Wikipedia is much deeper and nuanced than imagined

Total revenue 154MM. Staff at 88MM. Total expenses seem to be 145MM and I don't see anything to indicate they are re-donating that money. Where's the source for your comment? It seems to be blatantly untrue, and I'm wondering why.

I think the use of the word "eclipsed" is a a bit odd. Eclipsed in this case, and the literal sense, just means it's covered. In this case, revenue exceeds costs by what, 8%?

The article appears to be a beef about moderator structure and the author's perception of a Biden bias over an article they hand-picked.

The revenue and expense statement, the subject heading an entirely misleading heading given the bulk of the article is not about revenue/expenses strapped on at the end appears to have no, or at best threadbare connection to the main article other than 'politics' - well, what I had for breakfast is 'politics' too, perhaps that influences my reading of this article.

The moderator discussion and revenue/expense discussion offers nothing of substance in information of discussion over multitudes of other articles that have discussed the same thing with far more insight.

HN political flamebait, really. {Edit, thanks for the downvote.. author? That was 3 minutes. I really don't care, the account's literally called 'throwaway'. Censorship, eh?]

(This comment was written when this HN submission had an editorialised headline about server hosting costs)

Funny how people will (1) ignore the software development side of things, and (2) cheer on the massive new regulation of "Big Tech" but ignore what that imposes on an org like the Wikimedia Foundation, both during the legislative stage (re. advocacy) and the once the regulation is imposing its bureaucracy. The UK Online Safety Bill is a prime example. Also, Wikipedia is a very important project, but just one of many projects operated by the Foundation. Finally, these articles somehow attack "high expenses" at the very same time as "running a surplus being added to an endowment capable of generating income that will help support then projects indefinitely even if some people stop visiting the sites (and thus seeing the December donation banners) because ChatGPT could be their interface to all the great knowledge".

The org is not without reproach, and certainly not the most important part of the overall Wikimedia Movement, but there's a bit of smoke and mirrors going on with articles like these.

As for the tone of banners: I believe there's a consultation about them going on right now; they're being co created with the userbase. Go be part of the solution! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2023_b...

I read it, and I read their audit report. And in 2022 they grew by only 8MM. So in 2021 they received more donations than needed to just cover expenses. What's the problem?

We should want the assets to grow significantly. Ideally Wikimedia would have an endowment that is sufficient to grow at a rate to allow the site to be run in perpetuity without any further contributions.

> at this point this thing should run itself and require very little maintenance.

This is a very popular belief about established web services. From time to time someone tries it; it rarely works out well.

Rather glad Wikipedia isn’t doing the “you have to log in to use it, also we’ll rate limit you if you don’t pay for Wikipedia verified, and it will also randomly go down a lot” thing that Twitter is trying in an attempt to make this work.