They seem a whole lot less bloated than Wikipedia as well. Given that something around 3% of donations to Wikipedia actually go to the website, they'll be fine with less donations despite what their nag popups suggest.
I get that's designed to protect themselves for the long term and it sounds like they've made it so they don't need my money for now, at least not at the expense of other projects that don't have such cash reserves like Let's Encrypt.
After I read your comment, I thought they had 10x annual expenses or something but really they have 18 months of runway. That's not that long IMO.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
And that are outdated numbers from 2015.
2021 report:
$153m dollars in donations spent on $67m in salaries, $10m in grants (surprisingly low, in 2020 it was $20m), $2m in hosting and like $10-20m in other professional expenses.
Net assets at the end of 2021 now at $231 mio.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
If we only looked at costs related to hosting the website they have almost 100 years. They got total assets of 191 millions, and the website hosting costs are 2.4 millions each year. 55 millions each year goes to wages (up from 46 millions previous year).
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
Charities have a common guideline that a maximum of 25% of donations is allowed to go to operations of the charity and minimum of 75% must go to the purpose of the charity. That mean if you donate to cancer research, 75% should go to cancer research and a maximum 25% to operational costs of the charity. I personally find 25% to still be too high.
When Wikipedia is asking for donations to keep the servers running then people expect more than 2% of the donations will go to that purpose. If they asked for donations to operate and pay wages to the foundation then they a perfectly free to do so and people wouldn't call them out as much when 49% is taken out as wages.