Comment by bakugo
6 hours ago
> Wikipedia spends $185m per year
Only a small fraction of that is spent on actually hosting the website. The rest goes into the pockets of the owners and their friends.
You can do a lot with very little if your primary goal isn't to enrich yourself.
Do you have a source for that?
Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin...
Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too.
Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
> $106M was spent on salaries and benefits
…across 650 employees, which is $166K on average.
> Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
With an order of magnitude less data to host, though. The entirety of Wikipedia is less than 1PB [1], while the entirety of IA is 175+ PB [2].
Traffic is relatively cheap, especially for a very cache-friendly website like Wikipedia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
[2] https://archive.org/about/
My countdown to donating to Wikipedia when a random MAGA nerd makes some baseless claims is getting close. When Elon had his little rant a couple of years ago it got triggered as well.
A fool and his money are soon parted.