> The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.

This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the software?

I think there are things to criticize WMF budget about, but the website wouldn't exist if you only paid for the web server. Legal is important. Trust and safety is important. Having people maintain the software is important. Having people on call in case the site goes down at 1am is important. Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.

That's not to say i agree with everything WMF spends money on, but there is a lot more to running a major website then just buying a bunch of servers.

I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?

What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider, I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.

How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?

I agree that you need someone on call and I appreciate that they serve a massive amount of traffic. But then $5 million per year is a similarly massive estimate for a hosting budget.

IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.

> Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.

Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.