&gt; Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization.<p>Wikimedia. They do a lot more than just the encyclopædia.<p>&gt; For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs.<p>Server costs are not the only thing they need to spend money on. Consider their budget for 2015-2016:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan&#x2F;2015-16#Appendix_A_-_Budget_Detail" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...</a><p>40% of that is spent on engineering. Someone needs to maintain MediaWiki.<p>~6% is spent on legal - they&#x27;re a large site that has to deal with copyright issues, they need lawyers. ~15% is spent on administrative costs, as if you employ lots of people, you need to manage them.<p>&gt; They ask for way more money than they actually need.<p>They could run on a leaner budget, yes, but it&#x27;s not as if the other money they get is wasted. More money means they can hire more engineers to work on the site and improve it, for example.<p>&gt; More money is spent on &quot;investments&quot; and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site.<p>Looking at that budget, they spend more on Engineering than on Community Engagement, Grants, Advancement, and Communications combined.<p>&gt; Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from.<p>Could you provide evidence, or at least a credible source?