Do you ever get lost in the Wikipedia web?
 

Today I Wiki'd Frank's RedHot because for some reason I thought it came from my hometown of Rochester, NY. Then I realized that's Boss Sauce but not before I somehow ended up on the Opium Poppy page. (RedHot is from Parsippany, NJ, by the way). I tried to retrace my steps on how I could go from a hot-sauce to the plant responsible for producing the most addictive drug on the planet but that didn't work since I always use the middle-click on my mouse to open pages in a new window(I always accidentally hit the "Back" button on my mouse while I'm reading something, aggravates me so bad). I also tried to figure out where over an hour of my life disappeared to but at least I know I have yet another entry stored in my cache of worthless information.

As I was nearing the end of my searches I saw a banner up top with a link to a "note" from the founder of Wikipedia and I decided to read that, too. Of course it was just them looking for money but did you know it costs 20 million dollars a year to run that site? Holy crap! And they get all of it, or at least that's what I gathered, from donors. This place(TFP) runs on less than 1,500 bux! This deserves another Holy Crap!

I guess what I'm getting at is I don't exactly know how lost I would be without the Googles, Wikipedias and TFP's this lovely interweb has put at my fingertips so I think donating the only proper thing to do. Except for Google, they get their money from adverts. Keep the web advert free! Donate!

If I go to Wikipedia, I'll be there for hours. I have a folder in my favorites titled "Wikipedia" where I put all the links to Wiki articles I haven't had a chance to read. Wikipedia is an endless adventure.

Wikipedia is a great source for information. I am a wikipedian, and have written articles and make edits where they are needed. There are over 3 million articles on this site. I love it. It's amazing. Anyone can edit if you read the policies Wiki has. The bots are awesome! They can whip through 3 million articles within 10 minutes. Cool, Cool, Cool!

According to their own numbers, wikipedia has around 22 million articles in 270 languages, along with some 850 000 media files (source). To say that they're orders of magnitude bigger than TFP still doesn't quite do the size of the gap justice. I'm not the slightest bit surprised that their costs run into the millions -- it's thoroughly impressive that they manage to keep everything running quick and snappy throughout it all.

I suspect a large proportion of their funding comes from various grants. The kind of funding we're talking here just doesn't come from donation drives.

And yes, it's stupid easy tot get lost. Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your stay.

(Try tvtropes some time).

This comic from xkcd sums up my thoughts on wikipedia perfectly.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_prob..._wikipedia.png

...and for that reason I try to stay off the site as much as possible.