Beeple’s NFT was bought by the founder of a coin he had a major investment in, and he had been granted 2% of all B.20 tokens for free. Very sketchy. https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...

This is not an unreasonable comparison at all. It puts things in perspective. I dislike what Wikimedia is becoming, yet Wikipedia is still functioning and useful!

It's fairly unreasonable since NFT values are really not tied to anything, and in tokens that may or may not be valued at what they are supposedly valued due to manipulation of the small markets (similar to penny stock pump and dump).

So those values can be more about money laundering or poor signaling than any indication of real worth.

What would be a good comparison? Meta spending $36+bn on the Metaverse[0]? What are examples of websites that provide clearly better value for money than Wikipedia?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

That would be a better one yes. It was just a bad comparison of fake valuation to real.

But I don't think anyone is disagreeing that Wikipedia is offering good value for money, just that some people might be justifying that to excessively compensate themselves for an operation that requires very little to run and depends almost entirely on unpaid volunteers.

"well, our service is a boon to mankind, therefore it warrants skimming a bit off the top"

And that could be a problem in the long run.

I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but the current budget is more than twice that and continues to grow at a very fast rate. The budget trajectory may even be sustainable from a revenue perspective, I'm just saying it might not be so from a public interest perspective. Wikipedia to the typical user is basically entirely unchanged since 2016 and it's not clear to me why they need so much more money now than they did in 2016.