thetechchild

January 02, 2011 at 7:53pm

Wikipedia takes more than the majority (over 90%, I believe) of that money towards just hosting/expansion fees. Moreover, it takes $100K+ to pay a single person working for Wikimedia, given that Wikimedia has a tiny staff, and that each one of them is highly skilled. Just 20x that $100K is 2 million dollars. I don't think you realize how easy it would be to spend 16 million dollars on a service that millions of people visit every day.

It requires HUGE amounts of space (millions of pages, images, videos, sound clips) and bandwidth (millions of visitors). I think you're being a greedy & selfish whiner. If you had asked for the ad to be removed for your user after donating, fine, that's reasonable. If you had blocked it and not made a comment, that's your choice. But don't come complaining about a 100% free website (in the top 10 for traffic) that has a small ad at the top for a month out of each year.

Even worse is that you're making up conspiracy theories, accusing a non-profit organization for taking in profits just because of that small ad.

Maybe you don't realize this, also, but $500K missing is a lot of money. They have every right to ask for that last bit. I'm willing to bet you get paid less than $500K every year, so think how you'd feel, eh?

quickone

January 02, 2011 at 3:28pm

 They ask for money once a year from its users.  $16M is hardly anything for as much traffic & content as that site has, they're 7th in web traffic in the world.  It isn't just bandwidth, it is storage space, servers, electricity, cooling, physical space etc.