Among the world’s top five most trafficked websites, one stands out.
This site has 60 million articles available across 332 languages. Two billion people visit the site every month, with thousands adding new content daily. The site has, on average, 5.7 edits per second.
This level of traffic typically means a gold mine for a technology company, but most of the contributors don’t receive a dime. There are no shareholders, and the executives do not have million-dollar compensation packages.
Most amazingly, this website has no ads except for occasional asks for donations to cover operating costs. It’s a rare place on the Internet where you can breathe and read in peace.
An interviewer asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in 2014, “If Wikipedia were capitalized in the same way as [regular] Silicon Valley companies, wouldn’t you have more money to do more things?”
He replied:
No, no, because if we were in that situation, we wouldn’t care about languages, for example.
If we were supported by advertising, we would care about entries that get another million users in the US but not what might be of interest to another million readers in India.
A big part of my aesthetic vision for Wikipedia is that it is like a temple for the mind. I’m not anti-commerce, but I don’t think it belongs in every aspect of life.