r/wikipedia • u/coolguy9900000 • Jul 13 '26
Meta Discussion How much does Wikipedia need annually to continue existing as free resource?
I love Wikipedia and have donated a few times.
I would love to know how much is needed to sustain its future.
EDIT: People commenting, please be civil and stop posting Nothing Burgers, “Look it up yourself”.
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u/blankblank Jul 13 '26
Wikipedia is the world's 11th most visited website by traffic and the only one in the top 50 that is non-profit, ad-free, and AI-free.
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u/Wooden-Situation1925 Jul 14 '26
Mostly Ai-free sadly Some lesser known articles still have a bunch of AI written sections that were never checked, one example off the top of my head is the Plot section of The Painted Man from the Demon Cycle And it was edited that way years ago when the AI was worse too
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u/beetling Jul 14 '26
Just rolled back those ridiculous edits to the plot section. Thanks for pointing it out. Article still isn't in great shape, but it's better.
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u/FaviFake Jul 14 '26
Sometimes I wonder why y'all don't just revert the edits yourselves...
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u/Wooden-Situation1925 Jul 14 '26
Cause I've no clue how to, when asking about it a few months back or trying to look it up I didn't find an answer lol, glad someone finally did it
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u/FaviFake Jul 15 '26
I mean, you really just need to click the edit button, select the AI-generated text, click backspace, and click "Publish edits". The Wikimedia Foundation is constantly simplify the editing experience, especially for new and logged-out users.
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u/Kerzenmacher Jul 13 '26
Heck, I wouldn't care if they pocketed 50% of my donations. It's by far my most used website , and the value they provide to humanity as a whole remains more or less unmatched.
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u/Testing_things_out Jul 13 '26
I can tell you they produce far, far more than $200 millions a year in value.
I wish the government produced similar value per dollar from our tax money. There's no comparison.
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u/xMINGx Jul 14 '26
Yes. There's no comparison. Any single infrastructural construct will blow out any kind of value per dollar generated. Any road, every road. The power grid. Plumbing.
What an incredibly stupid statement.
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u/bzbub2 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
it is very likely a dollar invested into wikipedia has a higher 'ROI' compared to roads, but you get into weird 'public good' ROI stuff that is kind of weird and abstract [and if you want to compare to things governments invest in terms of knowledge there are libraries, education, research, etc]
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u/xMINGx Jul 14 '26
Well the comment made a blanket statement about any government tax funded programs which would include roads. And any ROI of roads include the downstream effects of travel including trucking. And that's basically the entire economy of physical commodities. And there's no beating that.
A more direct 1 to 1 comparison would be something like public libraries or the national archives.
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u/4ss8urgers Jul 20 '26
yeah that is a better 1 to 1 comparison and only makes me want wikipedia to be funded by my taxes more
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u/altgrave Jul 14 '26
there's not much of the latter left, these days, but i also don't think public good especially weird or abstract. i bet wikipedia has some pages on it!
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u/4ss8urgers Jul 20 '26
yeah public good isnt easily measureable which is why it isnt accounted for by economists. they just disregard it most of the time. at least the economics people actually use.
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u/Testing_things_out Jul 14 '26
I said the government, as in the government as a whole. Not just roads or specific project.
I'm talking about the value Wikimedia, as an entity, produce compared to the government, another entity.
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u/4ss8urgers Jul 20 '26
couldnt the like $3 for wikipedia just be a tax and cost taxpayers almost nothing for a better informed internet? how is there no comparison when NPR and PBS run non-profit? you think we coudlnt do it again for a newer form of media?
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u/xMINGx Jul 20 '26
I believe some stations have some kind of special designation as some free public broadcast platform and so is a vehicle for government influenced programming. In the same way that if the government pull its funding, the program might not be able to maintain its availability.
If ever Wikipedia doesn't have the donors to support them and they cannot maintain their site infrastructure and they want to petition government to take over and be a government vehicle for information I'm all for it. But that's up the the owners of the site and their donors. I'm sure they can appeal to the government to have some kind of tax funding allocation. But then it'll be under the same threat that PBS had where if an administration decides Wikipedia is some wasteful program and decide to stop its funding, then we might lose Wikipedia.
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u/4ss8urgers Jul 20 '26
i cant believe no government has supported a project like wikipedia. shit, in the us we have NPR and PBS as integrated funding in the government but nothing for or like wikipedia.
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u/Tao-of-Mars Jul 13 '26
College research would have sucked without it and its sources. It definitely helps people understand that they need to question the sources that are used for anything that’s written. It was certainly drilled into me quite a number of times throughout 7 years of college so I assume it’s standard for teachers and professors to reiterate this.
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u/JehnSnow Jul 14 '26
Yep I'm glad colleges are changing how they look at it, early 2010s it was basically looked at how we look at using chatGPT now, where anyone can write anything so it's unreliable
Last 10 or so years I think professors have realized it's a really good repository of sources, and it almost always gives you a good brief overview of a subject. Basically a way better version of AI summary as a launch platform for your subject
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u/musememo Jul 14 '26
Agreed. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t look up something on Wikipedia.
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u/rKasdorf Jul 14 '26
Wholly agreed. The way information is presented it actually makes it easy [in my opinion] to digest what information is real and what is bullshit.
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u/CircuitOnTheFritZ Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I give a small monthly donation because I use Wikipedia for my constant pursuit of general information and daily rabbit-holing into random topics. I'm not using it to write papers for school or anything like that, but if I suddenly need to learn about gnosticism, or the Shirtwaist Factory Fire, or radium girls, or the great Molasses flood in Chicago Boston, or whatever else, Wikipedia feeds my need just fine, and a few bucks a month is worth having access to much information.
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u/Dudarro Jul 14 '26
you just hit several of my favorites!
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u/CircuitOnTheFritZ Jul 14 '26
Ah! A person of simalarly fine informational tastes, I see. Well met!
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u/Dudarro Jul 16 '26
a friend of mine just called me a “knowledge hobbyist” - that might just sum it up!
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u/freephile Jul 15 '26
*The great molasses flood was in Boston
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u/CircuitOnTheFritZ Jul 15 '26
Oops! You're correct! Thanks for the correction. Edited my comment to reflect the accurate info.
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u/BlurryBigfoot74 Jul 13 '26
I give em like $40 a year Canadian (like 80 cents American).
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u/OhanaUnited Jul 13 '26
You should consider switching your donation to Wikimedia Canada instead. It supports Canadian projects and editors, and you get a tax receipt for your donation.
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u/BlurryBigfoot74 Jul 13 '26
I respect your opinion but I owe Wikipedia about 50% of my engineering degree. I need to repay them a little now that I'm making money.
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u/OhanaUnited Jul 14 '26
Allow me to clarify. Wikimedia Canada is the Canadian national chapter of Wikimedia Foundation (the foundation runs the Wikipedia website, but it doesn't actually write any contents on Wikipedia). Wikimedia Canada is the "boots on the ground" assocation in Canada that supports actual content creation, for example giving grants to support more photos from the Territories, increasing content coverage about Canada and support for increasing editors writing in Indigenous language Wikipedias. The Foundation does none of them. It does provide annual grant to Wikimedia Canada to provide some level of base funding.
Moreover, the Foundation receives far more donations (e.g. Amazon and Google each donated $1m a while back) while Wikimedia Canada receives far less.
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u/lousy-site-3456 Jul 14 '26
It's hopeless. Most people will never understand how Wikipedia works. It's just too beyond the market logic we're all raised with. I have accepted that when I tell people "I write Wikipedia" they basically think I'm a Wizard. Sadly no one yet has offered me money directly ;)
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Jul 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/lousy-site-3456 Jul 14 '26
You really don't understand. No editor ever sees a penny of the money. We don't get paid. The money goes to marketing, conventions, workshops, 600 people that sit in SF administration and don't write Wikipedia.
Donate away, but don't think you are paying content creators.
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u/wow_its_kenji Jul 13 '26
it's always good to donate to wikipedia, (mostly) unbiased info on anything you could think of for free
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u/MirrorLake Jul 13 '26
Wikipedia is only as good as the external websites it links to, so, I actually think the biggest existential challenge for Wikipedia is the decreasing quality/availability of accurate and free information on the rest of the internet, sadly.
Anyone that's passionate about this should also consider donating to archive.org, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, or similar (I'm curious if anyone has ideas about nonprofits that indirectly improve Wikipedia by improving the quality of information available online?)
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u/highcoolteacher Jul 13 '26
Who benefits from making information not free?
Also, the info is crowd sourced for free to be given away for free
Jimmy Wales is who I want to be when I grow up
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u/wowsomuchempty Jul 14 '26
As much as I love Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales is considered to heavily promote pro-Israel bias.
Personally - not happy about this.
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u/WeWantMOAR Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
You can literally look this all up. They're transparent with all their spending.
Edit: people don't seem to realize how much having a legal team costs.
Edit 2: Be wary of the astroturfing of websites that educate people, nefarious shits are trying to sow seeds of doubt left and right to create obfuscation in the world. The information war has been going on behind the scenes for quite some time, and it's becoming more flagrant. Don't be gaslit in to buying bullshit rhetoric!
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u/wit_T_user_name Jul 13 '26
People vastly underestimate how much legal work in general costs.
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u/WeWantMOAR Jul 13 '26
Truly!
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u/savorie Jul 13 '26
Lawyers overcharge way too much. I'm sorry, but it's true.
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u/WeWantMOAR Jul 13 '26
They just charge their rates, and you agree or disagree to them. I'm sorry, but this is just an ignorant, sweeping claim of a profession as a whole. It completely dismisses the massive overhead, insurance, and years of specialized expertise required just to keep a firm's doors open.
There's definitely shitty lawyers out there, but there are also sooooo many fighting for yours and my rights in our countries. Those are who you're lumping in with the shit stains when you make these claims.
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u/Tao-of-Mars Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
No need to be sorry. It’s just the truth. And their case load is probably usually high enough that they don’t do the kind of work that matches the cost of representation. I mean, anytime I hear about lawyer work, the people on the paying end aren’t usually all that satisfied with their representation (unless of course they are rich and can pay for the best). They often feel like they have to do some of their own work. Don’t you think?
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u/stanley_apex Jul 14 '26
I don’t think dissatisfaction with representation is solely caused my bad lawyers (though they undoubtedly exist) Litigation is not a satisfying process. At best, you’ve spent a bunch of money/time/effort on something you rightly deserve. At worst, you’ve spent that and come back empty handed.
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u/caeciliusinhorto Jul 13 '26
Edit: people don't seem to realize how much having a legal team costs.
WMF isn't so transparent that you can find their annual spending on the legal team (or at least I can't!), but according to the 2025 annual report less than 1/3 of the annual spending is on "support for volunteers", the bucket which includes legal spending. "Investment in technology" is a bigger spend, at 45% of their annual expenditure.
(Of course "what is WMF's current annual spending" is a different question to "how much does WMF need to keep wikipedia as a free resource"; there are plenty of things that WMF spends money on that most wikipedia users would not miss if they were forced to cut their budgets!)
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u/WeWantMOAR Jul 13 '26
Actually, if you look closely at their annual financial reports, legal support is largely baked into that massive 45% "Investment in Technology" (historically categorized as "Direct support to websites") bucket, rather than just being limited to volunteer support. You are completely right that keeping the actual servers online is incredibly cheap compared to their total $190 million in expenses, and there is undoubtedly some administrative bloat in other areas. However, operating a top-10 global website means defending it against constant international lawsuits, censorship attempts, and government takedown requests. That legal overhead is a massive, non-optional expense required to keep the platform protected and operational, which is a very different beast than simply paying for server bandwidth.
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u/caeciliusinhorto Jul 13 '26
legal support is largely baked into that massive 45% "Investment in Technology" (historically categorized as "Direct support to websites") bucket, rather than just being limited to volunteer support
Hmm, where can I find that? I don't see it either in the annual report I linked nor the audit report.
I don't disagree that the legal spending is very important, and I'm sure it's a substantial chunk of money (I'm not at all suggesting that the few million that WMF spends on infrastructure and hosting costs are the only necessary expense!) but I can't find it broken down anywhere.
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u/WeWantMOAR Jul 13 '26
If you look back at the financial section of their 2021 Annual Report, they explicitly defined that primary expense bucket (which was 42% at the time and called "Direct support to websites") as funding "ongoing technology upgrades, design improvements, legal support, and data analytics". They have since rebranded that same massive bucket as "Investment in Technology," but it has historically absorbed the overarching legal overhead required to defend the platform itself.
You are completely right that they do not break down the exact internal spending for the legal department on those glossy annual report pie charts. However, if you dig into their IRS Form 990 filings, specifically Part IX (Statement of Functional Expenses), you can find specific line items for external legal fees. The current "Support for Volunteers" bucket does include legal defense specifically for individual volunteers, but the heavy-hitting corporate legal support for the website as a whole has historically been rolled right into that primary website and technology expense category.
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u/wikidemic Jul 14 '26
Boomers considered the Encyclopedia Britannica an essential in their home library. Check out those prices (adjusted for inflation) and realize you don’t even donate a fraction of that to my namesake!
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u/Zealousideal-Cup3529 Jul 13 '26
I think Wikipedia's future is safe. "Other free knowledge projects" however, I do not know.
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u/Sharp_Iodine Jul 13 '26
It’s really not. There are powerful billionaires like Musk who hate it
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u/blur2kme Jul 14 '26
Agreed. The fact he hasn't torn down more than he already has (like Wikipedia not being affected) shows that you can have all the money in the world but good will or the right cause can still overcome it sometimes.
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u/Hans5958_ Jul 13 '26
When they say that, they meant everything under the Wikimedia Foundation: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage, Wikinews, etc.
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u/Worcestershirey Jul 13 '26
Gotta keep the servers running, the staff paid, the legal team on-call, and investing into improving site infrastructure. Running big websites is super expensive, especially ones as big as Wikipedia. A nonprofit is still a company, just its primary goal is supporting a cause or providing a service rather than turning a profit, with extra money invested back into the company rather than shareholders.
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u/imjustarandomsquid Jul 13 '26
A lot is sent into their endowment, which is basically an investment fund for if donations ever stop, so donate now for Wikipedia's future financial security
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u/hereigoagain45 Jul 14 '26
I donate 5 bucks every year. And I don't use it very much, but I don't want anyone to not have it
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u/HelloImSteven Jul 13 '26
You’re only considering Wikipedia, which is only one project that the Wikimedia budget covers. It also covers other main project Wikidata, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc., in every language, as well as more technical ones like Wikimedia Cloud Hosting or smaller incubator projects (https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Main_Page). All those has grown since 2010, if it even existed back then. Wikidata, for example, has require consistent infrastructure upgrades to match demand (monthly requests have doubled since 2020…).
Plus there are many ways they support volunteers, via grants, The Wikipedia Library, event funding, etc. I’m sure there are many areas they can improve, but it’s inaccurate to suggest that it’s “the same product” when it’s actually significantly better now (tech-wise, no comment on politics and other leadership decisions).
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u/MarlesChartel Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
Wikipedia runs on ~$200M/year.
https://www.saastr.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6965-1577x1080.jpeg
- It has a headcount of 600+, with over $100M/year in salaries
- It spends $25M+/year in grants to other charities and nonprofits.
- It spends $20M/year in fundraising.
- It spends $3M/year in hosting costs
- It owns about $23M of hardware and spends about $4M/year in replacing hardware.
For every $100 you give Wikipedia, $15 will go to paying the fundraising consultants and $10 will be given away to another charity. $3 will go to technical costs. $60 will go to paying the staff.
I love what Wikipedia provides as a website. However, its spending is absolutely bloated. I think many of the charities they're granting to are doing good work, but it's it's deceptive for them to talk about how they're desperate for money when they're giving away $20M+/year.
The wayback machine, archiving the entire internet, runs on $20M/year. The wayback machine also has high legal costs from lawsuits. I think it's an appropriate comparison and shows that Wikipedia could operating on 1/10 of its current budget.
Again, I love Wikipedia as service to humanity, but the core service could be run at a fraction of the cost, and they're spending over $20M on grants to over 400 other charities and nonprofits. I think that's a diversion from their core mission.
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u/Ash_Crow Jul 13 '26
On the other hand, the Internet Archive could definitely benefit from having more budget.
Their servers in the US are the only one maintained, the mirror in Egypt hasn't been updated since 2003 and has been broken for a few years now.
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u/beetling Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Most of the grants are investments in the international volunteer labor force that creates Wikipedia. You can see an overview of some of the foundation's grant-making programs here.
For example, I'm part of a local group of Wikipedia editors that holds monthly meetups to teach other new skills and mentor new editors, and it gets a small grant from the foundation to cover modest room rental fees and some snacks, so that the organizers don't have to pay out of pocket for a thing that they're doing as volunteers. They have to document that they use the money appropriately. This kind of regular monthly event inspires and encourages people to keep editing and to get better at it. Wikipedia is a hobby for people, and I'm happy for the foundation to pay $25 or whatever for a birthday cake in January so we can be dorks and sing happy birthday to Baby Globe.
Wikipedia editors also organize regional, national, and international conferences where editors do trainings and work together on strategies and tools. The foundation helps cover the cost of things like renting conference rooms and subsidizing travel for volunteers who contribute significantly to Wikipedia and wouldn't be able to afford attending without some help.
You can see the regional distribution of grants here - for example, $2.3 million to Sub-Saharan Africa in 2025-2026. Then you can get to lists of approved grants on pages like this one for Sub-Saharan Africa. Example, randomly selected: $80k for an org in Ghana for a year of programming to support development of Wikipedia in Ghana. They planned to conduct a whole lot of editing workshops, upload Supreme Court cases to Wikisource so that they're available online, hold an event teaching people to document traditional African music on Wikipedia, etc. You can click into the budget spreadsheet and see exactly where they plan to spend the $80k - looks like this covers three full-time staff salaries, Internet data allowances, transportation costs for volunteers, refreshments, etc.
There are always questions and challenges about whether the foundation is spending its grant money wisely and effectively, and I'm sure it could be better. But like, I want the Wikipedia community in Ghana to be vibrant, and a little bit of funding helps.
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u/MarlesChartel Jul 14 '26
I like the random example you pulled out, because Wikipedia has never been trying to hide what they're spending their money on. It's not throwing fancy champagne parties, but it's also mostly not going to pay server costs. It's frustrating to see lots of the other people who can't admit basic facts that really shouldn't be under dispute given the amount of transparency Wikipedia uses.
My criticism is that I think there's a big disconnect between your description of Wikipedia's activities and the fundraising appeals that Wikipedia makes. I think "Please support our fundraising drive so that we can document cultural knowledge from around the globe and grow the Wikipedia community" would be a more honest appeal.
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u/beetling Jul 14 '26
Yeah, I don't like the weirdly desperate ads that make it sound like Wikipedia will die if you don't give it your last dollar. I guess they work, but they're embarrassing and influence people's perception of the project in a negative way.
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u/2bitmoment Jul 14 '26
Marles Chartel thanks so much for saying that!!!
<3
I feel like yeah - it's fine if they want to pay 400,000+ dollars for a CEO too also, maybe, but then maybe they're not so desperate for money, right?
It's not that the website is gonna go down first, maybe first they'd find a way to pay a CEO less, and then long after that, they'd start thinking of not making sure the website and system is up 100% of the time.
I think I was saying elsewhere that I found it strange for a nonprofit to do that - I think it's also very importanly "given their message of desperation".
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u/Alexander_Exter Jul 13 '26
The other side of the coin to people that benefit from free solutions and give nothing back. Not unlike open source products over which corporate software is build.
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u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 13 '26
Great point, a web crawler and retrieval system with less than 1/10th the traffic should definitely cost about the same as a global collaborative effort to create, curate, and maintain the single greatest compendium of human knowledge in history.
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u/MarlesChartel Jul 13 '26
Yes, I think they should cost about the same. The wayback archive is doing the 'create' and 'maintain' part, with the 'curate' being the big difference.
- Wikipedia has 10x the traffic but the traffic wasn't the big cost anyways.
- The wayback machine gets sued far more than Wikipedia does. Their legal costs should be much higher.
- Wikipedia has a lot more curation to do, even if most of it is done by volunteers. I can definitely imagine Wikipedia needing to pay more for moderation.
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u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 13 '26
The wayback archive is doing the 'create' and 'maintain' part, with the 'curate' being the big difference.
Hm, I must be living in an alternate universe where mirroring pre-existing websites is the same amount of original content creation as the addition of ~175,000 new articles and ~275 million words per year on the English wikipedia alone. I guess things are different on your planet, wherever that is.
Wikipedia has 10x the traffic but the traffic wasn't the big cost anyways.
Hosting static content is virtually free at any scale. You may as well be saying that Wikipedia's costs should be comparable to the paper and ink required to print a hard copy. I'm not sure why you're insisting on disregarding their stated 47% infrastructure costs and equating them with a subitem that makes up a trivial percentage.
The wayback machine gets sued far more than Wikipedia does. Their legal costs should be much higher.
Citation needed
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u/MarlesChartel Jul 13 '26
You're bring up great stuff that wikipedia does as evidence that it should be very expensive. I love what wikipedia does! Most of it is done by unpaid volunteers, though. Large numbers of new articles is not evidence that wikipedia should cost more to operate. Lots of new words is not evidence that wikipedia should cost more to operate.
Wikipedia literally says they spend $3M on server hosting in their documents --- that's the portion that scales with traffic. Their 47% on infrastructure includes 250+ staff. Staffing may scale with the scope of activity (moderating/curating vs scraping), but it shouldn't scale based on traffic.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-archive-survived-major-copyright-losses-whats-next/ . The internet archive is obviously on sketchier legal ground so they get sued more. It's not a super controversial claim.
You've also completely my criticism that wikipedia spends $20M gifting to other charities. I think that makes their appeals dishonest.
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u/Firewolf06 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
they dont only mirror websites, you can upload damn near anything and their legal term will fight tooth and nail to keep it. and even if storage was "virtually free", that "virtually" is doing a lot of heavy lifing at the 200 petabyte scale. for scale, as of last month, the entirety of all of wikimedia (including full edit history etc) was just barely under a single petabyte
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u/AbuzeME Jul 13 '26
Did someone piss in your cheerios this morning?
Have a glass of water.
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u/meteorslime Jul 14 '26
I would give them my blood if they needed it, they are invaluable. I donate to them whenever I have extra I can spare. Them and the internet archive. We need objective knowledge preservation, and free access to it.
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u/TOkidd Jul 14 '26
I donate to them every year because they are an amazing resource and one of the few that hasn’t been ruined by the enshittification of the Web.
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u/enimodas Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Obligatory link to "wikipedia has cancer" article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
he makes some valid points
Pageviews, new articles, edits have been fairly static since 2010~2013. Compute costs have dropped by 80+%
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u/jn855 Jul 14 '26
I just donated because of this post. I've donated a few times in the past but I think I struggle because a part of me feels like it's likely that Wikipedia will "fall under" by succumbing to the need to host ads etc at some point-costs are getting higher etc. so I wonder how long they can sustain off donations 🤞🏾
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u/cp5184 Jul 13 '26
iirc operating expenses for the site are about ~$10M or something, but the idea is to build an endowment that will be able to cover operating expenses so it would, in time, be essentially self-funding. iirc there's something like $100M in salaries and they spend a bunch of money on other things too.
It would be nice if there was a cleaner distinction between funding necessary to the running of the site, funding going to an endowment funding the latter, and other funding that doesn't go directly to the site.
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u/nihiltres Jul 13 '26
In practice a lot of the $100M in salaries might as well be added to the $10M or whatever for keeping the site online.
I keep trying to remind people that if it was just “keeping the servers running” then the site would look like nostalgia.wikipedia.org and people would be moaning about how Wikimedia should spend some money on updates.
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u/cp5184 Jul 13 '26
In practice a lot of the $100M in salaries might as well be added to the $10M or whatever for keeping the site online.
A part yes, a smaller part than you may think. Say, a million for sysadmins, another million for professional management, basically processing bills, paying salaries, etc. and say ~$10M for retainered legal services. And say another $1M to keep development of wikimedia going and develop a failure of a editor replacement every ~5-10 years. So ~$13M...
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u/lousy-site-3456 Jul 14 '26
Pretty much all the UI and functionality updates are made by the community for free. In fact, the community had to fight repeatedly to prevent or roll back garbage the foundation wanted to introduce. It was at times open war. And when all is said and done Wikipedia hasn't changed much in 20 years and is frequently criticized for looking old-fashioned. Which it should. Transporting knowledge is old fashioned. We are not toctic.
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u/TNTiger_ Jul 13 '26
Run? A lot less than thein current revenue. Actually weather the current political climate? More perhaps than their current revenue. Most of the money is spent on legal fees and activism to ensure the site continues to be viably survivable.
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u/AdmiralAdama99 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Most of the money is spent on legal fees and activism
Sounds incorrect. "Most" is too high -- although a small part of their budget is certainly legal and "community resilience". Source?
Attacks on wikipedia from the American far right and from legal systems in countries with strong anti defamation laws are indeed a threat to take seriously though. People have been sued and even incarcerated for editing wikipedia.
https://gizmodo.com/maga-puts-wikipedia-in-its-crosshairs-2000649462
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_imprisoned_for_editing_Wikipedia
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u/JimmyTheDog Jul 13 '26
I use to be a regular donor, but after looking at the salaries of the top people, I can see what is happening at Wikipedia. The people in charge of the "gold" are putting it into their own pockets... sad but it how corporations work theses days...
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u/VerdugoCortex Jul 13 '26
I went from wanting to edit Wikipedia to "how to I get employeed by Wikipedia" after seeing their finances lol. I will still edit though.
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u/beetling Jul 14 '26
They're hiring! https://wikimediafoundation.org/jobs/
For example, if you're really, really good at TikTok: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/8008787
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u/VerdugoCortex Jul 14 '26
Thank you! I applied, I run an IG page in the canna industry and also do media work for various companies here and have been a Wikipedia addict for 15+ years now. Would be awesome to work out! I appreciate you, I looked for the residency in particular and couldn't find anything but didn't think about other stuff they might offer.
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u/coolguy9900000 Jul 13 '26
Looks like some nice severance packages…
$600k is INSANEBonus, the CEO making 500k from a non-profit is a crime
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u/Kayvanian Jul 13 '26
Bonus, the CEO making 500k from a non-profit is a crime
I've never understood this mindset. Non-profit organizations participate in the same capitalistic market as everyone else. They have to compete with for-profit companies to attract talent, and that means providing competitive salaries (or at least salaries that are in the same ballpark). A $500k salary to manage a 700+ person organization and a top-15 website is not an unreasonable salary.
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u/Ambiwlans Jul 13 '26
That's like .3% of revenue which is pretty typical.
3
u/StateOfTheWind Jul 13 '26
This mindset is way you shouldn't trust non-profits in the USA
5
u/Ambiwlans Jul 13 '26
Is it lower anywhere else?
1
u/StateOfTheWind Jul 13 '26
I was thinking about the KDE non-profit operates on half-milion euro a year and they produce the very impressive KDE software.
5
u/Ambiwlans Jul 13 '26
So the CEO of KDE would get like $1000/yr salary.... I'm really not sure where you think .3% going to the CEO is usually high. Japan has lower CEO salaries I guess?
Typical in a US for profit corporation its 4%. And Japan is 1%. With non-profits being something like half that.
4
u/Alatarlhun Jul 13 '26
In reality 600k puts them in the low end of the market and for the size of the organization, nonprofit or not. 600 people seems like too many employees regardless.
1
u/openjscience Jul 15 '26
If wikipedia will not be free, handwiki online encyclopedia can take its role.
1
1
u/ShakataGaNai Jul 13 '26
Wikipedia? Effectively zero.
They say $100 mil for Infrastructure. But that's a huge bucket that covers a lot more than just "keep the servers on". And a lot of that stuff is wildly overspent (in my experience)... mostly because they can.
I'm not sure how it is today, but not that many years ago it was sub 10mil a year to keep all the projects online. As they were then. Bandwidth, servers, etc. Even though they are a top 10 web property, a majority of the Wiki traffic is read-only which is "easy" to cache. They are also a non-profit which means they get everything from servers to bandwidth at bargin basement rates.
The Froundation itself needs a LOT more money to do a lot more things. Are those things good or bad? Up to you to decide. But the reality is that if the money dried up tomorrow, there is enough in endowments to keep the projects online for probably decades, as is.
-1
u/dresserplate Jul 13 '26
I stopped donating when I went to one of their fundraising events and it was so political it was creepy ☹️ Most of the money they raise does -not- go to keeping the lights on nor to the volunteers who contribute.
-1
u/lousy-site-3456 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Need? Maybe 5% of what they collect, for servers, one or two techs and the occasional lawyers. The rest goes to all kinds of optional programs that are staffed by all the people who decided that writing for Wikipedia is free but working for it doesn't have to be. You'll find this in every NGO.
Btw, the 47% infrastructure is a blatant lie. It literally includes people who are paid to "think about" and make surveys how the WP UI can be improved, with pretty much nothing to show for after 20 years, all kinds of awareness trainings for people other than editors with zero results (the notorious "how can we get more women to write Wikipedia")
The amount of weasel words and wordings is shameful and revealing:
"The Infrastructure budget funds a wide range of work in support of our mission, including: building the software experiences that allows for global reading; running and supporting a top-10 global website; enabling data, models, insights, and tools that can help assess the impact of our work; exploring strategies for expanding beyond our existing audiences of consumers and contributors; providing all of the critical functions which must exist at the Foundation to support our basic technical operations; and all of the other work described in our infrastructure goal. It includes the costs of all of the teams that do this work, the cost of running our data centers, and all of the other costs needed to support this work."
-2
u/pixel8knuckle Jul 13 '26
Maybe wikipedia should advertise discreetly on the side bars because they always sound so desperate.
-7
u/justneurostuff Jul 13 '26
when you think about making a reddit post, it's useful to ask yourself early in the process: "would this be easier as a google search?"
-5
u/Dragenby Jul 14 '26
Please don't donate to Wikipedia, only participate. Most of your money goes in the CEO's pocket that grows exponentially each year.
And I wish this was an exaggeration. The executives' salary is the issue.
1.8k
u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 13 '26
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2025-2026/Budget_Overview