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Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed]

Fixed.






Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really?

They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads.

At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through.

They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?


The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.

There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".

No, you simply assume that.

In 2025 they spend 184 million, and 2% was on hosting. Even several times that for salaries means that an absurd fraction is on non wikipedia items.


Hosting does not include software development. It does not include sysadmins. I'm not sure if it even includes data center personel (Wikipedia owns its own servers. That means you have to hire people to plug them in. Amazon isnt doing it for you).

Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going.

That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia.

Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.




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