Would you donate spare homelab resources instead of money to run a free, distributed Wikipedia-style site?

I went down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia’s fundraising recently and it got me thinking about whether something like Wikipedia could be hosted in a completely different way. I use Wikipedia constantly and think it’s incredibly valuable, but some of its fundraising has always felt pretty sleazy to me. The banners can make it sound like Wikipedia is barely surviving and needs your $2.75 to stay online, despite Wikimedia being in a very healthy financial position. In FY 2024-25, the Wikimedia Foundation reported about $311 million in assets, $209 million in revenue, and only about $3.5 million specifically categorized as internet hosting. There’s also a separate Wikimedia Endowment with about $169 million. The Washington Post has criticized the disconnect between the urgency of the fundraising and Wikimedia’s finances, and Wikipedia’s own editor community has pushed back on some of the fundraising language too. Sources: Wikimedia Foundation 2024-25 Annual Report, Wikimedia Endowment 2024-25 Annual Report, and the Washington Post article “Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?” That got me wondering: instead of asking people to donate money to keep knowledge free, what if people could donate some of the server resources they already have sitting around? Basically, imagine a public Wikipedia-style site. Call it “OpenWiki” or whatever. For a normal person, it’s just a website. Open it, search, read an article. No special app and no downloading a giant archive. If you have a homelab, NAS, VPS, old mini PC, etc., you could optionally install a container and tell it something like: 100 GB storage 25 Mbps upload 2 CPU cores Then mostly forget about it. The network could use donated machines to store, cache and serve the encyclopedia. Someone might give it 20 GB, someone else 500 GB, and the guy with 200 TB sitting in a rack can go nuts. There are already pieces of this. Kiwix makes Wikipedia archives, people seed them over BitTorrent, Wikipedia has been mirrored over IPFS, and Kiwix already uses donated compute to build archives. What seems to be missing is putting all of that behind a normal polished public website and making contributing resources dead simple. I also think there’s something cool about the concept itself. A lot of us have servers running 24/7 anyway. Giving up some unused disk space and bandwidth has basically no noticeable marginal cost, but you could open a dashboard and see something like: “Your server served 18,402 encyclopedia articles this month.” I’d get a little warm fuzzy feeling from that. Wikipedia already exists because thousands of people voluntarily contribute their time and knowledge. This would just be another way to contribute. And I really like the idea that the knowledge itself stays completely free. You don’t need money. You don’t need a server. You don’t need to contribute anything. People with spare resources contribute because they want to, and everyone gets the same access. The distributed part also seems valuable on its own. Lots of independent copies means built-in redundancy and archiving. A server disappearing doesn’t matter much. Potentially even old versions could remain available instead of disappearing because one organization stopped hosting them. I wouldn’t want this to involve crypto, tokens, mining, or paying people for resources. That kind of defeats the point. I also wouldn’t try to reinvent Wikipedia’s editing/moderation system at first. Initially it could literally just distribute regularly updated Wikipedia content under its existing license. Mostly curious what people here think: - Would you actually run a node if it was an easy container you could set resource limits on? - Roughly what would you realistically give it in storage/bandwidth? - What would make you hesitant to run one? Security, privacy, ISP limits, maintenance, etc.? - Would you actually use the public site if the experience was as good as Wikipedia? - For people who know more about distributed/self-hosted systems than I do, does the basic idea seem technically sane or is there something fundamental I’m overlooking? Just to be clear, there isn’t a repo, website or actual project behind this. I haven’t built anything. Mostly curious whether people would actually participate if something like this existed. I’d love if someone else took this idea and ran with it. Because if you told me I could give a container 500 GB of my NAS and some bandwidth and know my server was helping keep a free public encyclopedia available to anyone in the world, I’d probably run it just because that’s cool.