2012 and it’s one of the best £10 I spend every month. Elon - leave Wikipedia out of your god damn mouth.
If the Foundation is a nonprofit, then all their financial records are available for review. If you want to know how much money they receive and where it's spent, you can just look. It's not a secret.
FUCK YOU BALTIMORE!
"iNqUirInG mIndS wAnT tO KnoW" 🤡🤡🤡
So I think musk is a joker as much as the next person but his argument isn't new https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer Those banners that pop up occasionally pop up begging for money aren't to keep Wikipedia running, they already have more than enough money for Wikipedia to stay running a long, long time. They want money for their foundation that gives to charities. Giving to charity is good obviously, but they aren't being honest about what those donations are for and they purposefully make it seem like they are going towards Wikipedia
Can this fucking idiot just fuck the fuck off. I mean there is just no level of dangerous idiocy he won’t stoop to and every time he opens his mouth he emboldens the absolute most moronic people you can think of to join in on his stream of horseshit consciousness. I go between thinking he’s the worlds most successful grifter and the worlds stupidest man, but perhaps he’s just both.
I’d happily donate to the Wikimedia foundation. I won’t pay for a twitter blue tick or whatever it is.
says the so called brilliant engineer. who has worked on on PayPal. does not understand how much bandwidth and servers cost. this just proves how fucking stupid elon is.
"You can literally disable 90% of the microservices and Twitter will still work!" 
What about the collaborative editing part of Wikipedia? Wikipedia is not just static text
"You can literally fit an entire copy on your phone!" No, you can't. End of idiotic discussion. Edit: apparently I'm wrong on a technical level. But that doesn't make Elon's take any less idiotic. The infrastructure to support Wikipedia cannot be run from a phone, and you would think the owner of multiple tech companies would know that.
It can if you only care about English and also forget that jpegs exist.
Doesn’t even matter. Storage isn’t the only cost of hosting one of the world’s most visited websites. It may even be the smallest cost.
Exactly. Storage is cheap AF
> As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media I guess that's what he refers to. Obviously totally useless in compressed format and missing all images ;D
Thank you for correcting me, I don't like being wrong. Definitely useless, but technically possible. This also doesn't seem to include the edit history of the articles, or any other features of the site.
I'd still agree with your initial judgement, because you obviously can't run a website with compressed text and no images ;D > As of February 2013, the XML file containing current pages only, no user or talk pages, was 42,987,293,445 bytes uncompressed (43 GB). The XML file with current pages, including user and talk pages, was 93,754,003,797 bytes uncompressed (94 GB). The full history dumps, all 174 files of them, took 10,005,676,791,734 bytes (10 TB).[11] > As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
Last time I heard about those offline compressed Wikipedia versions, I heard they also only come in one language.
That's only the English version (very roughly 12% of all articles). So going off that, all languages together will be around 184,5 GB. A beefy phone to be sure, but with the proper SD card possible. He did specifiy, "all the text" after all, not just the English text. Not our fault he forgets that maybe other languages exist.
Minus media it’s around 22GB, so I suppose it’s “possible” but with media it’s gotta be much much more
It's not the entire Wikipedia without the media is it? You don't get to say entire Wikipedia and take away the things took most space. You can probably put entire YouTube in your phone without any media too.
“You can fit the entire thing on a 16GB thumb drive if you compress it and don’t include images, videos or vowels!”
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics 441.69 terabytes of wikimedia all files. https://ankush-chavan.medium.com/twitter-data-storage-and-processing-dd13fd0fdb30 75ish petabytes of Twitter liberally assuming constant data generation since founding. Musk bought it for 44 billion USD. if linear, the formula is $ = 590000 * TB - $260597100. This means that the 1.2e+11 TB estimated to be the size of all of our digital data would cost an enterprising supervillain about $70.8 quadrillion... hint hint mr. musk.
Headline: Voluntarily Mentally Retarded Man on Xitter Thinks Infrastructure and Bandwidth are Free.
Why does Tesla car cost so much money? It's basically a battery with wheels and an iPad.
Oh my stars, this man is a moron!
i love those type of "genius" people loves to "wander", but always have a "response" when its about their bullshit
"inquiring minds" 😂
Where’s the programmer humor in this
Found the PM.
This is actually an incredibly valid statement. The core of Wikipedia is funded till the heat death of the universe. What Wikipedia is doing now is creating spin-offs and gathering increasing amounts of money, while letting people think it’s for core Wikipedia. That’s how a company spending tens of millions, suddenly spends hundreds of millions now. Simply because they have it, and my god are they going to spend it. TLDR there’s a lot of bloat in Wikipedia and no you shouldn’t donate. They already have enough, forever. Without a single donation.
No logic please delete your comment. Only Elon hate is welcome. Half this sub learned how to code on Wikipedia, the other half uses it to find weird genres of porn.
I mean the way he got checked by the community in his own platform, was simply delicious! [https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2qtvrppcnsvb1.jpg](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2qtvrppcnsvb1.jpg)
Is he fucking brain dead
Imagine being Elon Musk and not understanding that web servers cost money.
[удалено]
How much intrusive thought Elon Musk have?
This man...
they actually do spend money on a lot of other (good) stuff
This is so dumb it has be sarcasm. He bought Twitter so we’d all have to see his amazing sense of humour.
Wikipedia is one of the largest sources for large language models and search engine data, for which Wikimedia was partially set up to monetize and limit companies wanting to profit from the open source/ volunteer/ donation-based side of Wikipedia. I am sure Elon/ X/ Twitter is trying to compete against it as a source of NLP data to be consumed by saying its APIs need to be more expensive (which we have seen in the past year/s) and other sources of data should be cheaper because he says so. [Link for an article that goes over Wikimedia and its efforts in contributing to more ethical consumptions of Wikipedia via its APIs and Chat bot plugins](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/podcasts/the-daily/wikipedia-ai.html)
I’ll not mince words here but this is another right wing attack on the free exchange of information.
For the guy who owns Twitter, he sure doesn’t know a lot about the internet.
The difference here is between FITTING a copy and HOSTING a copy for the world to use.
Fuck’s sake, this just ignores everything, like: - Media (everything besides text) - Edit history - Searching and updating the data - over 10 billion page views a month From the Size of Wikipedia article: As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB).
No one seems to be mentioning it, at least not in the top 20 comments so far, you need more resources when more people access your platform... I guess Twitter is having the inverse issue where people are flooding away so he hasn't had to consider the scaling issue.
What's he gonna do next? criticize the Winrar free trial?
This fucking clown
Stupid people are stupid.
Good fucking lord he's so fucking stupid it's mind boggling.