What Google is to search, Wikipedia is to what comes next. It has emerged as one of the most oft-browsed non-social media websites, and an unparalleled inventory of shared digital knowledge. In 2023, the website has seen an average of 4.5 billion unique global visitors per month. The online encyclopaedia marked its 22nd anniversary in January.

It now has versions in 334 languages and a total of more than 61 million articles. It consistently ranks among the world’s 10 most-visited websites. However, it alone in that select group — led usually by Google, YouTube, and Facebook — is an American 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Wikipedia’s contributors, who make nearly 345 edits per minute on the site, are not paid.

The website does not run ads. It does send out occasional messages though — for donations. Typically, they run for about a month at different points of the calendar year, for the different geographic and cultural regions its services reach. Users have recently found the frequency of these banner messages encouraging them to donate, to be rapidly increasing.

A couple of months back, the flagship arm of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), reached out to its Indian users for help.

“We ask you, humbly: don’t scroll away,” the message read. “We depend on donations from exceptional readers, but fewer than 2 per cent give. If you donate just Rs.150, or whatever you can…Wikipedia could keep thriving. Thank you.”

The Bare Numbers

The message immediately triggered a chatter across Indian social media handles, with many puzzling whether one of the world’s most popular websites really needed donations to stay afloat.

Some users feared that the online encyclopaedia was on the brink of bankruptcy. That is not the case. The WMF raised upward of $165 million ($165,232,309) from over 13 million donations in FY22. It has budgeted for $175 mn in 2022-23. Its total assets stood at over $250 million in 2022.

In its annual plan for 2022-23, WMF said: “We anticipate a 17 per cent increase in our 2022−2023 budget, most of this representing inflationary and other year-on-year costs. The overall increase includes a 28 per cent increase in funding to other movement entities (individual and affiliate) including an additional $2.8 million in the grants budget and an additional $2.4 million for WikiData.”  

A spokesperson for the WMF told Business Standard that a majority of the firm’s funding comes from donations ($15 is the average) from people who read Wikipedia; most contribute through the banner messages. “We use the fundraising banners as a quick way to invite readers to support our mission during the brief campaign period,” they added.  

The knowledge aggregator dedicates the largest portion of its annual budget towards personnel, representing roughly 60 per cent of expenses across permanent staff and temporary contractors. “The increasing costs in our budget reflect the cost of living and similar expenses related to salaries, benefits, and other personnel costs,” says the spokesperson. (See Chart 1)

The WMF also classifies these expenses under four operational heads. For instance, the company allocates nearly 49 per cent of its budgetary expenses towards supporting the technical infrastructure of Wikimedia projects, including designing and launching new products to improve user experience, as well as developmental projects in machine learning and internet-based collaboration. In fact, the majority of the WMF staff work in product and technology, maintaining and updating its software and user interface.

Nearly 22 per cent goes towards strengthening performance and effectiveness, while 17.6 per cent is dedicated to supporting volunteer communities through grants, programs, training etc.

Another 11.6 per cent is dedicated to ensuring legal safeguards for Wikimedia projects “against growing external threats such as disinformation and harmful government regulation, to ensure they can continue to thrive in the future.”

Over the years, through fundraising campaigns and generous corporate endowments, Wikipedia’s assets have grown exponentially. Given its considerable net worth, many have criticised the website for the doomsday-esque tone it adopts in its call for donations. Asked about the same, the spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation said, “As a website that hundreds of millions of people have come to rely on, we have a duty to ensure Wikipedia remains accessible, up-to-date, and relevant for its readers.”

Tech Fortifications

For instance, a large chunk of what readers donate to the WMF is focused on tech improvements. The goal of Wikipedia, as its co-founder Jimmy Wales described it in 2004, was to create “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

Twenty-three years into its life, Wikipedia is much more than a digital encyclopaedia. It has lent its DNA to the interconnected tissues of information that hold the internet together. Thus, when you “Google” something, and get highlighted answers? The answers are at least partly derived from Wikipedia’s data, which had been ingested into the knowledge banks of search engines like Google, Bing, etc. YouTube draws on Wikipedia to counter misinformation. Many companies will give you a link to their Wikipedia page, rather than an extensive statement on the “About Us” section. Journalists and researchers include sections from Wikipedia in their write-ups, for quick and simplified context-building.

The new AI chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus, too. Embedded deep within their responses to queries is Wikipedia data and Wikipedia text, knowledge that has been compiled over years of painstaking work by human contributors.

Aditya Bannerjee, whose PhD research at the University of British Columbia revolves around information aggregation and biases by AI-enabled search and chatbots, believes Wikipedia is by far the most important single source in the training of AI models. “Given its collaborative information aggregation model, Wikipedia is a living archive. While this does mean that the site inadvertently incorporates biases in its essays and pages, it also makes it one of the primary sources of data for AI models,” he explains.

“But AIs are also cannibals of information. Bots like ChatGPT, which are heavily dependent on the WIKI sites for their base-level info at this point in their evolution, will soon outperform Wikipedia, as repositories of information,” Bannerjee cautions, explaining why the WMF needs to spend a massive portion of its funds for tech innovation.

Diversification Drive

This is also the root of Wikipedia’s need to expand rapidly across markets. The foundation schedules campaigns in different countries throughout the year with new campaigns beginning in parts of Latin America in 2016, and India in 2020.

The following have donated $500,000 or more each (not including gifts to the Wikimedia Endowment)

Source: WMF