Wikipedia will really be fine. It is all the other expenses that raise eyebrows in a major way. This, of course, includes the pay of the executives and high-ranking officials that earn anywhere between $150k to $500k a year, and their salaries keep growing exponentially. At the same time, they spend donated money hiring union-busting firms - presumably, to crush on the latest unionization attempts and keep growing their pay.
If you have a spare hard drive lying around (rare amidst this storage famine), consider downloading Wikipedia and a few other things you would be interested in. There are multiple ways to do this, but I’ll recommend Kiwix.
Literally just for the sake of preserving and archiving information, for a bunch of reasons (fascist retconning, natural disasters, cyber attacks, etc…). You don’t even have to seed it or make it available publicly. Use it if you want, or throw the drive into a drawer.
If anyone are unable to do this, absolutely no worries. But to those who can, please do. It helps.
Enshittification comes for us all. But we really need to be proactive about saving wikipedia, or at least it’s data.
Wikimedia Foundation has enough assets to keep hosting Wikipedia for the next 60 years, according to their financial reports:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3f/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY_24-25_Audit_Report.pdf
Wikipedia will really be fine. It is all the other expenses that raise eyebrows in a major way. This, of course, includes the pay of the executives and high-ranking officials that earn anywhere between $150k to $500k a year, and their salaries keep growing exponentially. At the same time, they spend donated money hiring union-busting firms - presumably, to crush on the latest unionization attempts and keep growing their pay.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries
It’s good the only thing required for a website is hosting costs that never increase. And not like… maintenance.
If your operating expenses for a website outweigh hosting 50:1 while most work is done by volunteers, something is seriously wrong with your books.
If you have a spare hard drive lying around (rare amidst this storage famine), consider downloading Wikipedia and a few other things you would be interested in. There are multiple ways to do this, but I’ll recommend Kiwix.
Literally just for the sake of preserving and archiving information, for a bunch of reasons (fascist retconning, natural disasters, cyber attacks, etc…). You don’t even have to seed it or make it available publicly. Use it if you want, or throw the drive into a drawer.
If anyone are unable to do this, absolutely no worries. But to those who can, please do. It helps.