The Growth of Wikipedia's Budget

Wikipedia's expenses have grown by 69% per year since 2004.
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+22
Level ∞
Jan 13, 2020
I love Wikipedia. But I think this is ridiculous. Their core product has not changed much in the last 10 years, yet their budget has increased by 2000%. I've donated a decent amount of money to Wikipedia over the years, but I won't be doing so in the future as I believe it would simply be used to fund an expanding bureaucracy.
+11
Level 76
Jan 15, 2020
On the face of it this would seem to be true - but I don't know, and I'm not sure at this stage that you do either. Have you researched the reasons for the expanding budget? Maybe get some answers from Wikipedia, before jumping to conclusions.
+5
Level 82
Jan 15, 2020
What are they spending $81 million on? Server costs?
+5
Level ∞
Jan 15, 2020
No. Server costs account for a small fraction of their budget. They actually spend (slightly) more on travel than they do on hosting.
+6
Level ∞
Jan 15, 2020
Funny enough, they actually spent more on travel and conferences in 2018 than their entire budget in 2007.
+4
Level ∞
Jan 15, 2020
You can read the full report here.
+3
Level 82
Jan 15, 2020
2004 expenses seem pretty reasonable.
+2
Level ∞
Jan 15, 2020
No kidding. Early Wikipedia was simply amazing. Rarely has so much value been provided for so little.
+2
Level 63
Jan 15, 2020
As Wikipedia has grown to be a more reliable source of information, I think them having a growing budget is perfectly normal. 81 million dollars may be a bit much, however, its expanding reference library is probably where most of this money goes to in order to get better information on topics. Looking at the "References" section of a Wikipedia page is the largest it has ever been even for even the smallest subjects. Not to mention the huge workforce I'm sure is needed to not only to update pages but edit and create new ones as well as editing already existing pages.
+15
Level ∞
Jan 15, 2020
Unfortunately, that's simply not true. The vast majority of the content is created by unpaid volunteers.
+28
Level ∞
Jan 15, 2020
And to those volunteers, all I can say is "thank you"!
+2
Level 51
Jan 15, 2020
What is the biggest expense that they listed? 81 million seems like a lot.
+5
Level 88
Jan 15, 2020
Salaries and wages is by far the largest item on the 2018 expense list, at $38,597,407. Perhaps more of work is being done by paid staff these days than the Quizmaster surmises. I'd be interested to see a breakdown of how many employees and/or contractors are on the payroll and what they do.
+2
Level 50
Jan 17, 2020
I'm interested to see the biggest types of jobs Wikipedia employs. Would it be article contributors?
+5
Level ∞
Mar 15, 2020
No, they don't pay for content. That's created by unpaid volunteers. It's mostly (in my opinion) administrative overhead.
+1
Level 45
Feb 26, 2021
I thought Wikipedia need to keep going but they already have 81 million!
+1
Level 58
May 7, 2021
I'm pretty sure that Wikipedia is planning on opening a major branch in India soon.