[khamidou]

If you look up their latest annual report (https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...) you can see that they're allocating ~1.7% of their expenses towards hosting.

I doubt that they're getting "hugged to death" by AI scrapers.

[bawolff]

People cite this figure a lot, but its a little misleading because when you own your own servers a lot of the expenses that are typically hosting actually fall under a different category.

If you use AWS, the people hired to manage the servers is part of the price tag. When you own your own you have to actually hire those people.

[DeusExMachina]

But in that case your costs don't go up because of AI scrapers, as you don't need to scale employees with traffic.

[khamidou]

I mean, it's not like you can get away with running with zero SREs if you're running in the cloud. The personnel costs for on-prem hosting are vastly exaggerated, especially if you contract out the actual annoying work to a colo.

[Liquix]

this is a very eye-opening read on their financials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

[skeaker]

The easy counters to this article are:

1. I think their spending is a good thing. Charitable scholarships for kids and initiatives to have a more educated populous in general are things that I am happy to donate to.

2. As stated in the article, hosting is still a relatively simple expenditure compared to the rest of their operation. If Wikipedia really eats a huge loss, falling back to just hosting wouldn't be unrealistic, especially since the actual operations of Wikipedia are mostly volunteer run anyways. In the absolute worst case, their free data exports would lead to someone making a successor that can be moved to more or less seamlessly.

The only real argument in my eyes is that their donation campaigns can seem manipulative. I still think it's fine at the end of the day given that Wikipedia is a free service and donating at all is entirely optional.