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Comment by stinkytaco | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what you mean by "the mission hasn't grown". In the last 10 years Wikipedia has become perhaps the go-to resource for ready reference, information on breaking news, Google search results on a given subject, etc. They've grown quite a bit in that time. But the mission hasn't changed? What direction would you see them take?

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Those have all been true for more than a decade, since Wales was bragging on TED that they only had one employee and everything was volunteer driven. The scale of the operation has grown, with some necessity, but the mission is the same and doesn't require exponential growth in dollars.

Wikimedia had expanded in that time, adding projects like wikibooks, and similar properties. It's also become a target for parties that want to manipulate it, but has been surprisingly resilient to that.

I'm not sure if that all requires this level of growth, but its use and importance have grown exponentially. I can't think of many places that deserve those funds more, really.

I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer".

Re: "It's also become a target for parties that want to manipulate it, but has been surprisingly resilient to that" not a penny of the budget deals with parties that want to manipulate Wikipedia. That is dealt with by unpaid volunteers like me. --~~~~

Which of those things doesn’t fall under the umbrella of making the sum of all human knowledge accessible to anyone for free?

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