Some of their staff are paid pretty high salaries ($300-400k), but its still nothing like what most business executives get paid and not much of their total costs. And while they have a lot of money right now, that could quickly change if people stop donating. Its best to be on the safe side with such a valuable resource.
On the other hand, I see the Internet Archive as just as valuable or more, and I think it deserves a lot more money and attention than it has been getting. Of course it doesn’t have to be one or the other, I just think that Wikipedia gets a disproportionate amount of donations compared to the Internet Archive.
Wikipedia is great, and they do have real operating costs, but hosting all the data is about 2% of their budget. All the admins and editors and contributors are volunteers. Most of the money is spent on projects not related to the encyclopedia and donations to miscellaneous social groups.
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Some of their staff are paid pretty high salaries ($300-400k), but its still nothing like what most business executives get paid and not much of their total costs. And while they have a lot of money right now, that could quickly change if people stop donating. Its best to be on the safe side with such a valuable resource.
On the other hand, I see the Internet Archive as just as valuable or more, and I think it deserves a lot more money and attention than it has been getting. Of course it doesn’t have to be one or the other, I just think that Wikipedia gets a disproportionate amount of donations compared to the Internet Archive.
Removed by mod
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Wikipedia is great, and they do have real operating costs, but hosting all the data is about 2% of their budget. All the admins and editors and contributors are volunteers. Most of the money is spent on projects not related to the encyclopedia and donations to miscellaneous social groups.
Their accounting is public: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation