Otoh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Ceramic%20a...
Even for a well-informed person who understands that's not how Wikipedia works, your comment does no favors for the people who are already walking around with the idea in their head that it does, nor does it help the people who have to correct this (too frequently) mistaken belief. And after ruling out that that's what you meant, it's not clear what your comments did mean.
Whether or not its 10x better service, I don't know, but they are definitely doing more now then back then. There's been lots of software development since 2011 (Some good, some not so much). Even just site speed and stability has improved significantly since 2011.
And it's probably questionable if all side ventures are needed or if they could/should have sticked to the core project and developt it with little money.
As mentioned further down: Do you really need 40 fundraiser positions?
It seems they currently (2019-2020) are responsible for 12% of the expenses [1], but I can't find any information as to which percentage of the donations they're responsible for. I wonder if there's a more transparent report for that.
Looking at their donor numbers [2], it suggests that most of the fundraising is still coming from the long tail, from regular people donating online. They only seem to have 17 "major benefactors" and even if we multiply the smallest amount for that tier (50k) by 10x, that still only accounts for 7% of the donations.
According to their 2019 data, the average donation seems to be $15, which suggests Jimbo banner is way more important than the fundraisers.
Of course my assumption might be completely incorrect.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
EN Wikipedia has always been where the lion share of attention was focused on (With wikidata and commons coming in second. The other projects get very little love).
Well, side ventures which burn money would explain factor 10, but yeah...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
On big thing that changes as a site grows, and as it reaches more places internationally, is that it attracts more attacks. Stopping that costs lot.
Money is a funny thing, in Denmark about $320 million is spent on Covid testing a month. So from January to July that would be the equivalent of Wikipedia funding for 20 years.
I'd definitely want an analysis on the server costs. Compared to ten years ago you can get vastly better servers per dollar and about ten times the bandwidth per dollar.
Here's the OG version by Jimmy Wales: "The sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world."
Here's what it currently looks like: "Empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/
Which one is more inspiring on all counts?
The management probably don't see themselves as caretakers of incredibly valuable resource that needs to be preserved. Which is probably what 90% of the rest of humanity want them to be.
The first version is about centralizing all informations so it can be consumed. It's the traditional view of knowledge dissemination, scaled to the whole world instantaneously. The second version is about giving people the tool to produce knowledge so it can be shared with the whole world. Just like the printing press spread authoring power from a select few people who bothered to write everything, to anyone with enough money to buy a machine, Wikipedia is giving the power to share knowledge from those who had the right curriculum to anyone with a bit of motivation.
This is the revolution that Internet and the Web promised (not just allow everyone to watch and listen, but give everyone a voice), and I'm glad Wikipedia is doing it. If it takes more money to fulfill that mission then it's totally worth it.
The 2nd is mature, focused, grounded in reality and is actually what wikimedia does. So yeah #2 100%. But then again I'm not 12.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/AR_web_a...