alt Hacker News> "I have no idea why so many people keep getting this wrong."
To me it seems a perfectly natural effect of nearly everyone using it as a website which holds lots of information, and very few people comparatively have any experience with the community side, so people assume that what they see is what Wikipedia is.
Not many people are spending time reading reports on organisation costs breakdowns for Wikipedia, so the only way they'd know is if someone like you actively tells them. I personally also assumed server costs were the vast majority, with legal costs a probable distant second - but your comment has inspired me to actually go and look for a breakdown of their spending, so thanks.
Edit: FY24-25, "infrastructure" was just 49.2% of their budget - from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
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As a former Wikipedia admin, I think the best way to think of it as a massive text-focused battle MMORPG that happens to produce an encyclopedia as a side effect.
> holds lots of information
But they want that information to be at least kept up to date and hopefully to improve over time, right? That's what the community is for. It's not a free lunch.
Wikipedia is also uniquely cacheable.
I suspect that 95+% of visits to Wikipedia don't actually require them to run any PHP code, but are instead just served from some cache, as each Wikipedia user viewing a given article (if they're not logged in) sees basically the same thing.
This is in contrast to E.G. a social network, which needs to calculate timelines per user. Even if there's no machine learning and your algorithm is "most recent posts first", there's still plenty of computation involved. Mastodon is a good example here.