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Comment by m101 | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia spends 1% of its budget on hosting fees. It can spend a bit more given the rest of their corruptions.

Steady on cowboy. They might mislead the public in their needs and spends, but to jump from that to "corruption" is a bit too fast and loose.

From their financial statement 2024 you can learn that they probably spend about $6,825,794 on site operation (excl. salaries etc.). This includes $3,116,445 for Internet hosting and an estimated $3,709,349 on Server infrastructure (est. as 85% of equipment).

Now as of June 30, 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation's net assets totaled approximately $271.6 million, and the Wikimedia Endowment, established to support the long-term sustainability of Wikimedia projects, reported net assets of approximately $144.3 million as of the same date, so combined approximately $415.9 million.

So yes, annual sites operation is about 1,64% of their total assets, and they can operate all the wikimedia sites till the end of time without raising a single dime in donations ever again.

Sure they're not going to advertise this fact when doing another donation drive as that would likely make the donators starting to ask pertinent questions about the exact purpose of their donations, but that is just marketing, not "corruption".

You say it’s not corruption but it’s still shady as hell.

I think it’s reasonable to say any shady stuff is a form of corruption

Shady as hell, sure. Misleading? At least misdirecting. But corruption? No.

If you have an olive green shirt and a grass green shirt, you can call both of them green, but calling the olive one grass green is a mistake.

I think you need to think carefully as to what corruption means. I would go so far as to say man's inability to recognise things as corrupt is a corruption of man.

That was always my feeling - however big Wikipedia is, however many requests it handles, it is not big enough to warrant burning so many millions every year. Alas, I never studied the subject, as overall I feel Wikipedia is good force in the Universe.

So perhaps price comes with the greatness?

> the rest of their corruptions

the "corruption" accusations are mostly BS and the usual ideological differences

I'll take Wikipedia, with all its warts, over $BigTech and $VC-driven (==Ad-driven) companies/orgs any day, and it's not even close.

You don't need a VC if your sitting on $415,9 Million.

They didn't start with $415M, and they didn't take VC money to get there either -- that's the point.

Yes, they didn't take wealthy person VC money, but rather begged for $2 donations from people who actually need the money.

BTW, I do not know why you are getting downvoted, this is a real concern that someone needs to tackle one day.

It’s getting downvoted because the parent comment aligns with what Elon said about Wikipedia; so it’s a knee jerk reaction. Though the sentiment is factual.

Previous discussion: (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32840097

> sentiment is factual

the sentiment might exist, but that doesn't mean it's based on facts

that discussion you linked to can be broken down into:

- people upset because they thought Wikipedia was almost bankrupt and it turns out its not (though Wikipedia never claimed to be in its fund-raising)

- people upset because they see too many requests for donations

- people upset because Wikimedia execs are getting "high" salaries (though they are much _much_ lower than at private co's)

- people upset because they think Wikipedia spreads "left-wing ideologies"

None of this has anything to do with "corruption".

I think there are a lot of blinkered folks who don't see the corruption with Wikipedia. What wiki are experiencing with bots is probably ubiquitous with every website yet the violins come out for them, one of the most corrupt institutions around.

Real concern or not, this is not related to the discussion at hand, which is AI crawlers hammering Wikipedia, which is related to AI crawlers hammering everything these days. Here's the concern at hand.

I would like to read on Wikipedia corruption with quality sources (in a separate HN post, which would probably be successful), but that's not quite on-topic here. Not only it's off-topic and borderline whataboutism, it's also not sourced, so the comment doesn't actually help someone who isn't in the knows. Thus, as is, it's not much interesting and kinda useless.

These reasons are probably why it has been downvoted: off topic, not helping, not well researched.

Fair enough!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com