That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO.
Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
Bandwidth is also the sort of thing that gets way cheaper at scale than most people expect. When you are big enough there comes a point where the telecom companies want to connect to you because all their users want to access your website. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot (not all) of Wikimedia's bandwidth is actually free.
No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can. In fact, I’d say the biggest impediment to P2P sites in 2026 is the absolute unit that is advertiser data. We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%). We have VPS and serverless. We also have content addressing and symmetric cert verification, but when a site’s “traffic” is P2P you lose visibility on most of it. And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it? Woof.
Even if true, being the first to do anything is usually an expensive proposition.
> We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%)
I dont know how you are defining "p2p database" or which product you mean, but in general distributed p2p solutions where you do not trust the peers cannot propagate information in a single round-trip, or anything even remotely close to that.
> We have VPS and serverless
Neither of these are p2p technologies. They are also a terrible fit for something like Wikipedia.
> We also have content addressing
Sure, but that is like 1% of a solution
> symmetric cert verification
Do you mean mutual TLS? That is indeed a technology that exists, but i dont know how its relavent.
> And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it?
Which kind of brings up the other flaw with p2p - privacy.
It obviously depends on what technology is chosen, but p2p often has poor privacy properties. Think media companies sending threatening notices to people who download movies. People often look up private things on Wikipedia. Think sexual health topics. Do we really want malicious people to be able to track that?
Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
Licenses do matter, just like open source.
Raising funding for Wikipedia, then diverting 90% of the funds for pet projects is dishonest at best, and most likely fraudulent.
The other problem, is that the projects wikimedia foundation has historically funded have a notable political bias, to the point where it has been accused of being a pseudo-PAC.
That being said, we're not just covering the big fancy events. We've done hundreds of events from indigenous festivals to minor league sports to science conferences. We've also donated equipment to wiki communities in Kenya, Ghana, and Benin to photograph their local events and culture, which are very undercovered on-wiki. The big events are what gets a lot of visibility and make the headlines but we do a lot more than that.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiPortraits_by...