[bawolff]

So there are roughly 150,000 active editors ( hard to get good numbers cross language/project https://wikistats.wmcloud.org/wikimedias_html.php?s=ausers_d... but if you sum you double count people active in multiple which is common).

WMF had 104 million in revenue in 2018. Even if you could give all of that to contributors, no administrative fees, no money to buy servers, no developers, no bank fees, etc (highly unrealistic), you would only be able to give rmeach person $690. That hardly seems like enough to actually get people to edit wikipedia as a job.

There's also plenty of articles on the internet about how introducing money into volunteer projects can very easily cause the project to collapse and have unexpected side effects.