> In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told a TED audience: So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.
2005: bandwidth cost of $5000 in with 1.4 billion page views
$104,505,783 in revenue ($97,748,964 from donations)
$81,442,265 in expenses ($38,597,407 salary, $2,342,130 tech costs, others)
I am not that educated on their operations but it seems a bit crazy to me how only 2.4 million out of all expenses is the server costs. And the 39 million salaries are all to their employees none of which do the actual content contribution
Going from 1.5 billion page views at $5000 to 15 billion page views at 82 million is crazy imo.
The WMF does quite a few things besides paying for the hosting costs of Wikipedia. As one example, their latest project is Wikidata, a general-purpose, language-independent knowledge base which already gets more edits over time than the English Wikipedia does. Given that developing such a generally-useful knowledge base has been a "holy grail" of AI for literally decades and that Wikidata is freely available at zero cost right now, those donations might already be more than paying for themselves.
There was a behind-the-scenes talk at 36c3 in Dec 2019 where a few Wikipedia Admins show what the infrastructure looks like and what they actually do: Infrastructure of Wikipedia https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-73-infrastructure-of-wikipedia
