What are their expenses btw? Are their hosting costs so high? Do they have paid staff beyond some fairly trivial admin? Do they curate articles for cash?
Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity.
The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good use.
Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The tech stack runs on its own bare metal (on the scale of a couple thousand servers) and its own CDN (to better protect against censorship and surveillance for the global audience, among many reasons), the total network currently has some physical presence in 7 different datacenter locations around the world, and there's all the redundant transport, transit, and peering network requirements that come with that. The live codebase gets new releases to production multiple times a week. There are many other side-services that run alongside the core MediaWiki codebase. There's constant network attacks on our infrastructure. There's all the infrastructure layer metrics and monitoring stuff. I could go on and on...
On top of all that (which implies reasonably robust techie staffing): there's a Legal department that has to defend against threats to the org from businesses and governments around the world and in general does a ton of amazing work in many different directions (my favorite example was our past lawsuit against the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v._NSA). There's all the usual corporate supporting functions, including finance, travel, talent and culture, etc. Can't fail to mention the Fundraising team itself, of course! :)
The foundation has a big job keeping the soft and hard infrastructure of the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia going. The budget really isn't that unreasonable, and the endowment also isn't anywhere near big enough to replace our annual donation budget and ensure the org remains financially stable in the long run, yet. Usually when one of us goes to a conference and talks about our infrastructure, others are shocked to learn just how small our tech teams are for the jobs they're doing.
I'm sure the engineering efforts to make that infrastructure operate so well would make for a fascinating blog post which the rest of us could learn from, but it's almost irrelevant in regards to the bottom line of the organization.
Yes, the engineering "efforts" are exciting and interesting to learn from. They're also a continuous process that requires a heavy human investment in the form of staff (and staff retention!), and those salaries and benefits are relevant to the bottom line.
On the parts about annual expenses: keep in mind this is a long-term movement and foundation with long-term aims. Being sufficiently financially stable to run another year or two isn't really a win. It still leaves a rather important institution and its projects subject to lots of short-to-medium term existential risk.
Ultimately, what you're asserting is that "only" having two years of runway is somehow dangerous to the survival of the organization, and is a legitimate justification for using aggressive tactics. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find another organization whose reserves are double both revenue and expenses. So it's rather silly to assert that Wikimedia is in a precarious position.
If the organization is really concerned about not having enough cashflow or reserves, then maybe they should stop giving away 20% of their revenue. Charitable contributions are great, but that's not the proposition being made in the fundraising tactics, which all aim to convince us that Wikipedia is going to die any minute unless every user immediately donates. These are the same tactics that PACs use, and are based on classic social engineering methods with the sole intent of manipulating people into feeling concerned or even panicked. An organization like Wikimedia should not be engaging in these tactics, especially when they provably don't need to.
I get that the article and other comments are about the fundraising, but my comments are not trying to address anything particular about fundraising methods/tactics.
To boil it down, somebody asked "are their expenses really that high" and you responded with "yes" even though the evidence says otherwise. You can name all of the individual expenses you want, but their existence does not automatically equate to justification.
Their complete audited accounts for 2019-20, page 3 [0]
Total expenses: $129 million, of which
- Salaries (~500 staff): $55 million
- Awards and Grants (I suppose this is them donating to other causes?): $23 million
- Hosting: $2.5 million
- Professional Services (mostly lawyers?): $11 million
- Donation processing: $4 million (3% seems reasonable here)
- Other operating expenses: $10 million
[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#a1-...
Top expenses are: Salaries and wages ($56M), awards and grants[1] ($23M), professional services ($12M), other operating expenses ($10M), donation processing expenses ($5M), and internet hosting ($2M)[2].
[1] Still trying to figure out what goes into that.
[2] From my own experience and their size and availability, I would expect that to be at least an order of magnitude larger. I'm impressed.