Honest, naive, somewhat rhetorical question: has any organization ever said "We are good, we can stop growing now.", followed through on it, and then not been thoroughly outcompeted or obsoleted?
Considering the main productive work of developing wikipedia is done by volunteers, does funding need to grow vastly in order to keep growing that? And if the goal is to create accessible and open knowledge for all and a superior competitor came along that was able to thoroughly outcompete and obsolete wikipedia unless vast amounts of money kept coming in, it doesn't seem like the goal would necessarily be lost. Might even be achieved better and cheaper.
They don't grow, they don't expand or move into new fields. They do their one thing, they do it perfectly. All extra money is saved for a rainy day. Most can run for years without a yen of money coming in just on their savings.
The question should be rather asked like that:
"Has any charity/NGO ever pretended that they would not be able to run another year without donations RIGHT NOW from everyone visiting their site, while they are fully loaded and not being transparent about it?"
But generally, there are many businesses and projects around the world which stay at their size and run successful for a long time. I mean isn't Hacker News itself an example for this? Small forum, running year after year and barely changing, nor aiming for growth.
https://hfordsa.medium.com/rise-of-the-underdog-92565503e4af
People may remember how Freebase disappeared – absorbed in Wikimedia's CC-0-licensed Wikidata project (contributor rights be damned), just like much of Wikipedia's infobox content got absorbed in Wikidata (database rights be damned). And there is now actually a chance that even more of Wikipedia's content will end up CC-0 licensed (i.e. completely free and public domain, usable without attribution):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia/Lice...
That would be horrible, as end users would no longer even be given an indication where content presented to them comes from. (Gresham's law also works in the information ecosystem.)
There should always be a Wikipedia, but going CC-0 in a bid for complete world domination is an almost Orwellian dystopia that can only benefit the same Silicon Valley lot who preferred CC-0 Wikidata to CC BY-SA Freebase.
As long as AI-based articles are algorithmically generated nonsense, those seeking accurate knowledge won't turn to them.
It’s more rare in publicly traded companies - though it can happen. Often it changes after a founder dies.