Don't get me wrong, I love Wikipedia, it's a great resource, probably the greatest single resource on the internet. But asking for $20,000,000.00 to run a single website??.... Yeah, it's among the most visited websites on the web... I get it, but $20M in expenses is just way over the top. I know a thing or two about websites, worked for a company that runs a website that's in top 10 visited along with Wikipedia and actively participated in running that website. I know very well what it takes to run a website on such scale. It's $2M - not $20M. If you look at their report here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf You can see that in 2010 they've spent 1M on web hosting and 1M on capital expenditures (hardware). That I can believe. That totals $2M. Now let's take a look at their 2011 plans: almost $2M for hosting and $3M in capital spending??? Do they expect their traffic to more than double in a year??? It's not 90s anymore, you know. Pretty much everyone goes online already, so do they plan to expand their services to Mars? Or perhaps they expect a reversal in decades long trend and bandwidth and hardware prices are going to skyrocket??? $9M in salaries??!!. WTF??? $3.5M in 2010 was large enough and personally I don't understand why would they need that much anyway. But $9M???? Talk about Wall Street bailout bonuses. $2M+ for external contractors on top of $9M salaries??? No comment. $1.2M for facilities and operations (which is more than double the same expense in 2010 and for a volunteer driven website should be ZERO anyway). These people should find a cheaper place to rent! Almost 1M in travel expenses??? Travel? Really? What for? Where? Ever heard of economy class? WTF??? All this spending paid for by barraging visitors with very aggressive "give us money" ads with no proper way to turn them off and then for some weeks more with "thank you" ads that strangely still had the "donate" button, while claiming that they are against ads... I donated to Wikimedia in the past without being forced to in such a rude and aggressive way. I'll never do so anymore. It's one thing to donate to a worthy cause and a worthy service but to finance somebody's wasteful spending on delusions of grandeur most likely caused by an acute mid-life crisis??? I'll find better use for my money!
we are talking about to much money here. I dont think we are going to get at least 0,01 of what wikipedia earns on internet.
They gathered a sh*tload of money , maybe the plan to add more then text and a few pictures to the site .
That's the thing, Wikipedia doesn't earn a dime, nothing, nada, zip. They are completely dependent on donations. Yet they are starting to piss away money like they are Paul Allen. I'm more than sure that come next new year you will not be able to spot a meaningful difference in Wikipedia compared to what it is right now.