User talk:UBX/wikivalue

Disclaimer: The value presented is purely speculative and presented for entertainment purposes only.

How is the value calculated?

The calculation is based on Erik Zachte's blog post Quantifying volunteer contribution, which addresses the question "If Wikipedia was written by paid workers, how much would it cost to produce all its current content from scratch?" (well, not exactly this question, but close enough).

One of the metrics he proposes is calculating the total number of edits and then, assuming an average edit duration (he chose 3 minutes), measuring how much time would it take to do all the edits. With a 3 minutes average edit, in an 8h/day, 5d/week, 50w/year, one person could (virtually) make 40,000 edits per year. So we divide the number of total edits by 40,000 and we'll have the number of years it would take a person to write wikipedia from scratch. Then, multiplying this value by a reference yearly salary, (Erik assumes 50,000$), we'd have the total cost of the endeavour! Here's the formula:

{{NUMBEROFEDITS}}/40000*50000

Since not all edits are good edits (there are vandalism edits, bot edits, vandalism reversals, minor edits, discussions, etc), We divide the number of edits by 2, to achieve a more realistic value. Next, we divide the whole number by one million, to have a nice digestible value, in million dollars. Also, we have to add :R to {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} so that its value comes in raw, i.e. not formatted with group separators, so that {{#expr:}} can process it. And finally, by using #expr's rounding feature, we eliminate the ugly decimal places that remain after all these calculations. Here's the final formula:

{{#expr:{{NUMBEROFEDITS:R}}/2/40000*50000/1000000}} round 0}}

Please do improve this formula by tweaking the values or by adding other elements referred to in the blog post (recommended read!). Here are some magic words that may come handy: mw:Help:Magic words#Statistics --Waldir ^talk 23:39, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Another approach

Besides the cost of production, this issue can be also approached from the "potential commercial value" side. That is, ways Wikipedia could monetize the site's content while still offering it for free. A thorough analysis was made by HipMojo — that's a good starting point. There are a few other pages explaining ways to calculate this value. Then, there are the tools that give you brainless answers such as CubeStat and WebsiteOutlook. There are also more advanced tools, such as Glurk. For still others, you can look at the list at SEO Blogr. Finally, you might be interested in taking a look at Wikipedia:Advertisements. --Waldir ^talk 00:14, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Yet another interesting way of calculating Wikipedia's value is assessing how much a printed version would cost (so it could be compared with other traditional encyclopedias). Wikipedia:Size in volumes offers a good estimate of the number of volumes Wikipedia would yield. --Waldir ^talk 11:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Just found out another site which provides value estimates of other sites: http://webdetail.org/www.wikipedia.org --Waldir ^talk 21:55, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Overheads

A large cost that is totally left out is that of overheads for a commercial company. Wouldn't the company have to provide it's editors with computers and networking, and desks and bathrooms, and heating for it's workers?

Besides one would have to add the cost of the software. How much would developing and maintaining WikiMedia cost? And although Bots do edits automatically, the cost of developing and maintaining a bot needs to be counted too. Additionally, the talk pages substitute thing like meetings and general management costs, which also have their share of overheads (how much does a boardroom cost per hour?)

--Inkwina (talk · contribs) 13:34, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Dead link

The external link here currently leads to a page saying "Error establishing a database connection". Can we fix it without using archiving services, which by their very nature show outdated content? Glades12 (talk) 08:22, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Concur, link is dead. Pointing to Erik Zachte's page http://infodisiac.com, the blog is down for unknown reason. Having said that, the boxes' current value of $0.631M is certainly out of date. Searching the web, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-much-is-wikipedia-worth-704865/ gives some idea around 2013: "Band and Gerafi write, “The millions of hours contributed by volunteer writers and editors leverage this modest budget, funded by donations, into an asset worth tens of billions of dollars that produces hundreds of billions of dollars of consumer benefit.”" 😅 and http://www.centives.net/S/2012/how-much-is-wikipedia-worth/ estimating "Wikipedia would be worth around $2.2 billion at the end of 2011." More general, doesn't this ask for "How to estimate net worth a NPO + the X"? Interesting stuff. 17387349L8764 (talk) 19:50, 6 April 2021 (UTC)