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Comment by dreslan | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.

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Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising.

There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.

There's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with donors is important.

Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed]

Fixed.

Its a widely known controversy

https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really?

They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads.

At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through.

They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?

The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.

There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".

No, you simply assume that.

In 2025 they spend 184 million, and 2% was on hosting. Even several times that for salaries means that an absurd fraction is on non wikipedia items.

Hosting does not include software development. It does not include sysadmins. I'm not sure if it even includes data center personel (Wikipedia owns its own servers. That means you have to hire people to plug them in. Amazon isnt doing it for you).

Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going.

That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia.

Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.

By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).

LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.

You go ahead an tell users that.

Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.

The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.

statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias

On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.

For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.

It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.

For your own sake, get out of Xitter.

To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations.

The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.

And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.

I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.

Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.

I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.

To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.

I agree, but this has to be one of the least consequential problems an encyclopedia might have.

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