Well the Wikimedia foundation does indeed not need this amount of money for wikipedia.org alone, they have copious amounts of money and their “asking for donations” is in some countries straight up “Wikipedia will shut down if you don’t pay” and seeing that as questionable behavior is absolutely ok.
Wikipedia is great, and they do have real operating costs, but hosting all the data is about 2% of their budget. All the admins and editors and contributors are volunteers. Most of the money is spent on projects not related to the encyclopedia and donations to miscellaneous social groups.
Well the Wikimedia foundation does indeed not need this amount of money for wikipedia.org alone, they have copious amounts of money and their “asking for donations” is in some countries straight up “Wikipedia will shut down if you don’t pay” and seeing that as questionable behavior is absolutely ok.
However… WE WITNESSED A MURDER.
I endorse this post.
Wikipedia is great, and they do have real operating costs, but hosting all the data is about 2% of their budget. All the admins and editors and contributors are volunteers. Most of the money is spent on projects not related to the encyclopedia and donations to miscellaneous social groups.
Their accounting is public: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation