Here's my favorite Wikipedia article. Cancer seems pretty bad, but what if cancer got cancer?
Fantastic article. Without powerleveling too much, people were warning Jimmy Wales about his spending to his face since at least the late '00s. He's a petulant little tyrant (both online and in person) that would quickly become defensive and churlish when called out about it before, and certainly is doing the same now. I have personally seen him pitch little hissy fits when called out about this.
Think, realistically, about what the Wikimedia Foundation really needs to operate. Assuming their ~$2M spend on web hosting is reasonable, all you really need in addition to that is probably a leader (Wales, presumably), two or so IT guys, a volunteer coordinator or two, a finance person or two, and maybe a media spokesperson. Even that might be a stretch, as you could easily outsource a lot of labor to contractors or outside consultants (who, on the whole, might still be cheaper than the yearly salary and benefits for a full-time employee). Everything else is free to them: the authors provide their work for free, editors do their work for free, mods do it for free, etc. Rounding up and assuming ten employees, and assuming you're paying them really nice wages (say, $200k/yr. + benefits), that's probably another ~$4M in spend. That's ~$6M total for the whole operation. That's a level of donations they were getting back in the '00s. In 2024-2025, their annual spend was a staggering $190M, seemingly largely going to a bloated engineering staff, ~10 HR staffers (how??), 10+ staffers in "Legal and Community Advocacy" (those are two different things, so who the hell knows what that means), and more. Why should people donate a single cent to an organization that's so ridiculously wasteful and that largely exists due to volunteer efforts?
This sort of cancer is why it's hard not to hate most non-profits. There is no realistic market force (other than the possible loss of donations) to force them to be lean and mean, even if they start that way. That's why, for example,
the Red Cross paid a "Chief Transformation Officer" $650k to seemingly do a whole lot of nothing. And, of course, the whole organization gets to shroud itself in the image of being prosocial and "good" despite this nonsense.
