Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnjj257 | Hacker News Reader

Those threads don't show anything interesting, some just bash the org for spending any of the money they receive in a way someone doesn't like from years and years ago. This is silly

View on HN

They show something interesting, that "Hosting wikipedia accounts for roughly 2% of their total expenses", something that someone donating might not know.

"years and years ago", this was in 2019

Can confirm, didn't know and glad I do. Won't be donating again in the future.

I do think it’s relevant to know how funding is spent, but I’m not sure why hosting being only 2% of expenses would have you advocate AGAINST donating to Wikipedia.

The running one of the biggest technical and community concerns on the planet takes a lot more then serving content from a computer somewhere. Salaries, community management, improvements to the wiki software—these things cost money too and are no less important then responding to HTTP requests.

Community is arguably a bigger part of why Wikipedia works the way it does, vs hosting which is a commoditized concern and only thinks of the bare minimum to keep the lights on.

But lighting up an empty building doesn't turn into Wikipedia.

The community rarely benefits from the actions of the organization. In fact there is kind of a hostile relationship between them. Most people contributing to wikipedia have never been to one of the parties for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com