Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024

How lazy are these people scraping Wikipedia that they can do a bit of research to see there’s an entire dump provided by Wikipedia directly?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dumps.wikimedia.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dumps.wikimedia.org&#x2F;</a>

I used to be a Wikipedia donor, until there was an article that made the rounds a few years ago that argued that Wikipedia-the-website is essentially funded in perpetuity, and that the &quot;Jimmy Wales needs your help or kittens will die&quot; scarebanners are actually raising money for the Wikimedia foundation to spend on its own political ends.

The reason?<p>&gt;&gt; a rise they attribute to AI crawlers. AI companies are killing the open web by stealing visitors from the sources of information and making them pay for the privilege

I&#x27;m curious what would happen if Wikipedia tried to sign up for a $200&#x2F;month Cloudflare plan and use it for all their content. In theory, that would be consistent with Cloudflare&#x27;s ToS; and while there have been examples of Cloudflare sales reps trying to pressure customers with larger bandwidth needs to spend more, executives have said (including in comments here on Hacker News) that those sales reps were acting against policy, and that unlimited bandwidth really does mean unlimited.

From &#x27;What it Costs to Run Wikipedia&#x27;<p>Wikipedia spends $US 3m on hosting in 2024. They spend $US 107m on salaries.<p>So their hosting costs might have gone to, say, $US 5m at the outside.<p>That is they are maybe 1&#x2F;20th of their salary cost.<p>AI&#x27;s extra scraping might be a problem for some folks. But for wikipedia to talk about the percentage increase is disingenuous.<p>Source :<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saastr.com&#x2F;what-is-costs-to-run-wikipedia-3m-in-hosting-107m-in-salaries&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saastr.com&#x2F;what-is-costs-to-run-wikipedia-3m-in-...</a>

Shouldn&#x27;t be paying for bandwidth.