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Comment by Improvotter | Hacker News Reader

I remember seeing an article here these past few weeks talking about the business model of Wikipedia and how it's supposedly inherently flawed. Wikipedia doesn't bring in a lot of cash, but it rather sets a sad tone for itself how unfortunate that may seem.

Personally I'd be more interested in seeing StackOverflow branch out. What have they done these past few years? It seems like StackOverflow has remained stagnant, yet they have so much potential.

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I'm not sure where you got the idea that Wikipedia doesn't bring in much. Their annual plan from last year [1] says that they expected to raise over $60M during the year. Unless anything's changed recently, they also try to keep over a year's worth of operating expenses in reserve, which means they're likely also sitting on almost $100M.

The complaints I see are usually related more to thinking that they really shouldn't need to spend so much (the FY17-18 plan for expenses is $76.8M [2]), and that their fundraising drives always make it seem like they're on the brink of death when they actually have a huge amount of money in the bank.

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia...

Wikipedia's primary purpose is not to bring in cash, it's a non-profit, so the money is going towards mission-related activities and supporting the site. Generally, the current level is enough to support the site (check also [1] which is meant to ensure at least basic level of support more or less forever). If donations dry up (which they don't seem to be) the activities may be reduced, but "bringing in a lot of cash" by itself is not really the purpose, the cash is the means to get things done. It's a bit different for for-profit establishments when usually getting profit on the investment is at least one of the goals of the whole deal.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment

They've done a lot, but apparently it hasn't been particularly successful. Their new "Documentation" platform didn't really ever gain traction: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...

I don't think I ever saw a Documentation page in a search result. Instead, I saw (and see) dozens of copies of the same SO Q&A content spread across multiple sites. I wonder if they would have had better success if they adjusted their SEO strategies and went after the rehosting sites (more?) aggressively.

Google was never pointed at Documentation, so you wouldn't find it there. There were constant concerns within the meta SO community about the quality of the content and how embarrassing it would be (not a small fraction of it was worse than W3Schools of old - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334638/ ). It could have been rather damaging to the SO brand to have such poor material shown as examples of what is desired.

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