[belorn]

18 months runway is included all expenses including wages, awards (that Mozilla gives out, for example to political initiatives), travel, social events and so on.

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...

[tomnipotent]

That's the cost of hosting, not the cost of operations. A business the size of Wikipedia doesn't run itself, and being a nonprofit doesn't magically make operations disappear.

[belorn]

There is no upper bound on how much profit they can take out as wages, and there is no lower bound either. They don't need to match wages with oil companies.

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.

[tomnipotent]

You've confused some words and missed the forest for the trees. It's recommended they spend 65% on program activities for certain third party charity ratings, for which Wikimedia Foundation passes.

[belorn]

Resulting to insults doesn't makes conversations more interesting nor do they convince anyone.

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.