[misterdoubt]

It doesn't even make sense with the data being presented.

> After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending

Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year.

As a grad student I made a total $1,300 per month, but ten years later I'm spending that on just housing costs. So what?

[elect_engineer]

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Re: "Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year."

You missed the first part of what I wrote in my essay:

"Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it WILL happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment."

I made it clear that Wikipedia is not in trouble at the present time. But there is a real possibility that there are bad times ahead, and we should prepare for them now.

[misterdoubt]

I think you're reasoning about this backwards. They don't worry about setting harder spending limits because the revenue continues to increase. If the revenue cut back, you call it "naive" to suppose that they could put 2 and 2 together and cut spending. So they should be fiscally conservative and think of the future when they expect themselves to be... profligate and short-sighted? Why?

You started this page in 2017. The revenue has continued to increase at as steady a pace as expenses. And an argument along the exact same lines as yours could have been made in 2009 or 2010 or 2011. Actually, your argument has gotten weaker -- expenses used to be higher than the previous fiscal year's revenue, but in recent years the growth has been much flatter.

There's no compelling reason to think that now is the time to act to make sure that it's not too late to act at some vague future point in time. Sure, something can't grow forever. Granted. But are we at 127 grains of rice or 131,071? How can you tell?