To be fair to Wikipedia here, quoting a nearly ten year old figure and comparing it to current earnings in order to prove that their required expenses are low is not that honest.
Note I made the same argument in Wikipedia's community newspaper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Read the comments from Wikipedians underneath. No one claimed it was a dishonest argument to make.
I'm pretty happy to wager real money that Wikipedia has had to scale significantly in the last ten years.
But, hey, if you've got evidence to the contrary, I'll happily read it.
As an example, if we are to trust this site (https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm), a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars in 2012. You can purchase 8TB for 130 dollars now.
From this wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics) we can see the amount of English articles has about doubled since then. Chances are that storage costs have not only not gone up, they have gone down.
As far as I can see, the text of Wikipedia is about 10GB. I don't know how much space the images occupy, but if we assume they take up roughly the same space, then a single 2TB disk would accomodate 1,000 Wikipedias.
This isn't about the cost of disk storage.