> a cultural value of exactly zero

I hope you recognise that this is only your opinion. The beauty about a crowd-sourced encyclopedia is that you don't get to define what other people find interesting or of cultural value. The (utopic) mission of Wikipedia is to encompass the whole human knowledge, and that includes a lot of niche topics which might be interesting only for a small amount of people, but it is not limited to that. I love that Wikipedia has a lot of info on "current" (i.e. popular right now) topics, as I get to know what I want to know avoiding the gazillion ads (even though I blackhole all of them) or click-baity titles from the rest of the internet.

Their network cost is negligible. Overall hosting cost them less then $3 million, actually they spend more on travel & conferences [0].

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

This is dangerously dismissive. Cultural value is subjective, and in any case these articles provide an in-road to other articles, giving the opportunity to expand people’s knowledge further.

I would, however, support Wikipedia having ads on articles in such pop culture categories – and those alone, of course, to avoid conflict of interest where factual accuracy is more vital. This would have to be carefully managed by the Wikimedia Foundation — marking articles for monetisation should be handled only by a specific role – but if done quite carefully and in a privacy- and user-respecting manner (eg Carbon ads [0]) could potentially subside the academic content without damaging Wikipedia’s brand.

[0] https://www.carbonads.net

That's a terrible idea in my opinion, any advertising at all on Wikipedia would be the thin edge of a very unpleasant wedge. Wikipedia is many people's first stop for knowledge, we really don't want people being able to buy eyeball space next to what's supposed to be unbiased content.

Additionally, expanding advertising generally is a bad move when exposure to advertising has been shown to be negatively correlated to quality of life and contentedness. We need to be transitioning away from advertising as a primary driver of the online economy, not fuelling it further. Advertising should only be employed when there's no better option in my opinion, not the first thing you reach for monetising a site. We should see advertising like fossil fuels, a regrettable necessity that we should aim to phase out.

As soon as you open the barn door for having ads at all, the floodgates will open. Also a pointless concession given Wikipedia has far more money than they need.

If Wikipedia ever puts ads up because of the bureaucratic WMF cancer exceeding donations, that's the day Wikipedia dies.

There is little money in creating a piece of artwork that lasts 300yrs, like a church or an exquisite painting for the producer. Companies can't survive on that, all the money goes to magic pop art and maybe some heroic efforts. After that you're outside the system. To quote a fading movie, you either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain (dead genius).

You probably know it and it feels worth saying anyway. I yearn for the enduring masterpiece that transcends simply 'changing the game' and is instead appreciated for its own being for hundreds of years.

Why do they have a cultural value of exactly zero?

More to the point, what even is "cultural value?" After Googling it, I found that it doesn't even seem to be a well defined phrase, much less a quantifiable concept.

Wikipedia uses notability[1] to decide which articles to include. Notability is defined as significant coverage in 3rd party sources. Popular movies are "notable" because other people write about them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

There's too much in art that relies on unmeasured effects like the impact on the audience's consciousness and the execution on structure and intention to be bothered with numbers beyond box office or critic reviews. You could measure something related to those concepts and you would be capturing a fourth of available judgement for cultural impact.

Culture is a game we have been playing for thousands of years. Art pieces with an observable influence on other artists, the public audience or any human decision making along with an ability to survive the wear and tear of existing in the world as an artwork is a good place to start summarizing an artwork's cultural value.

A grand cathedral like st peter's stands as an example of high quality baroque architecture, the value of the church as an institution. It remains intact after a large number of years, not having been physically deconstructed. It's influence on other artists is common to this day, recently used as a baroque example of maximalism on HN. The site attracts visitors and has yet to be rivalled in it's unique baroque grandeur.

Those influences are quantifiable, and kind of comparable to a flash in a pan like a Hollywood film that gets most of its attention and influence in the first few months then sits in an institutional back pocket whilst other artists denigrate it so that new films can occupy the spotlight and the cycle continues. These films are sometimes used as reference for making new films and the industry puts out two similar styles of film at the same time reducing uniqueness. Generally otherwise left to sit in DVD/bluray jewel cases or disney vaults as they fall out of favour.

You can rank these impacts and have conversations over which interpretive labels they fit into and conclude some are mor valuable than others.

You don't think those views result in a stronger brand and more views on pages with a higher cultural value?