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While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site).

I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use your budget otherwise it would be put into question", but it also means when I give 1 euro to them it goes less and less to their core mission I want to sustain.



You're giving them money, for your own reasons, when it's well established that they don't need your donations for their core mission. They spend it on things other than their core mission. Isn't this just a problem which you have created yourself?

Just stop giving them money, give it to some other project which is also doing something valuable but which needs it more. If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.


Wikimedia is swimming in money. Give to the Internet Archive instead. They really need it.


Your post just got me to finally donate to internet archive!


> If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.

If they run out of money to run the servers, I'd consider that a good thing.

Someone can start a new "wiki-2" project, starting out with a wikipedia dump as a base, and continuing to be a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but without the $150 million dollars of expenses - I think you could host wikipedia with 2 members of staff and 5 servers, plus cloudflare for the 99% of read-only requests - similar to how they ran it at the start of the project.


Wikipedia is not particularly well run. Just look at their infrastructure expenses. On the other hand, they bring in tons of money from companies and user donations.

Maybe its time for a leaner alternative?


Even knowing those issues and hating it, after all the news last year I'm starting to appreciate the fact that Wikimedia at least still isn't changing its core function at all. Any new things they try is independent to Wikipedia and funding for Wikipedia itself still isn't cannibalized ao far for those other projects.

I can't say the same for other enshittified companies.




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