I wish archive.org fundraised like WMF. Archive.org is super slow when it doesn't plain timeout with some message about server load.

I really don’t think that would be needed. I’ve never had a timeout on archive.org and the rise in costs probably wouldn’t be worth the value add.

Archive.org has a tons more work to do (they have many side projects beyond Wayback...) and definitely could scale to a Wikipedia size organization, if they had the fundraisers.

Otoh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Ceramic%20a...

Archive.org is a lot less people intensive than what WMF does. Even the book scanning work they support is mostly done by third parties, and they largely focus on hosting the resulting content. Wikipedia can't work like that, no matter how much some people wish it could.

You don't say it explicitly, but this comment is toeing close to the sentiments of people who believe that WMF is responsible for the generating the content that appears on Wikipedia (instead of the legions of unpaid volunteer editors—the wiki part of the thing).

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.

As opposed to Wikipedia where the content is written by third parties, and Wikimedia largely focuses (or should focus) on hosting the resulting content?

How often is archived pages edited? It is a very different problem hosting static and dynamic data.

An "archive" is a repository of material that can't be edited. Editing archives is a kind of fraud.

That’s my point. You can easily cache static data, it’s easier to scale, etc. Wikipedia is semi-static at most.

Every time I see the Wikipedia/WMF donation banner again, I donate to the Internet Archive. Maybe I should give the WMF some change because they remind me to do that periodically.