Raju Narisetti on Wikipedia and the mission to bring free knowledge to every person

All of our campaigns are time-based, depending on the country. For example, in the west, the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas tends to be the time for giving. So we will put some campaigns next. It therefore depends on the country and is always limited in time.

The easy answer to your question is no, this is not a shortfall or crisis related fundraising campaign, but I would say that since our mission is to provide free knowledge and information to every single person on this planet, we will always need money to do this.

I think it’s easy to look at a number like $120 million, which is our annual budget, and say, “Wow, that’s a big number. Why do they need the money ?”

Let me give you a few examples. Depending on the month, we are probably the fifth or sixth or seventh largest site in the world in terms of number of visits. If you look at the top five or the top six ahead of us, it will be Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Baidu.

Baidu said in their annual report that they spent $4 billion on research and development alone. Facebook said it will spend between $29 billion and $34 billion on capital expenditures alone in 2022.

So here are organizations that are pretty much in the same ballpark as us, having to spend significant amounts of money to keep up with infrastructure. And here is Wikimedia, entirely non-profit, taking no money, no advertising.

We do some of the same heavy infrastructure work, to support 1.5 billion devices with data centers around the world, ensuring that whenever you want information, it’s available. I think these things cost quite a bit of money.