They are highly dependent on web traffic for revenue.
And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.
And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.
I doubt that they're getting "hugged to death" by AI scrapers.
1. I think their spending is a good thing. Charitable scholarships for kids and initiatives to have a more educated populous in general are things that I am happy to donate to.
2. As stated in the article, hosting is still a relatively simple expenditure compared to the rest of their operation. If Wikipedia really eats a huge loss, falling back to just hosting wouldn't be unrealistic, especially since the actual operations of Wikipedia are mostly volunteer run anyways. In the absolute worst case, their free data exports would lead to someone making a successor that can be moved to more or less seamlessly.
The only real argument in my eyes is that their donation campaigns can seem manipulative. I still think it's fine at the end of the day given that Wikipedia is a free service and donating at all is entirely optional.
The second biggest line item is grants at $25 million, primarily for users to travel to meet up.
Then $10 million for legal fees, $7 million for Wikipedia-hosted travel.
I think it's pretty unethical to say you have to donate to keep Wikipedia running when you're practically paying for C-suite raises and politically-aligned contributors' vacations.
Paying the travel for a bunch of highly active volunteer contributors to meet up ocassionally and hash out complex community issues pays massive dividends. It keeps the site moving forward. Its also pretty cheap when you consider how much free labour those volunteers provide.
Whenever people criticize wikimedia finances, i think they miss the forest for the trees. I actually think there is a lot to potentially crticize, but in my opinion everyone goes for the wrong things.
Also, asking out of ignorance, what things need to move forward? I thought wikipedia is a solved problem, the only work i would expect it to need is maintenance work, security patches etc.
I think criticism should be based on looking at what they were trying to accomplish by spending the money, was it a worthwhile thing to try and do and was the solution executed effectively.
Just saying they spent $X, X is a big number, it must be wasteful without considering the value that is attempting to be purchssed with that money is a bit meaningless.
> Also, asking out of ignorance, what things need to move forward? I thought wikipedia is a solved problem, the only work i would expect it to need is maintenance work, security patches etc.
I think the person who i was responding to was referring to volunteer travel not staff travel (which of course also happens but i believe would be a different budget line item). This would be mostly for people who write the articles but also for people who do moderation activity. In person meetings can help resolve intractable disputes, share best practises, figure out complex disagreements, build relationships. All the same reasons that real companies fly their staff to expensive offsites.
Software is never done, there are always going to be things that come up and things to be improved. Some of them may be worth it some not.
As an example, there are changes coming to how ip addresses are handled, especially for logged out users. Nobody is exactly saying why, but im 99% sure its GDPR compliance related. That is a big project due to some deeply held assumptions, and probably critical.
A more mid-tier example might be, last year WMF rolled out a (caching) server precense in Brazil. The goal was to reduce latency for South American users. Is that worth it? It was probably a fair bit of money. If WMF was broke it wouldn't be, but given they do have some money, it seems like a reasonable improvement to me. Reasonable minds could probably disagree of course.
And an example of stupid projects might be WMF's ill-fated attempt at making an AI summarizer. That was a pure waste of money.
I guess my point it, WMF is a pretty big entity, some of the things they do are good, some are stupid, and i think people should criticize the projects they embark on rather than the big sum of money taken out of context.
If you use AWS, the people hired to manage the servers is part of the price tag. When you own your own you have to actually hire those people.
You're also ignoring the need for infrastructure/network engineers, software engineers, fundraising engineers, product managers, community managers, managers, HR, legal, finance/accounting, fundraisers, etc.
[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...
There is probably a lot to criticize, but you need to go deeper than "salaries" are bad. You need some of those to actually run the website.
There's also the need to support the staff and volunteer developers, which includes wikimedia cloud services, git hosting, config management and orchestration, CI, community hosted tool/bot services, etc.
WMF has ~600 employees, and that's quite lean, for a service of their complexity.
Wikipedia is not getting hugged to death by AI scrapers.
The source letter shows a relatively small portion of traffic was reclassified as bot traffic.
They get a lot of page views globally. It’s a popular website. The bot traffic is not crushing their servers.
Something tells me a person is way less likely to donate if they're consuming the content through an LLM middleman
But that means I'm still using it. Especially for more reference stuff like lists of episodes, filmographies, etc. As well as equations, math techniques, etc.
If you're the kind of person who donates to Wikipedia, you're probably still using it some even if less, and continue to recognize its importance. Possibly even more, as a kind of collaboratively-edited authority like Wikipedia only becomes more important as AI "slop" becomes more prevalent across blogs etc.
Does it matter if you see the banner 10 times or 100 times in a month?
For such purposes, I'd naively just setup some weekly job to download Wikipedia and then run a "scrape" on that. Even weekly may be overkill; a monthly snapshot may do more than enough.
At the time I though, well it's a bunch of hippies with a small budget, who can blame them? Now I learn that there is 600 of them with a budget in the hundreds of millions??
This is becoming another Mozilla foundation...
There are a bunch of mainly-compatible third party parsers in various languages. The best one I've found so far is Sweble but even it mishandles a small percentage of rare cases.