Some people here think Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to keep Wikipedia up. That's a subset of their mission. I attribute nearly all of the blame to WMF, because their donation ads are quite deceptive.
The actual, public mission of Wikimedia Foundation:
> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
As such, WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects, like funding photographers to go to events like Fifa World Cup and Cannes, and take (CC or public domain) portraits for Wikimedia Commons (https://www.wikiportraits.org); etc.
> WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects
According to [0], they intend to spend $18m on community projects total, out of their total $240m FY26-27 budget[1]. $330k of that go to the WikiPortraits project[2].
Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects). I would hardly call that deceptive.
> Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects)
That's a bit of a stretch. I couldn't find any up to date information, but for 2024-2025 WMF wrote:
"Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Services."[0]
So "keeping Wikipedia up" is a very minor part (15%) of the "Investments in Technology" budget. It receives around 7% (15% of 48%) of the WMF total budget.
That not to say the rest of those "Investments in Technology" is useless. It's just that it's mostly about developing features, like updating the Wikipedia app, or creating functions and Wikipedia Abstract.
Wikimedia has enough cash in the bank, to fund wikipedia forever from interest alone.
At this point, 100% of all new funds raised in the name of Wikipedia are actually being diverted to other projects. It’s incredibly deceptive, borderline fraudulent.
The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They make it sound like wikipedia is very much at risk of dying due to lack of funds when in reality they are looking for more funding for programmes like this, which is where a lot of the mistrust and 'deceptive advertising' opinions come from.
They could, but if their donation ads said for example 'please help us to take more photos of live events' instead of 'we need your help to keep wikipedia alive' then they would not get half the donations they do currently, which is the point.
Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”.
Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
Depends on how you define "hosting". CapEx costs for buying the servers is a non trivial expense (note: in accounting statements this isn't considered part of internet hosting). Not as much as software, but still expensive.
P2P hosting doesn't really work in reality, especially for websites that change regularly and require quick propagation of those changes. Its not just Wikipedia. Name a high traffic site that actually uses p2p hosting. I'll wait.
Bandwidth is also the sort of thing that gets way cheaper at scale than most people expect. When you are big enough there comes a point where the telecom companies want to connect to you because all their users want to access your website. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot (not all) of Wikimedia's bandwidth is actually free.
Actually, I think your argument is almost entirely about P2P tech inspired by BitTorrent. We’ve had good be the enemy of great here.
No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can. In fact, I’d say the biggest impediment to P2P sites in 2026 is the absolute unit that is advertiser data. We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%). We have VPS and serverless. We also have content addressing and symmetric cert verification, but when a site’s “traffic” is P2P you lose visibility on most of it. And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it? Woof.
> No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can.
Even if true, being the first to do anything is usually an expensive proposition.
> We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%)
I dont know how you are defining "p2p database" or which product you mean, but in general distributed p2p solutions where you do not trust the peers cannot propagate information in a single round-trip, or anything even remotely close to that.
> We have VPS and serverless
Neither of these are p2p technologies. They are also a terrible fit for something like Wikipedia.
> We also have content addressing
Sure, but that is like 1% of a solution
> symmetric cert verification
Do you mean mutual TLS? That is indeed a technology that exists, but i dont know how its relavent.
> And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it?
Which kind of brings up the other flaw with p2p - privacy.
It obviously depends on what technology is chosen, but p2p often has poor privacy properties. Think media companies sending threatening notices to people who download movies. People often look up private things on Wikipedia. Think sexual health topics. Do we really want malicious people to be able to track that?
Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it.
Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
Speaking as a WikiPortraits organizer: Wikipedia primarily uses free media, and the for-profit event coverage is of course usually not releasing their photos under free licenses. Our photos are released under Creative Commons for use by Wikipedia and, well, anyone, and big events like the World Cup are where we can capture a lot of the most notable people at scale.
That being said, we're not just covering the big fancy events. We've done hundreds of events from indigenous festivals to minor league sports to science conferences. We've also donated equipment to wiki communities in Kenya, Ghana, and Benin to photograph their local events and culture, which are very undercovered on-wiki. The big events are what gets a lot of visibility and make the headlines but we do a lot more than that.
If it’s really that important to people, they should be able to raise donations for that program in particular.
Raising funding for Wikipedia, then diverting 90% of the funds for pet projects is dishonest at best, and most likely fraudulent.
The other problem, is that the projects wikimedia foundation has historically funded have a notable political bias, to the point where it has been accused of being a pseudo-PAC.
WikiPortraits organizer here. To give a sense of scope of project, at this point more than 1 out of every 50 pageviews on Wikipedia globally is illustrated with a WikiPortraits photo (and maybe more, we are still trying to digest what the surge from World Cup traffic means). Since our project started in January 2024, WikiPortraits photos have been viewed 5.8 billion times (https://sightglass.toolforge.org/results/iAi_KYlZs8ZXW9Xc/wi...). Of those, the ones I’m most proud of is finding a volunteer in Rome to take openly licensed pictures of the new Pope Leo XIV in May 2025 (Since all the commercial agencies and news outlets photos of Habemus Papum moment were not openly licensed, we did not have a “Pope as Pope” photo for Wikipedia, only older meh photos of him as a Bishop in Peru).
Those new Pope photos, which were featured on the front page of many language Wikipedias, were viewed 50+ million times in their first month (nice feeling for a first time photographer!)
WikiPortraits photos are CC-BY-SA, which means other (mostly smaller) media outlets can use with attribution (though we’ve seen them mangle that in all sorts of ways, but they are trying). These are generally orgs that cannot afford Getty or other agencies, though we have seen a WikiPortraits photo pop up at CNN Brasil. Fan Instagram accounts also like us.
Even with the grants, WikiPortraits photographers are all volunteers. It’s what they do in their leisure time. (A number are professional photographers but they are donating their time to this project, or theg donate older photos they took on assignment where they control the rights).
The main FIFA World Cup photographer is a Brooklyn high school teacher by day (also a comedian by night). His World Cup photos have been viewed 500 million times (“what I did l on my summer break”). Wikiphotography, like much of wiki, depends on a base of supercontributors.
Where does the funding go to make educational open content?
WikiPortraits pays for lodging, buying better equipment to lend folks (eg longer lenses so photos are not as grainy), a LOT of parking fee reimbursements, a meal if someone has been shooting for a long day. We also pay honoraria for experienced wiki folks to create Wikidata items or Commons categories behind photogs where necessary (Taking photos fun! Metadata not so fun).
But WikiPortraits travel is generally a mix of people getting there themselves, using airline miles, and external donations (eg not funding from WMF. Some limited exceptions, but we’ve tried to keep that line pretty clear). We used American Airlines miles to get the World Cup photographer to Seattle for that Round of 16 game of US vs Belgium.
Wiki ethos vibe.
It’s easy to emphasize glamorous World Cup coverage (which gave us huge stats!). But a lot of the events photographed are things like AAAS and other academic conference, local book festivals, politicians at an event in Adelaide, Indian artists at a fair in Santa Fe. Volunteers grinding away to fill out wiki coverage in areas they are passionate about.
What’s nice is at a time when new editor registrations are declining precipitously (LLMs?), photography has brought in a lot of new volunteers to the Wikiverse. Also it’s a noticeably different population. We are half female vs 15% female for wiki overall, and a lot more diverse, especially in the US (where Black Wikipedians are only .5-1.5% of the Wiki volunteer community). Photography is a fairly immediate high-impact, low-friction way to improve Wikipedia.
LLMs may be able generate a text article. But they don’t (currently) have the ability to rally a community of photographers to go live events and take openly licensed photos for the world.
Also what we appreciate, methodically covering events helps us find coverage gaps on wiki. We just covered a rodeo in Sheridan, Wyoming. The rodeo, despite being around since 1930s, did not have an article. Also more surprising, no article (or Wikidata item) for Indian Relay, a popular Native American horse racing sport where riders go bareback from horse to horse. It’s amazing to watch. Highly recommend. I spent a lot of creating wikidata items and articles for the teams, lead riders and tournaments just so we could match our photos to wiki. Contemporary art, as we discovered with the 2026 Venice Biennale, also has huge gaps of on wiki coverage.
I’m willing to bet that dollar for dollar WikiPortraits may be some of the most effective community grants WMF has given in terms of on-wiki impact. One reason: you can take a single photo and it’s used in 200 wikis.
Remember the WMF doesn’t get involved in editorial content. So the community grants help spur organized efforts like ours to help improve on-wiki content.
We are looking for more volunteers! (Also if you have excess airline miles/hotel points you want to contribute for a good cause).
> It’s easy to emphasize glamorous World Cup coverage (which gave us huge stats!). But a lot of the events photographed are things like AAAS and other academic conference, local book festivals, politicians at an event in Adelaide, Indian artists at a fair in Santa Fe. Volunteers grinding away to fill out wiki coverage in areas they are passionate about.
How does work for major events? I noticed a bunch of the before-after photos were taken at TIFF 2025, where actors were presumably on the red carpet promoting their debuting movie. Did the volunteer get a press pass to be able to be there? Or were they in the 'fan line'?
We apply for press credentials using our portfolios and publication stats like any media outlet. Stats happen to be very strong for Wikipedia (Circulation? 2 billion monthly).
After two plus years, we have a good sense of what thresholds we need for which events. Bryan Berlin (World Cup photog) spent a LONG time getting qualified for FIFA through local soccer games and up. We took advantage of Thanksgiving weekend when credential demand was slow and sent him to a single game in Florida on the Friday to qualify him in a way that had been hard for us up until that point.
What is still hard for us: Met Gala (a more “known” fashion photographer may help there), Oscars, Golden Globes and F1. F1 much demand from our photogs, but very high and specific bar that is hard for Wiki to thread (photos bought at market rates).
Also some places, like World
Economic Forum, have an exclusive with Getty so we are functionally locked out.
The photos work hard to get credentials. A British photog got himself qualified for BAFTA TV awards! A high school girl in Bay Area got herself credentialed for NHL. Olympics are country by country so smaller countries (like Armenia) are sometimes more strategic to credential through.
Working on better pictures of the Pope thanks to a Rome-based fashion photographer who joined us.
Remember, a number of the WikiPortraits photogs are professionals. They are just volunteering their time with us.
But we also help folks who are like “My mom is willing to help buy my first camera camera, what should I get.”
One of WMF's more controversial expenditures was its $4.5 million "Knowledge Equity Fund", a grant program that tries to fight racial inequity. The recipients don't have to participate in Wikipedia or anything.
They may be noble causes, but it's not how many Wikipedia donors expected their funds to be used, after seeing the donation banners begging for funds to keep Wikipedia running.
The actual, public mission of Wikimedia Foundation:
> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
As such, WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects, like funding photographers to go to events like Fifa World Cup and Cannes, and take (CC or public domain) portraits for Wikimedia Commons (https://www.wikiportraits.org); etc.