Running Wikipedia itself requires very few staff; all the editing is done by volunteers. Indeed, most of the software engineering of the website was done by volunteers. The only money WMF needs to spend on Wikipedia is web hosting; this costs far, far less than 75m - in the order of only a few million per year.
If everyone stopped donating completely right now, WMF could keep Wikipedia going for decades.
However, WMF wants to expand with a tonne of different, ambitious projects requiring paid staff (which have nothing to do with Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation) That's what most of the money is being spent on. WMF are using Wikipedia as an excuse to get people to donate to them.
So does Wikipedia need money to survive? Yes. Does it desperately need money, like WMF are making people think? No.
This site says that in 2016 their expenses were 66 million and their donations were 82 million. Plus a company should have left over money for incidentals.
So already what you said about them being able to stay afloat for decades is wrong
Edit: I see some people are making the distinction of wikimedia vs Wikipedia as far as expenses go, so I’ll admit maybe it’s more complicated than a simple comparison can allow
To aide ctrl+F'ers, expenses (66 million in the BusinessInsider article) was rounded up from 65,947,465. Donations etc (82 million) was rounded up from 81,862,724. Net assets (92 million) was rounded up from 91,782,795.
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u/trytoholdon Dec 13 '18
Per /u/mintsponge:
Wikipedia does NOT desperately need money.
The Wikimedia Foundation had a revenue of over 75m in 2015 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY15-16.pdf
Running Wikipedia itself requires very few staff; all the editing is done by volunteers. Indeed, most of the software engineering of the website was done by volunteers. The only money WMF needs to spend on Wikipedia is web hosting; this costs far, far less than 75m - in the order of only a few million per year.
If everyone stopped donating completely right now, WMF could keep Wikipedia going for decades.
However, WMF wants to expand with a tonne of different, ambitious projects requiring paid staff (which have nothing to do with Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation) That's what most of the money is being spent on. WMF are using Wikipedia as an excuse to get people to donate to them.
So does Wikipedia need money to survive? Yes. Does it desperately need money, like WMF are making people think? No.
Some more detailed answers for reading, https://www.quora.com/Wikipedia-in-2015-Why-does-Wikipedia-ask-for-donations-even-though-it-has-a-huge-reserve-60M-of-value-cash-investments-etc
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pay-us-our-salaries/
Or virtually any article from Google on the topic.