It's unbelievable that Wikipedia is free and survives on donations.
Youtube sells ads and is subsidized by one of the biggest ad companies in the world that happens to have a lot of cheap cloud storage available.
Youtube sells ads and is subsidized by one of the biggest ad companies in the world that happens to have a lot of cheap cloud storage available.
The donations go to the Wikimedia Foundation which spends the money on a bunch of other social stuff that's not related to running Wikipedia at all. So unless you want to support all those other causes, you're effectively wasting your money by donating to Wikipedia's frequent donation requests. Wikipedia isn't the storage hog that YouTube is; it doesn't cost that much to keep it afloat, and the people moderating the content (the editors) are all volunteers anyway.
However, at this point, IA needs your donations much much much more than Wikipedia does.
Wikipedia is mostly text. You can download the whole thing and fit it on a SD card.
The scale of storage and serving is not of any real comparable scale.