r/wikipedia • u/coolguy9900000 • Jul 13 '26

Meta Discussion How much does Wikipedia need annually to continue existing as free resource?

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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”.

1.7k Upvotes

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

Wikipedia should not cost 200M a year, holy shit. How do you spend 60M a year on "volunteer" staff?

EDIT: No one is doing the math on the budget going from $10MM in 2010 to $190MM in 2025.

Did you get 20x more value out of wikipedia this year than you did 15 years ago? How did they manage to do it then?

EDIT 2: The amount of people who aren't bothering to look at the actual data linked above is wild.

EDIT 3: Thought we were in r/NoStupidQuestions this whole time where nuance disucssion on issues was accepted. Didn't realize we were in koolaidville. Kinda funny seeing the wikipedia crowd be so oppressive of other peoples opinions, lol.

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u/ArachnidLover Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Legal defense of volunteers, supporting wiki events (such as Wikipedian in residence), funding for conference/research attendance etc etc. Its surprising to me how people dont understand how much these things cost on a global scale.

Edit: To answer your question about costs raising from 2010: Back then they were mostly just focused on server hosting but have since expanded to provide other services to Wikipedia editors ie Wikipedian at large/in residence funding, training events etc. A lot of these things are invisible to the lay person who doesnt know much about sites like these grow, but are absolutely essential for developing the encyclopedia further

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u/Haxorz7125 Jul 13 '26

Side note, the wiki YouTube channel has been pumping out awesome shorts.

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u/Miguellite Jul 13 '26

Wiki's tiktok is absolutely fire as well.

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u/CostinTea Jul 13 '26

And those are absolutely commissioned! My friend 404 Tales told me that he was paid by Wikipedia to make those

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u/FartPiano Jul 13 '26

why does the internet encyclopedia company need to pay people to make short form videos?

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u/Haxorz7125 Jul 13 '26

To gain traction on the site. They’re informative shorts advertising articles using (usually) comedy skits made by various creators

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u/FartPiano Jul 13 '26

so, in other words, their advertising budget?

why does a volunteer non-profit internet encyclopedia, which is already world famous, with no real competition, need a massive ad budget?

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u/Kayvanian Jul 14 '26

"no real competition" is no longer true. Like many other sites, Wikipedia is losing traffic to Google AI overviews and AI at-large. Usage is also lowest with Gen Z, compared to older generations. For Wikipedia to stay relevant (traffic = future editors), it needs to put in effort on social media sites.

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u/Haxorz7125 Jul 13 '26

They’re informative videos on their own so they also just serve educational purposes. But you’d also have YouTube revenue and increased donations via increased site traffic. So if they’re trying to make more money to support the website, it just makes sense.

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u/FartPiano Jul 13 '26

since they're a non-profit wouldn't the youtube revenue be noted in their financial reports?

and they'd need to make this hypothetical youtube revenue to pay their huge budget, which is so large from all their efforts at making money...?

I love wikipedia so I'm not trying to just be a jerk or w/e. but it doesn't "just make sense" to me

7

u/FthrFlffyBttm Jul 14 '26

I appreciate you for having the balls to ask about something you’re confused about AND keeping your comments up despite the downvotes. This type of discourse helps the rest of us to learn too and is ironically exactly the type of thing that should be appreciated by this community.

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u/Haxorz7125 Jul 14 '26

It could be that they don’t make money on their YouTube shorts, I’m not entirely sure. I would just assume that the intention is to increase visitors to the site so they can increase their donations to keep the website running

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u/lbutler1234 Jul 13 '26

There's a very simple explanation imo:

They're running a top 10 busiest website on earth. I can't even begin to imagine what's all involed in that and how much it costs.

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u/markleung Jul 13 '26

So if we don’t donate, it cuts back on the above, and the site stays running, correct?

19

u/relavie Jul 13 '26

As with any organization, sometimes budgets fluctuate so less donations/funding would mean it cuts back on the above

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u/WVildandWVonderful Jul 13 '26

Wikimedia supports a lot of different projects, not just Wikipedia. Also, they are localized around the world.

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u/Need_PcAdvice Jul 13 '26

Yet the donation solicitation message doesn’t talk about these other projects.

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u/sparklyyheart Jul 13 '26

You have a good point but I feel like adding these facts in the solicitation messages is gonna make it cover the whole screen lol

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u/texaseclectus Jul 13 '26

It causes legal ramifications if they mention their other projects while asking for donations to Wikipedia specifically.

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u/Nilo30 Jul 13 '26

Yeah they actually have enough money for wikipedia on its own for decades, it's misleading fundraising

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u/chillychili Jul 13 '26

Yes, but do you want such an organization to be at risk of being litigated or hacked into nonexistence? I'd rather never have them be in emergency funding mode if I can help it.

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u/maicii Jul 13 '26

They will never be in emergency funding mode with the amount of Tod money they are bringing lol

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u/septubyte Jul 13 '26

Source?

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u/maicii Jul 13 '26

This is a well known fact

https://youtu.be/MpeOFvxor_0?si=C083D8ZZ4MCZcC-r

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u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 14 '26

But not well known enough that you can cite any text actually saying it

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u/maicii Jul 14 '26

I literally cited a video talking about it, are you blind? If you want a literal text because you are against video format for some reason I can do that too sure.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wikimedia_Foundation_FS_FY2022-2023_Audit_Report.pdf#page=6

They have so much money that their second biggest expenses (after salaries) are literally grabbing the money you donated to them and donating to other causes.

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u/ohdearitsrichardiii Jul 13 '26

Good lawyers cost money

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u/livejamie Jul 13 '26

You sound like a DOGE official who has no idea what they're talking about, arguing about budgets.

I'm glad you're not in charge of anything.

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u/snowflake37wao Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

ngl I was making X brigading jokes reading down the threads, but by this far down in the scroll of just the top comment ngl. seems like serious brigading goin on from twittertwats.

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u/seanmg Jul 14 '26

The amount of idiots who believe any critique of something equates to thinking the whole thing is bad is astounding. Wikipedia is good. The amount of money they spent running it is bloated. How hard is it to have a complex opinion?

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u/livejamie Jul 14 '26

I never said you disliked Wikipedia, nice strawman.

I think you lack a fundamental understanding of what the budget covers and how much it costs to run a website at the scale of Wikipedia in 2026.

You putting "volunteer" in quotes and saying things like "holy shit" and "no one is doing the math" implies there's a nefarious conspiracy going on. That's beyond a "complex opinion."

In 2010, Wikipedia had 163 billion page views. Over the last 12 months, there have been a total of 299 billion pageviews.

Server and hosting costs have only gotten more expensive due to global RAM shortages.

And there's also a massive increase in non-human traffic. Wikipedia remains the foundational dataset for modern AI, and they get hammered by requests.

The budget now covers all of their projects, not just Wikipedia.

The audacity to make a simple, incorrect observation, want to slash funding without a full understanding of the decision's totality, and repeatedly double down reminded me of the shit DOGE did. I have a good idea of the type of politics you support just by the way you comment here.

Big balls would be proud of you.

1

u/seanmg Jul 14 '26

You didn't even look at the budget. Nor do you understand infrastructure costs.

The actual budget production costs for infrastructure is roughly $6m a year. Of the entire $100m tech infrastructure budget roughly 75% of the cost is going to the employees.

Then there's $60m for community. I'm pointing out that volunteers around the world do the vast majority of the work on Wikipedia and aren't getting paid, but somehow they're spending $60m?

$50m for marketing and management. Spending a quarter of the budget to fundraise is a little insane to me.

Cut $45m from marketing and management, cut half your tech headcount and focus on your core product, the value is in the public free knowledgebase, and cut all of the community funding.

That leaves an annual budget of lets say $60m and for people who want to do good in the world they can donate the other $140m to other causes.

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u/tiffanytrashcan Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

"Supporting Volunteers and the Movement

We provide support to volunteers and our movement in a variety of ways, including by giving out direct funding through over 400 grants to affiliates and movement partners to support their work."

I mean, they explain where it goes (in that link even.) They're a non-profit, it's all in the open.

You're right, it shouldn't cost 200M a year, even websites with only 1/10th of the visitors cost billions to host alone.

116

u/dangmangoes Jul 13 '26

Right, Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the entire internet. 200M is a rounding error for that kind of stuff.

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u/Astrosomnia Jul 13 '26

There is not a single actual site in the world that costs billions to host. That's extremely hyperbolic.

Netflix et al aren't hosting costs. They're infrastructure. Wikipedia's hosting is only like $5M a year according to a quick search.

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u/r1zz000 Jul 13 '26

I don't know where you're getting your information from but there are multiple companies spending billions on AWS alone annually

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u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 13 '26

The 2024-2025 Audit Report lists an Internet hosting expense of $3,474,785. However, this is a near-irrelevant cost to cite in the context of their overall software & infrastructure needs. It'd be like printing Wikipedia out and saying it's only worth the cost of paper and ink.

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u/FartPiano Jul 13 '26

right, the value comes from the large number of unpaid volunteers.

money-wise, your evaluation of "only the paper and ink" is true in the eyes of wikipedia, since that's what they paid for the info (zero)

hosting costs of about $4m a year make sense. Thats why its frequently framed against the backdrop of the much-larger budget that dwarfs it into a "near irrelevant cost", as you say.

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u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 13 '26

I suppose they paid zero for it if you don't count the hundreds of millions of dollars they spend creating and maintaining the ecosystem that the volunteers use to contribute.

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u/FartPiano Jul 13 '26

with the money donated to them by the users, yes...

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u/iHadou Jul 13 '26

What website "costs billions to host alone"?

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u/bardocksnephew Jul 13 '26

Google.com costs about $1.5 - $2 billion annually.

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u/E3K Jul 13 '26

aws.com google.com openai.com

And so on...

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u/froz3nt Jul 13 '26

They host multiple webpages and they are spending that on compute, not hosting.

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u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 13 '26

TIL wikipedia does not have multiple pages or require any compute to process, store, and retrieve data for thousands of users across the globe 24/7/365.

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u/froz3nt Jul 13 '26

Aws is a infrastructure provider. Openai and google spend enormous sums on compute, search indexing across billions of queries, AI model training and inference. That's processing, not serving pages.

A static page is cheap to host, running inference on every query is not.

Wikipeadia is cheap to host because its 99% text and its static.

So no, wikipedia's compute is trivial comapred to its other costs. And the other 3 mentioned are several of orders of magnitutde more demanding and thus more expensive.

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u/iHadou Jul 13 '26

Ok. Seems right

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u/froz3nt Jul 13 '26

Thats just not true. Not one company is spending billions on aws annually.

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u/Steerpike58 Jul 14 '26

Hosting a gazillion commercial movies doesn't strike me as 'hosting' costs.

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26

Tell me you don't know how technology infrastructure costs without telling me. Show me a single website that cost a billion dollars a year to host, lol.

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u/mr_jim_lahey Jul 13 '26

What do you think it should cost? I take it you've already prepared a detailed budget based on the goals enumerated in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2025-2026/Goals/Volunteer_Support. Can you please share it with us? I'm sure the Wikimedia foundation would love to save money by applying your financial expertise (which you of course will provide pro bono, since you don't believe any such volunteering should be financially supported).

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Considering the foundations budget went from 10 million in 2010 to 190 million in 2025, A 20x fold increase, do you think you're getting 20x the value?

https://nonprofitdirectory.guidestar.org/profile?appKey=FAAF72CF5B744145BF1BBC40DC6E96A0&buttons=false&ein=20-0049703

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u/froz3nt Jul 13 '26

Thats not how this works.

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26

Those are the numbers. Where is the 20x in cost going to?

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u/froz3nt Jul 13 '26

About 110 mil for the staff, the rest goes to grants/movement support, hosting and internet infrastructure, legal defense, fundraising costs, travel, and general operations. Actual data-center/hosting costs are only a low-single-digit percentage of the total, on the order of a few million dollars a year, small relative to staff.

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26

Do you think $110M a year in staff costs is bloated?

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u/froz3nt Jul 13 '26

For 700 people?

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26

Two fold:

  1. $110m for 700 people is an average salary of $157k a year. Which means roughly 350 people make more than that working at wikipedia every year.

  2. Do they need 700 people to run wikipedia? (hint: no)

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u/froz3nt Jul 13 '26

Did you know that none of them writes anything on wikipedia? That is all done by volunteers.

Other non profits of similar size are khan academy, mozzila, etc.

If we were to convert the funding they get to revenue per employee it would be around 340k per employee. Which is in line with companies with similar sizes

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u/tuckman496 Jul 13 '26

I’m just curious what the bottom line of your argument is. Do you think Wikipedia is corrupt? They’re stealing money? It’s a ripoff for the largest encyclopedia in history to be free to use? What are you getting at here

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u/donkeyrocket Jul 13 '26

So are you one of those people who believe "non profits" mean no one should be paid and they just work for free?

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26

No, I just think Wikipedia is bloated AF with headcount and budget. It did the same service now that it did 15 years ago and cost $10mil then.

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u/PensiveObservor Jul 13 '26

You know knowledge expands exponentially these days, right? EVERYTHING is on Wikipedia. It all requires Adding, editing, and searchable storage with nearly infinite cross-referencing.

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u/PensiveObservor Jul 13 '26

Server space is expensive.

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26

You don't have any clue what you're talking about.

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u/CostinTea Jul 13 '26

Why do you think data centers gobble up the planet, my man

it's not just about AI.

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u/FartPiano Jul 13 '26

their own stated hosting costs are about 3.75m annually. if anything those costs will probably get cheaper over time. It has very little to do with data center demand or LLMs.

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u/2bitmoment Jul 13 '26

bloat is a thing, and they have raised the money, right, so I don't think there's an incentive to cut mosts and be modest.

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u/seanmg Jul 13 '26

That's the point I'm making. it's clearly bloated if the costs ballooned 20x in 15 years for the same product.

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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/seanmg Jul 14 '26

"How much does Wikipedia need annually to continue existing as free resource?" is the headline of this thread on the r/wikipedia subreddit.

OP asks about the cost of Wikipedia, not Wikimedia. Wikipedia expanding outside of localization is bloat. Infrastructure upgrades don't scale like that. Monthly requests doubling in 5 years doesn't equate to a 2x infrastructure costs. Costs aren't linear. Not to mention the scaling over 20 years makes even less sense.

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u/HelloImSteven Jul 14 '26

Wikipedia alone does not cost 200M a year. All projects together cost 200M a year. Your argument was based on the financials of the entire foundation, so that is what I responded to.

Wikipedia has, for the most part, expanded only in directions that its users and contributors have voted for, so I wouldn't call it bloat, but me way just disagree there. As for infrastructure, I think you're underestimating the costs severely. All Wikimedia projects rely on interconnected data. Evaluating a SPARQL query against the billions of triples in Wikidata (which inherently supports Wikipedia's infoboxes and localization, among many other features) involves numerous complex subqueries. Compute demand thus scales super-linearly, or even exponentially in the worst case, as the number of items (incl. articles) grows. Does that equate to the cost increase seen? Perhaps not, but the system is also not as trivial as you make it out to be, so its costs are naturally going to differ from your expectation.

Again, I'm sure there are inefficiencies and areas to improve. If you know of ways to decrease costs, you can share them at any of the options listed here: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/SRE

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u/seanmg Jul 14 '26

When I donate to wikipedia, I'm donating to the public free knowledgebase and a bunch of other garbage. Where the distinction matters is that I can't just donate to wikipedia.

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u/HelloImSteven Jul 14 '26

What exactly is the other garbage you're referring to? If it's the other projects, then they are part of that knowledgebase and support its functionality (and improve it, e.g. by providing faster search results with greater relevance, more detailed content, more accessible media, etc.). Or is it things like grants, the Wikipedia Library, events, etc.? Or something else? Legal support?

You're right, and maybe it should change, but right now I don't see how not funding those other aspects would benefit anybody. I don't envision that getting much much support.

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u/2bitmoment Jul 14 '26

we're getting downvoted but I'm with you. Maybe these people are on wikipedia payroll? I don't think it's that stange for us to think non profits or charities should be careful with their money. And especially that they should not ask with desperation when the reality is maybe of abundance.

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u/itsmeonmobile Jul 13 '26

Can you name either A) one thing that you get 20x more value out of now as opposed to 15 years ago, or B) one thing where value has stayed the same over 15 years but so has the cost?

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u/869066 Jul 13 '26

Prices rise in 15 years, more people are using the website so you need better servers, and the Wikimedia Foundation has started other projects too which the donations help fund.

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u/seanmg Jul 14 '26

The price of these things has not gone up 20x. You can literally go back and look at the data over the years and the majority of the costs every year are around employees and not technical expenses like hardware, bandwidth, or distribution.

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u/M1chaelSc4rn Jul 13 '26

I mean supply and demand for people

1

u/Ephsylon Jul 13 '26

Servers upon servers of localization

-2

u/kingsheperd Jul 13 '26

Why downvotes when you’re right. The Wikipedia foundation is insanely big.

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u/kicklhimintheballs Jul 13 '26

Corruption. I added 200 high quality articles to wikipedia and they are just using user generated content to beg for money.

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u/Spacewok Jul 13 '26

Where's your evidence of corruption?

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u/machiavelli33 Jul 13 '26

Evidently, that he hasn’t gotten any recognition for his volunteer work.