"The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, reported a total revenue of $185.4 million for the 2023–2024 fiscal year (ending June 2024). The majority of this funding comes from individual donations, with additional income from investments and the Wikimedia Enterprise commercial API service."

(Unless this was satire and I missed it)

What's the operating budget for other websites with comparable traffic? Without context $185 million seems like a lot, but compared to what? Reddit's operating budget for the same timeframe was $1.86 billion.

I agree, but it's not a shoestring budget. They also seem to run a surplus every year:

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) maintains a significant financial surplus and a growing, healthy balance sheet, with net assets reaching approximately $271.5 million in the 2023–2024 fiscal year. This surplus is largely driven by consistent, high-volume, small-dollar donations, with total annual revenue often exceeding $180 million.

Surplus is a good thing right? Long term stability, responsible financial management, healthy margins? If they said one year "You know what? We're good on donations this year." it would never be restarted.

Very prudent, but far from "operating on a shoestring".

I think the question might be how much money, effort, and expertise is going into the platform itself.

They are rather well funded for a non-profit and the reserves in the endowment fund are very healthy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports...

Wikipedia probably actively wastes $100m per year

On what? I'd be curious to read more (documented sources)

Where and how they spent their money is on p. 21 of this PDF [1] which can be obtained from this official source [2]. This is just a high-level breakdown, but it does illustrate that, for example, more than twice as much is spent on "Donation processing expenses" ($7.5M) as "Internet hosting" ($3.1M), and that the largest line item, by far, is "Salaries and benefits" ($106M).

[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...

[2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...

Well obviously salaries will be the highest expense in any organization like this. The more interesting question is if it's salaries to security programmers or teachers at an african womens' coding bootcamp (yes they did spend money on that, and yes it's probably useful, but hardly what people think of when they see those "donate now to keep wikipedia alive" banners). A big percentage probably goes to their CEO who does who knows what.

There are a couple of ways to approach this information. One is to compare to the past. For example, comparing with 2008-2009 [1], they now spend 3.75 times as much on hosting, but 48 times as much on salaries, illustrating a more-than-tenfold relative growth in salaries compared to hosting. While hosting is not now nor ever was their only relevant expense, it is a good anchor point.

Another key difference over the last 15 years has been the introduction of awards and grants, which didn't exist then but now comprise $26.8M (15%) of their expenditures. This is where most of the ideological/controversial spending actually goes, rather than the salaries per se, but even more to the point, this one line item is more than 3 times their entire inflation-adjusted budget from 15 years ago ($5.6M times 150% CPI = $8.4M) and is still more than if we adjusted their entire budget using the hosting cost as an index ($5.6M times 3.75 = $21M).

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/WMF_Annu...

Look, I'm not defending wikipedia, I'd just like to point out that comparing hosting to salaries is a quite strange metric. Hosting is cheap and relatively constant, adding features to the site or paying admins to maintain the quality of edits is scalable. How does throwing more money at hosting make a better product? It's not like the servers can't handle the requests.

Using hosting costs as an index is nonsensical. I wasn't able to find numbers for 2009, but since 2015 the monthly page views have remained almost exactly constant. So you might as well claim that they're vastly overpaying for hosting since inflation from 2008 is way less than 3.75x.

I picked hosting because it's a line item that exists across all of their budgets, it's a rough proxy for a web business's non-salary expenses, it's a big part of what you think you're donating to based upon Wikipedia's own language in their fundraising drives, and if nothing else, it's way more forgiving to the growth of their expenses than consumer price inflation is.

Ultimately every person has to decide for themselves whether they think WMF is a worthy recipient for their donations, but it is in no way operating on a shoestring budget nor staffed by volunteers anymore.

Depends how you define waste if you agree. But you could cut $100m yearly and core Wikipedia would still run great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

please stop spreading lies, Wikipedia is swimming in money and they have money for years or even decades if they would not waste them on various seminars and other nonsense unrelated to running Wikipedia

Society and culture were fine before Wikipedia. I could argue that they have degraded substantially since Wikipedia came into being (but correlation is not causation, in either direction).