Let's go through his line-by-line line-by-line:

> > DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we’ll never run ads.

> What is the point of a site saying they don’t want to show ads, then covering up 50% of the screen with a request for money? No serious for-profit site would consider giving up 50% of the page to an ad. It’s insane. At least this year’s fundraising banners don’t have Jimmy Wales staring out at the reader like Big Brother. Now I respect Wikipedia’s non-ad stance. They can’t very well make money on a site that was created through the free labor of its contributors, but for God’s sake show some decorum.

The substantive objection here is that ads are annoying because they take screen real estate and Wikipedia's drive for donations is annoying because it also takes real estate. He draws an absurdity here from a false equivalence, however - ads are something much more insidious. Ads would track what you are reading on Wikipedia (the modern version of a library) and build a profile of what subjects you are interested in. They would send this data to third parties and those third parties would have the right to sell this data at their discretion. Furthermore ads would run continuously year round. The donation banner is not equivalent to ads, and can not be snubbed for taking up screen real estate because its somehow contradictory to the value position of not running ads.

> > We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour.

> Money is not an issue of survival for Wikipedia. According to its latest annual report, The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the charity that controls Wikipedia, has $51 million in cash reserves ($28 million) and investments ($23 million). No-one can seriously claim that an organization that has $51 million in the bank is in “survival” mode.

Now for some numbers. Wikipedia alone costs several million dollars (~45 million) a year to run (it has been increasing each year as it is getting more traffic; also remember that servers and storage fail and that architectural changes like switching to ElasticSearch serve the world better).

This breaks down into roughly $20m for salaries and wages (~93k on average, does seem high). $13m operating expenses. $5.7m in awards and grants. $2.5m in web hosting and the same in depreciation of capital investments. $2m for travel and conferences (they do these globally, single events can cost an individual $10k or more, so this seems reasonable IMO). $150k for special events.

I don't need to spell it out but $51m can only afford one year of operating costs. Even if you cut the salary number in half and drop the conferences the author seems to hate, we're still not to two years.

> > Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee.

> Note the focus on programmers. But programmers don’t make Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s core software is essentially unchanged since 2001 when the project started. Since then Wikipedia’s programming efforts have been a disaster. The Visual Editor (a tool that would allow WYSIWYG editing) was a failure. Editors still edit using tags and arcane code to create their edits. The recently introduced Media Viewer is universally hated. The people who really make Wikipedia are the unpaid volunteers, but hey get nothing from donations. Nothing, while programmers who don’t have a clue get paid. Is that really where your money should go?

The author reads a lot into the sentence, which I took to mean 'cost of a cup of coffee'. Agreed that programmers are just one role at TWF, but why the ire? Furthermore it's fundamentally untrue what he says about Wikipedia being essentially the same since 2002. This is true on the client side but not on the server side. The transition to ElasticSearch as one example.

> > We’re a small non-profit

> This is a flat-out lie. The WMF is not a small non-profit. It raised $46 million in donations last year and has 215 staff, over 130 of whom work in the Engineering and Product Development department. Yet all of the money spent on programmer salaries has produced no measurable change to the site’s quality. These programmers take up a huge amount of the foundation’s $20 million spent on salaries, salary payments that rose $4 million since 2103.

> The closest WMF gets to creating content is the almost $6 million was spent last year on awards and grants — mostly funding international and regional staff and workshops to celebrate Wikipedia, such as Wikimania. These grants have been described as “corrupt” by the WMF’s ex-director Sue Gardner. who said, “I believe the FDC [Funds Dissemination Committee] process, dominated by fund-seekers, does not as currently constructed offer sufficient protection against log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices.” Oh dear.

I wholeheartedly agree that TWF is no longer a small nonprofit and has entered the range of medium sized. As for the Wikimania mention and the accusation of corruptness - I don't see that as relevant to the small non-profit claim but merely chosen because there wasn't much else for the author to say. I do not know much about Wikimania or associated corruptness, so I will refrain from commenting on that. I would think that if indeed donations are being spent in a corrupt self-serving way this would be a reason to scale back or refrain for donating to TWF.

> > with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs.

> The same KPMG report says that Wikipedia spent $2.5 million of its budget on hosting, almost unchanged since 2013. A closer look at the reports line items shows that the WMF spent almost $684,000 on furniture. That’s almost $3200 per employee. Your donations are going to golden chairs.

Furniture for the past 5 years:
45k, 200k, 200k, 400k, 600k (this year).

Maybe there's another reasonable explanation (outside golden chairs?) Is Wikipedia furnishing a new office? Anyone who has worked on something like that will know how expensive even simple things (like carpeting) are.

Here is a link to the report.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit...

The selective use of quotation of figures and partial sharing of information reads more like an indictment than a thesis. Please, if you are considering not donating to Wikipedia look at the finances and find the rest of Wikipedia's expenses (some shared above).

> > Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to think and learn.

> I guess parks and libraries would be a lot less popular if you had panhandlers at the doors. Especially panhandlers who have more in the bank than you.

Given that Wikipedia can survive approximately one year without donations, is it really fair to call them a panhandler?

No, it's more like paying taxes with public money to keep a public space open.

Oh wait...

> > If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year. Thank you.

> More weasel words. Wikipedia is already useful without the extra donations, and even if donations stopped tomorrow it would still be able to stay online, continue on cash reserves for years (with some salary cuts).

Covered before. If they cut all salary and all travel and all conferences and all awards they would last at most two years.

No weasel words there.

It turns out it does take millions of dollars to run an operation as large and as often visited as Wikipedia.