The budgets are rising exponentially each year, apparently
It looks like quadratic growth until around 2011, after that it becomes linear. This still seems like a lot of growth, considering the number of pageviews per article seems to be roughly constant over the last 5 years [1]
0: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
1: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...
Edit: this is how last year's expenses break down:
Salaries and wages: 46,146,897
Awards and grants: 12,653,284
Internet hosting: 2,335,918
In-kind service expenses: 1,361,958
Donation processing expenses: 4,977,583
Professional service expenses: 8,998,261
Other operating expenses: 9,005,744
Travel and conferences: 2,867,774
Depreciation and amortization: 2,856,901
Special event expense, net: 209,690
------------------------------------------
Total expenses: 91,414,010
Ha.
They may have raised more or less than their annual budget this year plus I imagine probably spend some money on their email campaigns etc.
So it doesn’t seem totally out of line.
If you live in SF, Seattle, Portland, NYC, Boston, Chicago or Philly, 80K is lower-middle class if that. Other cities/countries, it's incredible... just depends.
It's just pure greed. These sort of disinformation campaigns by nonprofits should be illegal.
Donations follow the same axiom as pricing: ask for what the market will bear.
while "dire" might be a bit of an overstatement, I agree with this impression because it is in part why I donated once or twice.
This is a reasonable stance to take, except when your donations are enough to cover the core product for decades.
It's not literally fraud in the legal sense, but it's purposefully taking advantage of the goodwill of unsophisticated donors to fund projects and people the donors predictably wouldn't approve of if they understood what was happening. The donors think they are supporting Wikipedia, and the money is largely going elsewhere. Morally, it's lying.
Not defending. Having done some myself, I'd guess they're mostly following the standard playbook.
And yet every donation dialogue on their page is a desperate plea for money to preserve Wikipedia itself.
This is the misleading theme around Wikimedia's donation strategy.