Wikipedia spends $US 3m on hosting in 2024. They spend $US 107m on salaries.
So their hosting costs might have gone to, say, $US 5m at the outside.
That is they are maybe 1/20th of their salary cost.
AI's extra scraping might be a problem for some folks. But for wikipedia to talk about the percentage increase is disingenuous.
Source :
https://www.saastr.com/what-is-costs-to-run-wikipedia-3m-in-...
Being the devil's advocate, there are are quite a lot of smaller non-profits that are entirely volunteer-run. While Wikipedia's mission might inherently be big enough to merit a few salaried employees, I can't fathom why they need so many. As per Wilde's famous quip, it seems to me that "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy".
Honestly, just don’t. The world doesn’t really need hypothetical antagonism anymore.
I imagine it also takes a toll on server, power, and maintenance (staff time) costs as well.
So it helps to show exactly how much more.