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by matteuan 2193 days ago
Wikipedia spends more than that only for "Donation processing expenses". Of course it is a nice contribution but, in my opinion, very small if compared to the huge value that Google is able to get for free. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
1 comments

I was going to be even more cynical and say that 3 million sounds absolutely pathetic relative to the scale of both entities, and given how important it is to the quality of Google’s search results.
I would be even more cynical and say that $3 million is more than enough to cover all of Wikipedia's expenses and that the rest is bureaucratic fluff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112115

To add to my own comment, this [1] was the submission that I originally had in mind. It was in the 2007-2008 operating year that Wikipedia's expenses crossed the $3 million threshold. In 2015-2016 the expenses were >$65 million. In 2019, they were $91 million. Remember that the content creators work for free.

The reports are available here [2]. Looking at the most recent report here for FY18-19, the amount spent on hosting is $2.3 million. That's less than half of the "donation processing expenses"!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/