Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline.

Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?

What a bad-faith argument.

I'm just going to let that little exchange stand on its own.

I took a look at the most recent 990 form you reference, and it lists compensation for a mere 13 individuals, with a total compensation just over $4-million in sum.

Hm, you're right. I had looked at some kind of summary that listed people for every year, and somehow thought that it was breaking down salaries for everyone, but it's only the top people.

Let's look a different way. https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf&page=9 says that there are 233 people who earn more than $100k (so basically, full-time people in a white-collar role). So if you make a ballpark estimate that for each one of those people, there's one other person doing janitorial work or similar that makes average $50k/yr, and average out the $88M they spent on salary in 2022 over all those 466 people, you get $327k per year for the white collar people. Presumably there's also some amount on part-time work, or grants, or something like that. But the point is, it's not that there is some absurd amount of money going missing. It's just that they employ a few hundred people and pay SF-tech-company salaries.

This is in no way counter-evidence that spending (ultimately due to the decisions of these executives) is at runaway levels. Salaries and wages have increased 22% compounding year-over-year for the last four years on average. This is a 120% increase in only four years (from $46,146,897 to $101,305,706).

These trends have been continuously called out for almost a decade now, but this exponential growth continues nonetheless. All while expenses for core responsibilities remain flat.

Didn't you just get super offended that I pointed out that paying the people who work for you is, in fact, a "core reponsibility", and so this argument doesn't make sense?

I'm happy with Wikipedia paying their people. If there was one person making $5M per year, then I'd be fine with that, even though there isn't. If there was one person making $50M per year, maybe I'd have some questions, but nothing like that is happening.

Wikipedia should be setup to succeeded indefinitely at this point if it weren’t for these decisions.

You said I sound hostile. Stuff like this is why. I've been dealing with maybe 5-10 different people who all have some kind of different reason of bending their way around to the conclusion "and so Wikipedia sucks." I don't think spending money that's coming in, on paying people to do Wikipedia work, spells doom for Wikipedia. I don't think that makes any sense. And, there's been such a variety of "and so that's why Wikipedia sucks" comments I've been reading that all don't make any sense if you examine them, that it's made me short-tempered to any given one.

I like Wikipedia. I think it's good.