It's a good question. They have spent half a billion dollars during the past five years, and have almost another half billion in reserves. The fundraising seems to have become an end in itself, just because they can.
They keep talking about wanting to grow Wikipedia in the global south (Indian and African languages) but the spending in those regions, even though rising slowly, is still a minute portion of their expenses which mostly go to pay rising US salaries.
So you have people in India (where people are currently shown fundraising banners on Wikipedia) donating a couple of dollars ... it takes over 200,000 donations like that to pay the salary of the Wikimedia CEO. $2 doesn't even buy a coffee in San Francisco. You could do a lot more with it in Kolkata. It's not like India doesn not have more pressing needs than sending money to the US because people are made to think money is needed to keep Wikipedia online for everyone.
They keep talking about wanting to grow Wikipedia in the global south (Indian and African languages) but the spending in those regions, even though rising slowly, is still a minute portion of their expenses which mostly go to pay rising US salaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
So you have people in India (where people are currently shown fundraising banners on Wikipedia) donating a couple of dollars ... it takes over 200,000 donations like that to pay the salary of the Wikimedia CEO. $2 doesn't even buy a coffee in San Francisco. You could do a lot more with it in Kolkata. It's not like India doesn not have more pressing needs than sending money to the US because people are made to think money is needed to keep Wikipedia online for everyone.