Transcoding is expensive but not that much, if my company doesn’t make 1/20 of Wikipedia and we can afford to do 1000s of hours a day of transcoding surely they can too.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/W...
e.g. there was a pretty strong consensus about not supporting MP4 back when the WMF asked whether it should be allowed, mostly on "it's not free" grounds: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comm...
Also note that VP8/VP9 is still patented, but just licensed freely. IMHO that's less free than patent-expired (public domain).
Firefox can support mp4 over h264 despite their clear FOSS aligned goals , I am surprised that Wikipedia whose goals more align to open information rather than open source directly has challenges .
Why would they spend money on improvements to the site when they could spend money on other things instead?
Wikipedia has one of the best SRE teams, they were pretty transparent too, a lot of the communication was on IRC channels you could see, at least that was the case few years back.
Running the top 5 website in the world is no joke especially as a non-profit and they do it well. They haven’t had any down time or major incident in the last decade which is pretty impressive.
I would think their SRE team is not just good but also very motivated in the mission otherwise they would leave for much higher paying jobs, infra jobs are very lucrative if you have prior experience at more scale not much more scale than Wikipedia .